Voicing Rivers Atrato for other possible futures

The Atrato River, recognised as a subject of rights through the Colombian court’s Judgment T-622 of 2016, crosses a large part of the biogeography of the Department of Chocó in Colombia. More than three hundred streams, fifteen rivers, and several swamps are part of its basin, assembling this body of water as the backbone of the beings that live and interweave along its course. 

For its inhabitants – mostly Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities – the rivers and their waters are the basis for fishing, food, transportation, economy, and the essence of diverse cultural practices. In this region, rivers are life. They are the compass, the geographical, temporal, and symbolic reference points where everything is woven together. The Atrato is the subject and articulating force of an extensive network of more-than-human relationships in this territory.

However, this watershed faces a profound socio-environmental crisis due to different forms of long-standing and constant violence sedimenting in its streams: criminal gold mining since colonial times, mercury and toxic substances in its basin, deforestation, structural racism, negligence of the Colombian state, forced displacement, disputes over territorial control and drug trafficking routes by armed groups (Rogelis et al. 2022). In this way, the imaginary of El Dorado continues. These violences and their constant repercussions accumulate, sediment, and deepen over time, molding the riverbasin toward the toxic and ruinous. All of them pose threats in their ways and directly impact the bodies of all beings that inhabit and relate to the Atrato (Gallon Droste 2023).

Through organisational processes of defense of the territories and life in the Atrato and its basin, the Black and Indigenous Communities have spent years collectively organising to resist and find ways to re-exist under these conditions, denouncing and mobilising national and international alliances, in which early warnings, written communications, peaceful local collective actions, and lawsuits stand out. From the Black Communities' organisational processes, they have achieved landmark recognitions and rights, such as Law 70 of 1993, which recognises Black Communities and Community Councils as the territorial authorities of their collective territories, as well as the T-622 Ruling that recognizes the Atrato as a subject of rights. In this way, they have inserted their ways of life as continuities with the watershed in the legal sphere, revealing how laws, as Lemaitre Ripoll (2009) argues, are resistance tools as alternatives to the violence that persists in the region ­–as spells–. In this context, laws have been seeds of potentialities to navigate new streams and other possible futures.

To be more specific in how Ruling T-622 emerged: In 2014, the Atrato Community Councils joined together and sued 26 state entities through a tutela action for violating the fundamental rights of Black and Indigenous Communities. They demanded the protection of the river, given their interdependent relationship with its waters. In response, the Constitutional Court recognised the basin as a subject of rights in 2016 with Ruling T-622, thus recognising the continuity between the waters and its inhabitants. 

The Rights of Nature

Our relationship with nature is severely disrupted. To sustainably protect people and the environment, we need new approaches – such as granting rights to nature. 

This article is part of the Rights of Nature dossier, which explores how this approach can be practically implemented and what opportunities it offers. ▶ Explore the Rights of Nature dossier.

The Ruling has an eco-centric approach, holding that "the earth does not belong to man but, on the contrary, it is the man who belongs to the earth" (Corte Constitucional de Colombia 2016: 117, author's translation). The Ruling orders the "protection, restoration, maintenance and conservation" (Corte Constitucional de Colombia 2016: 140, author's translation) of the Atrato watershed with 13 orders to be implemented through the creation of "action plans" led by the Commission of Guardians – spokespersons for the river on behalf of the communities and the state. The voice of the Colombian state is the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development. On the part of the communities, due to the diversity and complexity of the basin and the collective processes of Black, Indigenous, and Mestizo communities, they argued that "[...] a guardian would not have known the entire river. The river that begins in Carmen del Atrato is not the same river that flows into the Gulf of Urabá. The thread of the river weaves many wefts, and it changes, just as the people who inhabit its basin change" (Cagueñas, Galindo, and Rassmussen 2020: 177, author's translation). There are agricultural, mining, and sacred rivers. Approaching the issue of representation from a relational ontology perspective, it concerns the acknowledgment of the diverse and multiple existences of and with the Atrato River.

Thus, the ‘Collegiate Body of Guardians of the Atrato’ (CCGA) was formed with seven organisations of Black, Indigenous, and Mestizo communities, represented by, for the most part, one man and one woman from each organisation. The CCGA is a heterogeneous, intergenerational group, where "[I]ndigenous, mestizo farmers and Black peoples try to speak the same language that, without ignoring the different ways of relating to the river, aims at the reinvention of life on the shore” (Cagueñas, Galindo, and Rassmussen 2020: 192, author's translation). In this sense, the CCGA gathers to articulate the voice of the common Atrato "because, in defense of the river, we are one voice, we know that we are different and that we have different conceptions, but the defense of the Atrato River is shared, because what happens to the river affects us all" (Alexander Rodríguez, Guardian of the Atrato for COCOMACIA, 14.05.2021, Quibdó, author's translation).

As a result of this Ruling, the Atrato River is being heard. During a conversation at the river shore in Quibdó in March 2020, Alexander described the process around the Ruling like this: "The Court ruled in our favor, they listened to us, and this includes us in the process so that our territory does not continue to be managed from the center of the country" (Alexander Rodríguez, Guardian of the Atrato for COCOMACIA, 14.05.2021, Quibdó, author's translation).

During my Ph.D. research, I have been listening and navigating (see https://entre-rios.net/atrato/) how the Collegiate Body of Guardians of the Atrato (CCGA) assumes to represent and thus articulates and attunes to be the voice of the Atrato River for civil society while developing the so-called "action plans" that are co-created with various state institutions and the Atrato communities of the various tributaries and rivers, with the ultimate objective of restoring all rights to the river and its inhabitants by the year 2040. As such, the CCGA is looking for other possible collective futures from and with the Atrato, based on the postulates of "vivir sabroso" (dignified and autonomous life; see Quiceno 2016) and ethno-development. During this process, the plurality of voices and communities that converge in the Atrato articulate to translate, re-imagine, and represent the river and the riverine life in the legal sphere and vice versa. What does it mean, however, to be the Atrato's voice and speak out for it?

The CCGA assumes the legal representation of the river and is its spokesperson, not only in the bureaucratic and legal sphere in dialogue with the state but, as expressed by its guardians, through the generation of voicing spaces and establishing local dialogue and pedagogy. This serves to make Ruling T-622 known locally and internationally and raise awareness about the situation in Chocó. They aim to make visible what is affecting the river and the people who live with the river, given that they are co-constituted in living with its waters. Speaking the language of the river has to do with the ability to pass it through the body, as stated by the Guardian of the Atrato and representative of the Mesa Indígena, Nixón Chamorro: "the expression of the river is something that one lives." (Cagueñas, Galindo, and Rassmussen 2020: 184). It is an integral part of experience and memory. The realities of social groups and relational worlds are manifested through concrete practices, narratives, and stories with and about the river. Spokesmanship from the side of the CCGA is exercised through the embodied inhabiting of specific memoryscapes that have been shaped through the relationship with the river.

Members of the CCGA argue that they are ombligados (navels) to the territory because at birth, as stated by the Guardian Luz Enith Mosquera (2021) in diverse voicing spaces, their relatives sow the navels of their children on the riverbanks, which keeps them in a direct connection with the territory and with ancestry. That is why the central motif of the CCGA is ‘Atrato es, Atrato soy, Atrato Somos y debemos seguir siendo’ (Atrato is, Atrato I Am, Atrato We Are and We Must Continue Being). This postulate is based on the Ubuntu philosophy ‘Soy porque Somos’ (I Am Because We Are) (Mosquera, Rojas, Gómez, Escobar 2018), which alludes to the relationship of being with the Atrato, being in extension and continuity with the Atrato, since the river inhabits their bodies and manifests itself through them and their practices and repertoires.

In this line, I propose to navigate the representation process of the CCGA through the concept of ’voicing rivers’. Voicing offers the constant process of relationality. As a verb, it emphasises that one is in relation to and ‘with’ the river. As spokespeople of the Atrato, the members of the CCGA are expanding the practice of humans representing one another. Therefore, to listen to these ‘voicing rivers’ is to follow the concept outlined in Marisol De la Cadena's "Invitation to Live Together: Making the 'Complex We'" (2019). It is a multi-species "we" where one is "with" through humans and more-than-human relationships, in an infinite composition, in a "more than human" intra-connection, with bios and geos (De la Cadena 2019). As "complex we", the CCGA claims the collective we recognise as interdependent, interethnic, and an extension of the basin from polyphony. The invitation to inhabit the "complex we" is comprehended as an invitation to live together, as is being exercised by the CCGA through their ancestral connections to the river and their practices in relation to it.

As Eckersley (2011) argues, the challenge has always been how to represent what has been defined as ‘nature’ in a way that does not reduce it to a mere object, instrument, or backdrop on which human drama unfolds. Therefore, the representation of what is considered as ‘nature’ in law and rights of nature, which still can, in some cases, reproduce the culture-nature divide, implies an ethical and ontological claim, shift, and institutional innovations (Eckersley 2011, 328). In this challenge, the invitation is to recognise the continuities, commonalities, and interdependencies between humanity and what has been defined as ‘nature’ (Plumwood 2009). In this sense, the CCGA is expanding what is understood by the representation of nature through its practices of ‘voicing rivers’, while simultaneously redefining what or who a river is. In approaching ‘voicing rivers’, it is essential to question who and how one listens to them. How are you listening to rivers and their multiple manifestations? It can be acknowledged that the Atrato has roared, again and again, manifesting itself across diverse voices, thus exceeding and expanding law and achieving onto-epistemic openings regarding definitions of what or who rivers are.

All information as of 2024. Up-to-date developments on Rights of Nature cases can be found on the open-access platform EcoJurisprudence Monitor.

Literatur & Links:

• Guardians of the Atrato [ES].
• Elizabeth Gallon Droste: "Embarcarse a navegar con el Atrato: Diario de campo multimodal". Curated by Lisa Blackmore for entre – ríos (2022). 
• Blaser, Mario & Marisol De La Cadena. 2017. "The Uncommons: An Introduction". Anthropologica (59): 185-193 [EN].
• Cagueñas, Diego, María Galindo & Sabina Rasmussen. 2020. “El Atrato y sus guardianes: imaginación ecopolítica para hilar nuevos derechos”. Revista Colombiana de Antropología 56(2): 169-196 [ES].
• Corte Constitucional de Colombia. 2016. Sentencia T-622 de 2016. Bogotá [ES].
• Gallon Droste, Elizabeth. 2023. «Voicing ~ Listening to Rivers of Gold». En Wasser Botschaften, editado por Museum am Rothenbaum – Kulturen und Künste der Welt – MARKK –, 248-265 [EN].
• De la Cadena, Marisol. 2019. "An Invitation to Live Together: Making the 'Complex We". Environmental Humanities 11(2): 477-484 [EN].
• Eckersley, Robyn. 2011. "Representing Nature". In: Sonia Alonso, John Keane and Wolfgang Merkel (eds.), The Future of Representative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 236–257 [EN].
• Lemaitre Ripoll, Julieta. 2009. El derecho como conjuro: fetichismo legal, violencia y movimientos sociales. Bogotá: Siglo del Hombre Editores y Universidad de los Andes [ES].
• Mosquera, Marilyn Machado, Charo Mina Rojas, Patricia Botero Gómez & Arturo Escobar 2018. Ubuntu: Una Invitación Para Comprender La Acción Política, Cultural y Ecológica de Las Resistencias Afroandina y Afropacífica. CLACSO [ES].
• Plumwood, Val. 2009. "Nature in the Active Voice". Australian Humanities Review 46: 113–12 [EN].
• Quiceno, Natalia. 2016. Vivir sabroso: luchas y movimientos afroatrateños, en Bojayá, Chochó, Colombia. Bogotá: Editorial Universidad del Rosario [ES].
• Rogelis, Rodrigo, et al. 2022. El Atrato es la vida. Conflicto armado y economías extractivas en el río Atrato. Bogotá: Foro Interétnico Solidaridad Chocó y Centro Sociojurídico para la Defensa Territorial SIEMBRA [ES].