However, the authorities failed miserably in covering up their fallacious impact assessments on the project, because the worse was yet to come.  In 1992, CORELCA, predecessor of URRA S.A., the owner-operator of the dam, published its impact assessment, emphasizing that Urrá I would not cause significant hydrological or biological changes in the ciénagas along the River Sinú.  Then, in 1993, CVS, the regional environmental authority, issued the concession of water use for hydropower by CORELCA, claiming that releasing a certain quantity of water downriver from the dam, during the months of May and June, would safeguard the reproduction of migrating fish species.   

Constitutional tutelage – overruled!
While the water level behind the dam rose, the authorities held public hearings –a prerequisite to grant URRA S.A. the environmental license to operate the hydropower project.  Having already tasted the ominous consequences of the river closure, against the project surged the public opinion, spearheaded by Bogotá- based environmental groups, some brave local intellectuals and a few organizations of local farmers and fishermen who chose to fight for survival.  Since Do-Wabura, the Embera had tried, in vain, to convince the Central Government to implement the recommendations of their Urrá impact study, so they too joined in. Yet, the hearings constituted a mere formality, for the authorities had already made up their minds.  Sensing the imminent passage of the last obstacle to the project, the Embera played the last trump: they filed suit, at the Constitutional Court, seeking protection against the Project.  The Court, after a lengthy hearing, accepted the charges in September 1999, and ordered the Government to withhold the environmental license, until the dam operator negotiates with the Embera and complies with mitigating and compensating measures acceptable to them.

The court decision caused a pandemonium among the ranks of Cordovan political racketeers.  They cried out to the Central Government; “…How could we waste a 900 million dollar inversion, simply because it inconveniences a few indigenous?”  They tried to buy out the indigenous leaders (and they succeeded in bribing a small group.)  Finally, those who have the last word, the paramilitary, sent a letter to the Government accusing the Embera being guerilla sympathizers.  Less than a week later, on 5th of October 1999, then Minister for the environment, the self-defined front line environmentalist Juan Mayr Maldonado, issued the license to operate the dam, completely ignoring the Court order.

URRA S.A. hands out compensations as it sees convenient: the group of Embera, who signed a document approving the project, has received monthly monetary handouts, which pretty much destroyed their traditional lifestyles; they moved to the city, turned to alcohol and prostitution, and even prostituted their culture.  Those who challenged the project, had to escape to high ground as the lake water level rose.  The resettlement of those families did not go beyond mere propaganda.  A subsidy for all the Embera, negotiated as a compensation for the grave impacts caused by Urrá I, has unleashed a corruption scandal, amounting to the disappearance of over a million dollars, which involves some Project officials too.  What did the indigenous of the Zenú reservation receive as compensation for their fishing and farming revenues lost?  A truckload of chickens and pigs!

What about the project benefits?
The promoters revived the Urrá project promising to supply the national grid with hydropower during the periods of shortfall.  However, URRA S.A., as an energy producer, has failed to play an important role at neither the national level nor the regional level.  The installed generating capacity of the Project amounts to less than 3% of the national total, and the actual energy production lags way behind.  Within Córdoba, the problems of power rationing and supply instability have shown no improvement after the Project.  The peak energy production period of Urrá I (during the months of peak river flows), coincides with the time when many other dams in the country produce energy at much larger scale and at much smaller unit costs, preventing URRA S.A. from selling its production at a profit.  The root of the problem lies in the original project design.  Urrá I was planned to operate only as an auxiliary to a greater reservoir upstream; so, it doesn’t have the capacity to store the peak flows and spread energy production over a long period.  Besides, its low pressure head and the high volume of water required to operate its turbines make the cost of power production of Urrá I exorbitantly high.  The Cordoban power brokers simply ignored this technical fact while promoting the construction of only Urrá I (or may be… they conspired to force the Central Government to build the bigger Urrá II subsequently, in order to salvage the inversion on Urrá I.)  After only two years of operation, Urrá I has created an enormous hole in the public treasury.  And that, without even considering its true social and ecological costs, which run into billions of dollars.  Then, how in the world they got the economists to approve the Project?  The key word: Multipurpose!  The promoters fattened the project benefits with the possibility of ‘recovering’ 300,000 ha of swampland and that of ‘flood control.’

Today, URRA S.A. conveniently dilutes its initially proclaimed flood control benefit of its reservoir, to that of ‘partial flood control.’  Because it can’t do any more: its smaller retention capacity barely allows attenuating smaller peak flows that return year after year.  Such annual floods used to bring lots of benefits; they cleaned the river of detritus and contaminants, replenished the ciénagas with fish and nutrients, fed the groundwater aquifers, washed deltaic salt intrusions, etc.  Yes, lately, they did become an irritant in the eyes of the inhabitants of the immediate floodplain too. The ‘control’ exercised by Urrá I on the river flow would create among them a sense of safety, but in a false sense!  More people would invest in ‘recuperating’ the lands closer and closer to the riverbanks, only until a high flood like that of El Niño hits!  The devastation will be worse than what one has ever seen.

The ‘recovery’ of swamplands has turned into another myth. True, withholding the floods that annually fed the ciénagas frees up a large acreage of cultivable land.  However, cultivating them, year in year out, requires an expensive infrastructure of irrigation and drainage, and continuous injection of fertilizers.  The District of La Doctrina in Sinú delta provides a clear example: it requires three times more water to wash the soil than to irrigate the plants.  And, URRA S.A. has not a penny allocated for such infrastructure.  Besides, prior to Urrá I, in every dry season, these lands yielded short-term agricultural products and pasture for small farmers.  The ‘recovery’ could mean passing such lands into the hands of voracious land barons, who have the power to manipulate public funds for own benefit.

The real beneficiaries of Urrá
Not so hard to visualize one group who really benefits from Urrá: the owners of huge cotton, corn, or sorghum plantations that have propped up all along the lower Sinú.  There, poison-spewing spray planes whirr barely overhead, as if they also want to fumigate and eliminate the poorer neighbors.  These rich farmers aren’t worried about the termination of natural soil enrichment; tons of more poison would ‘fertilize’ their plants.  Neither worry they about the lowering freatic surface; bigger pumps would suck up groundwater for irrigation, no matter what the neighbor thinks.  Living in peace with nature?  A tale of subsistence farming!  They merely want the authorities to ‘control’ the nature –the river; till they siphon off the maximum from the nature before it is too late.

Well, Professor Alberto Alzate Patiño of the University of Cordoba also perceived where the wind blows, before its time: he published a well researched book about the impacts of Urrá Master Plan in 1987, and reemerged as an outspoken opponent of the project since Do-Wabura.  May be he knew too much and too well; he was assassinated in 1998.  Mario Calderón, an investigator of CINEP –a Jesuit think tank in Bogotá, who mobilized the social conscience against Urrá at the Capital, faced the firing line next, along with his family.  While the Constitutional Court deliberated the lawsuit filed by the Embera, the paramilitary launched their campaign of intimidation inside the reservation, assassinating in cold blood Lucindo Dómico, a young Embera schoolteacher and their spokesman during Do-Wabura.  In the year 2000, after an international tour seeking support for the plight of Embera, their principal leader Kimi Pernia was kidnapped in Tierralta by the same group; no word on his whereabouts so far. 

Every year, a few more locally trained professionals sign up for the technical resource pool available for community organizations, instead of enslaving for the rich and the powerful.  The best promise for the future lies in the resurgence of community activism, and the lower Sinú valley, which had the weakest organizations only a decade ago, now leads the way.

ASPROCIG, formerly an alliance of a few fishermen’s collectives located around Ciénaga Grande de Lorica, now boasts a membership of hundreds of community organizations, including many from the Sinú delta.  In 1994, Do-Wabura woke up the petrified mentality of valley inhabitants, and the subsequent loss of Bocachico jerked them into action.  They rallied behind their organization to fight for survival, instead of facing the slow, sure death, under subjugation.

As an immediate goal, ASPROCIG focused on improving the dire economic situation of the local population, directly affected by Urrá I.  The fishermen organized themselves to regulate fishing in the few remaining ciénagas and distribute the income equally.  They pressured URRA S.A. for financial help to build community fishponds, as a measure of mitigating the economic impact, and also demanded larvae to populate them.  With the help of some international NGOs, ASPROCIG organized a rotating fund for agricultural loans.  They forced the authorities to refurbish the caños, especially in the Sinú delta.  Such measures have serious limitations though: URRA S.A. routinely breaks its word on supplying larvae and other logistical support for the fishponds; sudden, irregular changes in river flow frequently destroy farmers’ entire agricultural inversion in ciénaga beachheads; recently, the shrimp industry halted the efforts to recover the salt-laden rice fields in the delta.

So, as a medium term strategy, ASPROCIG works on legal and political fronts, to compel the authorities declare, the still salvageable, important ciénagas and swamps, as natural reserves.  Already, some have received the designation, but the corresponding legislation and control activities take time.  These steps strengthen their protest campaign, against the shrimp industry encroaching further in the Sinú delta, and also against the attempts to convert the Cispatá forest into commercial plantations.   

-April 2003, Riobamba, Ecuador.

Acknowledgements:
I have been anxious to tell this story since 1994, but various circumstances did not permit me to tell it as I wanted, till now.  Many people, not only those mentioned by name in the article, played and keep playing active roles in it, and also helped me weave it.  I would like to thank especially the friends and members of Embera-Katio and Zenú communities in Sinú valley, the friends of ONIC, ASPROCIG and the ‘Urrá’ coalition of CINEP.  I would dedicate this piece to those friendly and courageous Cordovans and Colombians in general, dead and alive, who opened their doors and hearts and minds to this ‘crazy hat’ from Sri Lanka.

Bibliography:

Alzate Patiño, Alberto y otros (1987) “Impactos sociales del Proyecto Hidroeléctrico de Urrá” Fundación del Caribe, Montería, Colombia.

ASPROCIG (2002) “Aumenta rechazo público hacia Urrá I” Boletín, Lorica, November.

ASPROCIG (2002) “Identificación y caracterización de megaproyectos en la cuenca hidrográfica del río Sinú” Boletín, Lorica, October.

ASPROCIG (2001) “Cuchilla de Cispatá: Plantaciones Comerciales” Boletín, Lorica, July. 

ASPROCIG (2001) “Talleres de divulgación, sensibilización y concertación sobre reglamentación pesquera”, Santa Cruz de Lorica, Colombia.

Calderón, Mario (1995) “Urrá: otro elefante blanco” en Cien días visto por CINEP, vol 7, #28, pp. 24-25, Bogotá.

CORELCA (1992) “Las ciénagas del Sinú en el contexto del proyecto Urrá I” en En busca del desarrollo: Memorias del taller nuestras ciénagas, Ed: Victor Negrete B., Fundación del Sinú, Montería, pp. 69-79, Apr. 

CVS (1994) “La concesión de agua” en En busca del desarrollo, Boletín 9: Memoria de la campaña el reencuentro con el río Sinú, Ed: Victor Negrete B., Montería, pp 59-63.

Guzmán Arteaga, Ramiro (2001) “Urrá: ¿Desarrollo o fracaso?” El Tiempo, 27 de Agosto, Bogotá.

Negrete B., Victor (1994) “La expedición del reencuentro” en En busca del desarrollo, Boletín 9: Memoria de la campaña el reencuentro con el río Sinú, Ed: Victor Negrete B., Montería, pp. 48-58.

ONIC (1994) “Construir la represa Urrá I es insistir en el caos” Informe preparado en vísperas de Do-Wabura, despedida del río Sinú, Bogotá, Colombia.

Plazas, Clemencia & Ana Maria Falchetti de Sanez (1981) “Asentamientos prehispánicos en el bajo Río San Jorge” Fundación de Investigaciones Arqueológicas Nacionales, vol 11, Banco de la Republica, Bogotá.

Pernia Domico, Kimi (2000) “El proyecto Urrá, según lo hemos visto los Embera” en Para dónde va Urrá, Ed: Gloria Amparo Rodríguez, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota, pp. 21-31, August. 

Urrá S.A. (2001?) “Urrá”, Montería, Colombia.