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The Struggle of the U'wa Against Oil Exploration in their Territory: A Case Study of a Local Struggle That Became Global
Luis Carlos Arenas - Colombia

Since 1993, the small U'wa indigenous community has been opposing oil exploration by the U.S. multinational company Occidental Petroleum Corporation in its ancestral territory. Since 1997, the U'wa case has found a place in distinct international spaces, showing us in an unexpected way many of the current dimensions, potentialities, and limits of contemporary processes of globalization. The "U'wa case" has become a symbol of a broad group of contemporary struggles in Colombia and elsewhere. At the present time, the U'wa struggle is a plural symbol for the indigenous, environmental, and human rights movements, as well as for the movement against multinational companies. This chapter shows the social and institutional complexity underlying this struggle, which was at first merely local before acquiring visibility and becoming a topic of interest for international NGOs. The author describes and makes a detailed analysis of the process in which the U'wa community was involved before the question of oil exploration made it the center of attention at national and international levels. It is shown that the conflict around the oil question arose at a time when the U'wa were in the middle of a process of reconstructing their culture and identity, a process related to the consolidation of their social organization, to a willingness to fight for the recuperation of their ancestral territory, and to the growing prestige of the indigenous movement at the national and international levels. The chapter analyzes in detail the complex institutional and judicial developments that were activated by this case in Colombia and internationally due to the intervention of different national and international actors. Thus, the author distinguishes the different spaces of struggle the U'wa resorted to at the local, regional, national, and global levels, analyzing their respective potentialities and multiple interrelations.

 
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Centro de Estudos Sociais MacArthur Foundation
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian