Her hands are focused on extracting the pulp from the arazá or Amazonian guava to put it on a plate. Sitting at the main table of her farm, Olga Trujillo Zuñiga says with a smile that she is tired.
Since the Communal Action Board of the village where she lives, in Los Alpes, near the Los Pozos population center, in San Vicente del Caguán, was founded, she has chaired it and has learned about social organization while teaching by example that the fundamental thing is to plow the land with love and courage.
Olga makes bread, processes cocoa, collects eggs from native chickens to sell to other farmers, cooks on a wood stove, raises pigs and has a pasture with dairy cows for her consumption and that of her family. All the organic production on her farm is the result of her efforts and those of her partner who, while listening to her words from the side with proud gestures, also squeezes the sugarcane he collects a few steps away in a mill to prepare sweet juice.
The town where they are growing old today causes, at least for Olga, many setbacks because it is a region she loves but, at the same time, she is overwhelmed by an armed conflict that does not cease because they recognize the richness of the dream on which they built their life.
Olga Trujillo decided to dedicate her life to caring for the land where she lives and works.
After failed negotiations and broken promises by institutions and even armed groups for the farmers, the adult couple says they live between prosperity and scarcity. In the middle, Olga made the decision to care for the land with autonomy and put her system of values at the service of respecting it.
Emerald energy
In 2006, the oil company Emerald Energy was established in search of hydrocarbon exploitation in the Los Pozos area. The company of the Chinese state conglomerate Sinochem became an imminent threat for Olga, for the land on which she sows and for the community. She remembers it as a definitive event in narrating her process of territorial sovereignty and leadership.
Oil extraction gradually began to produce drought, soil contamination, deterioration of the road network of tertiary roads, as well as a deep disillusionment of the peasantry who, without sufficient information, seemed enthusiastic about the long-term job offers.
But the situation was different. In Olga’s words, the gas extraction company also offered long-term jobs and captivated some residents who were looking for promotions so much that it generated a shortage of young labor in the planting of crops, as well as fleeting and abusive relationships, she says, between engineers and young women who were excited about a prosperous life, something that was often encouraged by the same family.
In the midst of this situation, Olga’s concern led her to seek alternatives. As president of the JAC of the town, she encouraged her neighbors to map the water sources around their plots. The proposal also consisted of farmers naming the springs after themselves, as if they were a child. On her farm, she recalls, there were at least thirty outbreaks and, with this exercise, they identified that in addition to hydrocarbons, the field was full of blue gold with the risk of being contaminated.
Cocoa tree from Olga Trujillo’s farm
“The idea was to start with an identification. The progress of this task gave us great joy, and even more so, realizing that we were rich in water despite not seeing rivers or streams nearby.
We named that map ‘Water gives us life and we take care of it so that it lives’; we were all so excited thinking about what would follow after realizing where we were standing” she says.
Giving a name to each birth and installing messages on the sidewalks alluding to the care of the tributaries was, in his words, also a romantic exercise.
From that exercise, Olga was the only woman from Caquetá, at that time, to be invited to the Episcopal Conference to speak to the world about the care of Amazonian water sources in the southwestern foothills and the importance of this to preserve the lung of the Amazonian world.
In her words, she sought to demonstrate with these initiatives that all the beauty of the world can be found in small gestures. The diversity of animal and plant species that were beginning to migrate or die due to the oil spill was becoming increasingly noticeable; as was the silence that was imposed on her territory after the effect produced by raising her voice against the Chinese company Sinochem.
According to data presented by the Amazon Institute for Scientific Research-SINCHI in a research agreed with the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (2023), Emerald Energy obtained 5,656,472.45 standard barrels of oil (SBO); that is, almost 900 million liters.
However, this was not like turning on the water tap. According to data from the Ideas for Peace Foundation (FIP), the peasant social mobilization against this extraction, which lasted almost 17 years, provoked attacks by the public force against civil society because it protected the company’s deposits instead of protecting the productive interests of the locals.
Olga’s role was not only to not remain silent despite the risk, but also to further strengthen the social fabric and encourage other women to do so. “I knew that many men do not take care of water because they are not the ones who go to look for it to prepare food, to sustain a home; we are the ones who know that without it we cannot sustain a family and that is why we are in a hurry,” she says.
Caring for the ecosystem not only provides better quality food, but also keeps alive the species that inhabit it and depend on it.
Green dream
New projects came to mind. Each one sought to ensure not only individual but collective well-being. And since his department, Caquetá, has been at the top of the list for deforestation for over a decade, he proposed the planting of native trees, as well as species native to the territory, from the JAC.
Although the idea of a seed bank brings to mind the image of a laboratory that preserves a series of plant seed species in jars and under suitable atmospheric conditions, Olga rescues the popular idea of sowing from cuttings.
At that time he began to exchange ‘pieces’ or roots of plants, fruits and native wood species such as Samán, Laurel, Mango, Guama, Charcoal, Melina, Wild and Smoked Cocoa.
“Here we always struggle to get seeds, so I found some from Huila, where I was born, because there was a time when there was nothing to plant. That made me sad,” says Olga.
His idea was to build living fences along the roadside and reforest the waterways, giving cuttings of species to each owner.
Between successes and failures, due to ignorance of the necessary conditions for these introduced species, he gradually succeeded. A soil that seemed to be drying up due to oil extraction began to become a green dream again.
The need, she says, was to help reduce indiscriminate logging for pastures, often out of ignorance, other times for financial reward or simply out of habit; Olga Trujillo recalls that between the years of clearing and the arrival of the oil company, the guerrillas ordered the farmers to cut down hectares of land and after the peace agreement they prohibited deforestation.
Another of the projects she proposed to the Los Alpes village was recycling and biodigesters in order to raise awareness in the community. Olga says that although it seems to be a tradition among farmers, “not everyone likes to maintain subsistence crops (banana, potato, cocoa, etc.) because it takes a lot of time,” she warns.
If she were to translate her effort into time, she says that these agricultural tasks would take at least five hours a day. This, between household chores, caring for the production of almost 200 laying hens, raising pigs, milking cows, planting and caring for her crops and the garden that provides for them, is not an easy task that, she emphasizes, is not remunerated. She says that if it were not thanks to a good company it would have been impossible to sustain her land. But she also recognizes that her case is unique. She has a man who supports her in the care, sowing the land, but this is not the common case for her neighbors.
Olga Trujillo has the support of her husband in her work to care for the ecosystem through forest restoration.
Olga does this work because she wants to, but in most cases it is assigned to women without their prior consent.
For this reason, for Olga, the innate reason why women plant and care for water has to do with love and their intelligence, in her words. She says that it is theirs as well as hers the need to have a harvest to feed themselves and others, for this reason, she also says, the work of tilling the land does not rest.
When food sovereignty is sought on an integrated farm, according to this leader, work becomes “a lullaby”
The chives, bell peppers, white beans, pumpkin, basil, cilantro, cashews, guava, papaya, custard apple, caimo, cachipay, soursop, lemongrass, aloe, chili peppers, citrus fruits, sugar cane, plantain, banana, avocado and other species that are on your table would not be there without first having been put in the ground.
