As I was finishing my work on this book, I had the opportunity to travel to a remote region of Colombia and see firsthand, from the other side, some of the global economic changes that have contributed to the surge in immigration in recent decades—and will continue to do so in the future.
Colombia’s Guajira peninsula is one of the poorest and most isolated regions of the country. Except for a few tourist spots along the coast, few outsiders or even Colombians travel there. Because it borders Venezuela and abuts the Caribbean Sea, it has maintained a small-scale local economy of trade and smuggling for centuries—everything from precious metals to cigarettes, to illegal drugs, to gasoline.
The population in the region is made up of indigenous Wayuu people—the largest indigenous group in Colombia—and small Afro-Colombian and mestizo communities. The Wayuu trace their presence in the peninsula to before the Spanish conquest. The Afro-Colombian communities’ oral histories recount that they descend from enslaved Africans who rebelled and freed themselves on a ship bound for the Caribbean. They took over the ship and landed on the Guajira, making their way inland, and founded the original four communities there.
Public services are scarce to nonexistent. In the northern desert region, the mostly Wayuu inhabitants are semi-nomadic herders. Organized in matrilineal clans, they travel with their herds to where there is water. Many of the women are monolingual in the Wayuu language, though many men also speak Spanish. In the southern part of the peninsula, both Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities found fertile farmlands and depended on the Ranchería River that runs down the peninsula as a source of water.
Economic development came crashing into the Guajira in the early 1980s in the form of what soon became the world’s largest open-pit coal mine. The U.S.-based Exxon Corporation entered into a joint venture with the Colombian government to explore and exploit the mine, which was later privatized and sold to a consortium of some of the world’s largest mining multinationals: BHP Billiton, Glencore, and Anglo-American.
The mine undeniably brought economic development to the region. But it was exactly the kind of distorted development that destroys traditional farming communities and sets the stage for migration.
The mine gobbled up formerly productive lands and turned them into a giant hole in the ground, thirty-five miles long and five miles wide. It churned up a dust that blankets and smothers the region for miles around the mine itself. It fouled the Ranchería River, leaving the small communities with no water source.
“We have no source of work to support our families,” wrote members of the indigenous community of Tamaquito in the summer of 2006. “We don’t even have any income with which to buy our women the materials they need for their weavings … We are getting sick because of the contamination of the Cerrejón mine, and we have no land left to cultivate. We also cannot raise animals because they die. When we do plant something, we cannot harvest it because the coal dust kills it.”
After being subject to the same kinds of conditions for years, the Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco was razed in the summer of 2001 as the mine continued its inexorable expansion. “I want to say a little about how we lived in Tabaco,” a former resident told our visiting delegation five years later. “Life was rich, we shared, no one suffered because we shared what we had. There was a river near the town. We had land. We walked freely all over the territory. The last nine years we have had no land to work, we are displaced, we have no lodging. I had a farm, I had animals, but they ran me off, so I lost everything … I raised my twelve children there. When we lost my land I wasn’t able to continue educating my children. I still own a small piece of land but it is in the middle of the company’s land and we can’t even get to it.”
For the past five hundred years the global trend, accelerating in the past fifty years or so, has been one of rural– urban migration. Peasant farmers have historically been tenaciously attached to their land. The voices of the people of Tamaquito and Tabaco echo the voices of millions of people displaced from their small farms over the centuries. Enormous amounts of violence and coercion, and human suffering, were necessary to separate Africans from their lands and bring them to the Americas as forced laborers, to separate indigenous communities in the Americas from their lands to make the lands available for plantations and mines.
Once the millennial connection that ties peasants to their lands is broken, it is almost impossible to restore. Once their children leave the land to go to the cities, almost nothing could convince them to return to a life of farming.
It’s a painful, heartbreaking, and almost irreversible process. It’s already happened in much of the world: 48 percent of the world’s population lived in urban areas in 2003, and the proportion is expected to exceed 50 percent in 2007, for the first time in human history.1
Visiting the Guajira gave me an unmatchable firsthand view of the process, just at the moment of dispossession. The small farming communities in the area around the mine were barely hanging on. Their farmlands had been taken over by the mine, their water source contaminated, the air was thick with dust, their animals were dying and their children were coughing constantly. But the people were adamant. “I’m a farmer. That’s all I know how to do. We want land.” This was their unending refrain.
“Why don’t they just leave?” asked a U.S. embassy representative when we met with him after our visit to the Guajira and described the unbearable situation of the villagers there. Why, indeed? Where would they go? To join the two to three million other displaced people in Colombia in the shantytowns surrounding the major urban areas? To forage in the garbage dumps? To the United States?
What seemed so dramatic was catching these communities in a historical moment in which they still were utterly committed to maintaining their communal, agricultural lives: lives that were being undermined and destroyed by modernization.
If one goal of a humane migration policy is to reduce human suffering, then the needs and desires of peasant communities around the world that are struggling to maintain their traditional lifestyles and cultures should be central. Migration may not be clearly good or bad in and of itself, but the destruction of communities and cultures around the world is indisputably harmful to the people who live in them.