The complete title of this text is “Wind resistance: can Colombia overcome opposition to get its inexperienced vitality plan again on monitor?” Íñigo Alexander stories from Cabo de la Vela, Colombia. He writes, “Within the state of La Guajira, bold plans to transition to renewables are beset by bureaucratic delays and anger from many native Indigenous folks [the Wayúu, who see it as ‘new colonialism.’” Read the full article, with photographs by Charlie Cordero, at The Guardian.
A few years ago, as age began to take its toll, Rosa Velásquez decided it was time to leave the restaurant she owned in the coastal town of Cabo de la Vela and move back home for a peaceful retirement.. However, whe]n she returned to the tiny rural group of Jotomana, on the arid plains of Colombia’s northernmost tip, she discovered the place she and her ancestors had known as dwelling for generations suffering from big wind generators.
Towering white generators punctuate the horizon a couple of miles from Cabo de la Vela. The area, within the northern state of La Guajira, is dwelling to all of Colombia’s windfarms and its largest Indigenous inhabitants, the Wayúu. “We dwell amongst generators. The businesses like them, however I don’t. The place am I to go if that is my territory? What are my grandchildren going to do as soon as I die?” asks Velásquez, a Wayúu herself, as goats roam round her property underneath the blistering solar.
La Guajira, Colombia’s second-poorest state, has change into the point of interest and battleground of the federal government’s proposed vitality transition, a push to develop renewable vitality sources and scale back its dependency on oil and coal to sort out the local weather disaster. Based on La Guajira’s chamber of commerce, the state has photo voltaic radiation ranges 60% greater than the nationwide common and wind speeds double the worldwide norm. Personal corporations and Colombia’s mines and vitality ministry had sought to capitalise on these elements – even earlier than Gustavo Petro’s leftist authorities set out its ambitions for a “simply vitality transition”.
The renewables sector might see investments attain $2.2bn (£1.75bn) this 12 months, a lot of that being funnelled into the area. La Guajira has 17 renewable vitality initiatives in growth, with plans for dozens extra to observe – together with many offshore windfarms.
The Bogotá-based growth organisation Indepaz, which has lengthy tracked the event of renewable vitality in La Guajira, has discovered 57 windfarm initiatives in varied phases of completion.
When Colombia’s vitality ministry started fostering the renewables trade in 2019, underneath Petro’s conservative predecessor Iván Duque, it was hoped such initiatives would make up 15% of the nationwide energy provide by 2023. Nevertheless, these bold plans haven’t but materialised. By the top of final 12 months, lower than 2% of Colombia’s energy got here from non-conventional renewable sources, resembling wind or photo voltaic.
In Colombia, the event of windfarms is a cumbersome course of, with most initiatives going through extreme obstacles and lengthy delays. In July, the vitality ministry admitted that 82% of windfarm initiatives in La Guajira had been delayed. Business our bodies share considerations over the tempo of growth. SER Colombia revealed in January that 65% of initiatives throughout the nation forecast to start operations this 12 months had been delayed, many considerably.
Forms implies that small renewable vitality initiatives in Colombia usually take three to 6 years to change into operational, in response to SER Colombia. [. . .]
Resistance from Indigenous communities is one motive for the delays to the area’s windfarms, says Aníbal Mercado, head of the regional Wayúu council, often called a Pütchipü’üi or a Palabrero. He blames the failure by corporations and the federal government to enter into dialogue with native folks and perceive the complexities of La Guajira. “The rights of the communities have been violated,” he says, blaming the authorities for not explaining the consequences, defending native small companies, and never respecting land rights or the “religious and cultural features that maintain these communities”.
Irene Vélez, a former mines and vitality minister underneath Petro, says one in all her considerations whereas main the federal government’s vitality transition efforts was that officers and trade failed to understand the necessity for understanding of native communities to function efficiently within the area.
“From the start, I insisted that these initiatives’ difficulties weren’t technical however social,” says Vélez. Beneath Duque, she says, vitality corporations had been required to funnel only one% of their royalties from renewable initiatives again into affected communities. She elevated that determine to six%. “The auctions for development permits didn’t contemplate satisfactory distribution of advantages for native communities,” Vélez says.
“They understand these initiatives as having the identical exploitative dynamic of the outdated [extractivist] mannequin and don’t see advantages. So, after all, they oppose them,” she says.
Dialogue between the world’s totally different communities is one other problem. Indigenous folks in La Guajira are broadly dispersed amongst rural communities, or rancherías, that always wrestle to agree on windfarm growth.
[. . .] Isabel Preciado, an vitality and local weather researcher on the environmental organisation Censat Agua Viva, says: “The method is woeful as a result of they [government and companies] ignore the territorial context and the complicated organisation among the many Wayúu.”
Nonetheless, not all Indigenous folks within the space are towards windfarms. Elva María Velásquez remembers her mom strolling out, machete in hand, to fulfill firm representatives and categorical her opposition to windfarms on her land. Regardless of her resistance, nevertheless, the household moved out a couple of years in the past to make manner for the Guajira 1 windfarm. Velásquez now lives close to the farm in a brand new dwelling constructed by the corporate. She is glad to have a brick home with a photo voltaic panel, a brand new kitchen and freezer; it’s a vital improve from the straightforward wood hut she lived in earlier than.
For many individuals in La Guajira, who really feel perennially ignored by officers in Bogotá, the arrival of personal vitality corporations to their territory has introduced growth and assist that the state has didn’t ship.
Firms have offered recent consuming water – a useful resource that rural communities desperately lack – in addition to photo voltaic panels, mills and enhancements to properties and faculties. Folks have additionally had wiring and sockets put in however, regardless of guarantees that electrical energy can be offered by December, they’re nonetheless not related to the grid. [. . ]
Regardless of the Petro authorities’s vow to usher in a brand new age of inexperienced vitality, the prospect of such a transition occurring by La Guajira is slim – particularly contemplating that the president might have solely two years left in workplace. [. . .]
For full article, see https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/apr/05/new-colonialism-colombia-green-energy-windfarms-resistance-indigenous-wayuu
[Shown above, photo by Charlie Cordero: A windfarm on the outskirts of Cabo de la Vela, in La Guajira, overlooking the Caribbean.]