Swimming among tigers

(Versión en español)

Report made with the support of Oxfam Intermón

The paramilitary forces invaded the village of Condoto, tortured, raped, murdered and established their laws. For example: women were forced to wash their clothes, prepare their food, stay at home after sunset, they couldn’t wear short skirts nor short hair. María Eugenia Urrutia, an 18 years-old black girl, couldn’t take it anymore, so she shaved head, put on a thong, crossed the village running, went almost naked into river and started swimming up and down.

While the paramilitary were shooting at her, seizing the harvests and expelling the families from their craft mines of gold and platinum, María Eugenia insisted on defending by swimming to her small territory: the beach of the river Condoto. It wasn’t like any other beach.

She was born in the city of Cali in 1966. Both of her parents died when she was 10. Left without choice, she went with her three brothers to Condoto (Choco region) —their home town in the equatorial forest. Chocó inhabitants are 12% indigenous and 82% black, descendants of slaves from the Spanish Empire sent to this region to extract gold from the rivers. María Eugenia Urrutia has the old mark of slavery (a Basque surname) and the old mark of rebellion (a black skin which she exhibited when she was 18, wich was badly injured) and now she shows it again with a mix of risk and pride.

The day she arrived in Condoto, a 10-year old orphan, she left her uncle’s house and crossed the village slowly. A newcomer from Cali, she was surprised by the small houses without electricity with the doors always open. She liked the small orchards, the hens running around, the banana plantations, the corn fields. When she saw the river she got very excited. Her body was full of excitement. The men were fishing in crystal clear waters, the women were washing clothes and the children were swimming naked between the river and the forest. It is a paradise —she thought—, a gift from God after the death of my parents.

When she turned 15, she was sleeping on the beach, quite often. Her aunts were afraid that the waters could rise and take her away. That was the fear. In Condoto no one thought that a girl sleeping alone on the beach could be bothered.

The beach of María Eugenia had a danger: it was one of the most remote and envied within the country’s territories. In the first quarter of the 20th century, Colombia became the world’s largest exporter of platinum, and half of all its production came precisely from the Condoto River. It was a time of extraordinary profits. And as the Economist Claudia Leal explains, everything was exported out of the country: the Choco Pacific —part of a United States mining consortium, was sending shipments of platinum to New York without paying a single penny to the Colombian State. This outrageous looting lasted ten years. Then, for five decades, the company paid ridiculously low taxes thanks to a permanent game of corruption and accounting pitfalls. Despite the delicious deposits of platinum, gold mines of high-purity, untouched woods, fishing and animal stock, Chocó remains the poorest region of the country: in 2012, 68% of its inhabitants lived in poverty, compared with the national average of 32%. The main reason is that it is a region neglected by the State, with very little presence of the institutions, without investments or infrastructure, abandoned in the hands of oligarchs who appropriated the resources by force, blood and fire.