The history of FIERRO URCO: HYDRIC STAR OF THE SOUTH
Fierro Urco is not to be touched! This is the cry that echoes among the mountains that cradle the water sources. This sacred place for the Andean people, located in southern Ecuador, is the beginning of life for thousands of families, the birthplace of four rivers, San Luis, Guayabal, Santiago and Tent, which, in turn, feed other river basins, besides being the habitat of unique species of birds and a large number of reptiles. For some time now, this place has been under constant pressure: gold, silver and copper have been found in its bowels.
This March 22, World Water Day, we commemorate the struggle for the defense of water by thousands of families, communities and also religious life that takes up the cause of defending the goods of creation to ensure justice and dignified life.
Water: a cause of all believers.
Enry Armijos, parish priest in the Diocese of Loja, feels that the struggle of the people of Fierro Urco is a struggle of all believers. He tells us that Fierro Urco is called the Water Star of the South and supplies water to some cities in the region and is also a source for family and peasant agriculture, from which the families that occupy this territory live. “Here the people propose another way of living, without being enslaved to this system,” comments the priest.
“When you enter religious life you commit yourself to something: we seek to make this land something worthy, that is why we have a great responsibility, for me, this an imperative to which no priest can be indifferent.” For Father Enry, the imposition that the Ecuadorian state wants to make on Fierro Urco, giving it in mining concession to the company Guayacán Gold, goes against that search for the common good that the encyclical Laudato Si demands. “We cannot not listen to a prophetic message, with scientific bases and factual experiences from all over the world, that Pope Francis makes to us in Laudato Si. In a global SOS.” This is why he joins the resistance of the communities for this wasteland.
That what the people want be respected.
“With a stealth, without the community knowing it, the territories are already concessioned.” For this reason, Father Enry emphasizes the urgency for the authorities and the people to meet and dialogue, so that they respect what the people want. “Although in Ecuador we have laws in favor of nature, we see that these laws, when it comes to the executive power, of strategic areas that have to do with significant capital income for the country, well, in quotation marks for the whole country, because we already know that those who benefit are the companies and a few who do business over the people.”
The water from the springs of the Fierro Urco mountain range has a deep spiritual meaning for the people who live here and relate to this space. Not only because of family and peasant agriculture, which is effectively an alternative to this voracious and capitalist development, but also because this water allows different relationships to be woven between families, between human beings and with nature, where the profit is not personal, but collective. In order to make life prevail, there have already been cases of criminalization and violent confrontations. But there are small victories in the path of defense, one of them is that the National Assembly has urged the President of Ecuador to declare this mountain range as a Water Protection Area.
To defend this water is to defend a different way of living.
“I call us to make an effort to know this Christ incarnated in the common house, with this strong affective and emotional charge, to call it HOME. The house, warmth of home, closeness, is our home“. The interests on the territories rich in minerals are too many. The road is not an easy one and “the interest of the companies is to get them out no matter what, even if blood runs, they don’t care”, according to Father Enry Armijos. “We are left with the resource of resistance, to which all of us must appeal to defend a good that belongs to all of us. To that resistance that inspires the simple people who have a life that is not based on capital, nor on having, where no more explanations are needed than their own daily life, where they show you those new relationships that are woven and where the most precious good is at stake: life.”