The Ombudsman’s Office said Thursday that one policeman and a local farmer were killed in protests against the oil company in San Vicente del Caguan, a rural municipality in the southern Caqueta province.
The protests that began in November last year suddenly escalated on Thursday morning when “molotov cocktails would have been thrown and the installations were burned… which caused clashes between part of the community and the police,” according to the Ombudsman’s Office.
Indigenous and peasant communities from the region immediately sent their unarmed security guards to the site of the clashes and detained 79 policemen and nine oil workers in order to end the violence.
The cops and the oil workers were released on Friday after emergency talks between the locals Interior Minister Alfonso Prada and other cabinet members.
It wasn’t until Saturday, however, that a camera crew of Noticias Uno was able to show how Thursday’s explosion of violence had all but destroyed Emerald Energy’s facilities.
Why the protests?
Communities from the region where the subsidiary of Chinese chemical corporation Sinochem resumed protests in November to demand that the oil company reduces the environmental damage caused by its operations in Caqueta and honor commitments to construct infrastructure for the the benefit of neighboring communities.
Emerald Energy’s plans to explore and extract oil from Colombia’s Amazon region has been opposed by locals and environmental activists since the government ratified the company’s license in October 2012.
In 2018, locals and environmental activists asked the National Environmental Licenses Agency (ANLA) to revoke the license, claiming that the company’s original proposal lacked adequate environmental studies and ignored the existence of indigenous communities in the region
In August last year, the ANLA imposed multiple sanctions on the oil company for constructing oil mining infrastructure in a protected Amazon forest region and violating environmental regulations.
China’s secretive investments in Colombia
Oil sector response
Emerald Energy has ignored media requests to respond to the situation in Caqueta.
The president of the Colombian Oil and Gas Association (ACP), Francisco Lloreda, said the Chinese company is considering to abandon its operations in Caqueta.
According to Lloreda, the Interior Ministry was asked to send controversial anti-riot police unit ESMAD to Caqueta “to protect to lives of the workers, to protect the field.”
The oil representative said that the indigenous guard demanded an annual $1 million in cash from the oil company, which Lloreda called “an evident crime of extortion.”
ACP president Francisco Lloreda
Also this claim cannot be verified because all information on the company’s finances and commercial activities is “classified,” according to Emerald Energy.