Project
Preserving the legacy of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Heart of the World
Rising abruptly from Colombia’s Caribbean coast, the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta reaches 5,775 meters (18,946 ft.) at its highest points, the peaks of Bolívar and Colón. It is the highest coastal mountain system in the world, a place where indigenous knowledge and nature’s own wisdom converge.
The sheer changes in elevation create a wide variety of ecosystems within a small area, where the diversity of plant and animal life creates a unique exuberant region. The melting snows of the highest peaks form rivers and lakes, whose freshwater flows down steep slopes to the tropical sea at the base of the mountains.
The indigenous Arhuaco, Kogi, Wiwa, and Kankuamo people protect and care for this natural treasure with an authority they have inherited from their ancestors. According to their worldview the land is sacred and shared in divine communion between humans, animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and the spirts of their ancestors.
Despite this ancestral inheritance, development projects proposed for the region have failed to take the opinions of these indigenous groups into consideration. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is currently threatened by 251 mineral concessions, hydroelectric projects, agriculture, urban sprawl, and infrastructure projects.
Many of these concessions were granted without the prior consultation of the indigenous communities, which represents a persistent and systematic violation of their rights.
Mining, which implies the contamination and erosion of watersheds, threatens the health of more than 30 rivers that flow out of the Sierra; these are the water sources of the departments of Magdalena, César, and La Guajira.
These threats have brought this natural paradise to the brink of no return. With it, would go the traditional lives of its indigenous inhabitants, who are dependent on the health of their land and the sacred sites it contains.
The Sierra hosts the archaeological site of la Ciudad Perdida, the Lost City, known as Teyuna, the cradle of Tayrona civilization. According to tradition, it is the source from which all nature was born—the living heart of the world.
The four guardian cultures of the Sierra are uninterested in allowing this natural and cultural legacy to disappear.
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We heard the news at an exceptional moment. The Latin American Alliance on Fracking had organized a conference; activists, lawyers, NGOs, community organizers, and scientists from seven Latin American countries were meeting face to face in Colombia to work against hydraulic fracturing in the region. It was there we learned that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had accepted our request for a hearing. We erupted in collective joy! Not only would we have a new audience, but also fracking would be discussed for the first time before the Commission. Immediately, we channeled our excitement into hard work. We had just 20 days to prepare a 20-minute case that would summarize every negative impact fracking has had in the Americas. We worked day and night to prepare our case for the October 3 hearing in Boulder, Colorado. It was so little time that Gabriel Cherqui, spokesperson for Mapuche communities affected by the Vaca Muerta mega-project in Neuquén, Argentina, couldn’t obtain a visa in time to travel to the United States. Years of work, converted into minutes Perhaps the most difficult aspect of preparing our case was summarizing thousands of documents and stories into such a short amount of time. It had taken years to systematize our specialized research on fracking in the region and to have our case before the Commission—requested with more than 120 supporting signatures—accepted. Another challenge was to demonstrate the solid connection between fracking and human rights violations, an argument we knew the Commission would be interested in addressing, given the scale and complexity of the problem. 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