May 15, 2000
Reuters
BOGOTA - A Colombian high court revoked Monday an injunction, served by a lower tribunal six weeks ago, that banned Occidental Petroleum Corp from drilling for oil in a northeast region claimed as ancestral lands by U'wa Indians, a lawyer for the community said.
The hotly disputed Samore block is tipped to harbour some 2.5 billion barrels of crude and, if drilling is successful, could stave off the prospect of this Andean nation becoming a net oil importer again from 2004.
After a seven-year legal wrangle, Occidental was granted a license late last year to sink a $40 million test well just outside the limits of the U'was' legally recognised reservation. But the U'was launched a campaign of road blockades, protests and legal action saying the proposed drill site was still part of more extensive ancestral lands.
U.S. multinational Occidental began building a road to the proposed well-head at the start of the year with the aim of starting to drill in the first half of 2000.
But those targets were blown off course in late March when a lower court granted a temporary injunction in favour of the U'was arguing the project violated the Indians' fundamental rights.
``Bogota's Superior Court decided the basic rights of the U'was were not affected and for that reason revoked the decision of the lower court,'' Tito Gaitan, lawyer for the U'was, told reporters after Monday's ruling.
Neither court officials nor Occidental representatives were not immediately available for comment.
Gaitan said the semi-nomadic 5,000-member U'wa Indian community, which has a 543,000 acres (220,000 hectare) reservation that spreads from central Colombia to the border with Venezuela, was considering fresh grassroots and legal protests.
In comments after the March injunction, Alberto Calderon, head of state-run oil firm Ecopetrol, described Samore as the ``most important oil prospect this country has''.
Last year, Colombia produced an average of about 815,000 barrels per day of crude, its top export. Colombia exported $1.15 billion of crude in the first quarter of this year, up 81 percent compared to the same period last year and well ahead of the $239 million in revenues from the second main export, coal.
But production is set to dwindle to around 775,000 bpd this year as output from the country's largest field naturally diminishes.
Unless major new finds are made and quickly developed, Colombia is set to begin importing oil again by 2004, according to oil experts.