The damage to the environment in that department is causing serious damage to the ethnic territories and their inhabitants, who do not have state support to stop mining, logging and monocultures, according to a new report from Cinep.
Describing desolate scenes of destroyed forests and rivers of an incandescent blue typical of mercury contamination, Cutting down the jungle and polluting the waters: socio-environmental conflicts in the Chocoan Bajo Atrato, A report from the Popular Research and Education Center (Cinep) raises alarm bells about the critical situation in the region.
In a tour of the municipalities of Unguía, Carmen del Darién and Riosucio, with their different community councils, this publication makes visible the effects on the ecosystem with the excessive felling of forests and the pollution of rivers in the subregion known as Bajo Atrato and Darién in limitations with Panama.
Massive deforestation, legal and illegal mining, industrial monocultures and massive animal husbandry intersect with armed conflict and state abandonment. These socio-environmental conflicts force communities to change their way of relating to the territory, say the authors of the texts, Sonia Cristina Vargas and Laura Catalina Tovar.
An example is the series of animals and trees “that are almost no longer seen – or have directly disappeared” in this area characterized by thick jungle and crossed by the majestic Atrato River that originates there, in Cerro El Plateado. Certain plants that were used to cure diseases and some animals for food are no longer possible to obtain. The rivers that were the connecting routes between communities have lost their channels or are being polluted.
Cinep indicates that all this happens due to disputes between natural persons, organizations, private companies and the State that affect human rights due to access and use of natural resources and the impacts of economic activities.
In Choco’s Bajo Atrato, these disputes mainly derive from the use and access to land, reflected in the historical dispossession of large productive lands, “with the approval or omission of the institutions”, violating the collective rights of the black and indigenous communities that they inhabit them.
A great contribution of this work is the data collected to quantify the effects, since there are no official statistics. Among them, 65,000 hectares of forest were deforested within the 19 community councils and 20 indigenous reservations between 2002 and 2022. There are 108 mining titles and 140 points of impact on water sources.
Photo: Chasquis Foundation.
The detailed maps included in the report, made by Silvia Trujillo, illustrate the socio-environmental disputes and indicate the affected areas in the three municipalities and their ethnic territories. Riosucio is the municipality that has the most critical deforestation areas with 25,700 hectares, followed by Unguía with 21,108 hectares and then Carmen del Darién with 18,358 hectares.
Although the conflicts are similar in the three municipalities of this subregion, each one has its particularities. The Carmen de Darién municipality is the first to be analyzed, being the first to receive the Atrato River and the Curbaradó and Jiguamiandó rivers, where the report says, it has 49 current mining titles and 15 in the exploration stage in the 319,700 hectares that it they compose. There, gold, copper and molybdenum are exploited, a mineral used to harden steel.
Livestock farming and oil palm monoculture are largely responsible for deforestation. The other large monoculture is coca, which by 2020 had 192.67 hectares planted, being the largest crop in the subregion.
“The contamination of the Curbaradó and Jiguamiandó rivers with mercury, fungicides and other chemical substances represents a serious danger to the lives of the residents who depend on these rivers,” it is reported about this municipality that has nine community councils and four indigenous reservations.
In addition, the Ministry of Health is cited, which in a 2018 report said that “the levels of total mercury in blood, urine and hair of the inhabitants of Carmen del Darién exceed permissible environmental limits.”
Then follows the municipality of Riosucio, which has an area of 597,300 hectares and is made up of eight indigenous reservations and nine community councils. The big problem there is that its rural area is in the hands of third parties who have control over the use of the land, who also have economic, social, political and military power with interests in expanding the agricultural frontier for agro-industrial purposes. A large part of the population was displaced due to land dispossession at the end of the nineties, so businessmen took over those lands.
Between 2002 and 2022, Riosucio lost 15,200 hectares of humid primary forest and 57,300 hectares of tree cover. They identified 86 critical points with some type of impact on water sources, caused by the creation of canals, deviation in river channels or cattle and buffalo farming. There, too, the monoculture of rice and banana affects the rivers due to agrochemical waste.
One of the complaints made by this publication is about the Riosucio municipal dump that was installed irregularly in the Caracolí community, affecting the Community Council of the La Larga and Tumaradó rivers (Cocolatu) with environmental contamination and effects on the health of the inhabitants close to it. (Read more at: Sanitary landfill in Riosucio, Chocó, affects the community council.)
Photo: Chasquis Foundation.
Finally, there is the municipality of Unguía, with 119,000 hectares of area; It is located at the mouth of the Atrato River towards the Caribbean Sea. The municipality contains four indigenous reservations and a community council, where 26 critical points of some type of contamination of water sources are focused, affecting the life of these communities that depend entirely on the rivers, both for food, transportation and recreation. .
With all these effects, communities report diseases such as infections, malaria, dermatitis, poisoning, dengue, stomach damage, allergies, and flu.
These three municipalities are crossed by the Atrato River, which was declared a subject of rights in 2016, so no type of pollution should reach its waters. But the law is not applied there. “This means that the pollution caused by the activities exposed in this area of Chocó causes the arrival of substances such as mercury, agrochemicals, wastewater, plastics and fungicides to one of the main seas of the country,” the report says.
Given the condition of the territories, the work, carried out based on social mapping and interviews in the three municipalities, raises the question of what land can be returned to the communities of the community councils and indigenous reservations in the land restitution processes. which is in progress.
Cinep recommends activating surveillance, control, investigation and sanction mechanisms for those responsible, where necessary. “The enactment of the Environmental Crimes Law emerges as a promising path and, by prioritizing this subregion by the judicial investigation bodies and control bodies, it could become a scenario for reparation,” he says.
The post The trail of pollution and illegal logging in three municipalities of Chocó appeared first on Chocó7días.com.