From ipbn@web.net Thu Mar 2 11:33:53 2000 Received: from mxu4.u.washington.edu (mxu4.u.washington.edu [140.142.33.8]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW99.09/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA15726 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:33:38 -0800 Received: from tenerife.ghost.tsi.com.pe (www.blockbuster.com.pe [200.37.71.68]) by mxu4.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id LAA20014 for ; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 11:33:35 -0800 Received: from cospidata.inti ([207.79.215.81]) by tenerife.ghost.tsi.com.pe (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id OAA21975; Thu, 2 Mar 2000 14:24:05 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: X-Sender: ipbn@pop.web.net X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.0 Date: Thu, 02 Mar 2000 14:30:26 -0500 To: "Indigenous Knowledge" From: "Indigenous Peoples' Biodiversity Network" Subject: The U'wa and Occidental Petroleum Cc: elac Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit ------- Start of forwarded message ------- Date: Fri, 04 Feb 2000 17:13:21 +0800 From: elac Subject: letter to Gore from Abby regarding U'wa-Occidental Conflict I am writing from Palawan, Philippines. I just sent the following letter to VP Gore's very generic fax number. I am sending the letter to you  in case any one of you has any more effective way to reach him, more  directly. I don't. Not that I can think of. Do you? We heard yesterday that VP Gore will be meeting soon with his lawyers  to figure out what to do about his Occidental investments. This is a  rumor. But if it is true, it makes it all the more salient to get the below  letter to him soon. Thanks for taking a minute to read and think about if/how you might be  able to help me. ....If you can think of any publications that might run it, please, if you can, just go for it on my behalf! I can't very effectively do so from Palawan! I will be back in CA on Feb 17. in email contact, yes. (elac@pal-onl.com) abby ------------------------ c/o 445 Summit Road  Watsonville, CA 95076 February 3, 2000   Dear Vice President Gore, I write to you as the girlfriend of Terence Freitas, one of three human rights workers kidnapped and assassinated last March while assisting the U'wa indigenous community of oil-rich northeastern Colombia. I write to  you from Palawan, Philippines, where I too help provide crucial  environmental legal assistance to indigenous communities. I write to  remind you of the various roles you personally have played in the case  of the U'wa, including that of meeting Terence and the U'wa in 1997. One year ago this week, as I unpacked moving boxes into the apartment Terence and I would have shared in Brooklyn, I found myself shelving two copies of Earth in the Balance: my own, and that of Terence. I sat down with the book again, rereading with marvel the poignant message you asserted in 1993. You insisted that policy makers and the general  citizenry alike must take into account environmental and social costs of  our coveted northern affluence. Proudly, I thought back to the time  Terence met with you in Washington D.C., at a gathering for the 1997  Goldman Environmental Prize recipients. Terence was instrumental in  bringing the U'wa struggle against Occidental Petroleum to world-wide  attention. He accompanied U'wa leader Roberto Cobaria to your office.  How strong a statement of solidarity, for the Vice President of the  United States to meet with an indigenous leader from the cloudforest of  Colombia, recognizing his peoples' adamant resistance to a US  multinational oil company. You, Terence, the U'wa leader, and your  principles, standing there together in your office. While I reread Earth in the Balance last February, Terence was in the  U'wa cloudforest with Native American leaders Ingrid Washinawatok and  Lahe'ena'e Gay on a cultural exchange. On February 18, Terence called  from Cubara, Colombia. I told him about the two copies of Earth in the  Balance. We discussed whether you could be tapped as a more vocal  U'wa ally in the campaign against the pending ecological, cultural, and  economic havoc oil exploitation would spell for the U'wa and Colombia.  We were hopeful about your potential leadership on this pressing  environmental case. That phone call was the last time I talked to  Terence. One week later, on the day he was to return to New York, he  and his companions were kidnapped by guerrillas who are allegedly on  friendly terms with Occidental. One week after that, the bound bodies of  these three human rights workers were found splayed and disfigured by  rounds of bullets just across the Venezuelan border. You came to my attention again during the blurry week following the murders. In response to the appalling delay of the US State Department  to fly the bodies home from Caracas, the families received word that the Office of the Vice President was trying to arrange Air Force transport.  I wondered at that time if you remembered meeting Terence. I was hopeful  that your personal connection to the U'wa struggle would expedite the  process of getting their bodies home. Unfortunately, it was almost a  week later before we met the United cargo plane in Los Angeles carrying  Terence's body box. Seven months later, I read the Wall Street Journal's account of your family's lucrative inheritance from your father of Occidental Petroleum  and Occidental subsidiary stock and your long-standing personal  relationship with Occidental directors (9/29/99, editorial page). By  then I had experienced several such smacks of political double speak  from most actors in the Colombian debate. In Washington, Representative  Gilman used the murders of the three American human rights workers as  a "wake up call" for the United States to increase military assistance to  the Colombian military, despite that military's abysmal human rights  record spanning four decades of escalating civil war during which guns  held by any side have never proven a viable means toward peaceful  resolution (see Washington Post editorial page, May 22, 1999). In  Bogota, on September 21, 1999, the Colombian Minister of Environment  Juan Mayr - himself a former Goldman Environmental Prize winner -  issued the license for Occidental Petroleum to proceed with drilling the  oil under U'wa land. To justify his action, he claimed the  constitutionally-required community consent process and environmental  review complete, despite the fact that the U'wa community continues to  voice its vehement opposition and have been privy to no such process of  environmental review. In Los Angeles, on April 30, 1999, at Occidental  Petroleum headquarters, Public Relations Officer Larry Meriage held  Terence's mother's hand, calling the guerrilla murderers atrocious, despite the fact that his company's incipient oil operations in U'wa  land are directly responsible for the intensification of violent  conflict in the previously peaceful region. Even given this prevalent  political milieu, in which action wildly contradicts expressed values, I  am appalled and disheartened to see you, America's lead environmental  champion, living the antithesis of your espoused values by continuing  to personally profit from Occidental Petroleum's exploits. I am the same age as your daughter. Terence was one year our junior.  Like your daughter, Terence and I looked forward to joining the legal  profession together. We were eager to apply the conflict resolution and  community organizing skills we have gained abroad to help address the  wealth of environmental justice conflicts brewing domestically. Like  your daughter, Terence and I had a bright future. With unbearable  anguish, his family and friends buried him on his twenty-fifth birthday  last spring. Think how much brighter your family's prospects, as you  enter the candidacy, if you removed the shadow cast by your family's  complicity in the unspeakable horrors faced by our family and those of  the U'wa because of Occidental Petroleum. I implore you to divest your family from Occidental Petroleum and answer the requests from the U'wa Defense Working Group, a coalition of  US-based environmental and human rights organizations, to explain your  position on that company's actions in the U'wa territory of Colombia.  Further, I beseech you to engage your peers in Washington, at the  development banks, in Bogota, and the private sector in the sincere  pursuit of alternatives to military escalation and natural resource  exploitation as the means to address Colombia's economic woes. Guns  and oil have never spelled sustainable development or peace. Measures  such as debt swaps and demonstrated multilateral commitment to  Colombia's locally-driven social and economic development would move  the country closer to these goals. Don't let your silence on the U'wa-  Occidental conflict - an emblem of the wider sustainable development  debate you champion - continue to corrode the standards you set for  the American public with Earth in the Balance. Look again at what stirred you to work for the earth in the first place. Take a minute from your campaign, go to the forest, any forest. Take  a walk alone. Feel the pulse of your heart beating in time with that of  the rivers running. Feel the soil underfoot, like your muscles  stretching, resilient and alive. Breathe in the blessing of being alive.  Think of Terence and the U'wa working to defend that basic human  right, of life. Think of the Colombian military last week forcibly removing  U'wa families from their ancestral and legally owned land to provide  armed and protected access to Occidental's equipment and staff houses.  Think of the newly granted US budget for this very Colombian military,  the largest sum given in history, making Colombia the third largest  recipient of US military aid. Think twice about where you have chosen  to put not only your family's money, but that of the taxpayer as well. Vice President Gore, you should have my vote and that of virtually all  of my peers. We are young doctors, ecologists, policy analysts,  teachers, historians, artists, journalists, public officials, development  workers, and lawyers. We work for environmental and social justice.  We should be your constituency. I urge you to demonstrate to us  that you deserve it. Sincerely, Abby Reyes Indigenous Knowledge? 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