As US Federal Climate Disaster Protections Crumble, Look To Indigenous Leadership and Keep Multinational Corporations On the Hook

When Colombia entered its post-civil war transitional justice process, the investigatory magistrates sought to recognize me as a victim in Case 001 of their truth and recognition chamber. Their invitation came 20 years to the day after we found the bodies of my partner Terence Unity Freitas and his mentor-colleagues Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa (Menominee) and Lahe’ena’e Gay (Hawaiian). They were kidnapped and murdered in 1999 upon exiting Indigenous U’wa territory in northeastern Colombia, near land then coveted by a U.S. oil company.

Gingerly Terence’s mother and I breathed life into our questions long dormant about the role of Occidental Petroleum at the time of the murders in that part of Colombia, where oil pipelines have always been a magnet for armed violence. We wondered if finally we had found a forum robust enough to hold the weight of our inquiry.

The answer was no. The reason was a failure of imagination exacerbated by procedural capture. We can learn from Colombia’s mistakes.

As our own democracy falters, and the backbone of domestic federal environmental, climate, and civil rights protections breaks, it is time for us to look to the instruction Indigenous societies like Pueblo U’wa in Colombia offer for procedural guidance.

For Pueblo U’wa, oil is the blood of the Earth and the Earth is our mother. To sustain life, they say, we have to keep the oil in the ground. For the U’wa, it’s not about a sustainable development framework, or weighing interests among stakeholders. Rather, for the U’wa, the purpose of human life is to maintain equilibrium between the world below the surface of the Earth, and the world above, where we live our daily lives.

The Pueblo U’wa maintain this equilibrium through song: Songs that last days. Songs that every U’wa child learns. Songs that tell stories of our interdependence with the rivers, mountains, forests, oceans from which we come and to which we are beholden for planetary survival. In a letter home to a friend shortly before his murder, Terence observed, “this is the reason we are doing this work, so that people can listen to singing.” Defending the space for the song’s narrative defends people’s access to remembering who they are, a key to bold action. For life to sustain, the voice of the song must remain inviolate.

In the transitional justice process, Colombia considered an oil company to be a third party to the armed conflict. Although investigation of the role of third parties had originally been part of the envisioned charge, the judicial decision that finalized the investigatory scope of the truth and recognition chamber eliminated it. Business elites had ensured that third parties such as multinational resource extraction corporations were excluded from investigation.

In Terence’s notebooks, he meditated on the voice of silence in the U’wa people’s resistance to oil extraction in their territory. “Where is the voice of silence? Of women? Of children? Of the communities that cannot speak publicly about opposition to petrol?” He wondered about the relationship between silence and fear. His final note regarded the silence of “the sound of the stumps cut during seismic line studies.” In U’wa territory, Terence contemplated the narrative that silence elicits. In relegating corporations like Occidental Petroleum to third-party status, Colombia designed the truth and recognition chamber in a manner that restricted the range of stories that could be safely elicited. The narrative of silence was thus harder to hear. The sound of the stumps cut during seismic line studies did not ring out in the chamber. Earth itself was also rendered a third party, peripheral to the deliberations.

We are familiar with this playbook of course; it is, after all, our own corporations and those doing their bidding who are wreaking havoc on democratic institutions both abroad and here at home. But for a future to be possible, the truth demands that we move these so-called third parties—the corporations, the voices of community, and the not-so-silent voice of the Earth—out of the periphery and into the center of our vision.

As our institutions are eviscerated, we can take heart and reconstitute ourselves around a recent judicial ruling that did just that. In a case that Pueblo U’wa has diligently pursued since before the 1999 murders, the highest human rights court in the hemisphere—the Inter-American Court of Human Rights—just ruled in the community’s favor. Especially in this moment when everything tells us the opposite, Caso U’wa signals a course correction that we would do well to hear and amplify: For a livable planet, time’s up on the narrative of fossil fuel extraction as economic panacea.

In the context of the climate crisis, Caso U’wa highlights the importance of ancestral knowledge and the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination in the face of extractive projects that threaten their existence.

In the battle of competing narratives for our collective future, Pueblo U’wa played the long game and won. I have to believe that, in the end, we will, too. In these preposterous times, this is the collective pivot we make now to step forward into the livable climate future we know is possible.

Abby Reyes’ memoir, Truth Demands: A Memoir of Murder, Oil Wars, and the Rise of Climate Justice, is available now through Penguin Random House: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/645675/truth-demands-by-abby-reyes/

About the Author

Abby Reyes

Abby Reyes began her career with rural environmental legal assistance in the Philippines, her father’s homeland, and walking alongside the Colombian U’wa Indigenous pueblo for dignity against big oil. As an environmental and human rights lawyer, she directs community resilience at University of California Irvine, supporting community-academic partnerships to accelerate community-owned just transition solutions.

Reyes is also a lecturer at UC Irvine School of Law.

A graduate of Stanford University and UC Berkeley Law, she is a partner of the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners and recently stepped down from the board of directors of EarthRights International after nearly a decade.