The Women Who Stand Against Fracking in the Middle Magdalena Valley
Written by: María Claudia Dávila
Photography: Lia Valero
This story was supported by GRID-Arendal’s Investigative Environmental Journalism Grants programme. Learn more. This publication is also part of the conversation #HablemosDeLasDefensorasAmbientales, hosted by @MutanteOrg.
The lives of Yuvelis Natalia Morales, Yosselin Infante, Carolina Agón, and Yuli Velásquez are traversed by the violence, hope, and contradiction inherent in being a woman in Colombia, seeking protection from the state, and safeguarding a territory threated by government-approved extractive projects.
Yuvelis Morales was watching TV when two armed men stormed into her house and threatened her, “If you keep bothering, we’re gonna have to kill you!” It was the night of January 29, the same day in 2021 in which the Chamber of Representatives’ Fifth Commission summoned a virtual public hearing to discuss the draft bills on fracking in Colombia. Yuvelis, who was 20 years old at the time, attended the hearing as the only civil society representative from Puerto Wilches, a municipality in the Middle Magdalena Valley that has lived a struggle during the last four years against hydraulic fracturing, a fossil fuel extraction method brought forward and advanced by the government of President Iván Duque.
The day before the hearing, two men on a motorcycle threatened 28-year-old Yosselin Infante, also from Puerto Wilches. She was on the back of a motorcycle accompanying her father to a rural area fifteen minutes away from the municipality’s center.
“They held the gun to my head and told me they would kill me if I didn’t stop,” she recalls.
Yuvelis and Yosselin had met on December 8, 2020, during a meeting at the Posada Real Hotel hosted by the Colombia Free of Fracking Alliance, a coalition of more than 80 social organizations. About 20 young people joined the gathering, attracted by a pamphlet posted on the town’s walls that warned the inhabitants of the municipality about hydraulic fracturing and its potential ecological and social impacts.
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During the meeting, they learned about the two government-backed integrated research pilot projects (PPI, for its acronym in Spanish) that will commence fracking activities in Puerto Wilches for research purposes. Both PPIs—Ecopetrol’s Kalé Project and ExxonMobil’s Platero Project—had been approved by the Council of State in February 2020 and were already in the final stages of approval before the National Hydrocarbons Agency. Driven by curiosity, the gathering’s young participants met again a few days later to organize themselves to protect the land and water of their municipality. Thus arose the Defense Committee for the Life and Water of Puerto Wilches (Aguawil), which continues monitoring the two currently approved pilot projects.
“We could not allow Puerto Wilches to be that place where they always take and never give back,” explained Yuvelis in March of this year. We spoke at a café in central Bogotá, where she arrived after being forced to leave her municipality. Her tone was firm and composed, though she did not hide her discomfort with living in a city that, in her eyes, cares more about the gas that fuels its cars than about the future of her municipality. “In Wilches, we still shower with non-potable water and cook with firewood,” she explained.
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Yuvelis forms part of the small share of the municipality’s population that has had access to higher education (2.8%). She is currently in her seventh semester studying Technology and Environmental Resources Management, which has given her tools to understand the impact that fracking would have in her territories. National and international scientific studies have documented these effects, including consequences on air quality, an increase in greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change, pollution of surface and underground water, depletion of potable water, and seismic risks. Other studies have shown health risks related to cancer and neurological, renal, reproductive, respiratory, and hematological pathologies.
“If we give our hydrologic wealth, our complex ecosystems, and the great amount of flora and fauna that we have in exchange for this questionable idea of progress, we threaten not only Puerto Wilches, but also the entire region,” she explains. “We must remember that rivers are not separate pieces, but rather hydrologic extensions that disgorge into the sea. If they are polluted, the impacts could be very complex in the entire territory.”
This clarity has motivated Yuvelis, Yosselin, and 18 other teenagers and young adults from the Middle Magdalena Valley to spend countless hours sharing their fears and those of the Colombia Free of Fracking Alliance with the community, including recurrent allegations about the national government’s dismissal of the recommendations set forth by the panel of experts created after the Council of State’s legal endorsement of the polemic pilot projects.
Both Yuvelis and Yosselin, as well as three of their colleagues, have received death threats. They must be making someone uncomfortable with their pamphlets, murals, cacerolazos, and door-to-door conversations…
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Poisoned Water and Fish
Since she was a child, Yuvelis understood the relationship between the river and families who make a living from fisheries. Being the daughter of an artisanal fisherman, she learned this almost intuitively, noticing how seasons determined the abundance of food. “If the river’s level rises, there is no fish and no money or food for the family,” she explains.
“Not long ago, Ecopetrol told my father about a job opening as a construction assistant, working alongside a few environmental engineers. They offered him less than the minimum wage and assured him that his family would be better off. He opposed the idea. He prefers real opportunities over a fleeting 28-day contract. He knows that without fish, or with a polluted river, we have nothing.”
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Carolina Agón is also a fisherwoman. She was born in the municipality of Rionegro, located almost 200 kilometers away from Puerto Wilches but also on the banks of the Magdalena River. Her entire family depends on fishing. That is how they fed her, and that is how she feeds her children today. She is the vice president of the Fisherfolk Federation of the Middle Magdalena Valley, and she is also committed to protecting water from the potential impacts of the fracking pilot projects.
On March 28, she joined a river caravan of 300 fisherfolk who cruised a stretch of the Magdalena River carrying signs to express their worries and petitions: “We want cassava, maize, and fish in plenty; we do not want fracking in our country!” About fifty fisherfolk took their kuisis, clarinets, drums, and guaches onboard in an act of protest. “Those who come to drill for oil will leave with a full tote, and we will leave with an empty one; when there is no food left here, we will have to leave,” exclaimed Carolina in front of a crowd that reunited in the town square after the river caravan.
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Water bonds Carolina, Yuvelis, and Yosselin. Carolina says that only God knows how many fish there are under the river’s surface. Fishing is sacred to her, for it allows her to offer her children a better future. Yosselin, on the other hand, refers to herself as “a friend of the water and the earth” and explains that, after having spent her entire life near nature, it is impossible not to see it as a part of herself that she is willing to defend. Meanwhile, Yuvelis ponders what she missed most about her town when she left to study in the city of Bucaramanga—whenever she felt sad, Yuvelis would sit on the shore of the Magdalena River and entrust her tears and her problems to the water.
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Between 2015 and 2021, there have been close to 1,500 registered spills, leaks, and piping and structural failures in the oil fields of Meta and the Middle Magdalena region, according to Óscar Sampayo, a political scientist from the University of Antioquia and a member of the Yariguíes Regional Corporation. Both institutions carry out research on the impacts of oil exploitation in the region. “In 2020 alone, we found that close to 200 barrels were spilled due to failures from Ecopetrol in oil concessions in the municipalities of Puerto Wilches, Yondó, Barrancabermeja, and Carmen Chucurí. If we focus only on Puerto Wilches, in the Cantagallo and Yarirí operations, there were 12 spills last year,” he asserts.
Leonardo Guitiérrez, a mechanical engineer from the Industrial University of Santander and a member of the panel of experts created by the Council of State to assess the potential impacts of the pilot projects, warns that the PPIs will pollute an alarming amount of water. “A single well consumes 30 million liters of water. A well may have up to 10 holes. That would be 300 million liters, and 60% of it will return to the surface. That means that for each well, there will be 20 million liters of polluted water with no place for storage,” he explains.
According to Ecopetrol’s communications office, there will be a water reduction and efficient use plan for the drilling phase of Project Kalé in which “Wastewater will be treated and reused during the operations based on the principles of the circular economy.” According to Ecopetrol, the amount of water used in the pilot well “will be between 200,000 and 320,000 barrels, or between 12 and 20 Olympic swimming pools.”
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However, Carolina, Yosselin, and Yuvelis agree that it is difficult to trust those kinds of arguments. There have been countless spills throughout the history of oil in the Middle Magdalena region, and there are no real guarantees that this will not repeat itself. “The water will come from the Magdalena River. And it will also be released there. It has already been shown that the water will not be clean after such a large intake of chemicals. This is a serious issue because it will be released as polluted water. Additionally, a reference to the circular economy means that they intend to reuse polluted water for other activities in their operations. That would be irresponsible if it has an impact on the health of their workers,” warns Yuvelis.
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A lack of connection with communities
After eighty years of oil exploitation in the Middle Magdalena region, the people of Puerto Wilches have yet to see how oil can improve their lives. Poorly maintained roads, underfunded schools, scarce potable water, and widespread hunger, among other issues, have eroded the community’s trust in oil companies.
During the last five years, Puerto Wilches has registered the highest poverty levels in the department of Santander. One quarter of the population falls under the monetary poverty line. This indicator stands in stark contrast to the municipality’s oil exploitation figures. Political scientist Óscar Sampayo asserts that the Cantagallo-Yairirí Concession, an oil field that encompasses Puerto Wilches, produces between 16 and 19 thousand barrels per da. The price of oil has fluctuated between 40 and 90 US dollars during the field’s operation.
Besides noticing the contrast between the oil industry’s wealth and the region’s poverty, many inhabitants of Puerto Wilches consider that fracking projects are not being agreed upon with communities. Yuvelis summarizes this perception straightforwardly, “Ecopetrol never consulted anything with us; it just made it clear to us that fracking would occur one way or another.”
The malaise builds on the recommendations of the panel of experts. The document maintains that the pilot projects should obtain a “social license,” a concept coined by the Canadian academics Ian Thomson and Robert Boutilier to refer to a community’s perceptions of an extractive project and the presence or absence of trust in the operation.
In the eyes of the young members of Aguawil, oil companies have used the concept of “social license” ambiguously. According to them, sometimes the concept means effective community involvement in the decision-making process of the pilots. Sometimes it simply refers to the projects’ promotion and dissemination.
Even the president of Ecopetrol, Felipe Bayón, has used the euphemism, publicly stating the need for these projects to hold a “social license” without explaining the implications of the concept. “Now that the definition is no longer convenient for them, they claim that the term simply means that they will disseminate the process with us. Its use is questionable because there are no criteria to issue it [the social license]. Nobody knows what it entails, and we have not heard an explanation,” says Yuvelis.
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According to Ecopetrol’s communications office, between 2020 and 2021, the company has carried out more than 380 meetings to spark conversations and exchange information. However, the four leaders we contacted explained that these are meetings with the municipal government and businesspeople in which only a share of the community participates—a share so small that it falls short of being representative.
As an example, they explain that only Yuvelis, out of Puerto Wilches’s thirty thousand inhabitants, was invited to participate in the hearing of January 29. Other spaces, she explains, have not included the fishing sector, union representatives, or workers from palm plantations.
The government and oil companies often claim that this process is built together with communities, an assertion that is often at odds with the views of communities themselves. In Wilches alone, 52% of the population has expressed its worry with fracking. Nonetheless, the pilot projects will move forward.
“The only thing that would make a difference,” says Yosselin, “is for the state to listen to the community. No one here wants fracking. They promise us progress and work. Work for how long? Progress for whom?”
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Being a woman and protecting water
Yuli Velásquez was raised on the shore of the Magdalena River, in the San Silvestre Wetland in the municipality of Barrancabermeja. Her grandparents were artisanal fishermen. Since she was a child, she saw catfish more than a meter and a half long and scarlet ibises and crabs that are no longer present in the region. Yuli, who is 36 years old, has been working for the last four years so other species can avoid that ill fate. “As artisanal fisherfolk, we are protecting and conserving the West Indian manatee, which has already disappeared from the wetland because of pollution. We do not do it for recognition or payment. We do it out of moral duty,” she explains.
Alongside environmental organizations like Cabildo Verde, WWF, and certain universities, a group of fisherfolk that seek to conserve the manatee’s habitat monitors the strategic places where it feeds and defecates.
With her colleagues, Yuli participates in cleanup sessions cutting different kinds of shrubs to make bundles and bows that she later leaves in key places for the manatees to eat. “When it is dry, it is hard for them to get close to the shore, so we identify these places to make it easier for them to feed themselves,” she explains. “We break up and monitor where they defecate to identify the areas where they move.”
She is the vice president of the Federation of Artisanal Fisherfolk of Santander, and she devotes her time to protecting the San Silvestre Wetland, which supplies water to 300,000 inhabitants of the Middle Magdalena Valley. The wetland is also home to the West Indian manatee and forms part of the jaguar’s corridor. Given the issues it faces, San Silvestre is currently under the process of being declared a subject of rights.
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Yuli Velásquez, vice president of the Federation of Artisanal Fishermen of Santander next to the canalete and the atarraya, a paddle and fishing net that is thrown by hand, commonly used in Colombia by fishermen. Photo: Lia Valero.
Among other experts, Luis Villalva, who leads Doctor Fauna, a research group for the conservation of the Middle Magdalena Valley’s wildlife, warns, “If fracking takes place, the jaguar will not have where to move and will enter unknown lands, unbalancing the entire ecosystem. For example, it may start entering areas for extensive cattle ranching and hunting cows, which would possibly turn the community [fatally] against it. We need to think this through at the department, country, and global levels. This will only stop when people understand that [their natural resources] are worth more than what these companies have to offer.”
Given the gravity and the implications of this kind of projects, Yuli and other fisherfolk in the region began denouncing the wetland’s pollution. San Silvestre has long been affected by lixiviate leaks from the Yerbabuena and La Esmeralda landfills and the dumping of crude oil from Ecopetrol’s refinery in Barrancabermeja.
An audit carried out by the Office of the Attorney General in 2020 determined that the bodies of water most affected by pollution are the Magdalena River and El Rosario Stream, which disgorges into the San Silvestre Stream and San Silvestre Wetland. According to the report, “The effects of rainfall stand out among the causes of the events, specifically the overflow of channels and structures to contain hydrocarbon residues.”
On January 20 of this year, two men tried to shoot Yuli while she was home with her family. They threw themselves on the ground before the bullets could reach them. Then the men ran away. “They wanted me to stop denouncing these facts,” Yuli explains.
A report published by Oxfam in 2019 delves deep into the forms of violence that women who defend land and the environment face in Colombia. “One of the main worries of women who defend the environment is not the risk they face, but rather the threats and attacks aimed at other members of their families, especially their sons and daughters […] This tactic is used mainly against female defenders, as opposed to their male colleagues,” the document asserts.
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According to the database Tierra de Resistentes, a journalistic project regarding the forms of violence that nature defenders in Latin America face, 11 women were threatened and 20 murdered between 2009 and 2020 for serving this role in Colombia. Likewise, Global Witness registered a steep increase in 2019 in the number of environmental defenders murdered in Colombia. In that year, 64 defenders were assassinated in the county, and one out of every ten were women.
Being a woman, leader, and environmental defender in Colombia means facing violence in very specific ways. “There is the risk of being a leader, of being a woman, and also the fact that female leadership is frowned upon by certain sectors that have conservative ideas about the role that we should play,” explains Lourdes Castro, who coordinates the Somos Defensores program.
Carolina remembers one of the many meetings she attended to seek dignified working conditions as a fisherwoman. One of the attendants said it would be best for her to focus on the wood stove. She recalls, “In one of those spaces, they told me, ‘We are among men here.’ In another one, they claimed ‘You belong in the house; women cannot think.’”
This all builds on a paradox. Castro explains, “In these cases, they stand against interests promoted by the state, and it is that same state that must guarantee their protection. This heightens the level of risk. We have seen that defending the interests of the state is above the rights of those who defend community interests. It is important for the state to recognize that a robust democracy needs these forms of leadership, and it must commit itself, for example, with the implementation of the Peace Agreement.”
The fate of water that is protected
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Yosselin often says that women who play leadership roles are generally economically independent. For example, she has been able to take care of herself and her daughter working at a small palm plantation and helping maintain its power generators. Like her, 90% of the population of Puerto Wilches works in this sector, according to the Chamber of Commerce of Barrancabermeja.
According to Leonardo Gutiérrez, who forms part of the pilot projects’ evaluating committee and presides the Association of Small and Medium Palm Growers, there are 60,000 hectares of this crop in Puerto Wilches and 129,000 hectares in neighboring municipalities—like Sabana, Cantagallo, Barranca, and Aguachica—in the departments of Bolívar and Santander.
Gutiérrez explains that these pilot projects will drive an increase in the price of labor in the palm sector because people will prefer to work with oil companies. He adds, “The level of productivity here is 22 tons of fruit per hectare per year. In the Llano or the coast, it is 16 tons per hectare per year because they do not have the amount of water that we have here. If they ruin our aquifers, the productivity of our palm oil will fall.”
In Puerto Wilches, African palm is the queen of the landscape. For kilometers upon kilometers, there is nothing else but this crop to be seen. It is a paradox that confronts female leaders. The water they fight to conserve ends up nourishing an industry with devastating impacts, like the loss of topsoil and its nutrients, changes in the quality of water, biodiversity loss, and the displacement of species.
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“I know that palm is super polluting,” Yosselin affirms. “There are no environmental controls in the municipality, but neither are there economic alternatives for those of us who depend on it. We have spent more than 60 years cultivating it, and the pilots may threaten that history.
Activists who oppose fracking in the region, and who prefer to remain anonymous, explained to us that—though they wish it could be otherwise—they have had to forge alliances with the palm sector to keep fracking out of Puerto Wilches. “We know how dark and perverse the palm sector can be. They have murdered our unionized colleagues who oppose them. It is not salvation. We do not want an extractive palm sector to replace oil extraction, but fracking deeply worries us now,” one of them told us.
Yuli, who lives the state’s neglect up-close and the lack of guarantees from companies she has previously denounced, says that the approval of commercial fracking “would be the worst environmental disaster in the history of the Middle Magdalena Valley.” She backs her pessimism, “If, for example, despite knowing which measures should be taken to mitigate the harm caused by pollution in the San Silvestre Wetland, no one has done anything, imagine what could happen in this scenario. No one would repair the harm.”
Meanwhile, as the issue becomes untangled through state-run dialogues and decisions, Carolina, Yuvelis, Yuli, and Yosselin continue to bet in favor of the contributions they can make through their personal spaces and social struggles.
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Carolina summarizes the way she sees her role as a female leader, symbolically describing the courage of many women who choose to protect the earth in a country like ours, torn by scars and contradictions, “I know that one day, though I will no longer be here, I will leave a footprint that no one will be able to erase. It will be a footprint that states, ‘she was a feisty woman, and though she was not rich, she would come out and organize the community because she believed in her country.’”
This article was translated from Spanish to English by David Berón Echavarria.
About the photographer
Lia Valero is Colombian independent journalist and photographer. As part of her professional experience, Lia has documented for 7 years different issues of human rights, gender, memory and conflict in Bogotá and various regions of Colombia, where she has used audiovisual work as part of her journalistic journey. In 2020, she was GNI fellow of the Poynter Institute and since 2013 has been part of Chicas Poderosas, a global community that promotes change by inspiring and fostering the development of women in the media. Her work has been published in national & international media such as Mutante.org, Rutas del Conflicto, De Correspondent, VICE, among others.
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About the author
María Claudia Dávila is a Colombian independent journalist. She has four years of experience covering human rights, gender and culture subjects, and using innovation on storytelling as part of her work. In 2020, she was a fellow at the International Center for Journalism (ICFJ) at the program A digital path towards entrepreneurship and innovation for Latin America, where she collaborated with LA Times and LA Times en Español. In May of 2019, she was selected by the Fundación Gabo to attend a solutions journalism workshop with Liza Gross and then she became a member of the Solutions Journalism Network, giving workshops on this topic to colombian and mexicans journalists. She has worked with Mutante, VICE Colombia and collaborated with Pacifista.
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