Ituango Dam: an Apology for Necropolitics in the Privatisation of the Cauca River in Colombia

Fallacies of hydroelectric power as clean energy of extractivist capitalism in the Global South

Nubia Barrera Silva
 

The magnitude of the ecological and environmental impacts due to the effects of the hydroelectirc project is of such a magnitude that emptying the canyon of the tropical dry forests with their vegetation and ecosystems produced an escalation of inconceivable ruptures in the socio-cultural systems with repercussions on the physical and mental health of its inhabitants. The result is dramatically reflected in the necropolitics led by politicians and landowning business people with private and state armies, a distinctive feature of the big land grabbers in Colombia. What is happening now is the complete overflow of irresponsibility, improvisation, and arrogance with which these people continue to manage the course of our social imbalance. The transfer of public property has the acquiescence and direct intervention of large local companies through legally constituted institutions, strengthened by militarisation with legal troops and parastatal complements.

Beyond the borders of this world of intimacy, familiar, immediate experience, repetition, calculation, and individual mastery, another world begins, which is the exact opposite of everyday life… If the link with the land is unexpectedly broken, everyday life, one of the greatest capitals of subjectivities of the good life, vanishes. The solutions to this project's crisis proposes the technical and controlled dismantling of the dam in steps or stages, which is more economical and, above all, avoids loss of life and economic losses… Without completely demolishing the wall, reopen the Cauca river to its natural course/level and the ancestral route. The dam must be dismantled in the context of the recovery of the Cauca river, the Nutabe-campesino territory and the rest of the populations that have lived for centuries on the banks of the Cauca river until it flows into the Magdalena River.


For a full review of this essay, click here or on the picture to download the pdf file.