Not bad for a holiday, but what about the deaths, drought, displacement, devastation?
Financial Times fails to acknowledge the crises engulfing one remote Colombian region
Imagine a national newspaper publishing a 1,900 word article that begins with an encounter with three indigenous children, but fails to mention anywhere, even in passing, that allegedly 1000s of such indigenous children have died of chronic malnutrition or starvation in recent years. Imagine the article describing travelling into that indigenous people’s ancestral territory, accompanied by indigenous guides, staying in apparently indigenous-run hostels, and featuring photos of indigenous men, women and children, but never once acknowledging that their survival, as a distinct “people”, has been formally declared in danger. Imagine the article referring to a giant coal mine owned by one of the world’s most powerful, most notorious companies, but saying sweet zilch about the devastating impacts that it is reported to have had on those same indigenous people.
Hard, huh? But somehow the UK’s Financial Times (FT) managed to do all that - and more - in its “Travel” section on 5 June, ironically, given that day is designated by the United Nations (UN) as “World Environment Day.” The country visited was Colombia, the region La Guajira - “South America’s northern tip” - and the indigenous people the Wayúu, the country’s most populous.
You would have thought that somewhere the FT might have made clear that for years now La Guajira has been gripped by a series of different crises, and that the Wayúu, constituting the majority of the local population, have been the worst hit, with the fate of Wayúu children in particular becoming a kind of national or even international cause célèbre. Not just as a result of chronic - and even strategic - government or state neglect, which the FT hints at in its penultimate paragraph, but a complex suite of other factors including civil war between the Colombian army, paramilitaries and guerrillas, operations by foreign companies, organised crime, and broader social, economic, political and climate-related problems - severe drought among them. Indeed, less than a month after the FT went to print, an “Economic, Social and Ecological Emergency” was declared in the region on the grounds of a “serious humanitarian crisis” involving a scarcity of drinking water, among other things.
“It is evident that the majority of La Guajira’s population is experiencing the systematic violation of their fundamental rights to drinking water, health, food and other things,” the Colombian NGO Dejusticia stated in a response to the Emergency.
Nevertheless, apart from a vague, lazy reference to the Wayúu “clash[ing] with the conquistadors and then the Colombian government”, followed by a description of them as “victims of the state, the Catholic Church, and of the drug cartels”, there was nothing in the FT article. Nothing intimating that any such general crisis or emergency exists and has done for a very long time, and certainly nothing specific about the Constitutional Court in 2009 declaring the Wayúu “at risk of extinction”, for example, or the Court reiterating such concerns more recently, or all the other eminent legal institutions and entities which have responded to the Wayúu’s plight and particularly that of their children - the Supreme Court of Justice, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the UN’s World Food Programme etc.
“The statistics confirm a truth known for several years by Colombian authorities, international institutions and civil society organizations: Wayúu children die of hunger every month,” stated the Constitutional Court - not known for making wild, unsubstantiated claims - in 2017.
To give one blatant example of the FT’s apparent blindness: the month before its article was published, national indigenous federation Organización Nacional Indígena de Colombia (ONIC) sounded the alarm about more than 1,000 Wayúu families from 37 communities in one La Guajira province at risk of being “forcibly displaced” by “the Mayor’s office, the army and illegal armed groups.” The article’s author, UK journalist Ruaridh Nicoll, passed through that province’s main town, the biggest in La Guajira, but pretty much all he had to say was that he had drinks there with the well-known Wayúu writer and scholar - and former regional governor - Weildler Guerra Curvelo.
For Isidoro Hazbun, a Colombian who works for the US-based NGO Amazon Conservation Team, the FT “irresponsibly romanticises the Guajira peninsula.”
“It's far from a safe place,” says Hazbun, who recently returned from visiting Wayúu communities in the region. “The dangers extend beyond organized criminal groups to encompass the severe socioeconomic and climate crises plaguing the area. Just recently, the parents of Luis Díaz, the Liverpool football player, were kidnapped, highlighting the ongoing risks. If someone of his stature is being targeted, one can only imagine the dangers faced by the common-folk.”
For Hazbun, these kinds of incidents “serve as stark reminders of the perilous conditions in the area.”
“During my recent visit, about 40 tourists were robbed on an excursion, and a Brazilian businessman went missing in the borderlands near Maicao and Paraguachon,” he tells me.
Perhaps the FT’s most egregious failure, though, was something that it did mention, but so casually it was almost offensive: Cerrejón, the largest open-pit coal mine in Latin America. “At the Wayúu capital of Uribia we join a road that runs beside a straight-to-the-horizon railway,” the article ran. “A huge yellow engine comes the other way hauling a line of armoured boxes. “Explosives,” says José, headed for Glencore’s vast Cerrejón coal mines, 70 miles south.”
Nothing else worth mentioning, apart from the rough location and colour of its trains? Not only has Cerrejón had all manner of impossible-to-impress-upon-you impacts on the Wayúu for four decades, but its current owner, the Switzerland-based and London Stock Exchange-listed company Glencore, is suing Colombia, through a so-called “investor-state-dispute-settlement” (ISDS) mechanism, over a 2017 ruling by the Constitutional Court suspending the mine’s expansion into an area that is a crucial source of water for many Wayúu communities. Oxfam, Fair Finance International and other NGOs have just published a report about Cerrejón titled A Toxic Legacy: Glencore's Footprint in Colombia and Peru, while a delegation from La Guajira has been in the UK the last few days hoping to pressure Glencore itself, the company’s investors and European governments.
For Leobardo Sierra Frias, a Wayúu community leader who appeared at an event in London two days ago titled “Unmasking Glencore”, Cerrejón has destroyed the Wayúu's land, forest and sources of water. “Our hope is that the general public, investors, banks and academics etc understand what is going on, where their energy is coming from, how it is killing the environment and the cost to life that it is bringing, and that they reevaluate their investments, consumption patterns and other decisions,” he tells me.