26 April 23
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New evidence suggests the official police narrative that the anti–Cop City activist Tortuguita was killed by police after firing on them is a lie. The killing is the product of the domestic “war on terror” and its crackdown on nonviolent activists.
But new evidence has challenged that narrative over the past month or so, with the results of the DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s autopsy of Terán released last week revealing their body had been riddled with at least fifty-seven gunshot wounds. The autopsy also revealed no gunpowder residue on Terán’s hands. While gunshot residue is absent on the shooter in a minority of cases and doesn’t by itself disprove the police’s claims, it casts further doubt on law enforcement’s version of events.
These doubts were already present after the March release of a second, independent autopsy report commissioned by Terán’s family. While making no conclusion about whether or not they were holding a firearm at any point, that autopsy did conclude Terán had likely been sitting cross-legged when they were shot, and that at some point they’d raised their arms up and in front of themself, palms facing their body, all of which clashed further with law enforcement’s version of events.
That version, outlined in use of force incident reports, contends that as police were clearing the tents of the “protesters/domestic terrorists” — as one officer referred to the activists — an individual inside one of the tents refused to leave. The police shot pepper balls into the tent, goes law enforcement’s version of events, prompting a volley of gunfire from inside of the tent striking one officer, leading police to open fire, killing Terán. Officers said they found a handgun in Terán’s tent whose bullets they matched up to the one that hit the officer, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later released transaction records showing Terán had legally bought the gun.
But from the start, activists who were there during the incident have said they only heard one set of shots. The officers responsible for the shooting weren’t wearing body cameras, while the bodycam footage that has been released, from police who weren’t involved in the incident, has also cast doubt on the police narrative. One officer mutters that “you fucked your own officer up,” while another asks, “Did they shoot their own man?” When the shooting starts, an officer asks if “they’re shooting at us,” while another replies, “Nah, that sounded like suppressed gunfire” — meaning, it was the police shooting.
Meanwhile, the autopsy reports give a disturbingly visceral outline of just how violent the officers’ shooting spree was. The DeKalb County Medical Examiner’s report on Terán describes a body riddled with bullets, with gunshot wounds in their head, chest, both arms, hands, thighs, and legs, as well as their hip, pelvis, and scrotum. The independent autopsy report stated that it was next to impossible to accurately distinguish every distinct wound, since “many of the wound tracks within his body converge, coalesce and intersect.” The case has now been transferred to the Mountain Judicial Circuit district attorney, who was named as the special prosecutor.
Terán’s death is just one controversy in a saga full of them. At least just as alarming as the possibility of the extrajudicial killing of a nonviolent protester is the treatment of dozens of Cop City activists, by both the Georgian state government and federal bodies like the FBI, as “terrorists.” Twenty-three of the protesters are being charged under the state’s domestic terrorism statute, facing thirty-five years’ jail time if they’re convicted, with eight of them denied bond. Twenty-one of them don’t even live in Georgia.
Chillingly, they’re facing these charges despite the fact that, excluding the trooper allegedly shot by the now-deceased Terán, police themselves don’t claim there was any human bodily harm that resulted from the protests — just damage to windows and construction equipment. But that doesn’t matter, since Georgia’s domestic terrorism law was changed in 2017 from encompassing crimes “intended or reasonably likely to injure or kill not less than ten individuals” to crimes intended to harm or kill people or destroy “critical infrastructure” as a way of forcing political change. This change was made following the mass murder of black churchgoers by white supremacist Dylann Roof in 2015 over the objections of civil liberties groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which warned, prophetically it seems, that it would be used to suppress law-abiding Americans’ First Amendment rights.
Despite this, the ongoing campaign to bring the disastrous “war on terror” home to the domestic front is continuing — and it’s being pushed by misguided liberals as much as by the Right. Ostensibly aiming to target far-right and anti-government militia groups in the state, Democrats in Oregon have been pushing a bill alarmingly similar to Georgia’s broadly repressive domestic terrorism law. The Oregon bill defines domestic terrorism as, among other things, intending to cause “the disruption of services provided by critical infrastructure” — a term that explicitly encompasses roads and fossil fuel pipelines — by destroying or “substantially” damaging it. Once again, rights groups, environmentalists, and others are warning that such a law could easily be used against law-abiding protesters and left-wing groups, but it’s not clear yet if these alarm bells will make any more difference than they did in Georgia.
We’ll have to wait and see to find out what comes of the investigation into Terán’s death. But if things stay as they are — with little progress on police accountability under a Democratic government, the steady march of the criminalization of protest, and nonexistent liberal pushback against a new war on terror that’s now sold as a counterweight to the far right — the events in Atlanta may well be less of an exception and more a sign of things to come.
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Harry Belafonte speaks during a civil rights rally in New York, May 17, 1960. (photo: Jacob Harris/AP)
May the memory of his courage be a blessing and an inspiration.
A hair-raising night expedition ensued. The car with the two celebrities and their $70,000 were ambushed by a pickup truck that tried to run them off the road. It might have been the Klan. It might have been the local cops. In Mississippi in 1964, it very well could have been cops moonlighting as Klansmen, or Klansmen with badges. Belafonte and Poitier made it to Greenwood, where they delivered the cash to SNCC headquarters. Harry Belafonte was a winter soldier of the first order when his country needed him the most. He died Tuesday at the age of 96. May the memory of his courage be a blessing and an inspiration.
(Here he is on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968, singing "Don't Stop The Carnival" illustrated by films of that summer's riotous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. CBS refused to air the selection and, if I recall correctly, ran a long commercial for Richard Nixon's campaign.)
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Anti-abortion and abortion rights activists protest in Washington, D.C., at the March for Life rally in January. (photo: Chip Somodevilla/AFP)
"We can't touch you unless you're crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you're fixing to have a heart attack," she says she was told.
Speaking to NPR for a story published on Tuesday, Statton recalled traveling to numerous hospitals to seek an emergency dilation and curettage (or D&C) abortion procedure—the treatment for her life-threatening condition. Her emergency room doctor told her she was at risk of hemorrhage and even death, but that the hospital couldn’t provide treatment. Over the course of a week, she was transferred to three different hospitals. The last hospital instructed Statton to wait in the parking lot for her condition to worsen before they could legally treat her, she claimed. “They said, ‘The best we can tell you to do is sit in the parking lot, and if anything else happens, we will be ready to help you. But we cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack,’” Statton told NPR.
Oklahoma currently has three active abortion bans, which have conflicting exceptions and guidelines around medical emergencies in which abortion is appropriate, reproductive rights advocacy groups explained in a new study published Tuesday. Under these laws, abortion providers are threatened with prison time. As a result, many hospitals in the state have expressed confusion about whether and under what circumstances they can offer emergency abortion care: The study surveyed 34 hospitals in the state on their policies surrounding pregnancy complications and emergency abortion care. Per its findings, four hospitals disclosed that doctors must seek approval to provide emergency abortions; 14 hospitals were unable to provide clear answers about whether they even had an approval process for emergency abortions; and three of the hospitals said they wouldn’t provide abortion under any circumstances.
“These devastating findings from Oklahoma are consistent with accounts we are hearing from patients and health care professionals in other abortion ban states,” Risa Kaufman, director of U.S. human rights at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Jezebel in a statement. “These bans undermine the ability and freedom of patients and their providers to make safe, evidence-based health care decisions.”
At the end of last month—two weeks after Statton was denied care by three different Oklahoma hospitals—the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled that abortion care is legal when a patient’s life is in danger.
After ultimately being unable to get an emergency D&C procedure in Oklahoma, Statton said she and her husband drove three hours out-of-state to receive care in Kansas. She told NPR she’s now facing surgery to remove additional cancerous tissue.
Dr. Loren Colson, a reproductive health care provider based in Idaho, says that molar pregnancies and similar high-risk pregnancy complications carry even greater risk with delays when hospitals weigh their legal risks. “Procedurally, it becomes a lot more complicated than it had to be, and a lot more difficult to treat,” Colson said. In states with criminal abortion bans, like Idaho, Colson says at least two hospitals have shuttered the obstetrics and labor and delivery departments as a result of confusion over criminal risk incurred by the state’s abortion ban. “We’re seeing a mass exodus of physicians in the state as a result of this ban.” That means fewer health care providers are available to help pregnant people.
As hospitals weigh their legal risks and pregnant people shoulder the consequences, advocates have pointed out that regardless of bans, doctors remain obligated to provide life-saving care. And many hospitals have robust legal departments and resources that should enable them to take these risks. “I don’t want to speak for all physicians,” Colson said, “but I think when push comes to shove, hopefully, if someone had someone that was going to die without immediate intervention, that they would intervene.” If a patient faced less immediate pregnancy complications, Colson says doctors are more likely to refer their patients to health care in a state with less legal risk.
Fear of abortion bans has ultimately resulted in the dehumanization of pregnant patients, the Center for Reproductive Rights’ study of Oklahoma hospitals found. Dr. Michele Heisler, medical director of Physicians for Human Rights and one of the study’s authors, told NPR that one hospital spokesperson said in cases of pregnancy-related emergencies, the hospital “would try to use the woman’s body as an incubator to just try to keep the pregnancy going as long as possible.”
Statton told the Oklahoman she “felt so alone,” throughout her struggle to find care, and that she’s sharing her story hoping to change Oklahoma’s abortion laws and shed light on their lived impacts on pregnant people. “I wasn’t trying to get rid of my baby. I went there because my baby was not going to make it and neither was I,” she said. “If only these people knew.”
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A ground mural depicting a portrait of Breonna Taylor is seen at Chambers Park in Annapolis, Md., on July 6, 2020. (photo: Julio Cortez/AP)
Myles Cosgrove, a former Louisville police officer who shot and killed Breonna Taylor in March 2020, became a law enforcement officer again in a nearby county, according to various local media outlets.
"We think he will help reduce the flow of drugs in our area and reduce property crimes," Miller said. "We felt like he was a good candidate to help us in our county."
Miller added that Cosgrove had nearly two decades of experience in the police force. The Carroll County Sheriff's Office declined NPR's request for comment.
The hiring has garnered scrutiny in both Louisville and Carroll County.
Chanelle Helm, the lead organizer of Black Lives Matter Louisville, said Cosgrove's return to the police force showed the impunity often afforded to law enforcement.
"The way in which he can go and get a job in the same field should be illegal. For a typical citizen, we aren't able to re-enter certain fields, if we're fired from them. That carries with you," she told member station WFPL.
Cosgrove was one of seven officers involved in the deadly raid inside Taylor's apartment in the middle of the night. Police, who came to serve a no-knock search warrant, barged in — startling Taylor, a 26-year-old ER technician, and her boyfriend. Believing the officers were intruders, Taylor's boyfriend fired a single shot at them. Officers returned 32 shots, half of which were fired by Cosgrove. Two of his rounds struck Taylor.
An FBI ballistics report later showed that it was Cosgrove's bullets that killed her, according to WFPL.
In January 2021, the Louisville Metro Police Department fired Cosgrove for violating department procedures on the use of deadly force by failing to properly identify a threat when he fired his weapon. Cosgrove also violated LMPD policy by not wearing a body camera during the raid.
In Cosgrove's termination letter, the interim LMPD Chief Yvette Gentry wrote: "The shots you fired went in three different directions, indicating you did not verify a threat or have target acquisition."
Gentry added, "In other words, the evidence shows that you fired wildly at unidentified subjects or targets located within the apartment."
Cosgrove appealed his case to get his job back in November 2021, but ultimately the court upheld the department's decision to terminate, local media outlets reported.
The officer has not faced any criminal charges in connection to the killing. Four officers were formally charged by the Justice Department with civil rights violations but Cosgrove was not one of them.
In 2022, the Kentucky Law Enforcement Council voted to allow Cosgrove to keep his police certification, making him eligible to work for other police departments in the state, WFPL reported.
Cosgrove is not the first officer to be removed from a police department after misconduct only to be hired elsewhere. The phenomenon known as "wandering cops" has been an issue for decades in the U.S. in part because there is a lack of national coordination to keep track of officers with a history of misconduct.
Taylor's death fueled racial justice protests across the country in the summer of 2020. That year, Louisville's city council unanimously voted to ban no-knock warrants.
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Children hold signs during a protest to end gun violence in schools. (photo: Dean Obeidallah/Substack)
The scorched-earth fight over gun control obscures a key idea that could actually save lives: prioritizing gun storage.
My father’s unloaded firearms — a .22 pistol and a 20-gauge shotgun — were stored in a locked cabinet in the garage behind an array of boxes, bikes, and golf clubs. He worked across the country in California, and he kept the key with him at all times.
By most standards, my father’s weapons were safely stored, but he was in the minority of gun owners: 54 percent of the approximately 77 million gun owners in the US do not practice safe gun storage, according to a 2018 Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health survey. And one-third of these households with dangerously stored guns are also home to children.
This is a fact that should alarm us. In 2020, firearms surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children, with 4,357 children killed by gunfire that year. While the majority of child deaths from guns are due to homicide, an average of 35 percent between 2018 and 2021 were suicides, while 5 percent were caused by unintentional, accidental shootings.
“I often reflect on the day that our children walked out the door and one of my children returned home and for the other, I was picking out a casket,” said Julvonnia McDowell, a volunteer with the gun safety movement Moms Demand Action, whose 14-year-old son, JaJuan McDowell, was unintentionally shot and killed in 2016 by another teen who was playing with an unsecured gun. “Every time I say this, my heart breaks because our children deserve to live. They shouldn’t have to die like this.”
Despite the horrific toll of firearm violence, America remains deeply divided on guns, and hopes for any kind of comprehensive gun control reform is dim. But the US could reduce gun violence — both youth suicides and unintentional shootings — by adopting stricter secure storage laws and educating gun owners about proper storage methods.
That’s why the national gun control advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety on Wednesday released a new report on preventing unintentional shootings by children, which was first shared with Vox. The group found that nine of the 10 states with the lowest number of unintentional shootings by adolescents have some form of secure storage protection. In contrast, the 10 states with the highest rates of unintentional shootings by children have very limited or no secure storage laws.
And while tougher laws and norms to better store guns would do nothing about the sheer number of firearms in America, storage safety offers a rare opportunity to find political consensus on guns. “Often people feel like nothing can happen in the gun debate, and while it’s true that the state of gun laws in the US remains weak, relative to our peers around the world, that doesn’t mean that change is impossible,” said Matthew Lacombe, the author of Firepower: How the NRA Turned Gun Owners Into a Political Force. “But as bleak as things seem, and as dire and scary as this problem is, we’re in a better position to keep putting in the work to make change happen.”
What does a safely stored gun look like?
While American gun owners and non-gun owners disagree about many gun restrictions, they actually find common ground when it comes to gun storage, a 2019 APM Research Lab survey on Americans’ views on gun policies found. Over half of gun owners and non-gun owners support speaking to their children about gun safety, keeping guns in a locked place, and taking gun safety courses.
That means most American adults support at least one pillar of what Johanna Thomas — a licensed certified social worker, gun owner, and volunteer with Moms Demand Action — calls the “gold standard of firearm storage”: keeping stored firearms unloaded and locked away, with ammunition kept separately and locked as well.
An unloaded weapon prevents someone from using the device if they do not know how to load it, while keeping ammunition separate prevents unauthorized users who do know how to load a gun from doing so. For a firearm to be locked, it needs to be stored in a locked cabinet or safe, or, at minimum, with a trigger lock that needs to be removed.
These three rules — unloaded, locked, and separate — have been shown by researchers to provide protection for children who live in the home where guns are stored. And while some gun owners may argue that locking a weapon could put them in peril if they need to use it quickly, evidence from Everytown’s report shows that an unsecured weapon does not make an individual safer or more capable of defending themselves.
“When I tell people I keep [my gun] in a safe, and I keep the ammunition stored separately, there are always questions about that,” says Thomas. “But I can tell them, I have access to my firearm in three seconds if I need it. Those three seconds also help me to decide, do I actually need my firearm?” That’s time enough, Thomas says, to give her the opportunity to determine whether a possible intruder is actually her child or spouse entering her home.
The state of American gun violence and the policies meant to prevent it
In the first four months of this year alone, guns killed more than 13,200 people — 470 of whom were teens (ages 12 to 17) and 81 of whom were children. Of these thousands of deaths, 234 are from the 173 mass shootings that have occurred in the US this year so far. These mass shootings, including the recent March Nashville school shooting — the 377th school shooting since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting — often make national headlines.
However, suicides are a significant and overlooked portion of American gun deaths and account for well over half of all annual gun deaths. An encouraging finding from a RAND Corporation report is that child access prevention laws — laws that require guns to be made inaccessible to children — reduce the rate of suicides among young people in states where they are implemented, simply by making it more difficult for a child or adolescent in mental distress to get access to a weapon that could instantly end their lives.
“Part of what I think makes gun storage laws or safe gun storage practices important is that the studies show that they can help reduce the risk of adolescent suicide, and that isn’t necessarily what we think of when we think of a gun violence problem in this country,” said Lacombe. “I think gun storage is an example of a policy that could make a real difference in terms of combating one of these underdiscussed but unfortunately really common types of gun misuse.”
Currently, 25 states and Washington, DC, require gun owners to take responsibility for the secure storage of their guns to some capacity. These laws range in intensity and level of protection, with the most comprehensive enacted in Massachusetts and Oregon, where gun owners are required to secure their guns when they are not in possession of the weapon. In Massachusetts, the penalty for not properly securing a gun ranges from a $2,500 fine to 15 years in prison depending on the type of gun.
Along with reducing suicides, these two states with the strongest policies have a 78 percent lower rate of unintentional shootings when compared to states without secure storage laws.
“Secure storage laws are some of the most evidence-proven gun safety laws that there are,” said Sarah Burd-Sharps, senior director of research for Everytown. “I think the hopeful news of this report is that nearly all of these shootings are preventable.”
When you send your children to someone else’s home, you often ask questions to keep them safe: Do you have pets? Do you have a pool, and if so, how is it secured? My child has an allergy, do you have peanuts in your house? “All of those things are routine,” says Burd-Sharps. “Asking about firearms and how they’re stored should be another routine safety precaution.”
“It’s a difficult conversation, but it’s one that we have to have,” said Thomas, a mom to a 13-year-old and 10-year-old who has this conversation every time she sends her children to a new home or in a new vehicle. In the few cases where Thomas felt a firearm was not stored properly, she found alternative solutions, such as driving her child herself or proposing an outdoor play date.
One way to make this conversation easier is to communicate via text and share information about your own home first, Thomas added. “Anytime my children are going to visit somebody else’s home or I have children coming to my home, I offer up that information,” she said. “A lot of times my conversation starts with, ‘We have three dogs in our home, we have a pool, it has an alarm, we have all of our liquor stored in a locked cabinet, medications are put in a safe, we have two firearms, they’re stored in our closet. Guns are in one safe, and ammunition is in another. Kids don’t have access.’”
Volunteering this information means parents often offer it in return without having to be asked, she said. Parents can also find more information on how to lead this conversation through Everytown’s gun storage campaign, Be SMART, Burd-Sharps added.
On top of checking in with other adults, parents should also be educating their children about the dangers of firearms and the need to find and notify an adult if they see an unsecured firearm. “I think that with children, you have to have that conversation about the dangers of guns,” said McDowell. But, she adds, “I always lead this back to it’s always the adults’ responsibility to prevent unauthorized access to guns and not a curious child’s responsibility to avoid guns.”
“We should talk to our kids about gun safety, but it’s a precaution, it is not a guarantee,” Thomas agreed. “The onus is on adults to keep children safe, always, at every point.”
Parents aren’t the only ones who should be leading these conversations. Everyone should be taking up the task. In fact, most gun owners believe law enforcement, hunting and outdoor organizations, active-duty military, and veterans would be good messengers for information on safe storage practices.
Health care professionals also play a critical role in promoting safe firearm storage, said Thomas Delaney, an associate professor of pediatrics who does suicide prevention work at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont.
“Particularly when there are children or youth in the home or people with identified risk for suicide, health care professionals have an opportunity to ask, ‘How are firearms in the home stored?’ and then provide guidance about how improving storage practices can increase the safety of everyone in the home,” said Delaney. “Health care providers in general have a lot of credibility and often trustful relationships with patients built up over many years, and their guidance can be a powerful tool for increasing safe storage and, downstream, helping prevent suicide deaths, homicide deaths, and theft or improper accessing of firearms.”
McDowell, who knows the devastation of these unintentional shootings firsthand, agrees that it is everyone’s job to educate and be concerned about this issue.
“I honor JaJuan by using my voice to talk to Americans all over the country, from all walks of life, about secure storage of firearms,” said McDowell. “For me, taking action isn’t a choice, it’s my new path, my new mission. But gun violence is an issue that we all need to worry about.”
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Migrants start walking north from Tapachula, Chiapas state, Mexico, Sunday, April 23, 2023. They blame the government for the deadly detention centre fire. (photo: Edgar Hernandez Clemente/AP)
Thousands of migrants are marching through southern Mexico as part of a mass protest to demand the end of detention centres.
"The only thing we are asking for is justice, and to be treated like anyone else," Salvadoran migrant Miriam Argueta told AP news agency.
They are hoping to reach the capital Mexico City in about 10 days.
The caravan of about 3,000 people started walking at dawn on Sunday from the Mexican city of Tapachula, near the Guatemalan border. On Sunday they slowly made their way through the rural state of Chiapas, walking in more than 35C (95F) heat.
They are mainly from Central America, Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia.
Demanding better treatment for migrants, some are carrying signs reading "government crime" and "the state killed them", referring to those who died in the fire.
It is unclear how many of the protesters may continue on to the US border, as has happened in the past. Large groups have often been broken up by authorities well before they reach either Mexico City or the US-Mexico border.
The migrants travel in large groups for safety - they face several threats along the way, particularly from dangerous organised crime gangs and corrupt local law officials. Migrant rights groups say that breaking up the caravans has forced many people into the hands of people-smuggling gangs.
Mexico is struggling to deal with an influx of migrants who are fleeing instability, violence and poverty in their own countries.
While most are hoping to reach the US, some do apply for asylum in Mexico.
The immigration centre in Tapachula - the biggest in Mexico - is one of the main bottlenecks on their journeys. Nicknamed the "migrant prison", refugee processing offices in the city are overwhelmed.
The fire on 27 March started when migrants set fire to foam mattresses "when they learned that they'd be deported", Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said.
There were also reports that they were protesting over the poor conditions they were being held in.
There was outrage when video footage of the fire showed three uniformed officials walking out of the room, appearing to leave the migrants behind in a locked cell as the flames spread.
Five people are facing homicide charges, including a Venezuelan man believed to have started the fire, three immigration agents and a private security guard.
Meanwhile, on 11 May the Biden Administration expects to lift Title 42 - a controversial Trump-era policy brought in during the pandemic, which allows border agents to immediately deport undocumented immigrants.
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The Mavicure Hill is 170 meters (about 558 feet) high and was formed about 1.8 billion years ago. It is considered a natural wonder. (photo: José Guarnizo)
García Barros, a member of the Puinave ethnic group, points to the mountain in the front. She says this was where Princess Inírida hid forever, according to García Barros’ ancestors. The mountain, called the Pajarito Hill, has a near-perfect concave shape and its surface is an intense shade of dark gray, which almost seems blue. This is a result of the sediments and granite that accumulated in the Earth’s crust over the course of 1.8 billion years.
Mavicure, Pajarito and El Mono, another nearby hill, are among the oldest rock formations in the country, according to studies by geologists at the National University of Colombia. In the tradition of the Puinave people, these archaic hills represent three siblings who were abandoned by their parents and who had to grow up in the distant view of their grandmother, a much smaller mountain on the other side of the Inírida River. They are rocks, but also a family of giants — a historical treasure that many Colombians do not even know they possess.
The geological past of Guainía is one of the reasons for its abundance of metals. A study by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) on mining in the Indigenous territories in this department states that “the subsoil in most of this region is of Paleoproterozoic origin.” This era lasted 900 million years in the same time frame when the continents stabilized for the first time. These mountains may be some of the oldest on the planet, and this is why many are so certain that metals will be discovered in the area.
The Indigenous people from this area of Colombia — whose ancestors were here thousands of years ago — have been living on mountains of gold that have not yet been exploited by the West at a large scale. The Mavicure Hill’s surroundings are still virgin lands when it comes to the raging advancements of mining companies. This makes these lands a paradise: the same one that García Barros can recount from a legend that she knows by heart. This legend explains the worldview of the Puinave people; it is their way of relating to the mountains. García Barros says this landscape is the only inheritance left by her great-great-grandparents.
According to García Barros, Princess Inírida sought refuge on that peak while running from a group of men who fell in love with her during a party. At 480 meters (about 1,575 feet) high, no one has been able to climb this steep peak. Since then, while far from humans, the princess became the guardian of this ancestral land — but not for very long.
On July 30, 2021, the National Mining Agency of Colombia approved 13 proposals for mining concession contracts for gold and gold concentrates in the meeting hall of the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve. The reserve is in the area around the Mavicure, Pajarito and El Mono hills, near the community that García Barros calls home. The titles also include areas in the municipalities of Inírida to the north and Puerto Venado to the south.
Controversial mining titles
Mongabay Latam and Vorágine contacted the Ministry of Mines and Energy regarding its position on the implications, consequences and possible risks or benefits of a potential gold rush in the region. According to the ministry’s communications office, Vice Minister of Energy Belizza Ruiz is the official spokesperson, but she had not yet taken office at the time of this conversation, so no statements would be made about this. They indicated that the issue would be managed by the National Mining Agency, the government body that fully manages Colombia’s mineral resources. The National Mining Agency is also in charge of monitoring whether the people authorized to extract nonrenewable natural resources fulfill their obligations.
The National Mining Agency sent a statement to Vorágine and Mongabay Latam stating that in the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve, one small-scale and 12 medium-scale gold mining titles were approved.
There is great hope in the community, but there is also a high degree of ignorance about the magnitude of what could come along with the arrival of mining companies.
According to Law 1666, issued by the presidency of the Republic of Colombia in 2016, mining titles in Colombia that are in the process of exploration or in the construction and assembly stage are classified into small-, medium- and large-scale mining “based on the number of hectares granted in the respective mining title.” According to the document, medium-scale exploration for metals, like the majority of the projects that were approved in the reserve, refers to projects covering 150-5,000 hectares (about 371-12,355 acres) per title.
However, the mining titles of projects that are in the extraction stage — which will operate in the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve in the future — are also classified as small-, medium- or large-scale mining, depending on the annual volume of maximum mining production. For open-pit mining, the extraction of gold and gold concentrates is considered medium-scale when it produces 50,000-750,000 tons of metal per year. For underground extraction, the production allowed is 25,000-400,000 tons per year.
According to the National Mining Agency, the titles were issued while taking into account the minimum requirements for environmental and labor suitability. The agency indicates that the legal proceedings will ensure the title holder conducts its activities “with strict adherence to the environmental mining guides adopted by the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Ministry of Environment.” These titles are in the name of the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve Council, which is the name of the organization that requested them.
However, the ownership of these mining concessions is surrounded by controversy. One of the leaders of the reserve is Luis Alfonso García. He says the community has had two community councils since 2015, and this has caused division between the residents of the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve as they face the arrival of mining: Some have good opinions of mining and others do not. Alfonso García added that it is not the Indigenous people who have been managing the titles, since they would not have a way to do so.
“At no point have we been well-informed about how the situation will be. A man named Jorge Salinas, a corporate guy, is the one who has been attending to the issuance of the titles; he is who has been investing in the budgets,” says Alfonso García, who is part of the group of leaders who agree that legal mining should be carried out in the reserve.
According to Alfonso García, although the mining titles were officially granted to the Indigenous communities, the Indigenous people are not the ones behind the execution of the projects — and this is far from being a secret in the region.
Jenny Soad Rojas, the director of the Corporation for the Sustainable Development of the Eastern Amazon (CDA), tells Vorágine and Mongabay Latam there are clearly other interests, other than those of the Indigenous people, and those help finance gold extraction. “You know that gold mining is not for people without money. This [has to do with] very big investments, and the communities in this area do not have those resources, so we assume that there must be another type of force behind this,” says Soad Rojas.
Alfonso García also claims that on Aug. 22, 2022, there was a meeting between the community and the company that processed the titles on behalf of the reserve. During the meeting, an agreement was made with Salinas, who Mongabay Latam and Vorágine contacted via WhatsApp and a phone call. He referred us to a lawyer, who ultimately did not provide us with a statement, despite our insistence. “We told [the company] that in the community, we need an income to be able to support our families. We already contributed our lands, our richness; now we need a job — a salary,” says Alfonso García.
In contrast, there is a part of the community that considers the arrival of mining in the region to be a problem, mostly because it could trigger social conflicts. Some also fear that gold could attract armed groups. This group of leaders say they believe tourism can lead the way to opportunities that are scarce in the region.
Poverty: between a rock and a hard place
It is here — with a lack of opportunities and few resources — where the most complex issue surrounding mining in the reserve arises. Mavicure Hill is located in the municipality of Inírida, which is a three-hour boat ride from the urban area to the north, and 320 km (about 200 mi) from the border with Venezuela, to the east. About 2,000 Indigenous people live near these mountains, and most of them are part of the Puinave ethnic group. There are also people from the Curripaco, Piapoco and Sikuani ethnic groups, who have migrated from Guaviare, as well as a small number of Cubeo people from the department of Vaupés. The reserve is divided into settlements. The largest is Chorrobocón, with 1,200 residents. El Remanso is the second-largest, with a population of 300.
The reality of this lost paradise is that the Colombian government is like a ghost — a distant rumor that has never been seen. It is abandoned territory. Guainía, for example, has one of the highest multidimensional poverty indices in Colombia, according to 2020 data published by the National Administrative Department of Statistics. About 65.9% of people in this area live in poverty, far above the national average of 18.1 percent. The Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve is the greatest example of this huge gap.
Until 70 years ago, the Puinave Indigenous people from this part of Colombia kept their traditions almost completely intact. According to a Puinave leader who would like to remain anonymous for personal safety reasons, this is when Catholic evangelization arrived and disrupted the Indigenous communities’ customs. The leader says social conflicts will come with the arrival of mining, and that the peace the Indigenous people have protected for centuries will disappear.
“First, the religion prohibited Indigenous dances. Until a short time ago, the guayuco was used, which is a traditional garment with a loincloth. The women did not wear bras. Catholicism changed everything. They said to the women, ‘If you dress that way, it is sinful; you could go to hell.’ And they scared people. And consumerism appeared, so in the reserve, they then had to buy clothing and products that did not exist here in the past. When the companies that extract gold appear, all of this will worsen,” says the Indigenous leader.
The anonymous Indigenous leader, who is 38 years old, has ochre skin, defined cheekbones and is about 5 feet, 5 inches tall. He says the region could be a sustainable tourism powerhouse. Limited groups of visitors arrive every week to explore the wonders of Mavicure Hill and its siblings, El Mono and Pajarito. They can also see other majestic landscapes like the Fluvial Star of Inírida, a humid labyrinth where the Guaviare, Atabapo and Inírida rivers cross each other. These rivers form a single whirlpool of water that joins the Orinoco River on the border with Venezuela.
Tourists go on tours that sometimes seem magical. One of them is a visit to an area called Matraca, which is home to the common kingfisher. This bird has blue wings and an orange chest and is known as the Martín pescador in Spanish. In this area, tourists in small boats can approach Risso’s dolphins, which then jump above the surface as if waving hello. When the water is still, the dolphins can appear out of nowhere, using their pearly fins to draw imaginary arcs in the air.
Several Indigenous people from the area see opportunities in this sector of the economy — regulated, conscious tourism — that many years and various governments have denied their family members. It is not easy to live in El Remanso.
This small village can only be accessed by a three-hour trip on the Inírida River. The 300 people who live in El Remanso rely mainly on fishing to survive. Over the summer, the men go out in canoes every day to search for fish like tilapia, catfish, bocachicos, half-banded pike cichlids, dormilones and tambaqui (Colossoma macropomum). During winter, they search for jawfishes, palometas (Trachinotus goodei) and mullets. However, healthy fish are becoming harder to find. According to Soad Rojas, the CDA director, a study soon to be published reveals that the fish from this part of the river have higher mercury concentrations than the limit allowed. They are a reminder of the problems left behind by illegal mining.
The diet of the Puinave people is based heavily on yuca brava, or cassava. When processed, this tuber is turned into products like mañoco and casabe. Mañoco, or cassava flour, is a granulated food that can be mixed into juices or eaten by itself. Casabe is a type of unleavened bread (or tortilla) that can be eaten with all different types of food. However, not many other foods are grown in El Remanso, since the land is not very fertile. Pineapples, cashew trees, ahuyama squash, pacay trees and ají peppers are among the few that grow when planted. Most other foods need to be brought in from Inírida: fruit, vegetables, chicken, other meats, legumes, oil, sugar and salt are incredibly precious items, a paradox for an area so rich in gold.
Children in El Remanso attend school only until 5th grade, since their small school does not offer more levels. If a student wants to continue their secondary education, they must go to live in Inírida. This does not include university. García Barros, for example, could only study up until 9th grade — out of the 11 grades that Colombia’s secondary education system offers — because she did not have relatives in the town. “To get ahead in Inírida, you would need to sleep on cardboard because you need money to pay for [somewhere to] stay while studying,” says García Barros. Another person who was interviewed left the reserve and earned a diploma after several years of difficulties. Their childhood goal was to learn Spanish, as a gateway to Western knowledge and opportunities. Nobody studies in Puinave.
One of the Indigenous leaders of the reserve who spoke with Mongabay Latam and Vorágine says being born in El Remanso means having the odds against you. This leader managed to attend university and graduate. His education has given him perspective on the world, and his disillusionment has driven him to question the arrival of gold mining in the region. He still tries to put himself in the shoes of those who support mining, because in this community, the issue of hunger is urgent.
What is rarely discussed in El Remanso is what has happened with gold in other parts of the country and the world: The companies get the lion’s share. Whatever is left goes to the local miners.
Mavicure is a reserve area
The hills were so sacred to the ancestors of modern Puinave people that there were certain places that could not be visited. Grandparents warned their grandchildren that the Earth spoke when it felt abused: “They would say to you, ‘Do not go over there because something could happen; it could even bring on the rain,’” says another leader. In winter, this leader could only fish for a few hours because noises could be heard after that. It was like a message that indicated the work shift had ended. Before leaving, the Indigenous people would leave offerings on the hills: Often a piece of cassava cake would be left as a gift to the Earth. Many have kept this custom alive.
Soad Rojas says the Mavicure Hill is in the forest reserve zone of the Amazon (created by Law 2 of 1959) because of the territory’s biological characteristics. “Various studies have managed to identify a large number of species of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, plants and trees of priceless importance for the country,” says Soad Rojas.
In fact, in order for the 13 projects connected to these mining titles to begin the extraction stage, those who requested the titles must negotiate the deduction from the reserve in these specific areas with the Ministry of Environment. Mavicure Hill itself is within the perimeter of the Guiana Shield. This is one of the world’s oldest geological formations and includes parts of Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and the Guianas (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana). The Guiana Shield covers more than 2.7 million square kilometers (more than 1 million square miles), approximately 13% of the land in South America.
The Fluvial Star of Inírida, which borders the area surrounding Mavicure Hill — to the northeast, close to the urban area of Inírida — has special international protection. In July 2014, this national treasure was declared a Ramsar site by the federal government. This means that mining projects cannot be developed in this area because its environmental value was is on a global scale. Ramsar sites must be legally protected.
A study by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in Colombia, the Omacha Foundation and the CDA — edited by Fernando Trujillo, José Saulo Usma, and Carlos Lasso — highlights the extraordinary conditions of the Fluvial Star: “It forms part of the savanna ecoregion of the Amazon in Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela. [It is] an exclusive area in Colombia with uncommon soil and geological conditions that maintain the highest levels of endemism and diversity.”
For all these reasons, many have doubts and reservations about the mining titles in the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve, close to the Fluvial Star of Inírida.
One of the leaders who was consulted said the people have not even seen the documents in order to know what was negotiated with the companies that took out the titles. “I go there every week and ask them, but there is total ignorance,” says the leader. “The communities aren’t told what the consequences of this will be — for example, the social issues, the pollution [and] how the affected areas will be recovered. The Inírida River, for now, is free of dissidents [armed groups from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] that did not obey the 2016 Peace Accord]. I ask myself: What will happen when the mining begins?” he adds.
Mauricio Cabrera, a researcher from WWF, says the concern surrounding the mining titles that were approved in the Remanso Chorrobocón Indigenous Reserve is not insignificant, given the results of several studies conducted by the organization. “We believe that there are no enabling conditions for mining activity to be developed there; this has to do with indicators of governability and governance in the Amazon. This could cause social, economic and environmental problems. These are processes that have already been lived in other parts of the country, on top of the ethnic and community problems that may be exacerbated at other levels,” says Cabrera.
Cabrera adds that this does not mean it isn’t important to seek out formalization mechanisms — under certain environmental impact conditions — directed at communities that have historically been involved in artisanal mining.
All of this is occurring in a context that is unfavorable to the environment when it comes to issuing mining titles in Colombia. The legal system surrounding mining is fragile. The State Council recently made a historic ruling that requires the Colombian government and the National Mining Agency to correct gaps in the law. In many cases, these gaps are detrimental to the conservation of strategic ecosystems and protected areas.
For this reason, ecotourism has become an alternative activity, although it lacks committed support from the Colombian government. García Barros, for example, has spent four years as a guide at Mavicure Hill. To give her coworkers a better opportunity, she only accompanies tourists once a month. She earns about $15 for this work, almost nothing given high local prices for food.
In the middle of so much uncertainty, the legends of the Puinave people could be wrong in predicting that their ancestral land can be preserved as a treasure trove full of biodiversity for humanity. The legend of the princess that García Barros has been telling is, in and of itself, a story full of adversity. When Inírida went to the party, the men of the community were captivated. It is said that she was a strangely beautiful young woman: Although she had white skin, she had the eyes and facial features of the Indigenous people of southern Colombia.
In order to make Princess Inírida fall in love, one of the men visited a wise man on the reserve to ask for a potion prepared with a plant called puzana. If the princess drank it, it was said that she would fall madly in love with the man.
As the party ended, Princess Inírida drank the potion. She did not fall in love. On the contrary, the princess went crazy, undressed and ran away to hide forever on Pajarito Hill. This is the version of the legend that García Barros tells. The princess never emerged from that place again. The flor de Inírida, or Inírida flower, is the area’s only reminder of her.
The Puinave people believe that Princess Inírida manifests her presence and looks after the territory via an herbaceous flower with stiff red and white petals. This plant has the ability to grow and cling to the ground in extreme conditions. It goes through life with difficulty, just like most of the people in El Remanso.
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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