Environmentalists Against War



Colombian Gov't Sells Out Indigenous Peoples' Drinking Water To Western Mining Interests

June 6, 2017
MintPress News Desk & Caleb T. Maupin / Mint Press News

Colombia's Wayuu people have struggled to live without water since 2011, as a dam built that year has diverted the tribe's only water source to a coal mine that consumes an astounding 17 million liters of water a day. The Wayuu say 14,000 children have died since the dam was built.


MintPress News Desk

COLOMBIA (May 15, 2017) -- On Colombia's arid Guajira Peninsula – a region famed for inspiring the magic realism of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez – a quiet effort to eradicate the Wayuu people, Colombia's largest indigenous group, has entered its sixth year. The Colombian government and Western mining corporations are complicit in this attempt to wipe the group off of Colombia's map.

The victims of a devastating, manufactured drought, the Wayuu are fighting for their very survival, as thousands of children die every year. The deaths of nearly 5,000 children due to thirst or malnutrition have been documented since 2011, though the Wayuu themselves claim that the figure tops 14,000.

The Colombian government, as well as the Western media, have been eager to blame the drought on climate change and weather patterns like El Nino. But they have conveniently overlooked the 2011 construction of the Cercado Dam, which diverted the Ranchería River from its natural course.

The government claimed that building the dam would improve the lives of everyone in the region by supplying nine towns with a second source of drinking water, employing 1,000 workers and providing irrigation for 18,500 hectares of farmland.

But the Ranchería is the only river on the Guajira Peninsula, as well as the only source of drinking water for the Wayuu people. The consequences of the river's disappearance have been catastrophic. Now, the Wayuu must walk more than three hours to draw drinking water from wells, with each person living off of less than 0.7 liters a day. What little water they do obtain is contaminated with bacteria and salt, which has caused severe diarrhea and cholera to run rampant among their quickly dwindling population.

They can also no longer grow crops to feed themselves or raise livestock due to the lack of clean water, adding hunger and malnutrition to the mounting problems they are facing. An estimated 37,000 Wayuunow suffer from severe malnutrition.

While the Colombian government sold the Cercado Dam as a way to increase water supplies for nearby towns and farms, it turns out that the project's largest beneficiary has been South America's largest open pit coal mine, Cerrejon. Cerrejon guzzles more than 17 million liters of water a day, much of which is used to water the roads surrounding it to improve visibility for the mine's trucks and minimize dust pollution.

Originally founded by ExxonMobil, the mine is now jointly owned by a consortium of some of the largest mining companies in the world – including Anglo American, BHP Billiton, and Xstrata. The Wayuu and their leaders have tried for years to confront these mining behemoths and get their water back.

However, these same mining companies often work with right-wing paramilitary groups who have been responsible for the deaths of thousands in the past. Such groups have repeatedly threatened the life of the Wayuu's chief legal advocate Javier Rojas Uriana, pressuring him to abandon the case.

Wayuu resistance over the years has paid off in some notable ways. Last August, the Supreme Court of Colombia ordered President Manuel Santos to ensure that Wayuu children and adolescents can have access to water, food, health care, housing and other basic necessities.

The court's ruling followed an Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR) ruling in December 2015 that demanded the Colombian government take immediate measures to offer basic necessities to the Wayuu. But in the years following the IACHR decision, the Colombian government has done little to lessen the Wayuu's suffering, while threats against the Wayuu from right-wing paramilitary groups have been on the rise.

Meanwhile, there continues to be a blackout within both the Colombian and Western press regarding the Wayuu's struggle to survive. These same media outlets have devoted constant coverage to the ongoing political crisis and food shortages in nearby Venezuela -- a crisis also manufactured by the West.

Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that 'socialism means poverty.' But in the case of Venezuela and other states not governed by the free market, this cliche simply doesn't ring true

Caleb T. Maupin / Mint Press News

WASHINGTON (July 12, 2016) -- The political and economic crisis facing Venezuela is being endlessly pointed to as proof of the superiority of the free market.


The Chicago Tribune published a Commentary piece titled: "A socialist revolution can ruin almost any country." A headline on Reason's Hit and Run blog proclaims: "Venezuelan socialism still a complete disaster." The Week's US edition says: "Authoritarian socialism caused Venezuela's collapse."

Indeed, corporate-owned, mainstream media advises Americans to look at the inflation and food lines in Venezuela, and then repeat to themselves clichés they heard in elementary school about how "Communism just doesn't work."


Starting in 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. This is not a mere business decision, but a calculated move coordinated with US and Israeli foreign policy goals. Despite not just losing money, but even falling deep into debt, the Saudi monarchy continues to expand its oil production apparatus.

The result has been driving the price of oil down from $110 per barrel, to $28 in the early months of this year. The goal is to weaken these opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around oil and natural gas exports.

And Venezuela is one of those countries. Saudi efforts to drive down oil prices have drastically reduced Venezuela's state budget and led to enormous consequences for the Venezuelan economy.




The Bolivarian Experience in Venezuela
Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that "socialism means poverty." A quick, simplistic portrait of the problems currently facing Venezuela, coupled with the fact that President Nicolas Maduro describes himself as a Marxist, can certainly give them such a confirmation. However, the actual, undisputed history of socialist construction around the world, including recent decades in Venezuela, tells a completely different story.


Venezuelans told of how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wouldn't be collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said: "Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment."

Chavez took office on a platform advocating a path between capitalism and socialism. He restructured the government-owned oil company so that the profits would go into the Venezuelan state, not the pockets of Wall Street corporations. With the proceeds of Venezuela's oil exports, Chavez funded a huge apparatus of social programs.

After defeating an attempted coup against him in 2002, Chavez announced the goal of bringing Venezuela toward "21st Century Socialism." Chavez quoted Marx and Lenin in his many TV addresses to the country, and mobilized the country around the goal of creating a prosperous, non-capitalist society.

In 1998, Venezuela had only 12 public universities, today it has 32. Cuban doctors were brought to Venezuela to provide free health care in community clinics. The government provides cooking and heating gas to low-income neighborhoods, and it's launched a literacy campaign for uneducated adults.

During the George W. Bush administration, oil prices were the highest they had ever been. The destruction of Iraq, sanctions on Iran and Russia, strikes and turmoil in Nigeria -- these events created a shortage on the international markets, driving prices up.


After the death of Chavez, Nicolas Maduro has continued the Bolivarian program. "Housing Missions" have been built across the country, providing low-income families in Venezuela with places to live. The Venezuelan government reports that over 1 million modern apartment buildings had been constructed by the end of 2015.


The price of oil remains low, as negotiations among OPEC states are taking place in the hopes that prices can be driven back up. While American media insists the low oil prices are just the natural cycle of the market at work, it's rather convenient for US foreign policy. Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Islamic Republic of Iran all have economies centered around state-owned oil companies and oil exports, and each of these countries has suffered the sting of low oil prices.




The History of Socialist Construction


There is no contradiction between central planning and economic growth. In 1949, China had no steel industry. Today, more than half of all the world's steel is produced in China's government-controlled steel industry.


When the Marxist-Leninist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed in the early 1990s, economists like Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who can be counted among capitalism's "true believers," predicted rapid economic growth. Since the 1990s, conditions in what George W. Bush called the "New Europe" have become far worse than under socialism.


Russia's recovery from the disaster of the 1990s has come about with the reorientation of the economy to one centered around public control of its oil and natural gas resources -- much like Venezuela. The Putin government has also waged a crackdown on the small number of "oligarchs" who became wealthy after the demise of the Soviet Union.

Once strong state to control the economy was re-established, Russia's gross domestic product increased by 70 percent during the first eight years of Putin's administration. From 2000 to 2008, poverty was cut in half, and incomes doubled.

Neoliberal Capitalism Has Failed
It is only because these facts are simply off-limits in the American media and its discussions of socialism and capitalism that the distorted narrative about Venezuela's current hardships are believed.



The governments of Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines have done everything they can to deregulate the market and accommodate Western "investment." Despite the promises of neoliberal theoreticians, their populations have not seen their lives substantially improve.

If one compares the more market-oriented economy of the US, not to countries in the global south attempting to develop with a planned economy, but to other Western countries with more social-democratic governments, the inferiority of the "free market" can also be revealed.

The US is rated 43 in the world in terms of life expectancy, according to the CIA World Factbook. People live longer in Germany, Britain, Spain, France, Sweden, Australia, Italy, Iceland -- basically, almost every other Western country. Statistics on the rate of infant mortality say approximately the same thing. National health care services along with greater job security and economic protections render much healthier populations.

Even as the social-democratic welfare states of Europe drift closer to the US economic model with "austerity cuts," the US still lags behind them in terms of basic societal health. Western European countries with powerful unions, strong socialist and labor parties, and less punitive criminal justice systems tend to have healthier societies.

The American perception that socialism or government intervention automatically create poverty, while a laissez faire approach unleashes limitless prosperity, is simply incorrect. Despite the current hardships, this reality is reflected in the last two decades of Venezuela's history.

A Punishment Vote, Not a Vote for Capitalism

It is odd that the mainstream press blames "socialism" for the food problems in Venezuela, when the food distributors remain in the hands of private corporations.

As Venezuelan political analyst Jesus Silva told me recently: "Most food in Venezuela is imported by private companies, they ask for dollars subsidized by the government oil sales to do that; they rarely produce anything or invest their own money."

According to Silva, the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the US, in addition to the oil crisis, have made it more difficult for the Venezuelan government to pay the private food importing companies in US dollars. In response, the food companies are "running general sabotage."

"Venezuela's economy depends on oil sales. Now that oil prices are dropping down, the challenge is to get other sources of economic income," he explained. "Meanwhile, the opposition is garnering electoral support due to the current economic crisis."


While a clear majority cast a voto castigo ("punishment vote") in December, punishing the government for mismanaging the crisis, the Maduro administration has a solid core of socialist activists who remain loyal to the Bolivarian project.

Across Venezuela, communes have been established. Leftist activists live together and work in cooperatives. Many of them are armed and organized in "Bolivarian Militias" to defend the revolution.


In December, I spoke to Glen Martinez, a radio host in Caracas who voted for the opposition. He dismissed the notion that free market capitalism would ever return to Venezuela. As he explained, most of the people who voted against the United Socialist Party -- himself included -- are frustrated with the way the current crisis is being handled, but do not want a return to the neoliberal economic model of the 1999s.

He said the economic reforms established during the Chavez administration would never be reversed. "We are not the same people we were before 1999," Martinez insisted.


The climate is being intensified by a number of recent political assassinations. Tensions continue to exist on Venezuela's border with the US-aligned government of Colombia. The solid base of socialist activists is not going to let revolution be overturned, and tensions continue to rise. The Maduro and the United Socialist Party's main task is to hold Venezuela together, and not let the country escalate into a state of civil war.





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