To get to Mocoa, I left Bogotá for the Tres de Mayo airport in Puerto Asís. I am ready for a two-hour road trip. It’s early, but that ‘scorching’ humidity that tells me the jungle is close is already starting to be felt. As I imagined, just a few streets from the urban area, I am met with the green of the forest and the bustling of birds in the treetops. Further on, where the central mountain range gives way to the Amazonian plain, the rain from the night before gives us a spectacle of waterfalls that fall between the mountains.
However, the Putumayo is not just forest and songs. An endless corridor of oil pipelines, military camps, and the enormous anti-narcotics base that shares the airport with the municipality of Villagarzón, are other elements that make up this jungle landscape. A portrait of the historical relationships that the political and economic center of the country has established with these territories.
Even today, when the Amazon region is presented as a “world power of life,” arriving in Mocoa confronts me with an enormous construction that turns the Mulato, Taruca, and Sangoyaco rivers into cement highways. This is part of the execution of the so-called “Action Plan for the Reconstruction of Mocoa,” a massive infrastructure project carried out by the national government after the 2017 avalanche that claimed the lives of more than 335 people and left another 17,000 affected. This intervention replaced trees with embankments and cement as a strategy to mitigate the risk of a new flood and a possible overflow of these tributaries. Six years after the tragedy, the Attorney General’s Office has denounced delays in the completion of the works, and on March 31 of this year, a public hearing was held, called by the Congress of the Republic, to request explanations regarding these problems.
We arrived in Mocoa around nine in the morning, a city embraced by mountains and rivers. In a coffee shop in the main park, we met with Olga Yaneth Trujillo, Zulma Yulieth Ulcué, and Paola Jinneth Silva, founders of Uma Kiwe Madre Tierra. A corporation that was formally constituted in 2020 with the dream of transforming, through communicative initiatives, the way we relate to life, nature, and bodies violated by extractivist interests.
They make an effort to translate technical and legal concepts on issues that concern their territory into a more everyday language, in order to fuel the public debate with questions that are rarely talked about. For example: What does it mean to live in the Amazon? What effects do these interventions have on the ecosystems of the rivers and the other ancestral ways of inhabiting the territory? How to report on the disharmonies of the territory by uniting technical and ancestral knowledge? What community management alternatives other than cement could be developed to mitigate the risk?
None of the three are experts in hydraulic engineering or ecology. Olga and Paola are social communicators and journalists, and Zulma is a licensed ethno-educator, anthropologist, and psychologist. However, guided by the conviction that interventions like these are not in harmony with the needs of nature and the inhabitants, they did what they have learned throughout their experience: knock on doors and ask different voices. They made circles of the word among young people and environmental groups who were also concerned about this situation. They talked with academics, indigenous sages, and professionals from different areas to answer some of their questions and inquire about alternatives to address the problem.
They disseminate the materials from these conversations through their social networks, WhatsApp groups, and community workshops with the residents of the municipality with the purpose of offering input that strengthens their participation in public debate and citizen oversight in this and other projects.
The “Juntanza” and the Word as a Form of Healing
Recognizing interculturality as a principle, Uma Kiwe – Madre Tierra finds in open dialogue and the gathering of indigenous, peasant, and urban women, a path to advance in its purpose of repairing the fragmentation of the social and spiritual fabric that extractivist narratives and policies have brought to this territory. To do this, the corporation created “La Minga Kiwe,” a journalistic venture where, as its name suggests, by doing “mingas” (community work), they record the memory that inhabitants have of the territory, and make visible the social and environmental tensions that mining-energy and infrastructure projects impose on the municipality.
In the Nasa Yuwe language, Uma Kiwe means Mother Earth, which is also the second name of the organization. This worldview came through Zulma, who is part of this community and introduced indigenous thought to her companions, radiating in them a recognition of ancestral and spiritual knowledge as the basis of their actions.
Zulma is from Putumayo, Olga was born in Huila, and Paola in Cundinamarca. All of them come from the countryside, and despite having studied in major cities, the search to recover that more direct connection with nature and the work they did with other social organizations around the rights of the Amazon led them to meet in Mocoa. This common feeling brings them together through Uma Kiwe to walk their rivers, listen to their stories, and learn about their ancestral medicine. In their own words, this allowed them to “reconnect with the territory and feel its healing power.” From that meeting, the three decided that Mocoa would be their home and the defense of this territory a way of giving back to Mother Earth the resources and protection it provides from its depths.
As a result of this effort, during these three years, the Corporation has published several specials on social media: One of them is “Women’s Steps,” in which they recovered stories of indigenous women and their relationship with Mother Earth; “Memories of the Water,” on the other hand, is a work that focuses on the changes and effects that the rivers and Andean-Amazonian landscape of Mocoa have suffered as a result of illegal gold extraction and the execution of state interventions such as mitigation works; and “Let’s Talk about the Mountains,” a project through which the conflict between the mining company LiberoCobre and the communities of Mocoa over the interests in the exploitation of copper within the municipality has been made visible.
The Bet
Their dream is to be able to contribute to the collective construction of other narratives of the Putumayo territory that subvert the extractivist imaginary that has contributed to the destruction of the jungle, the rivers, and their communities. They want to resignify the Andean-Amazonian way of life in the memory of its inhabitants and of all those who approach this territory. As Olga says: “we want to tell the world, and not have the world tell about us.”
On my way back to Bogotá, many images and reflections accompany me. I think about the exuberant nature and the contradiction that subsist in this part of the Amazon. But also, about the strength and conviction of these three women who, being a young organization with few resources, have decided to question corporate giants and raise awareness about the way in which urban centers of power relate to nature and this territory. They infect me with hope and remind me that, like Uma Kiwe, there are many seeds throughout the country that are sprouting between the cement and making their way to build new ways of living.
(*) Researcher at Dejusticia
This article is part of the special #TejidoVivo, a product of a journalistic alliance between the Dejusticia study center and El Espectador.
