The communities, and especially the women living in them, felt this was a violation to their rights. The “chosen” places are also the place where old indigenous doctors clean the souls of children and adults, according to the local culture. This violation of an acestral land mobilized a large number of communities living around the Usa – Kirrandara (Cara de Perro) hill. They organized a popular consultation on February 28th, which ended with a landslide victory of the “no to mining in indigenous lands”.

The challenge is to make the people’s pronouncement to become part of the Colombian state’s decisions to stop the operations of mining corporations, Danilo Rueda, from the Intereclessiastical Justice and Peace Commission told Real World Radio.

Rueda said the Popular Consultation began with a homage to Mother Earth. The aim of the consultation was to decide if the communities affected by the mining project agreed with it or not.

The mining corporations wanted to obtain gold, silver and molybden and copper deposits in those lands. This meant they would stay there for at least three decades.

Rueda says this would imply to the militarization of the territory to intimidate the people who oppose the project, the manipulation of previous consultations carried out by the corporations, damage to virgin ecosystems and to the population, in particular women and children, even leading to death.

Delegations from Putumayo, Buenaventura, Valle del Cauca and Meta participated in the consultations, as well as organizations resisting mining projects in Paraguay, Honduras and Guatemala and observers from Germany and Canada.

“The popular consultation had a clear result against the company’s exploration and the militarization of the area by the Colombian Army”, Rueda told RWR. This is the first inter-ethnical exercise of direct democracy in Colombia, he said.

Meanwhile, Guadalupe Rodríguez from the organization Save the rainforest, explained the mining corporation’s advance as a result of the increasing demand for raw materials from the rich countries. “We wonder where all this proliferation of communities resisting mining projects comes from”. She found the answer in the growing agressive policy of the European Union for example, in the control of territories rich in raw materials that are good for new technologies, like molybden, a transition metal very often used in the oil and agrochemical industries.

“For these communities, this struggle for ancient lands is equivalent to the struggle for life”, Guadalupe said in Berlin.

Source: www.prensaindigena.org.mx