Heating Up the Oil Fight

A semi-nomadic Colombian tribe that has threatened to commit mass suicide if Occidental Petroleum drills for oil on its ancestral lands has issued a statement rejecting all oil exploration in the area.

The statement from the U’wa does not specifically address the plans of Los Angeles-based Oxy, but it is the first response from the tribe since the Colombian government proposed in May that Oxy exchange drilling rights in the disputed territory for a smaller parcel with more favorable profit-sharing arrangements.

The U’wa tribe contends that even the smaller parcel of land is within the tribe’s broad definition of its historic holdings, a boundary that Oxy and the Colombian government do not recognize.

For the 5,000-member U’wa, the standoff represents a matter of religious conviction. For Oxy, this is a public relations headache that won’t go away.

Meanwhile, recent campesino protests against oil exploration and leftist guerrilla bombings of a key oil pipeline operated by Oxy have sharply reduced production.

The U’wa spent more than two months in the mountains of Colombia fasting and meditating before releasing the statement calling for an end to oil exploration, said Steve Kretzmann, oil campaign director for Berkeley-based Project Underground, an environmentalist and human rights group that has been promoting the U’wa cause.

“They are clearly restating their philosophical and spiritual opposition to all oil development,” Kretzmann said. “It logically follows that they are opposed to further development by Occidental,” but they have never been consulted about the proposal to relocate Oxy’s operations, he said.

An Occidental spokesman declined to comment on the situation.

The U’wa religion holds that oil is “the blood of Mother Earth,” according to a message to Oxy shareholders published in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in April.

The latest U’wa statement, translated from the native U’wa language by Project Underground, said, in part: “We are seeking an explanation for this ‘progress’ that goes against life. We are demanding that this kind of progress stop, that oil exploitation in the heart of the Earth is halted, that the deliberate bleeding of the Earth stop.”

Unocal in Myanmar to Stay

Despite demands by human rights activists that it pull out of Myanmar, Unocal Corp. is staying put, Chairman and Chief Executive Roger Beach said Thursday in a speech to Houston’s Asia Society.

Beach said Unocal would even be happy to do business in Iran, if it weren’t prohibited from doing so by U.S. sanctions. Such sanctions damage the U.S. economy and are politically ineffectual, he said.

“Engagement is the answer, not isolation. I’m very proud that we’re in Myanmar. We’ve done a lot of good work there and they’ve learned a lot from us,” Beach said, according to a Reuters report.

Unocal is the last major U.S. oil company doing business in Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, where the military regime has recently clamped down on pro-democracy activists and prevented free elections. Atlantic Richfield Co. announced last week that it is withdrawing from the troubled country after investing $50 million.

Unocal is a partner in a multinational consortium developing a $1.2-billion pipeline. It is due to begin operation in December.

Beach said U.S. and other foreign companies could exert a positive influence on economic, social and political conditions through their investments in Asian countries.

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Nancy Rivera Brooks can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected] or by fax at (213) 237-7837.