We cannot close the eyes and less to remain been silent before the gravity than it is happening in our territories. We cannot either hide the fear obstructs that us when seeing as it advances the destruction of the forests that offered refuge us and they give life, joy and freedom us. We fear to lose what indigenous and black we have constructed during so many years of pacific coexistence between our towns, being respected the laws that the nature dictates to us, to which we have tied our lives and of which depend the well-being and the future of the presents and future generations of our towns.
While we discussed to the worthy permanence of the communities in the territory, planning our development and ordering our practices of handling of the environmental resources, other egoistic economic interests arrive that overflow our forces, ruining our cultures, hurting from death to the territory and destructiveness the organizations of the ancestral towns, the true owners of the Colombian Pacific.
We have the belief that the territory region of the Pacific is resembled the human body. It has life. Anyone of its parts that are hurt, affects all the organism. I mistreat that it receives the river basin of one of its rivers, harms all the territory.
To thus they understood our ancestors it and to that wise rule we continued it passing on our children, because there is the key of our survival, and it derives solidarity and mutual aid between the rivers there, that we must continue practicing.
Today we were debating the defense of the Mangrove swamp, unique space of life in the crucial planet and for the life of many settlers. We were in the crossroads. Or we defend the mangrove swamp and the thousands of species that live there, or our lives erase, but also the life of the resurgent ones, the children and indigenous and black children who have not even been born and who deserve to live in these vital ecosystems.
The mangrove swamp is so important for the life of the man, the species and the planet, that we propose that the damages caused to this ecosystem are catalogued like crimes of lesa humanity.
With this Social Emergencies that today we summoned, we are calling to all our brothers of the Colombian Pacific, to the black and indigenous organizations, to the friendly of the diversity of the life and the culture, to the scientists, students and lovers of this rich and generous region.
In aim we summoned to all those that value diversity, to that we react against very serious violations that appear in all these territories, especially those that are collective private property of the indigenous and black towns:
1. The gold mining. The auriferous operation is overflowed in Saragossa (Ague river), with irreversible damages to the environment and ecosystems waters down and highly detrimental for the black communities and indigenous communities of Means and Under Ague.
There they work near 300 backhoes day and night, turning around I milk and changing the course of the river. This situation has been tolerated and until allowed by the local, regional and national authorities public.
The deeds, the wounded, prostitution, the alcoholism, the increase of the life and the arrival of new and “legalized” companies bring about uncertainty and fear in the region. This mining extends like a cancer to other rivers of the Pacific. A dredge of great openwork works in became of Majorcan. In the Anticay river (San Marcos) also they are operating several backhoes.
We see with much preoccupation the maps of requests and titles that come giving to IGNOMINIES and the Ministry from Mines in the Colombian Pacific. This does not know the agreements that the Colombian State has it jeopardize with international organisms and harms of way burdens the rights of the communities.
Because it ends vital ecosystems for the feeding of the communities. Like environmental authorities in our territories, we only allowed the traditional mining, the baroque, practiced ancestrally by the communities, as one of the complementary forms of obtaining of income.
2. The fumigations that the same affect cocaine cultures and cultures of `pancake’. These do not manage to control the production of grazes of cocaine, but they contaminate grounds and waters, and they eliminate the genetic base of the cultures and the biodiversity.
Worse still, they violate the rights to the food, the health and the healthy environment. We know the evils that brings these cocaine cultures. Not only they harm the atmosphere, but they are implanted with violence, to induce the native population to seed cocaine.
The murders and the displacements that take place by the production, synthesis and traffic of illicit are a disaster for our organizational communities and our processes. The social order that imposes the armed groups destroys the own governments of the communities.
The worse thing, hooking to many young people for activities of control and monitoring with which also it is subordinated to the authorities of the communities.
The consequent abandonment of the own practices of food production and the dependency of the flow of resources of these illegal economies lead to the uprooting of the population, a situation that stops the towns ethnic-territorial leads them to ethnocide, to the disappearance of the ethnic characteristics that give social cohesion them.
But the control of the cultures of illicit use by means of the fumigation, the syndication of the settlers of being helping of tall o coal armed group that it benefits from the cocaine culture, the threats, the intimidation’s to the community.
The restrictions to the mobility and the purchase of gasoline and foods, also causes serious damages to our communities. In the majority of the cases is being more expensive the remedy than the disease.
3. The permissiveness of the environmental authorities and in particular the CIVIC (Regional Independent Corporation of the Valley of the Caucus) against serious attacks against the nature, enlarges east picture from offenses to our towns.
Already mentioned mining, the operation on commercial scale of mangle, mileposts the illegal tomb of the palm and the petroleum nadir, spill in Malaga Bay and the pouring from sweepings to the rivers and the sea, must be controlled of urgent way.
The Judicial and Agrarian Office of the judge advocate general and the Ministry of the Environment, must take emergency measures and also act without delay.
4. But we denounced the slackness of the CIVIC in this upsetting to the environment, also we are you allow that these plunderers and destroyers of the Pacific would not have all so easy and they could not act with impunity, of indeed not having mentors in the government and helpers and beneficiaries to the interior of our communities.
That promotes such situations, protected in the negligence of the corporation, an action absence, that as we showed already it, is eliminating the life in the most productive ecosystems of the planet, the mangrove swamp, harming to fishing communities and especially to the women who live on the harvesting of shells, crabs and mollusks.
5. The threats that come receiving the leaders from our organizations, to denounce these facts, are an indication that the capitals who today are rushed on the resources, come from equally illicit activities.
6. Absence of a true previous consultation on great infrastructure projects that implement the communities behind the back of, in spite of the negative impacts of these initiatives.
They have not inquired, less consulted properly to the communities on the construction of the Port of Guayule, the harbor development of the deltas of the rivers Anticay and Ague and the urbanization of the course inferior of the Ague river, where black and indigenous communities live.
7. Special mention deserves the project of development of expansion and harbor modernization in Good luck that is being carried out behind the back of the population of Low tide. These transferred communities are going to be desalajodas and without considering the international standards and without respecting their conditions and rights, first of all, without considering the river-town dynamics, that to break itself would affect all the population of the rivers.
We also denounce that the types are not known projects, the impacts that they will generate and the plans of handling to take care of such impacts. The communities of the rivers we see that our networks of product commerce will be altered seriously, that we will have to use private and expensive ports.
That the houses where we lodged when we arrived at Good luck will be transferred to distant sites and without access to the sea, situation that desestructurara the parental networks, social and political that established the communities that already had undergone other displacements, in an exodus that not yet finishes. This situation comes happening after living a wave on violence that summoned up the life of more of a hundred of settlers, many on young them.
8. Increasing militarization of the rivers. With the massive arrival from the cocaine to the Pacific and the increasing presence of groups armed, for the problematic government the social one of these regions enters to constitute itself in a phenomenon that must be treated in military terms. The proposals of economic development happen to background, because it is tried first to provide a military solution to him to the problem of the cocaine and the armed groups.
The greatest disadvantage of this policy is that all the settlers of the rivers where there are cultures of illicit use enter being catalogued like helping potentials of the armed groups. In that sense we see with much preoccupation the control armed of the territory with action as the adjustment of the military base of Malaga Bay and the abundant presence of the military in the rivers.This comes desinstitucionalizando plus the region, which favors more military presences and more violence of all the armed groups.
9. Public policies, economic plans and legal reorderings that come altering the territoriality and modifying the guarantees from access, use and handling of our collective territories, such as the reform to decree 622 of Parks and the Departmental Water Plan.
One is governmental initiatives that not only violate our rights, but do not know international standards that honor rights of our populations, like Agreement 169 of the International Labour Convention and `Declaration of the United Nations on the rights of the towns indigenes’.
It is considering this situation that WE DECLARED:
1. That we are convinced that to save the Pacific of this wild operation of all ecosystems, is to help to save the planet.
2. That we are the ancestral owners of the Colombian Pacific and that our life and history is ligature to these ecosystems and therefore it attends the legitimacy to us to demand that the destruction of our territories is stopped.
3. We indicate, like already it has recognized the Swedish academy when granting the Nobel prize of economy to Eli nor Nostrum, that the best and more efficient form to conserve the natural resources, is pronounced when they handle them to the proprietors of collective form, taking care of its vital needs a good one to live.
4. That we have made the firm decision to work united and of shared in common way between the organizations who we subscribed this declaration, assuming the principle of which what it happens to him to a community, a territory, passes us to all and we will act consequently.
5. That we will develop political initiatives and legal so that the damages that are infringed to him to all the ecosystems of the Pacific, of which we we derived our subsistence, are declared like crimes of leas humanity, because we resisted to being the environmental displaced futures.
6. That we will be alert and continue denouncing the threats and murders of members of our communities that to dare to denounce these upsetting against the nature, are white of armed groups.
7. We invite all the Communitarian Advice of the afrocolombiano town and to all the Town halls of the indigenous towns from the Pacific to that they adhere to this declaration and we are united in a single beam to this transcendental initiative to declare to the Pacific in social emergencies, because they are in game our lives and the future of the afrocolombianos and indigenous towns.
