Colombia’s transport ministry suspended a $740 million project that sought to upgrade a canal that has been an engineering nightmare for more than five centuries.

The suspension is the latest victory for the people that live in the vicinity of the 115-kilometer Levee Canal (Canal del Dique), which connects the Magdalena River with the port city of Cartagena.

A questionable bidding process

Former President Ivan Duque did “everything humanly possible” to give Spanish multinational Sacyr $740 for the “Restauration of the Levee Canal’s Degraded Ecosystems” before leaving office on Friday.

Duque called the suspended project was “the most important in Colombia of this century” on a visit to Cartagena in April.

Former Vice-President Marta Lucia Ramirez said the project would “give us the opportunity to have another exit point of Colombia’s export products.”

President Ivan Duque

The president and his former VP at the time said that 20 companies were interested in the canal project.

Last week, only construction company Sacyr, which is the subject of a corruption investigation in Spain, had made a bid.

The Comptroller General’s Office subsequently found inconsistencies between the company’s project proposal and the evaluation of this proposal by the National Infrastructure Agency (ANI).

Environment minister Susana Muhamad additionally said that the former government ignored a 2017 order to conduct a study on the environmental impact of the project before allowing companies to bid.

Despite everything, ANI director Manuel Felipe Gutierrez tried to close the deal hours before the end of his term on Friday.

Gutierrez was forced to leave the project in the hands of the government of President Gustavo Petro after the press got wind of his controversial plans.

Curiously, the ANI gave the Spanish company $920 million to upgrade the highway that connects the Pacific port city Buenaventura with the rest of Colombia in a last-minute deal instead.

Transport Minister Guillermo Reyes suspended the Levee Canal project for at least a month immediately after taking office on Thursday, claiming that “awarding a process that has questions would be irresponsible.”

A cemetery made of water

The suspension came two days after war crimes tribunal JEP ordered the ANI and whoever gets the Levee Canal contract to guarantee the search, exhumation, identification and the dignified return of human remains in the canal and the surrounding wetlands.

According to the JEP, paramilitary groups disappeared between 6,765 and 9,638 people in the area around the canal between 1991 and 2015.

Former ANI construction executive Diana Cardona

“The testimonies of the communities indicate that the waters around this river became a cemetery” where paramilitaries assassinated, disappeared and/or dismembers almost “10,000 people,” locals told Leyner Palacios, who has investigated the violence in the canal area for the Truth Commission since 2018.

According to the commission that has investigated the armed conflict, the paramilitary terror surged in 1997 when authorities proposed the suspended project and the now-defunct paramilitary organization AUC created the “Canal del Dique Front.”

Truth Commissioner Leyner Palacios

The group’s former commander, “Juancho Dique,” told the Truth Commission that the paramilitaries dumped their victims  in the Levee Canal because local authorities wanted to lower “the crime statistics’ and make sure that “nobody would find out about the homicides.”

Locals couldn’t ignore the terror. In fact, they couldn’t even come near the canal because “the smell of decomposing corpses was very strong,” according to Palacios.

The paramilitary group that was formed by the local elite and the security forces demobilized in 2005 and the “Restauration of the Levee Canal’s Degraded Ecosystems” project was put on hold.

Dique has actively been trying to help his victims overcome the paramilitary terror, but told newspaper El Espectador that he is too afraid to reveal who sponsored his group.

“Juancho Dique”

Additionally, the Levee Canal “is an illegal trafficking route, more than anything of weapons and drugs,” according to a social leader from the region.

According to Manati Mayor Evaristo Oliveros, illegal armed groups are also using the canal for illegal fuel transports.

“What they can’t sell they dump in the Levee Canal, the mayor said in June.

How much the canal contributes to Colombia’s legal economy is unclear.

From disaster to disaster

The government of former President Juan Manuel Santos revived the “Restauration of the Levee Canal’s Degraded Ecosystems” project in 2013 after a disaster that left more than 100,000 victims.

In November 2010, the northern levee of the Canal del Dique broke and much of the Atlantico province was flooded.

The 2010 flood was the latest of a series of disasters that began in 1575 when Spanish colonists realized that Cartagena, one of their main ports in South America, was 115 kilometers away from the Magdalena River.

The Magdalena is like the Mississippi of South America’s Caribbean coast and connects Spain to its colonial settlements in what is now Colombia.

For some reason, conquistador Pedro de Heredia visited the mouth of the Magdalena River in early 1533, but decided a weeks later to found Cartagena 115 kilometers southwest of what would be a perfect port instead.

The Spaniards decided they wanted access to the river 1571, but instead of building a port where the Magdalena River meets the Caribbean Sea, they opted to build a canal between Cartagena and Calamar instead.

In 1582, the colonists put 2,000 African and indigenous slaves to work to connect the wetlands west of the Magdalena River with the bay of Cartagena.

Sediments from the river almost immediately accumulated in the canal, which made it impossible to navigate and the project was abandoned.

The Spaniards had another go in 1630 and constructed the first levees, but ran into exactly the same problem.

By the time Colombia became independent in 1819, the Levee Canal was a muddy road rather than a waterway.

After the invention of the steamboat that was able to transport more freight up the Magdalena River, regional governments expanded the levee system in 1844.

Accumulating sediment continued to make permanent passage impossible.

In the late 19th century, the government gave up and built a railroad between Cartagena and Calamar instead.

The successful construction of the Panama Canal in 1914 made the National Government believe that a canal connecting Cartagena with the Magdalena River was no longer a lost cause.

The government hired the first of a series of foreign construction companies to properly construct the canal in 1923 and destroyed the railroad in 1953.

Late dictator Gustavo Rojas inaugurated an oil refinery in Cartagena despite the fact that was no oil anywhere in the Caribbean region.

The ongoing sediment problem blocked the canal again in 1960, making fluvial oil transports impossible and spurring another upgrade in 1961.

The last attempt to upgrade the Levee Canal began in 1980, but was abandoned because of financial woes in 1984.

The environmental disasters

The construction and the upgrades of the canal have a major effect on the water flowing from the Magdalena River into wetlands, which dramatically altered the local ecosystem.

Historian Jose Vicente Mogollon

The upgrades made since 1923 allowed the Magdalena River’s water to push the sediment through the canal and dump it in the Cartagena Bay, which has created an ecological disaster.

Instead of accumulating in the canal, the river sediment accumulated in the bay where it formed beaches made of river sand and silt.

Furthermore, the increasing amount of sweet water flowing through the canal has all but killed the coral reefs in the Cartagena Bay.

Had it occurred to anyone in the past five centuries to build a lock gate where the water from the Magdalena River flows into the canal, these ecological disasters may have been averted.

In fact, one could argue that a lock gate could have prevented much of the canal’s perpetual sediment problem.

Ironically, the suspended canal project does include the construction of one sluice gates in Calamar and another one in Cartagena.

Former Environment Minister Carlos Correa said in June that environmental authorities planted more than 38,000 corals in the Cartagena Bay to replace the reefs that were killed by the canal.

Disgracefully, the project that sought to tackle the the coral reefs’ cause of death has now been suspended.

Whether Cafyr, or any company for that matter, would want to include the search and possible exhumation of the remains of the thousands of people who were forcibly disappeared in the canal area is entirely unclear.

What is clear is that Duque bungled the “Restauration of the Levee Canal’s Degraded Ecosystems” despite ignoring the locals.

The war victims from the canal region were given a chance to perhaps find some of the remains of the thousands of people who were forcibly disappeared in the canal region.

Locals who feared that the government would further destroy the wetlands and their livelihoods were also given hope.