TROUBLED WATERS - META RIVER (CO, 2022)

In August 2022, we travelled 600 km along the Meta River to understand how its recent changes has affected its people and the environments that depend on it.

Just weeks after the election of Gustavo Petro as Colombia's first left-wing president. The political shift had completely changed the directionality of the plains. Since 2013, the closure of the border with Venezuela had enclosed the Llanos, blocking any commercial outlet to the sea and freezing the extractive economies that had heavily speculated on their land. When we arrived, the border had not yet reopened, but the possibility was imminent. People were travelling back and forth from Venezuela to prepare for the different outcomes.

We travelled in a moment of deep tension and uncertainty. Nobody could be sure whether the opening would bring relief or accelerate the violent colonization that had already profoundly transformed the region.

The Meta River descends over 1,000 km from the Andean páramos to its mouth at the Orinoco, draining a basin of approximately 100,000 km². It splits the Llanos savannas in two and marks the border between Colombia and Venezuela. The plains have always been the favoured site for extractive speculation, from the Jesuit missions of the seventeenth century that became today's plains towns, through the oil industry, to the recent agroindustrial expansion.

Extractive water-consuming activities by tributary watersheds,
The concentration of extractive activities around the piedmont causes multidimensional impacts on the lower basin.

Yet climatic and ecological conditions have not allowed this wanted development to succeed. Since the 1960s, the river has entered a drastic transformation. Its waters now carry increasing amounts of sediment. Despite contributing only 10% of the Orinoco's water, the Meta delivers nearly half its total sediment load. The timing of floods has changed: winter arrives earlier and lasts less, disrupting the cycles of cultivation, fishing, and transport that organise people along its banks.

The causes have not yet been established. Our hypothesis is that the major transformations produced in the upper basins, heavy deforestation of the piedmont, mining in the tributaries, industrial agriculture, and the diversion of the river's headwaters to supply Bogotá, whose Chingaza system extracts 80% of the capital's drinking water from páramos that feed the Meta, are now visible downstream, where their effects are most obvious as those communities face the greatest degree of isolation and vulnerability.

Visiting an island cultivated by landless farmers
Near La Poyata, Casanare, COL