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COLOMBIA - The legal battle to protect the indigenous communities of the Sinu and Verde Rivers has turned violent as a paramilitary group has begun a campaign of killings and planned attacks against outspoken opponents of a Urra Hydroelectric Dam project.

The Urra Co., a state-owned firm, plans to build the dam in the southern part of the state of Cordoba, Colombia. The dam is likely to destroy the primary fishing areas that have sustained the Embera Katio people for centuries and that also serve as the source of livelihood for 10,000 fishermen along the middle and lower Sinu River. The project has already destroyed the river route connecting he Embera Katio to their markets and part of their land will be flooded.

In August an Embera Katio leader, Alonso Domico Jarupia, was assassinated by members of the paramilitary group, Self-defense Units of Cordoba and Uraba. The group has also sent death threats to several members of a consulting team to the National Indigenous Organization of Colombia, as well as an anthropologist working for the Embera Katio and attorneys investigating the death of Jarupia for the Human Rights Division of the Attorney General's Office in Fiscalia.

The dispute began in 1996 when the board of directors of the Urra Co. refused to abide by an agreement with the indigenous groups made weeks before. In that agreement, signed at the Swedish embassy, Urra, the Colombian government and regional indigenous groups made arrangements for compensation from the company that included sharing the income generated by the sale of the electricity produced by the hydroelectric project.

In February 1998, the indigenous communities involved filed suit to protect their rights, and as a result, the Constitutional Court has ordered a temporary halt to the filling of the dam.

A definitive decision was expected to come down last November, but so far, nothing has come through.