Copyright © 2000 NLThomas
All Rights Reserved

October 31, 2000

The Honorable Al Gore
Vice President
Office of the Vice President, OEOB
Washington, DC 20501

Dear Vice President Gore:

Thank you for responding to my letter regarding the various roles you personally play in the Colombian indigenous Uwa communitys struggle against Occidental Petroleum. I appreciate your condolences on Terences assassination for serving the Uwa in that struggle. I have passed on the heartfelt sentiment to his family.

Please know that I was conflicted in writing this reply letter. To raise this issue again may add a drop of encouragement and incentive for you to take action on behalf of the Uwa. On the other hand, raising this issue again, at this juncture, may contribute a drop, albeit small, to the growing torrent of discontent whose sudden weight now threatens to tip the scales in a way that could ultimately spell an even more bleak future for the Uwa and most other marginalized communities at home and abroad. I choose to reply now regardless. I single you out as a focus for this solicitation not solely because of your late fathers estate or your familys 30 year relationship with Occidental. I single you out because, contrary to the seasoned analysis from most of my colleagues, I continue to believe that a leader with your expressed values and sensibility wants to do better by the earth, and can. Please read this reply from that vantage.

I thought about your letter recently while listening to you stress your commitment to protecting the environmental treasures of our country from domestic oil production and your determination to fight for all the people, not just the few. Your words caused my imagination to stretch from Alaska to northeastern Colombia, where Colombian troops encircle a patch of disputed land, keeping the unarmed indigenous people and farmers who own that land outside, in order to protect the movements of a US oil company within. In your letter, you convey that you are deeply concerned about the Uwa and that the highest levels of leadership within the Colombian government understand our concerns. I believe you are sincerely concerned. However, juxtaposed with both your public silence and your administrations very loud contrary actions of military escalation in Colombia, I find your words of concern on the Uwa issue difficult to accept at face value.

My concern is the social genocide taking place in the Colombian countryside, against which the Uwa communitys struggle to protect their land from oil exploitation has become a popular symbol of resistance. This social genocide is being carried out under the banner of globalization, from economic policies marginalizing poor farmers to the hoarding of land by Colombian elites speculating on the promise of mega-project developments. Greatly aiding this social genocide, which has also produced more than 2 million internally displaced Colombians, is the legal and extra-legal armed conflict. My concern is that the US version of Plan Colombia, under the banner of the drug war, ties extensive military aid to Colombias willingness to open its petroleum resources to foreign corporations. As such, Plan Colombia amplifies that movement swiftly changing the face of the agrarian landscape, providing perfect circumstances for an oil company, once again, to use the chaos of war to settle in, as indigenous communities such as the Uwa are wiped off the map in the process.

I understand that it may have been difficult to raise such concerns with the Colombian government, given your administrations role in tailoring Plan Colombia and Occidentals similar role as one of Plan Colombias most aggressive private sector advocates. You have said that you will be watching this situation every step of the way. I am afraid that perhaps, contrary to your best intention, you may have missed some important markers in the Uwa case. Throughout last spring and summer, while the legal status of the oil project fluctuated in Colombian courts, the Uwa were joined by thousands of students, clergy, farmers unions, national legislators, local Occidental workers, and other natives of Colombia and Ecuador to non-violently protest Occidentals militarized construction activities and the political milieu Plan Colombia set to condone such aggressions. At the same time in Washington, 25 Members of Congress co-signed a letter to President Pastrana calling for him to halt construction of the well site until [his] administration can guarantee that this project will violate neither the Uwa peoples fundamental human rights nor the environment upon which their lives depend. More recently, a delegation of European parliamentarians went to the drill site itself to monitor the situation.

None of these actions, however, has succeeded in preventing the escalation of armed violence in the zone and attempted legal manipulation of the community. Last month, in a move to ease the requirements to begin drilling, the Colombian government illegally changed the zoning of the Uwa land. A few days later, Uwa leaders presented the government with archival evidence of colonial titles for that land from 1661. These 14 Royal Land Deeds, issued by the King of Spain, recognize the pre-existing rights of indigenous people in Colombia, including claims to sub-surface resources claims which later Colombian laws uphold. When met with this documentation, the Colombian national ministers sat in silence. They had no reply. Their reply came implicitly two weeks later, when Colombia poured massive military resources into protection of the final move of Occidentals equipment into place for drilling.

It is often said that, despite your concern about this issue, your hands are tied. Its your mothers Occidental stock. You are not the trustee. I try not to imagine what tied hands look like. Terences wrists were bound with rope when they shot him. It sounds as though the corporate hold tying your hands may have a similar texture to the weave. The difference is, of course, that that which binds you is a figure of speech. To underscore my conviction that freeing ones self from that voluntary bondage is prerequisite to working for peace, or for being the champion of anything as noble as environmental treasures and all people, I offer you an image I have of Terence during the week of the abduction.

I have an image of Terence captive in the cloud forest being walked toward the Venezuelan boarder. At a certain moment, he turned his energy inward to himself, paying detailed attention to breathing in and breathing out. He was walking himself through the process of balancing all accounts, living forgiveness, and actively invoking compassion. I have an image of him coming to face the bullets with that compassion intact, flowing freely into the blood soaked earth. I ask myself daily whether I am living in a way that is worthy of my freedom, that which was taken abruptly from Terence and his colleagues, and that which is being taken systematically from the Uwa and other local peoples in Colombia in the name of oil poorly camouflaged under the banner of economic globalization and the war on drugs.

I invite you to practice walking yourself through this self-examination.

Take inspiration from a source meaningful in your own life. The national leader I am looking for exhibits the fruits of this contemplation through acute awareness of the interconnectedness of all life, with political action underpinned by and consistent with this principle. Environmental treasures and all people. Alaska, a Colombian cloud forest. US consumers, South American indigenous elders. Interconnected. Looking deeply in this way may awaken your understanding that, despite the contrary rules of the global marketplace in which you maneuver, this age-old premise of interconnection continues to fuel the political action of peoples movements to defend human, biological, and knowledge diversity at the base of this country and around the globe. Models for that kind of ethical leadership exist. I want to believe that you aspire to be that kind of leader. Taking action on behalf of this obscure community in a country whose name most of us northerners have trouble spelling might provide you good practice.

Your power to influence the outcome of the Uwa crisis extends beyond your professed impotence regarding the Occidental stock your father put in trust for your mother. Your father served that company for close to three decades. You, in many ways, carry the legacy of your father. You have acted, perhaps, with respect to this company in the way you remember your father having acted. I am calling on you to do even better than your father did. Recognize the things he did well in his career of public service. Honor those acts. Also recognize the things he did not do so well. Acknowledge to yourself the role he played, as a shareholder and corporate executive, in creating suffering in the places aversely affected by that company and its subsidiaries during his tenure, including Love Canal, including the Uwa territory. Commit yourself to doing better than your father did.

In the best circumstances, each generation builds on where the last generation left off both within a family and within a nation. You are in a prime position, in your family and in your nation, to do better. Those of us young people watching you move through this moment silent on the Uwa issue are, in many ways, your continuation. We would rather build upon your good acts than have to take up the mantle from where your fathers generation left off. We do not want to inherit a model of environmental leadership stuck in the last generation. I am calling on you to make different choices. Use the crisis on Uwa land as an opportunity to do what you genuinely know is right to do. I am calling on your daughters and wife to support you in this effort. I am calling on the brothers and sisters of our nation to bear witness and to support you should you choose to act on behalf of the Uwa community.

I stand firmly rooted in compassion for the fear and stress you must endure as a leader of this country. I stand firmly rooted as witness of that unfathomable terror that strikes when one realizes the hands are tied. I stand firmly rooted in the belief that liberation from those bonds is not only possible, but necessary for the continuation of life. Its a metaphor, and its real. It is anything but a platitude. You have a duty. Please step up to it.

Sincerely,

/S/ Abby Reyes

Abbey Reyes is the girlfriend of Terence Freitas who was kidnapped and murdered from U'wa territory in March of 1999. She has continued to support the U'wa but wrote this letter as a concerned individual rather than the representative of any organization. -- Patrick, (RAN) Rainforest Action Network