In Colombia: Water is a Casualty of War
As COP16 progresses, the link between illicit economies, conflict and environmental destruction is starkly illustrated
The residents of Morales, a small town in the southwestern department of Cauca, are no strangers to conflict. Since Colombia’s historic peace accord with the rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in 2016, the community has dealt with an influx of FARC dissident groups, who do not recognize the agreement, as well as other armed groups who have moved in to fill the power vacuum left behind when the guerilla group disarmed en masse.
More recently, the mostly agricultural community has been the scene of escalating violence due to fighting between government security forces and FARC dissident group Estado Mayor Central (EMC), as President Gustavo Petro wages a “Total Offensive” against EMC forces.
Violence in Cauca has left thousands of victims in the form of deaths, forced recruitments, displacements, and forced confinements. But it has also victimized ecosystems themselves.
As Colombian politicians are learning, illicit economies such as coca production, illegal mining, cattle ranching, and other illegal activities are wreaking incredible damage not just socially, but also threatening ecosystems, water supplies, and rainforests across the country.
Stated in simpler terms, there is a direct link between conflict in the country and environmental destruction.
Colombia has legally designated three rivers “victims of conflict” in the country after activists successfully argued that they possessed rights that had been violated by armed actors in the country that amount to “crimes against humanity”.
The first river to receive the designation was the river Cauca, in 2023. During Colombia’s 53-year civil war, thousands, if not tens of thousands of bodies were dumped into the river, a phenomenon which created mass graves along its shores.
Natural aqueducts and streams in Morales have also suffered environmental damage due to Colombia’s internal conflict as well— a dynamic that has created extreme water shortages for residents and farmers alike.
Mauricio Pinto Valdéz is a farmer in Morales and a member of a communal group for the rural poor in the region (Junta de Acción Comunal- JAC). Valdéz traveled to Cali, Colombia, this week to attend the United Nations COP16 conference on protecting biodiversity with the hope that he can draw attention to how conflict and environmental destruction are threatening ecosystems and human lives alike.
He began his presentation, one of hundreds taking place in the city as part of the COP16 conference with a photograph of Morales. The shot, taken by drone, displayed an agricultural region of the municipality: lush green fields surrounded by jungle that surround a beautiful lake that also serves as one of the main aqueducts for the region.
He began by expounding on the natural beauty of the region. “We are not wealthy in terms of money,” he said. “But we are incredibly rich in fertile land, biodiversity, and agricultural potential.”
He then directed viewers’ attention to the lush green fields of farmland in the photograph. “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, unfortunately, all those fields are coca.”
Cultivation of coca, the main ingredient in cocaine, has also exploded in the region since 2016. Cauca as a region produces more coca than any other region of the country. Colombia is the leader in cocaine production globally.
Due to a lack of economic opportunities, neglect by the national government in Bogotá, and sometimes under threats from criminal armed groups, many farmers in Morales, like other coca-producing regions of Colombia, have resorted to coca production to survive. And that dependence on coca is creating a host of environmental problems in the region.
The monoculture cultivation of coca, which often wears out the soil of even fertile farmlands, pesticides, poor water-management, the clearing of forestlands for coca cultivation, and informal land-grabs have devastated the water table in the region.
President Petro, who has made peacebuilding and environmentalism key planks of his administration, is finding out that a lack of progress on ending armed groups’ territorial control over vast swaths of the country is negatively affecting his environmental and conservation goals as well.
Switching the presentation screen to a video displaying crystal-clear rivers in the region, Morales continued his talk, to the two dozen or so listeners in the audience. “We have a wealth of water in addition to our natural wealth, but due to conflict and mismanagement, we are now experiencing a water crisis as well,” he said. “Despite this, we now have to import potable water.”
Morales has suffered severe public water shortages in recent months. In May, protests by residents blocked the highway in Yumbo, a municipality just to the north of Cali, in an attempt to draw national attention to the situation. In September, the municipality halted water services to residents after aquifers ran dry.
The lack of potable water in Morales is not due to drought, however, as is currently the case in Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. “This is caused almost entirely by water mismanagement,” said Morales, in large part due to exploding coca production.
“With both successes and defeats along the way, we’re trying to keep this aqueduct alive,” he said. Morales and some other farmers in the region have begun building wells and mini-aqueducts near natural water sources in an attempt to better conserve supplies for agricultural use, and advocate for the government to keep its promises regarding investment in crop-substitution programs, which have been implemented only sporadically, and have often left farmers who sign up for them in the lurch when payments fail to come through.
Activists like Morales, who advocates for sustainable farming in the community like crop rotation, responsible water use and a halt to the use of pesticides to clear forestlands, often find themselves in the crosshairs of armed groups.
Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for land defenders. Seventy-nine activists like Morales were killed in 2023.
“If we speak out too much, we are silenced,” he continued. “But if our voices are not heard, other actors will take over our communities,” he said, presumably referring to EMC, though he did not use their name.
As diplomats, representatives from NGOs, politicians, and U.N. officials met just a few kilometers away to discuss goals to protect threatened regions of Latin America and the world more broadly, Morales packed up his personal belongings after thanking the small crowd that had come to hear him speak.
I asked him, after the event, how he thought it went. “I’ve never seen an event like this before in Colombia, organized by any previous president,” he said.
“I’m just not sure how much politicians really want to hear our message,” he said.
As I left the building where Morales had spoken, a booth set up at the COP16 festival by Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, had a long line of attendees waiting to speak to company reps who were showcasing the latest innovations by the tech giant.
Morales paused for a moment, with his briefcase in one hand, his laptop computer in the other, looking at the crowd, saying nothing.
He then disappeared into the hot Cali night.
The Big Headlines in LATAM
An opposition leader was found dead in Venezuela after he had been detained by security forces on Oct 25. Edwin Santos, of the center-left party Voluntad Popular, was discovered on a bridge that connects the neighboring states of Tachira and Apure. Santos had been detained two days earlier by security forces.
The party blames the Maduro government for what they describe as a “murder” carried out as “political retaliation.”
Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, considered the father of “Liberation Theology” died on Tuesday at the age of 96.
Gutierrez was a champion of the oppressed throughout Latin America, and an advocate for the poor. His 1971 book “A Theology of Liberation” had a deep influence on practices by the Catholic Church in Latin America.
His teachings were at times criticized by some Vatican leaders, who claimed his message contained Marxist overtones, an image that in recent years was somewhat rehabilitated by modern popes.
In 2018 Pope Francis wrote Gutierrez a letter thanking him for his contributions to “the Church and to humanity, through your theological service and your preferential love for the poor and the discarded of society”.
What we’re writing
This week Joshua covered COP16 for Sierra magazine. The conference occurs amidst a series of climate crises in Latin America, from massive fires in the Amazon rainforests, to droughts in Ecuador and Colombia. For many wealthy countries, climate change is still largely a hypothetical, but Latin America is already reeling from its effects.
You can read it here.
Daniela wrote up a brilliant interview with Betty Garcés, a Colombian soprano from a small village in Cauca, Colombia who says her life work has been to “inspire the youth who come after her”. Their conversation, in the words of Daniela, “included everything from tears to autographs, to a neighbor who invited us to his house because his daughter admired 'la maestra'.
Spanish Word of the Week
Necropolítica- Necropolitics, the politics of death
Joshua spent, as you know, spent the week in Cali for COP16. For most of that time, he was attending presentations or wandering around the “Green Zone”— an area of festivities set up downtown to commemorate the event.
But he also spent some time hob-knobbing with fancy politicians, thousands of whom had flocked to the city. Friday night, he found himself drinking and chatting with a delegation of politicians from Colombia.
The night was largely uneventful, but he got the contact info of some of them for future stories. Saturday morning they invited him to the house of an arms salesman accused of paramilitary and narco ties in Cali.
Joshua was told that they wouldn’t send the address by text because “that isn’t how it's done”, but that he was welcome to attend. “It’s a huge and amazing house,” he was told.
Joshua declined. But he was struck by the brazen show of corruption by Colombian politicians, who seemingly assumed that he wouldn’t report on the invitation. He spent much of Saturday thinking of a concept invented by Achille Mbembe called “necropolitics”, or “necropolitica” in Spanish.
Necropolitics is a sociopolitical theory of the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die. The deployment of necropolitics prioritizes some lives within a given civilization as more important than others.
The accused narco, who hosted powerful Colombian politicians in town for COP16 at his luxury home on Saturday, is a perfect example of how necropolitics works in practice: an arms salesman who profits from tools that directly cause the deaths of untold hundreds of people is feted by the political elite, while the urban poor from Cali live in extreme poverty and inequality. Only one Public University exists for a city with a population of almost 3 million people.
Under the theory of “necropolitics”, those urban poor lead lives that do not matter to the state. They are the “walking dead” of Cali society.
Meanwhile, elites from Bogota enjoy cocktails at the house of a death merchant.
Depressed yet? Yeah, sorry about that. So was Joshua.