By Laura Betancur Alarcón (Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems-IRI THESys at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) and Ana María Arbeláez-Trujillo1 (Water Resources Management Group at Wageningen University and Research).
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On her way to the La Miel River banks, Isaura walks across the mountain. Lying down as tree steam, she sees the 6-kilometer pipe that transports the river waters to the powerhouse of the hydroelectric plant. She can’t swim in the river anymore: a large tube carries a large part of its water, diminishing its flow. Also on foot but in the riverbanks of a dry forest valley, Pedro looks for a possible port to embark on the “piece of river” they have left. It is a 14-kilometer stretch of the Magdalena River left between two large dams. While he searches, the river expands and retracts with the rhythms of the energy power plants. Isaura and Pedro seek the rivers’ current in territories fragmented by infrastructure. Following their footsteps, we travel along the banks and valleys of two rivers in the Colombian Andes. Ana walks with Isaura through the upper part of the La Miel River in the town of Bolivia, department of Caldas. The journey takes place around the influence area of the run-of-the-river hydroelectric project ‘El Edén’ -built in 2013- which partially diverted the river’s waters. Laura walks with Pedro along the upper Magdalena River, where the Betania Dam (1987) and the El Quimbo Dam (2015) were built in the department of Huila. Large physical transformations caused by hydropower on rivers have been the focus of academic inquiries. But what about those daily experiences in the territories inhabited by ribereños and campesinos? How do they feel about those transformations?
Large physical transformations caused by hydropower on rivers have been the focus of academic inquiries. But what about those daily experiences in the territories inhabited by ribereños and campesinos? How do they feel about those transformations?
We engage with such queries considering that water infrastructures generate territorial changes that, in turn, reshape human-water relations and senses of belonging and attachment. Different forms of water, mediated by pipes, forests, sediments, walls, and engines, awaken a web of emotions that spans fear, joy, and oblivion. The stories of Isaura and Pedro show that as time goes by, water infrastructures change not only the landscape but also people’s meanings, uses, and memories (Hommes, 2022). In that sense, we approach water-energy infrastructures as a “process over time” that evolves unevenly through diverse temporal scales (Anand, Gupta, and Appel, 2018), which at the same time are connected to the socio-political context. In the following lines, we attempt to understand how water infrastructures integrate and disintegrate these amphibious spaces, where land and water are in a continuous spatiotemporal nexus entangled in a complex web of emotions.
Let’s First Walk with Isaura Across the Hilly Road, Where We Encounter the Tubed River2
I take the 8 a.m. jeep that brings me from the center of Bolivia, a small town in the east of Caldas2, to the starting point of the road that leads to Isaura’s house. This morning, as in many others in this region, the fog is abundant and blurs the intense green of the mountains surrounding us. Alquiber, the president of the environmental peasant movement MACO, is waiting for me to go together to visit Isaura. “PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSING PROHIBITED,” says the sign that welcomes us to the path’s starting point. Alquiber explains that the land surrounding Isaura’s farm belongs to the hydroelectricity company El Edén. “Here, there used to be some of the most productive coffee plantations of the region,” he explains to me. Nowadays, land use has changed: the company bought most of the farms in the area and transformed them into forests to comply with the compensation plan and the reforestation measures of the environmental license granted to the hydroelectricity project.
The air feels fresher once we start crossing the forest. The song of the birds, the mist, and the sound of the leaves softly swaying in the wind are our companions as we go down the hill. We walk for about 20 minutes, and then, right in front of us, standing like a giant guadua3 tree that has fallen and is blocking the road, we encounter the hydroelectric tube. Alquiber takes a measuring tape. “I’ve always wanted to know how big this tube is,” he tells me. El Edén is a “run-of-the-river” hydroelectric plant. As such, it does not have a large reservoir. Instead, water is diverted from the river through a 5.8 km tunnel. Then, this pipeline, 396 cm in diameter, as per Alquiber’s calculations, transports the water to the powerhouse. We put our ears close to the tube and hear the tubed river flowing. The water is about to reach the turbines to produce energy. After fulfilling this task, it will be released to meet the free-flowing portion of the river again.
We continue our walk for about ten more minutes until we reach Isaura’s house. She is waiting for us with a warm smile and aguapanela, a drink made from panel which is a product from raw sugar cane juice. I will spend the following hours listening to how the hydroelectric project changed her life.
In 2013, when construction of the project began, the company announced several benefits, including employment, progress, and development for the local community and more forest for the animals. That last part generated some noise in Isaura’s head. “This area was all coffee plantations, and they said they would plant trees, biological corridors for the animals (…) I thought, but if they transform this into a forest, all these beautiful coffee plantations and pastures will disappear, leaving us in the jungle. I did not see the benefits”, she recalls. The hydroelectric company bought most of the land surrounding the pipe that transports the water to produce energy to the powerhouse. As a result, Isaura and her family are surrounded by a forest of guadua trees. According to the project’s environmental license, the company planted 4104 of these trees. They act as a water reservoir by collecting and storing large amounts of water when it rains, creating a cooling effect in the surrounding area. Living in the middle of the forest has not been easy for this peasant family: humidity affects the productivity of the coffee, the squirrels eat the cocoa, and the snakes stalk the chickens, which are now fewer in number and are enclosed in cages as a protective measure. “Some people tell me, why are you complaining if that looks so pretty? And yes, I’m not saying that it doesn’t look pretty, and nature has to be taken care of, but I disagree with the harm they are causing us and our farm” explains Isaura.
It is a warm May afternoon, I walk with Isaura from her house to the La Miel River. As we walk, she tells me that she used to go down that road with her family on weekends to bathe in the river when she was a little girl.
“We used to have so much fun here. We came to the river with all my aunts, cousins, and uncles and brought ‘la gata’ for lunch.”
– “La gata”? I am puzzled
Isaura laughs, takes with her hands the leaf of a plant nearby, and folds it. As she does it, she explains that the gata is a traditional dish made with chicken stew, potatoes, rice, yucca, and arepa wrapped in banana leaves in the shape of a tamal. It was their meal for having lunch on the river.
She also tells me that people no longer go to the river as much because after the construction of the hydroelectric plant, La Miel River has very little water. Also, the summer weather and the rainfall patterns have changed. “How good it was when we were all coming down here, how beautiful everything was, there was more peace, life was more cheerful. But now look at that little bit of water that the river brings”, she says.
After spending some time in the river, we go up the hill, back to her house. We try to keep the conversation going, with our breathing cut off by the effort. Isaura uses the white poncho hanging from her neck to wipe the sweat dripping down her forehead, and I do my best to keep up with her. When we are about halfway up, Isaura stops for a moment to rest. “This is one of the points where I stop to take my bogaderita4. Before, I used to look down from here to see those pastures and those beautiful cattle. They always say the past is better than the present, and I think it is true,” she tells me.
Let’s Get Our Feet Wet Walking Along the Riverbanks with Pedro
Pedro5 indicates the way. We must cross the building with the broken roofs and the dirty pool of Parque Bosque, the abandoned recreational center. Behind it, Ernesto and Vallenato – two elder fishers- live together. Their house is on a small hillock, less than two meters above the ground. From this river shore, we see a narrow water stream flowing and carrying water hyacinth about 10 meters away. “That’s when the river is shrinking,” Ernesto tells me. The water stream he points out is one of the branches of the Magdalena River. The braided river has several strands of water coming from the gates of El Quimbo Dam. At this point, those waters will expand again, forming the following reservoir of the Betania Dam. Both hydropower infrastructures are located in Huila, in southern Colombia.
To decipher the rhythms of the energy, whether they are generating electricity or not, Ernesto reads the speed of vegetation floating in those waters. When water hyacinths are coming down, he deduces that the gates are opening and turbines -might- start spinning. The land we are standing on, watching the hyacinths run, used to be the reservoir, the artificial lake filled in to store water for energy generation. Pedro and I arrived at their house because this site has recently become the last possible port. From Ernesto’s house, it is still feasible to use the canoe. On the contrary, in Puerto Momico, the regular shore from where fishers depart, the river level is so low that navigation is impossible.
In 2014, Puerto Momico, the artisanal fisher’s embarkment site got ‘bottled up’, as some fishermen call it, between dams. Twenty-eight years after the operation of the Betania Dam began, the El Quimbo Dam went into generation in 2015. Around 14 kilometers separate the new dam’s gates from the old reservoir’s starting point. I spent several afternoons with Pedro going around in the area of Puerto Momico, walking along the shores of the “pond”, the “water mirror,” or the “lake”. Those are all forms in which ribereños (riverine dwellers) name the reservoir, a place for living in and with water that arouses different emotions among them. For some, the “lake” gave them the best years of their lives as fishers. Stories of pride, adventure, and abundance are present when they recount their time working there. The changes, sedimentation and the El Quimbo Dam, have resignified the river as a place of more physical and economic efforts, struggle, and contestation.
In the following weeks, the inhabitants of the municipality of Hobo – where Puerto Momico is located- will tell me that where I see ruins today in the rivershores, they once enjoyed, danced, and cooked on the banks of the Magdalena River. When I ask them how long ago that area ceased to be a meeting point for the town, they will say maybe 15 years, maybe 20, maybe less. With an illusory fixation on facts, I will insist on finding a time when the river-reservoir changed its qualities. Until I’ll meet Ricardo.
The reservoir and Parque Bosque “was a place of the great union. Since we no longer had a river, we used to go to the reservoir…But the waters began to decline… the park became absolutely isolated by the land (sediments)”. That was the first thing Ricardo, a public officer of the municipality, told me. Then, he recalled a friend who recently posted a photo on Facebook: a yellowish picture of her, as a teenager, swimming in Parque Bosque. He showed it to me. Then, he continued: “We stopped going there when they killed Flor, the woman who used to manage Parque Bosque.” We got silent. In Hobo, not everyone would talk openly about those painful memories. Only Pedro told me about her during our walks. I could not avoid asking Ricardo about the date:
-“When did that happen?“, I asked.
-“I don’t know, I don’t remember, we would have to go to the cemetery,” Ricardo answered.
We actually went. We took his motorcycle, rode to the cemetery, and searched for Flor’s grave. The date: January 9, 2000. Then, I realized it was a month after the guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), bombed Hobo’s main square. I told him about that episode. He looked shocked and said: “I didn’t connect both events, we don’t want to remember those years, anyways we can’t longer swim in there.”
The temporal transformations of sediments, infrastructures, and fears redefine the land-water nexus in the experience of Pedro and other inhabitants in Hobo. Thinking through “spatiotemporal rhythms” (Krause, 2022) of the land-water nexus can be a generative element in analyzing socio-ecological transformations in regions with lasting water disputes. In the areas flooded by the human-made reservoir, over the years, sediments gave way to more fixed soil formations that caused a decline in recreational and productive water uses. In turn, feelings and senses of belonging with aquatic environments were also transformed from celebrating the river as a place for the collectivity to now perceiving it through the lenses of nostalgia and oblivion. The change of what physically constitutes the river, later the reservoir, and in the present, the emergent land areas show a mutable experience with the riverine environment where the land-water divide is more a matter of time than space. Land-water nexus under low-speed processes such as sedimentation or fast-space change like daily energy dispatches enact rhythms of space production that constantly redefine the river as an amphibious space. In the everyday of local fishers, the expanded and contracted form of land-water obeys both the inner functioning of the energy market system and large territorial land-use transformations.
In the case I follow in the Alto Magdalena region, such processes are coupled with other social experiences of time, such as the cycles of violence, mourning, and forgetting in regions affected by armed confrontation. In the narrative excerpt, the death of Flor – one of many that occurred during the escalation of the armed conflict in the 2000s in southern Colombia- caused an effect of abandonment while in parallel slowly sedimentation reformed an area of collective gathering. Here, the forms of water have an agential capacity as relevant as the very pains of violence in shaping the riverine environments where Pedro walks by.
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By accompanying Isaura and Pedro on one of their everyday journeys, we aimed to reflect on how living with infrastructured rivers does not occur without conflict. Instead, it is a deeply contested experience (Boelens et al., 2022). Memories of what these rivers used to be and perceptions of what they currently are reveal the complex emotional landscape underneath the physical transformations triggered by hydroelectricity projects.
Memories of what these rivers used to be and perceptions of what they currently are reveal the complex emotional landscape underneath the physical transformations triggered by hydroelectricity projects.
Instead of romanticizing these stories as “any time in the past was better”, while we walk with them, the material and temporal changes in their amphibious landscape unfold the affects of the everyday experience with energy infrastructures. Our aim was to shed light on those emotions that tend to be overshadowed when discussing the effects of hydropower dams in the academic and policy realms. How much more can tubes and reservoirs tell us when we look at them through the lenses of emotions? What has been the effect of ignoring so?
- Ana Maria’s PhD research is funded by the ERC European Research Council under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program [Riverhood, grant no. 101002921]. See www.movingrivers.org ↩︎
- This is a narrative excerpt of the current work of Ana María Arbeláez-Trujillo doctoral research as part of the Riverhood project at Wageningen University and Research. ↩︎
- A region in the Colombian Andes (Central Mountain Range or Cordillera Central). ↩︎
- Neotropical bamboo in the grass family (Guadua angustifolia ). ↩︎
- Bogadera or bogaderita is a refreshing beverage that is usually made with raw cane sugar (panela) and lemon. ↩︎
- Names changed to keep anonymity. ↩︎
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References
Anand, Nikhil, Akhil Gupta, and Hannah Appel. 2018. The Promise of Infrastructure. The Promise of Infrastructure. Duke University Press. https://www.academia.edu/37101526/The_Promise_of_Infrastructure.
Boelens, Rutgerd, Arturo Escobar, Karen Bakker, Lena Hommes, Erik Swyngedouw, Barbara Hogenboom, Edward H. Huijbens, et al. 2022. “Riverhood: Political Ecologies of Socionature Commoning and Translocal Struggles for Water Justice,” https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2022.2120810.
Hommes, Lena. 2022. “The Ageing of Infrastructure and Ideologies: Contestations Around Dam Removal in Spain.” Water Alternatives 15 (3): 592–613. https://www.water-alternatives.org/index.php/alldoc/articles/vol15/v15issue3/674-a15-3-3/file.
Krause, Franz. 2022. “Rhythms of Wet and Dry: Temporalising the Land-Water Nexus.” Geoforum 131 (May): 252–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/J.GEOFORUM.2017.12.001.Swyngedouw, Erik. 2010. “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930.” Http://Dx.Doi.Org/10.1111/0004-5608.00157 89 (3): 443–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00157.
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Ana María Arbeláez-Trujillo is a Doctoral Researcher at Wageningen University. She is part of the Riverhood project funded by the European Research Council under the EU’s Horizon 2020 program. Her research combines political ecology and critical legal studies to understand how hydroelectric projects and other water infrastructures impact riverine and peasant communities and how these communities mobilize plural sources of law to defend rivers and advance environmental justice. She is a lawyer from Universidad de Caldas and a Specialist in Environmental Law from Universidad del Rosario. She holds an MA in Public Policy from the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) and the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI). Contact: ana.arbelaeztrujillo@wur.nl
Laura Betancur Alarcón is a Doctoral Researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She is part of the Water Security for Whom? This project is funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. She researches human-river relations, rural occupations, and inequalities in the friction of multiple crises such as biodiversity decline, armed violence, and land-water grabbing. Laura holds a master’s degree in Environmental Studies and Sustainability Science from Lund University (Sweden). She has a background in social sciences and journalism from Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana (Colombia). Contact: laura.betancur.alarcon@hu-berlin.de
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