The War for Hidroituango

Since its independence, Colombia has had twelve national civil wars, the last of which endured for 52 years and killed 220,000 people (Pabon, Diez, and Jimenez 2018).   In the late 1990s, Colombia was the so-called "homicide capital of the world,” gaining an international reputation for crime, corruption, and bloodshed. However, 20 years later, the country seemed to be on the path towards safety and stability. Drug kingpins fell and armed extremists demobilized; the murder rate plummeted; the economy grew; tourism soared. 

Large national development projects served as the face of Colombia's recovery. A visual spectacle for the world, they concretized the idea that the nation was “catching up” with its more developed peers and putting its violent past behind it. Yet, activists and civilians were still being killed, many people still lived without access to necessities like clean water and electricity, and thousands continued to be driven from their land. In this project, I'll focus on how one of these large national development projects, the Ituango Electric Dam. Though it was imagined as an iconic symbol of Colombia's revival, the dam was responsible for an invisible and unacknowledged war on Colombia's rural populations.

Antioquia, one of the 32 administrative departments of Colombia, is located in the central Northwestern part of the country, with most of its territory in the Andes mountain range. The regional capital is Medellin, the second-largest city in Colombia. Initially deriving wealth from gold extraction and coffee production in the 19th century, Antioquia grew into an industrial center, as several manufacturing companies were established in Medellin. The region quickly gained a reputation for its hard-working and pragmatic residents, known as paisas (Roldan 2002).    

Today, Antioquia is Colombia's most economically powerful department. This is mostly due to its status as an industry powerhouse and its abundance of natural resources (Giraldo 2022).    In particular, Antioquia has high potential for generating hydroelectric energy because of its plentiful rivers (Quintero 2007). For the past 75 years, the region's capitalist elite have capitalized on this potential by building massive dams, which have been intended to provide energy for the entirety of Colombia. The most recent project was the Ituango hydroelectric dam, which is typically referred to by its name in Spanish, Hidroituango.

Hidroituango was originally the pet project of the ambitious engineer Jose Tejada Saenz. Labeled as an innovator, genius, creative spirit, and a great visionary, Saenz recognized the potential of the Cauca River’s flow and imagined it as Colombia’s great energy generator for centuries to come. The dream of the dam, like a fairytale come to life, spread among Antioquia's engineers, business people, and politicians who had always ‘dreamed big.” They gushed at the possibility of the creation of the mega-project—which the members of the high society believed would put Antioquia on the map (Roman 2020). From their perspective, Hidroituango was a practical solution to Colombia’s energy needs and an iconic symbol of the nation’s progress. Yet, from the beginning, the electric plant was technically unfeasible--and it would wreck disastrous consequences on both the ecosystem and the socio-economic fabric of the rural communities around it.

Despite a marketing campaign that painted the mega-dam as an initiative that would benefit rural populations, Hidroituango turned out to be yet another new disaster for the residents of a region that had already been damaged by decades of warfare. The mega-dam took away jobs based along the Cauca River, wrecking the local economy, forced thousands to leave their homes, and resulted in new waves of attacks by paramilitaries and guerilla armies. The history of Hidroituango reveals how development projects, often portrayed by the capitalist elite as an opportunity to end cycles of armed conflict, instead have served to perpetuate violence and exacerbate a crisis of displacement.

The "War for Hidroituango" is a narrative history project about the creation of the Ituango Hydroelectric Dam. It focuses on two stories: one about the corporate leaders who theorized Hidroituango and the transnational entities who cashed in on it, and the other about the people who lived through the dam's creation. The aim is to expose the dichotomy between the wealthy, urban elites who held the strings of power, but stayed mostly sheltered from the violence they caused, and the peasants living in the countryside who were forced to be part of other people's wars. By putting these two opposing realities side-by-side, I seek to demonstrate how development initiatives reinforce and even intensify existing inequalities in Colombian society.

I divided this project into three parts. Part 1 traces the origins of Hidroituango and the history of armed conflict in Colombia. Part 2 outlines the violence experienced by the rural population of northern Antioquia in the late 1990s and the beginning of the dam's construction. Part 3 documents the disastrous floods caused by the dam and the consequences on the surrounding towns.

In 1960, engineer Jose Tejada Saenz, the manager of the Colombian firm Integral, began making observational studies along the Cauca River, and considered the possibility of using the river’s falls for hydroelectric power (Sociedad Hidroeléctrica Ituango 2011).

In the following years, Saenz undertook a preliminary study, which would culminate in a 15-page paper documenting the Cauca river’s flow. He explained how the river could be an important asset for the energy development of Colombia, as the Cauca contained more than a quarter of the hydroelectric potential that had been assigned to all the rivers in the nation at the time. Furthermore, the study noted that more than 95% of the hydroelectric potential of the river was concentrated in the “Cauca Canyon,” a 360-kilometer-long stretch of the river that descended 800 meters (Sociedad Hidroeléctrica Ituango 2011).

Between 1971 to 1974, Saenz worked as a partner of EPM on a study called the “Desarrallo hidroelectrica del Cauca Medio,” or the Hydroelectric Development of the Middle Cauca. ⁶   The studies were carried out between La Virginia and Tarazá, and eight sites were identified for the development of hydroelectric plants, including Ituango, Cañafisto, Farallones and Xarrapa, upstream, and Apaví, downstream (Jimenez 2019). In 1979, Saenz requested the Integral Company to carry out a new feasibility study of a potential dam. In the next 4 years, an analysis of the Cauca River valley’s hydrology, geology, seismology, and geomorphology was conducted—though there were no studies conducted on the environmental, biological, or social impacts (Roman 2020).   Regardless, in 1982, it was determined that the hydroelectric project was viable, and a 247-meter-high dam was conceived, located 800 meters below the mouth of the Ituango River, with an installed capacity of 3560 megawatts (Jimenez 2019).   An economic crisis in the 1980s, however, put the dam temporarily on pause (Roman 2020).

To fully understand how violence in Antioquia intersected with the development of Hidroituango, we'll travel back to Colombia's mid-century civil war.

In the early 1950s, Colombia was in the midst of a conflict known as La Violencia, or the Violence, which was primarily a power struggle between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. It left an estimated 200,000 Colombians dead (approximately 2% of the total population at the time), and resulted in the displacement of over 2 million.   Most of the violence took place in the countryside, as Liberals and Conservatives fought for political control in small towns, and the majority of those killed or displaced were rural peasants (Roldan 2002).

In 1957, Liberals and Conservative parties decided to end La Violencia with a political peace pact called the National Front, or El Frente, an agreement that would alternate the presidency and divide political offices for 15 years. Though it was a formal democracy, there was very little room for independent political expression from Colombian citizens who were not a part of the elite. As the years went on, the government became plagued with bureaucracy and corruption, and the business sector held tight sway over politics through gremios, or lobbying groups, that controlled economic policy. The Colombian government was generally weak and held little power in rural regions, especially those that were recently settled. In areas like these, such as northern Antioquia, peasant settlers (known as campesinos) fought for control over cropland with wealthy landlords who had consolidated large properties and privatized public lands (LeGrand 2003).

Armed left-wing groups, known as guerilla organizations, formed in order to challenge the monopoly of the wealthy elite. The oldest, largest, and most important of the guerilla groups was the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the acronym FARC. While it originated as a peasant movement and a response to military repression, it grew into a powerful and violent group. Their operations included planting land mines, taking control of police stations, ambushing army patrols, blowing up bridges and water supplies, blocking roads, attacking infrastructure, kidnapping, and even taking hostage of politicians, such as the presidential candidate and governor of Antioquia, Ingrid Betancourt. In the 1960s and 1970s, guerilla groups capitalized on the growth of the international drug economy by taking over the commercial production of coca crops and using the profits to fund a military expansion. Though cocaine was not their only source of finance—they also taxed landowners, foreign companies, and businesses in regions under their control, controlled profits from gold and platinum mining, collected toll money on roads, and were involved in the stolen car business (LeGrand 2003).    At its peak, FARC had nearly 20,000 fighters and controlled up to a quarter of Colombian territory (Miroff 2021).

In 1981, the first paramilitary group formed called Muerte a Secuestradores, or “Death to Kidnappers,” a response to the kidnapping of Marta Nieves Ochoa, the sister of Jorge Ochoa, one of the founding members of the Medellin Cartel. Paramilitaries were right-wing, private armies aimed at killing guerillas. They were supported mainly by drug cartels, Colombian politicians, businessmen, and wealthy landowners, all of whom had been the target of guerilla violence and/or objected to the central government’s peace negotiations (LeGrand 2003).   Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, more than 250 paramilitary groups arose, many of which were coalitions of landlords and ranchers who sought to protect their property against guerillas who tried to tax them and peasants who contested their land claims. Paramilitaries typically attacked any civilians who they claimed were affiliated with guerillas or guerilla sympathizers; they threatened or assassinated human rights workers, journalists, teachers, union leaders, students, and activists (Weinand and Tremaria 2017).

The Department of Antioquia was particularly affected by deadly attacks from paramilitary groups. Data processed by the Colombian Center for Historical Memory found that Antioquia was more affected by paramilitary violence in Colombia than any other department; from 1980 to 2012, 598 massacres were documented in the department, of which 372 (about 62%) were attributed to paramilitaries (Weinand and Tremaria 2017).

While violence tormented rural townships, Medellin's urban economy was thriving. In fact, in 1950, the president of the National Association of Industrialists, an organization centered in Medellin, proclaimed that the Colombian economy "had never been better." As the economy grew, so did the population. In 1912, Medellin had 72,000 inhabitants. By 1938, the population had grown to 168,000, and then to 360,000 by 1952.   By 1972, 1.1 million lived in Medellin (Roldan 2003).   By the 1970s, many people living in the city were rural migrants, who had fled violence in the countryside or were forcibly displaced. Medellin's explosion of population resulted in an exponential increase in energy demand (Patino 2021).

On August 6, 1955, the Administrative Council of Medellin merged four independent entities, energy, water, sewage, and telephone services, to create one establishment, EPM, or Empresas Publicas de Medellin. From the beginning, EPM was headed by Antioquia's capitalist elite who controlled regional economic institutions. Between 1957 and 1961, EPM had already started to develop mid-size hydroelectric projects, like Guadalupe and Troneras. However, the company anticipated the city’s population growth and knew that these projects alone would not fulfill the city’s energy demand within a few years ("History," EPM, accessed July 2023).

As a result, EPM set the Guatape Dam in motion, financed by the World Bank's credit. The project was presented as Colombia's most significant development initiative that would provide energy to the entire country (Patino 2021). The hydroelectric plant was located on the Negro-Nare River around the small towns of El Penol and Guatape, about two hours outside of Medellin. From 1964-1969, the Guatape Dam was developed and proposed on a technical level, but the impact on the local community was unclear. Building the dam required the flooding of the river, and, thus, the flooding of El Penol. Residents of the town began to organize in opposition, as they faced the potential disappearance of their town and the threat of displacement. EPM proceeded with the project anyway. From 1970-1979, El Penol was completely flooded and 5,000 people were forcibly resettled to the new Penol (Lopez 2022).

Guatape did temporarily sustain the country's energy demands, but a growing population necessitated an even larger source of power. Within the next two decades, Antioquia's elites began to reconsider Saenz's scrapped project.

In 1995, Alvaro Uribe Velez was elected governor of Antioquia, and decided to revive Saenz’s Cauca River dam proposal (Roman 2020). However, Hidroituango faced a major roadblock: the area around the dam was being used as a strategic corridor for FARC, which sought control of the region's coca (cocaine) crops and routes for the transferring of weapons (Alejandra 2015).  According to interviews with the locals of Briceno and Ituango, FARC was seen as a useful group at the time. They were “the presence of the law in the face of state absence” (Diamond 8-5-2019). FARC acted in place of the local government by organizing groups to fix roads, imposing a minimum wage, resolving disputes, taxing the production of crops, and punishing criminals (LeGrand 2003).

However, FARC’s role as a primarily peaceful adjudicator changed when paramilitary groups arrived and the region became enveloped in armed conflict. Between 1996 and 1998, 15 massacres of civilians occurred in the municipalities surrounding Hidroituango (Diamond 8-5-2019). One of the most deadly of these massacres was El Aro. On October 22, 1997, paramilitary groups murdered 15 people, including 3 children, and displaced 900 campesinos accused of being supporters of the guerillas. They also raped women, looted stores, destroyed pipes, killed 1000 cattle, and burned down 47 of the 68 houses in the town, including a pharmacy, a church, and the telephone exchange (HRW 2000). 

That same year, on Alvaro Uribe Velez's last day in office as the Governor of Antioquia, he established the Sociedad Promotora de la Hidroeléctrica Pescadero S.A, or "The Society for Promoting the Pescadero Hydroelectric Project" (Caracol Radio 2011). Within a few months, the Colombian Departmental Assembly approved the Ordinance (El Tiempo 1998). Speculation arose that Alvaro Uribe had coordinated El Aro to clear the land of campesinos in order to impose Hidroituango (Rios Vivos – Canada 2019). Jorge, a man from the community of El Orejón, saw the paramilitary violence as a way to “clear out the canyon, to allow the (Hidroituango) project to enter where before it couldn’t because of the guerrillas.” The locals theorized that the incursion was meant to push both FARC and civilian peasants away from the dam site and drive down the prices of the land the hydroelectric company needed to acquire to move the project forward (Diamond 8-5-2019). A report by the Human Rights Watch in 2000 confirmed suspicions that the Colombian Army was affiliated with the paramilitaries: “Army officers (…) shared intelligence, planned and carried out joint operations, provided weapons and munitions, supported with helicopters and medical aid, and coordinated on a day-to-day basis. Some of the officers involved remain on active duty and in command of troops.” In sworn testimony to Attorney General investigators, Francisco Enrique Villalba Hernández, a former paramilitary who took part in the El Aro massacre, confirmed that the operation “had been carefully planned and carried out by a joint paramilitary-Army force” (HRW 2000). 

As Hidroituango was being developed, paramilitary forces began to demobilize. The 2003 Santa Fe de Ralito Agreement was a document signed by 22 of the 26 paramilitary blocks to agree on a ceasefire and demobilize combatants by the end of 2005 (Weinand and Tremaria 2017). In 2006, Bloque Mineros de las Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, known as AUC, the largest confederation of paramilitaries, was formerly dissolved. Yet, this was certainly not the end of violence in the region. Paramilitary successor groups, coined BACRIM by the Colombian government and media groups, began to form soon after the official demobilization process. BACRIM’s members included demobilized paramilitaries that reorganized themselves, former paramilitary fighters that did not take part in the demobilization process, and new criminal groups linked to drug trafficking and gangs. Furthermore, the official military only replaced paramilitary presence in northern Antioquia. The Colombian army installed troops to defend Hidroituango from FARC attacks and push the guerrillas away (Caracol Radio 2015). In addition to occupying battalions around areas of construction, troops began taking over buildings in the center of Ituango (Voyvodic 2022). The guerrillas responded by laying down landmines to forestall the military advance (Diamond 8-5-2019).

The Development of Hidroituango

Meanwhile, in conference rooms in Medellin and Bogota, the planning process had been set in motion. In 1998, The Sociedad Promotora Hidroelectrica Ituango hired Integral to update the feasibility studies and redefine the original project (Hidroelectrica Hidroituango S.A. E.S.P. 2011). By 2007, Integral presented the feasibility and Environmental Impact Study to the Ministry of the Environment, Housing, and Territorial Development (Roman 2020). A year later, the Ministry of Mines and Energy declared that the Hidroituango project was necessary for public utility and national interest (Roman et al pp 68-69), and the Ministry of the Environment granted the environmental license for Hidroituango (Jimenez 2019). Financial arrangements began, as the Institute for Development of Antioquia (IDEA) took over the majority of the Company, with a total of 52.88% of the shares, and EPM remained a minority shareholder with 46.5% of the capital (Hidroelectrica Hidroituango S.A. E.S.P. 2011). 

To fund a project of such a large scale, however, domestic funding was not enough; at the time, the cost of the dam was estimated at 2.3 billion dollars. Thus, the state began to look for sources of transnational funding. For instance, in 2008, The Governor of Antioquia, Luis Alfredo Ramos, began talks with representatives of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) (Hidroelectrica Hidroituango S.A. E.S.P. 2018). International capital began to flood in from countries around the world such as Germany, Brazil, Canada, Spain, France, Japan, Sweden, and China. The project was pitched to international funders as an investment in Colombia’s future as the next big supplier of energy (Henao 2019).

In 2010, Ituango Hydroelectric Company handed over the delivery of the mega-project to EPM (Jimenez 2019). The Boomt (Build, Own, Operate, Maintain, Transfer) was then signed, which obligated EPM to make the necessary investments in financing, construction, operation, maintenance, and entry into commercial operation. The contract stipulated that the dam would be transferred back to the Ituango Hydroelectric Company in 50 years (EPM 2013). It also mandated that the initial 50% of the total amount of energy capacity had to be delivered to the markets by December 2018, while the total 100% would be achieved by 2021--which put the dam on a tight schedule from the beginning (EAFIT 2019).

As contracts were signed, many still questioned the connections between Hidroituango and the paramilitaries. A Justice and Peace Tribunal Investigation asked Patricia Hernández, the 15th Prosecutor of the Justice and Peace Unit in Medellin, to investigate whether the paramilitary group, AUC, favored the development of Hidroituango and conducted operations in the affected municipalities in order to promote the construction of the hydroelectric plant. Hernández stated that “the main obstacle to this project [Hidroituango] was the presence of the guerrillas. In 1996, the Bloque Mineros entered Ituango and just two years later the Sociedad Promotora de la Hidroeléctrica Pescadero S.A. was established (...) the wealth of natural resources in these municipalities has been a reason for large economic groups to be interested in exploiting them. The presence of this natural and economic capital is one of the reasons why illegal armed groups have made a presence in these places" (Caracol Radio 2011). The investigation, though, had little impact on the construction of Hidroituango, which carried along without disruption.

In 2010, a coalition of farmers, artisans, women, students, victims of armed conflict, and human rights defenders joined together to create the Movimiento Rios Vivos Colombia (Rios Vivos Movement) to protest the construction of the Ituango Hydroelectric dam (Front Line Defenders 2019). Members of Rios Vivos soon disappeared or turned up dead. In 2012, evictee Piedad Mazo, an opponent of the dam, was threatened and her son was killed. In 2013, evictee and Rios Vivos member Nelson Giraldo Posada was shot; another Rios Vivos member, Robinson Mazo, was also shot ("Case 10," accessed July 2023). When Rios Vivos held a protest in Valdivia, paramilitary groups threatened the protesters and prohibited them from chanting any slogans that expressed opposition to Hidroituango. Even after the threats were reported to local authorities, there was no investigation conducted. Furthermore, both Colombia's Ombudsman’s Office and UN experts documented the fact that Rios Vivos members were being threatened, detained, or killed, though nothing was done to ensure their protection (Jimenez 2019).

In spite of the threat of violence, Rios Vivos members continued to fight against the dam. However, they faced another obstacle: unlawful police activity. For instance, a protest in Ituango was dispersed with tear gas by a Colombian police force, even after the protesters had obtained a permit for peaceful demonstration. When a group of 400 campesino activists marched by foot from the Valle de Toledo to Medellin, Colombian police charged more than 80 of the demonstrators with obstruction of roads. They were later released when a judge declared the charges unfounded (Aguirre 2013). The activists then lived for 8 months in the University of Antioquia coliseum in order to bring public attention to environmental damage and human rights abuses occurring as a result of Hidroituango (Martinez 2013).

Despite public disapproval of the project and documented violence against opponents of the dam, investment continued. In 2012, the Inter-American Development Bank approved a US $2 million technical cooperation package (IDB 2012). In 2016, The Brazilian National Development Bank lent EPM $111.4 million in US dollars (BNDES 2016) and Export Development Canada provided $135 million for the importation of equipment for Hidroituango (EPM 2016). In July 2016, community activists requested information from Inter-American Development Bank's private sector arm, the Inter-American Investment Corporation, but did not receive a response. Later that month, the IDB group approved $400 million in financing and a $700 million syndicated loan for the construction of Hidroituango ("Case 10").

Delays in Construction

Hidroituango was facing its own technical issues. Due to poor weather conditions, problems with the property acquisition process, and construction delays, the accumulated delay of the dam had reached 20 months. Thus, a new acceleration plan was created to recover 18 of the 20 months by recruiting additional labor and shipping more equipment. Nevertheless, the acceleration plan could not entirely make up for the delays and the project was rushed in order to comply with the Boomt contract's stipulations (Jimenez 2019).

Peace Agreements and the Development Plan

A historic peace treaty between FARC and the Colombian government in 2016 promised an end to decades of war (Weinard and Tremaria 2017). The peace accords stipulated the demobilization of FARC and heavy investments in rural areas where guerilla violence was once an obstacle to economic development (Miroff 2021). One of these investments was the pilot coca substitution program, which was launched in northern Antioquia in 2017. Participants of the program voluntarily uprooted their coca crops, and began receiving small subsidy payments. After a year, the Coca substitution program's subsidy payments ended, but the residents of Briceno still hadn't received replacement crops and the state functionaries running the program disappeared. Without new crops to sustain residents' livelihoods, the region's economy collapsed (Diamond 8-5-19).

Furthermore, paramilitary violence also returned to northern Antioquia. New armed groups entered villages, telling people that they would manage the coca business and anyone caught selling coca would be killed (Weinard and Tremaria 2017). Paramilitaries targeted human rights defenders, such as Rios Vivos member Hugo Albeiro George Perez, who was shot and killed, along with his nephew, hours before a protest against the dam that he had planned to attend. One week later, another Rios Vivos member, Luis Alberto Torres Montoya, was shot and killed while panning for gold in the Cauca River (Rios Vivos 2018). Between 2013 to 2018, members of Rios Vivos faced a total of 151 threats and attacks, including 63 threats, 2 attacks with explosives, 2 cases of torture, 26 cases of criminal charges against activists, and 2 episodes of mass detention (Frontline Defenders 2017) (Ibid 2018).

Read more about attacks on human rights defenders:

A combination of economic necessity and the threat of violence forced many families to abandon their homes and resettle in peripheral communities of Medellin. These communities include poor neighborhoods controlled by armed groups in the suburb of Bello, which have high rates of violence and curfews as early as 6 PM (Diamond 8-5-19).

Due to time strain, EPM began to fill the reservoir without permits from the local authorities. The company sealed two out of three bypass tunnels for the river with cement, damming the river and creating enormous pressure on the third tunnel (Frontline Defenders 2019). A series of disastrous events occurred:

Resident Teresa Jaramillo described the real-time events: “I was in Puerto Valdivia when the first alarm sounded. It was very chaotic. No-one knew whether to run for the hills or along the road, whether to grab the children or grab the elderly. Everyone was going crazy” (BBC 2018). In Sabanalarga, Nutabe indigenous group member, Eva Celdi Higuita, who had already been displaced three times by violence, said that “we had to run like we were running from an armed group” (The Guardian 2018). 

For the next eight months, the risk of the dam collapsing was high due to pressure from the avalanche, leakage of water through the legs of the wall, and the poor state of the rocky massif where the underground works of the project were located (Jimenez 2019). 

Many families were banned from ever returning to their homes after the 2018 floods. On the remaining homes in Puerto Valdivia's flood zone, EPM municipality workers placed stickers with the words “No Return” on the front doors. In November 2019, 1,700 of the 2,500 families evacuated from the town were allowed to return by the municipality, but found that they had lost half their town. The town's main square was scheduled for demolition--only the church would remain, but the surrounding houses and stores would be destroyed (Calvo 2019 #2).

I was raised next to this river. I was practically born in it. I was happy living here. I was comfortable living here. People used to marvel at the color and joy that thrived in this community. But now what we see is psychological damage. Those who have returned to Puerto Valdivia live in fear daily. A huge segment of the population is missing or diminished because of fears of new flooding due to an avalanche or a technical failure at the dam"

Environmental Catastrophe

EPM found holes inside the mountain from the force of the water that caused damage to the power plant. On February 5, 2019, the company decided to close the only gate left open to Hidroituango because of the risk that the water pressure would compromise the resistance of the dam. As a result, the flow of the river was reduced by 80% for several days, resulting in the death of fish and many other species living in the river as well as the loss of vegetation on the shores.

Additionally, the suspension of the river's flow ensured that the millions of people living along the Cauca temporarily lost the basis of their economic livelihood. Crops dried up, fishing ceased, and the transport of goods along the river became impossible (BBC 2019). Locals said that EPM had “killed the river” (Frontline Defenders 2019). 

The Return of Armed Groups

The lack of civil infrastructure and proper governance presented an opportunity for armed groups to reassert control of the territory. Dissident members of FARC ramped up fighting against paramilitary successor groups who had returned to Northern Antioquia. In July 2021, paramilitary violence displaced more than 3700 people, or 15% of the population, of Ituango in a period of just a few days (Alsema 2021). Today, the remaining members of the communities are at constant risk of being caught in the crossfire between armed groups. Human rights defenders, such as members of Rios Vivos and Cuerpos Gramaticales, are consistently targeted and killed (Calvo 2019).

Economic problems only compounded the violence. Even after the emergency, towns like Puerto Valdivia stayed nearly empty: the majority of businesses were shut down, most of the town's residents lost their jobs, many moved to Medellin or other towns, and the yearly water and fish festivals were canceled (Calvo 2019 #2). Prior to the Hidroituango crisis, there were 120 mototaxistas (motorcycle taxi drivers) in Puerto Valdivia. Because of forced displacements and the collapse of the regional economy, there were fewer than 40 in 2019 (Calvo 2019 #1). FARC members capitalized on the town's emptiness by taking over abandoned homes and buildings in Puerto Valdivia, and using them for hiding and weapon storage (Alsema 2021).

Five years after the mass floods, the government has done little to repair the economy in the region. There are still few job opportunities in Puerto Valdivia and the town lacks basic facilities, such as a health center, school, and bridge (El Colombiano 2023). The process of investing in rural areas as part of Colombia's peace deal with FARC has also been slow. A 2021 study by the University of Notre Dame found that just 4% of agreed-upon rural reforms had been implemented by the deal’s fifth anniversary in November 2021 (Cobb 2022).

Corporate Losses, Corruption, and Mismanagement

A 2019 preliminary report from the EPM Comptroller's Office estimated the fiscal loss of Hidroituango at more than four trillion pesos, or 962 million US dollars. According to the report, the megaproject did not carry out sufficient feasibility and engineering studies, which caused 1.1 billion in lost profits and 2.9 billion in value destruction. The manager of EPM, Jorge Londoño, announced that the cost of the emergency in the dam was projected at 3.9 trillion pesos (1.2 billion dollars). Furthermore, the National Authority of Environmental Licenses (ANLA) announced a sanction to Hidroituango for $1,718,000,000 (518,000 USD), for the excavation of one of the tunnels without the obligatory license (Boletin 2019). With all of the costs factored in, the mega-project, which initially cost 11.4 trillion pesos (3.4 billion dollars), was estimated to cost 15.3 trillion pesos (4.6 billion dollars) after the crisis (Boletin 2019).

Hidroituango finally began to produce power in December 2022, almost 4 years after it was originally scheduled to begin operations. (Jaramillo 2022).

Hidroituango was imagined as Colombia's greatest energy plant of all time, and an iconic symbol of Colombia's progress. When the dam was actualized in the early 2000s, it became a source of pride for Antioquia's capitalist elite. They believed that mega-projects like Ituango would stimulate economic growth, provide an antidote to violence, and bring prosperity back to a region that had been ravaged by conflict. The project, however, was enormously short-sighted, and, ultimately, the government and the dam's shareholders lost far more than they gained. While the killings of innocent civilians by guerrillas and paramilitaries were a highly visible form of violence, Hidroituango challenges us to consider whether the purposeful flooding of a home or local church may also be a form of state-sanctioned violence.

The engineers and politicians behind Hidroituango made a conscious choice to ignore the community's voices, instead putting the interests of spectacle and profit over human welfare. Rural residents were deemed expendable; they were the necessary sacrifice for a national supply of energy. While Colombia's elites pushed forward a narrative of national progress, communities living in the vicinity of Hidroituango experienced another reality of displacement and terror. 

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Alsema, Adriaan. “Violence Displaces More than 15% of Inhabitants of North Colombia Town.” Colombia News | Colombia Reports, 30 July 2021, colombiareports.com/violence-displaces-more-than-10-of-inhabitants-of-north-colombia-town/.

Ardila, Laura. “How the Powerful Hidroituango Drowned an Indigenous Territory.” Tierra de Resistentes | Consejo de Redacción, 1 May 2021, tierraderesistentes.com/en/2019/04/25/el-territorio-indigena-que-ahogo-la-poderosa-hidroituango/.

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