My Fight for Land and Life in Colombia

OCTOBER 13, 2017

by ANGELICA ORTIZ

My name is Angelica Ortiz. I am a Wayuu woman from the Ipuana clan of the Lomomato indigenous reserve in La Guajira, Colombia. I am a human rights defender and part of the Wayuu Women’s Force Movement. I am also a mother.

October 12th is a significant date for me and for the Wayuu people. It is the day they say they discovered America, but we were already here when the Spanish arrived. If they did discover our lands and our cultures, then they also found out the ways to force us into submission. Today is about remembering those cultures and peoples whose resistance wasn’t enough, those who’ve been erased.

In Colombia, the Spanish inquisition set up a system whereby indigenous communities had to pay the crown a royalty for being allowed to work the land. Through that system, they placed barriers on the original people of the land, rounded them up and told them “you can’t cross these borders”, and in the process, created the reserves that we live on today.

Irreversible impacts

Today, we see a new form of conquest, the land is being stripped of its minerals. For us, the coal, the oil and the minerals are the organs of our land, which is slowly being killed. If you take the organs out of a person, you kill them.

More:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/10/13/my-fight-for-land-and-life-in-colombia/