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The Duque government, ignoring the decision of the Constitutional Court, again insists on imposing the return of aerial spraying with glyphosate, this time in four municipalities of Catatumbo.
After Ruling T-413 of 2021 left without effect the approval of the environmental management plan granted by the National Environmental Licensing Authority -ANLA- and the resolution of the Ministry of the Interior that said that prior consultation was not required for this permit, in record time the ANLA is processing the environmental permit requested by the National Police to resume spraying in the municipalities of Hacarí, San Calixto, Sardinata, and Zulia in Norte de Santander. So far in March, in less than 15 working days the Police filed the request, the ANLA initiated the process and held a meeting in Cúcuta with local authorities, the Procuraduría requested a public environmental hearing and this has already been ordered by the environmental authority. More than an express procedure, it seems that they want to grant an automatic approval of this permit.
On the other hand, despite the fact that the Catatumbo region is part of the traditional territory of the Barí indigenous people, the Directorate of Prior Consultation of the Ministry of the Interior certified through resolution 158 of March 7, 2022 that there was no need for prior consultation since in the municipalities where the activity will be executed, “the existence of ethnic collective subjects” was not identified. According to this entity, this verification was made according to the coordinates delivered by the Police on March 2, 2017.
These actions would mean a fraud to the judicial resolution and a contempt to the sentence of the Court to the extent that the Court ordered the ANLA that it can only adopt a decision on the modification of the Environmental Management Plan (EMP) until it has completed the process of prior consultation with the ethnic communities that are present in each of the six (6) operation nuclei defined for the modification of the EMP of the Crop Eradication Program, through aerial spraying with the herbicide Glyphosate -PECIG- covering a total of 104 municipalities in 14 departments has been completed.
In this new process that is being carried out at full speed, the conditions of enhanced participation ordered by the Court in judgments T-413 of 2021 and T-236 of 2017 continue to be disregarded. Once again we insist in pointing out that The environmental public hearing is a predominantly informative mechanism that the ANLA itself has qualified as a “socialization mechanism” that according to the normative regulation, “is not an instance of debate or discussion”, and whose purpose is limited to informing about the details of the project. Therefore, the mere holding of this hearing, without modifying its scope or generating additional spaces for participation, does not meet and satisfy the requirements of promoting a genuine, deliberative, two-way dialogue that the entity must actively generate and coordinate in compliance with the orders of the Constitutional Court.
Similarly, it insists on disregarding Auto 387 of 2019 in which the Constitutional Court stated that the decision on the return of spraying should be framed within the public policy of point 4 of the Peace Accords. This means that the Government has the obligation to respect the prioritization of voluntary substitution over forced eradication methods, since it was agreed that only in case voluntary substitution fails, and after the additional failure of manual eradication, aerial spraying with glyphosate may be used.
Likewise, the agreement’s agreement to grant special treatment to the weakest links in the drug trafficking chain, which are the people who grow and consume illicit drugs, and to intensify efforts to dismantle the structures and organizations dedicated to production, commercialization, the value chain and money laundering, has been disregarded. Hundreds of grower families have denounced the failure to comply with the substitution agreements and the increase in violent and disproportionate attacks by the security forces during eradication operations, while the government has focused little or no effort on dismantling the strong links.
Furthermore, with its arbitrariness, the government ignores the recommendation of seven United Nations special rapporteurs to reject the intention to reactivate the spraying because of the risks to human rights and the environment.
Recently, the ANLA, together with the Police and the National Legal Defense Agency, filed nullities against Ruling T-413 of 2021. In one of the sections of its brief, the ANLA argues that the nullity recourse can be invoked as an exception to comply with the judgment, which is an absurd and illegal interpretation. At the same time, this entity points out that the Court’s order to guarantee spaces for deliberative participation within the environmental process is against the law. In arguing for these nullities, the ANLA and the Police use identical paragraphs, which shows a lack of impartiality and independence on the part of the environmental authority.
In the case of environmental impacts and risks, what has been demonstrated is that this impartiality has not been ensured either, since during the last few years, the environmental authority has been acting improperly in complicity with the police and other high government agencies to force and accelerate the return of spraying with this agro-toxin, even in contravention of the fundamental rights of peasant and ethnic communities, judicial decisions and the terms of the peace agreement. Despite the fact that disciplinary complaints have been filed with the Attorney General’s Office for these conducts, there has been no response on the progress of investigations.
For all of the above, we insist on the request that the Constitutional Court resume direct monitoring of compliance with the orders established in Judgment T-236 of 2017, as we requested in December 2021. We consider that in attention to the repeated asymmetrical pressures, abuses of power and arbitrary actions of the National Government to circumvent the conditions of the Court, its intervention is indispensable in order to safeguard the supremacy and integrity of the constitutional order and ensure the effective protection of the fundamental rights threatened.
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ORDER No. 01473 (March 15, 2022) “Whereby an administrative procedure for the modification of an Environmental Management Plan is initiated and other decisions are adopted”.
ORDER No. 01821 (March 25, 2022) “ORDERING THE HOLDING OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL PUBLIC HEARING AND MAKING OTHER DECISIONS”.
