Reseñas

Mauricio Archila, coord., Zohanny Arboleda, Sergio Coronado, Tatiana Cuenca, Martha Cecilia García y Luis Emiro Guariyú. "Hasta cuando soñemos": Extractivísimo e interculturalidad en el sur de la Guajira. Bogotá: CINEP / Programa por la Paz, 2015. 452 páginas. DOI: 10.15446/achsc.v44n1.64031

A look at a satellite map of the Complejo Carbonífero de El Cerrejón in the southern Guajira exposes a huge brown stain on the landscape. As you move into the image, it appears as a series of circles and squares, some black and some lighter in color, ringed by tan lines, like paths or terraces. The blot is surrounded by alternating bands of green and beige. Beyond the blot ravaging the landscape is a sea of green. The Wayuu resguardo of Provincial is a small dot on the northwestern frontier of the stain: a David, positioned against the Goliath of El Cerrejón.

Hasta cuando soñemos presents the results of a collaborative research project between the Cabildo Indígena of Provincial and academic researchers from the Centro de Investigación y Educación Popular (CINEP). By the time the project commenced, El Cerrejón had been in operation for three decades, the neighboring community of Tabaco had been forcibly relocated, and the cabildo had engaged the state and the mining company in preliminary conversations with an eye to a consulta previa (a process of prior consultation with the indigenous community before external agents undertake a major project). Those discussions left them thinking whether it would be advisable to pursue this option, given that should they embark on a consulta previa, they would be forced to negotiate with the mining company, which was intent on diverting the Ranchería River. This constituted a no-win situation that would deprive the indigenous community of access to a vital resource and, ultimately, impede indigenous exploitation of their territory.

During the organizing process against El Cerrejón, the community of Provincial forged alliances with nongovernmental organizations dedicated to the environment and made contacts with legal collectives, while also working through their regional indigenous association. Ultimately, they opted for an unusual resolution: instead of continuing with the consulta previa, which from the start would limit their ability to achieve control over their territory, they decided to initiate a process of consulta autónoma (an autonomous consultation process, without participation of the state or the mining company), so as to ensure future generations the right to continue to enjoy their territorial rights. But changing course in this way, adopting a new and unknown strategy, meant that the community would need to prepare itself, garnering not only a deep knowledge of its surroundings but also learning how to conduct such research. This is the logic behind the collaborative relationship forged between the cabildo and CINEP researchers that ultimately resulted in an almost-unanimous vote against El Cerrejón's diversion of the Ranchería River and in the pathbreaking book, Hasta cuando soñemos.

This book is framed as a diálogo de saberes, a horizontal conversation among different forms of creating knowledge, the results of which would be immediately applicable to the process of the consulta autónoma. The team, which included community leaders and youth, as well as CINEP researchers from a variety of disciplines and expertise (anthropology, economics, history, law, and sociology) conducted this dialogue through a series of carefully prepared workshops, employing written documentation, graphics, and narrations by community members, and alternating between bilingual discussions and dialogues in Wa-yuunaiki, the Wayuu language. Breakout groups were organized according to the preferences of community participants. In these workshops, important historical questions, such as the origins of the Wayuu and their arrival at Provincial, a regional historical timeline, and the history of indigenous struggle, were discussed, with issues brought up, equally, by community members and by the CINEP team. As historian Mauricio Archila's chapters on diálogo de saberes and on collaboration, or what he calls co-labor illustrate, after a careful and wide-ranging investigation into the various forms of collaborative and participatory research that have been employed in Colombia, the team opted for a particular definition of co-labor that would take into account the differences that exist in the community according to generation, gender, and clan membership, and that impact on the nature of both the administrative authority of the cabildo and the authority of those who can be called "traditional authorities": narrators and healers whose authority stems from their status as knowledge-bearers. That is, the project involved not only an analysis of the impact of El Cerrejón, but a self-evaluation of power dynamics in the community (as well as within the CINEP team), constituting a recognition of the complexities of teamwork, not only between researchers from different cultures, but also within those very subject-positions. Archila's insightful literature review and his brutally honest evaluation of where the collaborative venture succeeded and where it fell short is something that should be welcomed as both an encouragement to collaborative researchers and at the same time, a cautionary tale about the limits to academic goodwill.

The detail with which the authors of this volume approach the question of the extent to which El Cerrejón has devastated the environment of the southern Guajira is, indeed, unusual and highly welcome in a publication recounting the results of collaborative research. Using both their different expertise in social science and their ability to learn from the scientific literature, Zohanny Arboleda, an anthropologist, and Tatiana Cuenca, an economist, demonstrate very convincingly how indigenous access to the regional resource-base was severely obstructed by the presence of the mining company: limited access to pasture, the closing-off of forests that had provided the basis of traditional medicine, hunting-grounds, and, above all, access to the water that sustains this arid and seemingly inhospitable environment. They achieve this through a careful ethnographic examination of how the Wayuu perceive their own territory, and at the same time, persuasively illustrate how members of the community of Provincial not only lost control of these resources but also witnessed how, over time, they were degraded by deposits of waste from the mine, carrying a series of toxic heavy metals, like mercury, lead, arsenic, and cadmium, that definitively altered the pH of the Ranchería River. Arboleda and Cuenca also document the alarming degree of air and noise pollution to which the community has been exposed; it is the constant intrusion of noise and vibrations from the explosives used at the mine that blocked the Wayuu from dreaming, a traditional mode of knowledge-gathering (hence, the book's title).

However, to speak of environmental justice in the southern Guajira is to inquire not only into the effects of large-scale mining, but also into how the process made such massive inroads in the region. This is accomplished with skill and insight by sociologist Martha Cecilia García, in her historical reconstruction of the scientific expeditions that discovered coal in the Guajira, the government policies and international negotiations that laid the groundwork for its exploitation, the international financial support that encouraged the development of mining, and the complex genealogy of national and international corporations that ultimately began to extract coal from the earth in El Cerrejón. García deftly illustrates how this network of politicians and diplomats, scientists, multilateral lending agencies, and corporate executives was able to transform the landscape into the catastrophic topographic scar that is El Cerrejón.

García also demonstrates her ability to move between the analysis of documentary sources originating in dominant economic institutions and in national historical archives to a sensitive interpretation of indigenous narrative, in her illuminating chapter reconstructing how the Wayuu arrived in Provincial, a territory known as "Corazones" that furnished a refuge in times of famine during the nineteenth century. Interweaving archival materials, genealogical information, myth, and oral history, she makes a case for the Wayuu occupation of the southern Guajira and chronicles their conflicts with non-indigenous ranchers and the violent conflicts that erupted in the 1970s with the appearance of mafias "marimberas" (a Colombian expression referring to marihuana), as well as the entry of indigenous refugees displaced by inter-clan clashes in the upper and middle Guajira. In this chapter, we are also treated to the history of carbon mining in the region, complementing the document-based narrative that García highlights in her other chapter.

In the midst of this history of displacement and conflict, of environmental degradation and a loss of indigenous territorial control, Hasta cuando soñemos probes the possibilities of exercising indigenous autonomy in a series of enlightening chapters. Zohanny Arboleda weighs the benefits and the shortcomings of the process of consulta previa as it has played out in Colombia in general and in the Guajira in particular, demonstrating how the imposition of a defined process of negotiation has severely limited the fundamental rights of indigenous communities. Arboleda, writing in co-authorship with Tatiana Cuenca, provides a blow-by-blow description of how Provincial forged a path to the consulta autónoma, a narrative that is echoed in Luis Emiro Guariyu's personal narrative that serves as a preface to the volume (the preface is a reconstruction of an emotive and inspiring story that the community leader shared in a prepublication workshop, but which, unfortunately, was not recorded). Legal scholar Sergio Coronado concludes the volume with a series of acute observations regarding the critical points at which the Provincial activists encountered tensions and contradictions implicit in the consulta previa format, including the formulation of preacuerdos (preliminary agreements) between corporations and communities, the clash of indigenous and western forms of knowledge in the consulta process, and the need for institutional protections of indigenous rights and for strategies to ameliorate internal conflict during consultas.

This is a dense volume, bristling with evidence, continually confronting various forms of disciplinary knowledge and creating partial bridges with indigenous knowledge, which, unfortunately, are only recounted in the words of the CINEP researchers; a common difficulty in collaborative research, where grassroots participants have only a limited degree of control over the written word. Hasta cuando soñemos is a story of environmental loss, and of the political and methodological errors made along the way to achieving autonomy, but it also provides an important inspiration, both for the future of indigenous control over territory and for would-be collaborative researchers.

JOANNE RAPPAPORT
Georgetown University, Washington D. C., Estados Unidos
rappapoj@georgetown.edu