Defending the river, defending life
Rivers for life not death!
by Milena Mora and Ignasi Bernat
This year’s Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLASCO) Award has been won by the Ríos Vivos Movement. The prize, one of the most important in the Latin American academe, was given for the movement’s outstanding contribution to the defence of life.
The Ríos Vivos Movement is organised around the struggle against killings and forced displacement from their ancestral land caused by the construction of the Hidroituango Dam at the Cauca river in Antioquia, Colombia.
The peace agreements in 2016 between the guerrilla and the Colombian state have not resulted in peace in the territory. The construction of the dam, the largest in Colombia, has displaced Inhabitants of the towns and villages around the Cauca river. And many have been tortured, killed, and disappeared by paramilitary groups. These communities have been taken their fight for justice for the disappeared and for a return to their flooded villages, to the predatory corporations and the paramilitary groups which collaborate with them. They regard their fight not only as a fight for their homes, but for their ancestral way of life that is inseparable from the life of the river. The Ríos Vivos movement has a small area of land further up to the canyon that they have claimed. It is there that they grow food and coffee to sell and sustain their struggle for justice.
This is the speech given by the representative of Ríos Vivos Movevement, Milena Mora:
Good afternoon everyone. From the Ríos Vivos Colombia Movement, we want to thank CLACSO for recognising our struggle, for acknowledging the different ways we fight from our territories from our ancestral knowledge that our ancestors have left us and that these corporations and these forms that they want to implant in our territory want to erase us.
Today I want to make a call to all our compañeros who have fallen in struggle, that this award is in honour of them, but also (the public interrupts with applause) but also to all my compañeros who are in the territory fighting to transform that land that they have tried to destroy. We continue as a movement resisting in spite of the threats, in spite of the assassinations, to remain and transform those forms of life.
This is our refuge of life, our ways of working the land. We want to remain alive so we can continue fighting and leave a better territory for future generations. I ask all those present and all who are watching us to continue supporting us. That support is a way of giving us life, because we cannot endure so much abuse from those multinationals, from those who claim to hold power and who try to drive us out of our territory just because they wield those forms and asymmetries of power. As peasants, as barequeros (traditional gold miners), as fishermen, we continue standing and fighting, and we will continue transforming our territories into spaces for a dignified life.
Water, women, and energy are not commodities! [the crowd shouts water, women, and energy are not commodities!]
We invite everyone—our territory is open to all who wish to visit, to strengthen it, but also to learn from the ancestral knowledge we hold in our land. We await you at the Casa Grande.
Welcome to all, and we continue to fight from our territory to transform those extractivist ideas that dominate our land.
Thank you all very much!