In the town of Wimpeshi, located one hour from the municipality of Uribia, in La Guajira, the funeral of Yudis González almost did not take place with all the honors with which a Wayú is traditionally bid farewell. The reason: lack of water. The death of the 49-year-old indigenous woman occurred at a difficult time for the region due to the prolonged drought. It hasn’t rained since September 2023.
Furthermore, it occurred in the midst of the scandal due to the purchase of 40 tank trucks by the National Unit for Disaster Risk Management (UNGRD), Today they are parked and exposed to the sun and water at an Army base, while the residents manage to find the liquid and survive.
More than 250 relatives and acquaintances of the deceased attended the funeral and stayed for nine days, as is customary. He housed them all, fed them with roast goat and provided them with water, because the community, with no other option, collected money and bought a tanker with water after selling hammocks, backpacks and a couple of animals. Sometimes, the supplied truck reaches 2 million pesos. In others, 900,000 pesos.
This has been done in more than a dozen indigenous funerals, because on the La Guajira peninsula it seems that the Wayús have agreed to leave for eternity this summer, when some of the tank cars that circulate through the streets of Uribia are intended to serve areas of Alta Guajira and, therefore, committed. The waiting list does not seem to have an end.
2,300 requests for drinking water have arrived at the Emergency Care office of the Mayor’s Office of Uribia until the last week of March, among them those from widows and orphans who almost cry out for the vital liquid.. They are desperate people from the majority of the 3,000 recognized indigenous communities, who, since January 2024, when the scandal arose over the tank trucks that Olmedo López bought, have been demanding their rights; citizens who believed in President Gustavo Petro’s promise that water would be guaranteed during his government and were deceived because the change did not come.
In Uribia, a town with 8,200 square kilometers, the residents believe they are praying. Or something strange happens, because not even with Petro, of leftist ideology, who won with more than 11,000 votes, almost 4,000 more than Rodolfo Hernández, did they have the solution.
They were immediately transferred to the military base. Only ten stepped on the asphalt again, as they did some functional tests. One of them was buried in Portete Bay, in the middle of the desert. “These are the consequences of bad and hasty decisions made without planning, without knowing the territory,” criticized Senator Alfredo Deluque, from La U.
They all ended up guarded by the public force, almost hidden, like proof of a shame. The soldiers avoid being photographed. Not even to testify that the decals with the faces of Gustavo Petro and Olmedo López, stamped on some of the tank cars, were erased almost by force. That was one of the sins of the rosary of inconsistencies in the millionaire contract.
SEMANA toured the extensive Alta Guajira desert and confirmed that the double-truck tank trucks purchased by the UNGRD will not be able to deliver water to the remote rancherías, the ones most in need of the liquid, although they are suitable for supplying areas located a few kilometers from the urban area.
In some sections there are dunes, sandbanks where motorcycles get stuck in summer. “Not to mention the winter,” describes Juan Antonio, the motorcyclist who accompanied SEMANA. On other routes, over the bay, the sea spreads its fury and bathes the road, even in summer. It leaves as a witness a thick layer of salt that prevents passage, because it slides and buries whatever passes over it. In some more, like in the towns of Taparajin and Porshina, almost no one enters. The rocks on the road cut any tire, and the old tank cars to go from one hamlet to another prefer to go to Uribia and turn around, even though they are less than an hour away. There are no micro-aqueducts or wells. People consume green water that refuses to disappear from the jagüeyes.
The controversial cars set foot in Uribia without being ready to operate. They did not have the hoses, in addition to some required tanks and couplings. And as if that were not enough, they did not have insurance policies, denounced the new director of the UNGRD, Carlos Carrillo.
They are not yet insured and, two months after arriving for the first time in the municipality, the Mayor’s Office has not received them on loan. We will also see the hiring of 40 drivers that the Army selected from 1,000 resumes that came from almost all the rancherías: men, without judicial records and Wayús. They were enrolled in social security and trained by Kenworth de la Montaña, the company that supplied the trucks to the State, which was accused of cost overruns and was the subject of a surprise inspection by the Attorney General’s Office.
The staff was ready, but they did not work a single day. As if that were not enough, the tank trucks arrived in Uribia with the aim of bringing water from other towns, including Riohacha and Maicao, since there is not enough in the town. However, both municipalities cried foul and escaped responsibility because they barely met their needs. Mohamed Dasuki, former mayor of Maicao, warned the Minister of Housing, Catalina Velasco, that their aqueduct could not cope. They didn’t pay attention to it.
Without water in the urban area
In the town it is clear that the UNGRD bought 40 tank trucks and did not guarantee their supply. And even less so when Uribia does not supply drinking water for its urban residents. First, because there is no aqueduct network for all neighborhoods and, also, because the liquid is scarce. “We do not have the amount of water for all citizens; “The most affected are the inhabitants of rural areas,” acknowledged the president of the Council, Aldrín Gutiérrez.
The Triple A company schedules service suspensions every week and water almost always comes out of the tap on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays the municipal aqueduct is in charge of filling the old State tankers that carry water to rural areas. Uribia, officially, does not have the means to supply water to the new tank trucks, each of 16,000 liters. However, in the town it is an open secret the proliferation of cisterns or clandestine fresh water wells that sell the liquid to the most needy communities, a kind of black business that benefits many and annoys others.
In the opinion of some political leaders, Uribia is dry on the surface, but with underground water in some sectors. The previous week, the authorities found a new freshwater well a few meters from Cabo de la Vela.
SEMANA listened to a virtual meeting of a unified command post, in which the UNGRD confirmed the news and warned that, after the tanker scandal, they did not have enough means to move the liquid. “We only have seven vehicles, they are few to be able to work. We hope that each one will distribute 10,000 liters of water on the parallel railway in Maicao, Manaure and Uribia,” reported Walter González, from the National Risk Unit. He requested that water not be delivered to areas distant from the highway due to the shortage of vehicles.
The optimization of the municipal aqueduct, the improvement of electrical energy – the downturns have damaged several appliances –, the optimization of rural micro-aqueducts and desalination plants that allow the sea water of La Guajira to be converted into fresh water would be the solution. So why didn’t they start there instead of purchasing 40 luxury cars?
In Uribia the positions are found. Some residents defend the tank cars. Rosa Iguarán – for example – says that the cars, beyond the scandal and the alleged cost overruns that Justice must determine, belong to the Wayús. “Those tank trucks here are not leaving, they are from the Wayú people, we are not going to accept this mockery,” she told this medium. “We will strike,” Iguarán announced.
While in Bogotá, Carlos Carrillo, director of the UNGRD, defines what to do with the controversial and expensive purchase of double troques, in the most remote areas of Uribia, such as Bahía Honda, they continue to drink green water from the jagüeyes, since the Mayor’s Office still does not resume its contract with the tankers. In other more arid areas they collect money to pay bribes to those who have cisterns in the rancherías and sell the vital liquid.
The unfortunate thing is that these trucks were purchased as a three-month provisional measure due to the impact of the El Niño phenomenon, but, as things are, La Niña will arrive first, and the cars will continue to be stored while Justice investigates the missing Olmedo López, the former director of the UNGRD, who was swallowed by the earth.
