Colombia's Hidroituango dam: 'There's a new war taking place'

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Ituango, Colombia – Ruby Posada transient from her home on her son’s back, underneath a sheer light of a moon in northern Colombia, when a waters reached waist height.

Her house, like dozens of others tighten to Colombia’s measureless River Cauca, was flooded when H2O burst through a dam construction site progressing this month.

Grabbing what they could, she and her son assimilated other artisanal bullion miners and started a three-day travel wasteland to safety.

Once they could go no further, they fashioned a white dwindle out of a broom and captivated a courtesy of rescuers from a Red Cross and a inhabitant disaster agency.

Now, a replaced organisation have assimilated during slightest 24,000 people, many of whom warranted their vital fishing or mining bullion in a river, who have been evacuated from a area due to a risk of serve flooding, and are vital in proxy shelters.

“We have no work, no tools, no houses, no animals,” Posada says, sitting on a petrify building of a open auditorium that houses some of a displaced, as woodsmoke billows in from a temporary kitchen in a murky yard outside. “The inundate has taken everything.”

The Hidroituango dam, in northwest Colombia, was impending execution when disaster struck.

The hydroelectric facility, initial recognised of in 1969 and instituted in 2010, will be a biggest a nation has ever seen, and will accommodate scarcely 20 percent of Colombia’s whole electricity needs – if completed. 

In a arise of a flood, some 1,500 engineers are operative opposite a time to finish a 415-metre-high wall that will reason behind rising stream waters.

The devise will now expected distant surpass a projected $5bn bill – $250m of that was invested by a Canadian supervision – due to a flooding of a engine room and a finish drop of dual bridges over a river, as good as dual schools and a health hospital in a riverside town. 

Hidroituango had been touted as a honour of a segment and of a country, with promises of millions of dollars of amicable investment in a internal area.

Now, though, with a destiny of a dam unresolved in a balance, some contend it comes during too high a cost for a village already traumatised by years of conflict, and risks sparking uninformed carnage in a frail region.

Ruby Posada transient from her home on her son’s behind when a waters reached waist height [Mary Atkinson/Al Jazeera]

‘There’s a new fight holding place’

Posada, for one, knew a despondency of detriment prolonged before a inundate took her livelihood; she mislaid dual brothers to Colombia’s decades-long armed conflict. The initial left 15 years ago – his physique was found dual weeks after on a banks of a River Cauca, his heart private and his eyes gouged out by worried paramilitaries. Four years later, her other hermit was shot passed by a severe insurgent group, in a box of mistaken identity. 

It is estimated that a area influenced by a dam saw over 3,500 murders between 1990 and 2016, with some-more than 600 people forcibly left and 110,000 displaced. 

A segment once dominated by FARC rebels, assault here was fuelled by a area’s vital plcae in a mezzanine that links a coca-producing internal with a Gulf of Uraba, and from there with markets and traffickers in Central America.

“The River Cauca is a tomb – during a tallness of a dispute a paramilitaries lined people adult on a overpass and shot them, and afterwards threw their bodies into a water,” says Posada, holding a low drag of her cigarette.

“And we know that there are mass graves along a banks of a river. Now, since of a dam, we’ve mislaid a possibility to redeem a stays of a desired ones; they’re underneath 100 metres of water, and nobody will hunt for them.”

Despite final year’s landmark assent accords between a supervision and FARC rebels, that bequest of assault shows small pointer of stopping. Two members of a romantic organisation fighting opposite a dam, Movimiento Rios Vivos, were shot passed within a one-week duration in May, and many some-more have faced assassination attempts and threats.

“There’s a new fight holding place right during a heart of Hidroituango,” says Carlos Alberto Builes, a highbrow of domestic scholarship during Colombia’s Pontifical Bolivarian University. “In what we call a post-conflict period, it’s one of a many frail areas in a country. It’s still a ideal drug trafficking route, and new paramilitaries and riotous groups are now fighting it out for control.”

Empresas Publicas de Medellin, a utilities hulk in assign of a dam project, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s ask for comment. 

 At slightest 24,000 people, many of whom warranted their vital fishing or mining bullion in a river, have been evacuated from a area due to a risk of serve flooding [Mary Atkinson/Al Jazeera]

‘If we lift on like this, we’ll never grasp peace’

Hidroituango is only one of many such projects being rolled out in regions still struggling to cope with a effects of Colombia’s bloody conflict.

Since 2012, a Contract Plan growth programme endorsed by a OECD – an mercantile confederation Colombia is finally fasten this month after a five-year wait – has seen a executive supervision siphon millions of dollars into informal infrastructure projects in some of a worst-hit tools of a country. To date, 700 projects have been finished underneath a plan, including roads, electricity networks, schools and aqueducts.

The programme has brought advantages to some of Colombia’s many bankrupt communities, though Builes insists that such projects need clever management.

“The genuine thought behind [the Contract Plan] is to build infrastructure that enables vast companies and multinationals to do business in areas left behind by a FARC. This is growth though courtesy for a internal communities left spiritually and psychologically damaged by a conflict. These communities contingency instead be incorporated into growth projects.”

If we lift on like this, we will never grasp peace

Ruby Posada

In a box of Hidroituango, Maria Victoria Uribe, a highbrow of anthropology during a Del Rosario University, says a project’s outcome will go distant over a effects of a new floods.

“Despite a insurgency Hidroituango has generated among riverside communities, it stays a really critical devise that will accommodate a appetite needs of vast numbers of people. It’s only like always; what we call ‘progress’ will force a approach into these communities and change their approach of life.”

For Posada, who has spent a final 8 years fighting opposite a dam alongside other internal women, projects like Hidroituango have small wish of benefitting a internal village if they problematic a scars of a past.

She says a village museum on a banks of a River Cauca, where kin of dispute victims kept cinema of their desired ones and collected to plead compensation processes, was broken to make approach for a dam. 

“The museum was a dedicated place, and a detriment caused us good pain,” she says.

“If we lift on like this, we will never grasp assent – a initial step contingency be to find a truth,” she adds. 

“Once we have a possess land we will entice a male who killed my hermit to eat lunch with my family – though it will be done with mixture we have grown myself. That will be a impulse when we can finally pardon him.”

Hidroituango is only one of many such projects being rolled out in regions still struggling to cope with a effects of Colombia’s bloody conflict [Mary Atkinson/Al Jazeera] 

Article source: http://www.france24.com/en/20161207-renewed-fighting-hits-libyas-key-oil-region

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