Making nature a healing place: Interview with Colombia’s Enilda Jiménez

The Gulf of Urabá, on the northwestern coast of Colombia, is a territory living in a constant social, economic and environmental struggle for existence.

Biologically, Urabá is a complex biodiversity hotspot where the Pacific and Caribbean fuse into one. The migration flow between Central and South America and the Caribbean’s unique ecosystems, such as mangroves, estuaries, wetlands and rainforests, hosts an immense variety of fauna and flora threatened by accelerated agricultural expansion, illicit crops, fires and the mega construction of a $672 million port, Puerto Antioquia.

Plantations such as the banana industry extend to 46,500 hectares, producing around 64 million boxes of bananas annually, making it the base economy of the region and Colombia’s banana capital. According to the Colombian Ministry of Commerce, Industry and Tourism, around 80% is sent to the European Union, surpassing $1 billion globally in export revenue in 2024. It’s an industry also built on a para-economy relationship among banana plantation owners, paramilitary groups, drug traffickers, cattle ranchers and the Colombian military forces.

The lack of Colombian government presence in decades of conflict with guerrillas left the perfect conditions for violence to thrive, leaving the region in a never-ending story of violence and forced displacement from different actors such as the guerrillas, paramilitaries, military forces and, currently, criminal organizations such as the Clan del Golfo. Urabá has suffered extortions, kidnappings, land dispossessions and drug trafficking, leaving an aftermath of more than 100 massacres.

In 1995, a time when Urabá faced violence from different armed groups like waves hitting the shore, Enilda Jiménez Pineda, 15 years old, and her 20 siblings were forced to leave their home in the region of Surikí, Urabá. Her father, Samuel Antonio Jiménez Madera, was assassinated by armed men while taking his nieces to school. The family ran away, not knowing who was responsible for their father’s death.

Between 2003 and 2006, the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia paramilitary forces gave up their arms. The ex-paramilitary leader of the Bloque Bananeroin the Urabá region, José Éver Veloza García, alias “HH,” confessed to the tribunal the magnitude of the atrocities committed under his command: Between 1995 and 1996, their actions amounted to 1,500 killings in Urabá. Samuel Jiménez was one of those premeditated targets. Enilda and her family heard how their father had been intercepted and killed for refusing to voluntarily give up his land on the borders of the Surikí River.

It took 22 years of forced exile before Enilda and her family were finally able to come back. They returned full of excitement. Everything was absolutely different — where cattle used to move freely, forests stood full of life; what used to be their house was reduced to ruins. Faces of sorrow and joy coexisted. They improvised a campsite, sleeping in hammocks under plastic roofs, taking baths in the river, bearing clouds of mosquitoes, eating whatever the earth could provide, making that land again their home.

After walking and recognising the 470 hectares (1,160 acres) of their land, they had to decide how they would make a living from this place.

To make Surikí productive and keep their father’s legacy alive, the older brothers suggested bringing back cattle, for which they needed to cut down part of the forest that had grown in their absence. Enilda and a few others opposed, opening a question up for debate: “If we cut down that forest, wouldn’t we be doing the same that was done to us, of taking away the home of all those living beings in those forests?”

Mongabay spoke with Enilda Jiménez, community social psychologist from the National Open and Distance University and co-founder of the Surikí Nature Reserve, via video call. The following interview has been translated and edited for length and clarity.

Mongabay: What tipped the balance in favor of protecting those forests rather than cutting them down to bring back an intensive cattle farm model?

Enilda Jiménez: I think finding that dilemma was, and still is for me, the milestone in which my family faced that discussion, and unanimously, we all saw ourselves combined in that question. After all that we had been through, it is what, in a way, gives rise to the root on which Surikí is today, woven and embroidered. We had already gone through the war, suffering, forced displacement; and we had gone through confronting our perpetrators, listening to them, going through that pain, healing and forgiving. I think my family made a spiritual effort that transformed us a lot. One of the ways in which we realized the transformation was that when we appealed to that question, no one had the courage to say yes, we are going to do the same to the animals. We all cared.

Mongabay: What do you think has been the most difficult challenge you have faced in Surikí since you returned?

Enilda Jiménez:I tell people the risk of building a business with 20 siblings is crazy. The challenges involved in turning a family like mine into entrepreneurs, in reconciling the family, the productivity and still having affection for each other. If you don’t understand a startup beyond the economic profit, you will fail. For example, I remember that the position of my older brother was always as if we had to tear the forest down again. The discussion of recovering the pastures that we felt we had lost for our economic development, or the jaguar attacks on the cattle, after officially becoming a private nature reserve.

In 2022, the jaguar began to eat the cows, even my brother’s horse, Amarillo, and his first reaction was that we had to kill that animal. I had the feeling that this was not going to work. I remember I said to him, ‘You shoot and kill that animal, and we have to close down.’ Nowadays, my brother is the greatest defender of the jaguars. He developed a system of management and coexistence, using motion sensor lights, cow bells and convincing the neighbors to reduce retaliatory hunting.

I feel that we, as a family and as a business, are becoming a healthier, more conscious network, with more tools and skills to pilot this dream of building wealth through the care of life.

Mongabay:  How do you feel about being able to walk those forests again in this new dynamic in Surikí?

Enilda Jiménez: In general, we have grown up in a culture in which one is the owner of a 100-hectare [250-acre] plot of land and one can transform it and use it for profitability, right? But what I learned to feel from this process is that when I walked through those forests again, I didn’t just feel that I was the owner, but that I felt responsible for a lot of things that I don’t think we could conceive of ourselves as owners. For example, the water, the air that purifies, of everything that this ecosystem provides.

And that was a beautiful, respectful, understanding process. I remember in October 2020, my brother saw the first groups of tourists arrive in Surikí, and he saw them smile, he saw them pay us, he saw the money that tourism generates as very tangible; he said to me, ‘Oh, it’s true, there are indeed people who are going to come here to pay us to come and see the trees, the river, the animals.’ And then he who hunted told me, ‘Well, I’m not going to shoot the ducks anymore, I’m going to show people the ducks.’

Mongabay: How can a place like Surikí make historical memory of the conflict just by protecting these ecosystems?

Enilda Jiménez: At the beginning, when people came to Surikí, we didn’t tell our story; that was never in the plan. In itself, Surikí is a place that has a beauty that sells itself. At the end of the day, people always asked, ‘Well, how did you get here?’ And we would tell them openly just like that, over coffee, and that gave people a very overwhelming feeling. People would say, hey, look, this is very cool, the animals, the forests, the trees, but the thing that I will never forget about this place is your story. And that happened to us so many times until we started to tell the story of how that place allowed us to grow, to stay united, to have a purpose as a family, to fight, to recover our land, to keep the memory of my father and my mother alive, who were the ones who created that place and who made the right decisions in the middle of a war in which they were also able to keep us all safe, even giving their own lives.

Moreover, I believe that humanity and nature have to be intertwined again from stories like these. It is the story of what nature is always doing. It’s turning all the tragedies and everything we do horrible to it into an opportunity. That’s what my family is doing by projecting something that this territory deeply needs. And it is like a metaphor where we can build a story about this territory where we can all fit, where we can all live together, because there is no way we can continue to imagine a world where I have to go there to finish off the banana growers or finish off the ports, or the ports finish me off. That is to say, what I like is that nature, in a way, does not oppose anything. And everything that happens to nature turns it into a possibility.

Mongabay: In your opinion, do you think that the nature of the armed conflict in Urabá helped to protect the forests indirectly, as it did in other regions of Colombia?

Enilda Jiménez: I think that in Urabá, the war was fought for territorial control of resources and as an aid to the industrialisation of the palm, banana and livestock industries. In this territory, 25-30% remains as healthy ecosystems. In other words, I believe that in the case of Urabá, the conflict turned more toward intervention in order to generate something that is also true today, and that is that Urabá, based on this industrialized economy, produces the third-largest income in Antioquia [department].

In Urabá, the focus was to generate security so that, as they said, development would not stop. All this pressure has been based on the hydraulic transformation of drainage channels. And we have also systematized them, we have recounted how this has also brought dispossession, conflict, massacres and a lot of things to flatten such a diverse ecosystem and profited from it.

Mongabay: Why is the fight for the water socially and environmentally important in Surikí?

Enilda Jiménez:Because everything we did to that ecosystem, we did to the farmers, Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities who inhabited it. We displaced them, massacred them, divided them. … In other words, what we did to the ecosystem in Urabá, we also did to the people. And this is indicated by the 9,000 cases of forced displacement [in the area] that we have there, the volume of victims, the volume of massacres. You take an environmental story from there, and you start to cross it with the story of the war, and that gives you more or less layers with very similar curves.

Urabá is in itself a story of great diversity. This place has such a biologically and culturally diverse way of expressing itself that it has become an obstacle to the development model that has to homogenize everything. And the construction of wealth that we have proposed in that place clashes with that. It needs to flatten that diversity for its economic model to work, including today. One could try to imagine a profitable economic model, such as the banana industry, with ways of constructing profitability mechanisms that also bet on a lower impact in terms of all that this crop has entailed in Urabá. Because, for example, we are currently talking with banana growers about how much water we need to send a box of bananas to China, right? That water is considered in your value chain because the question of water is not a romantic or abstract question. Without water, you cannot produce bananas, and without the rainfall regime, you are not as productive.

The way out that we are trying to show and to put forward in the story is that this diversity, this thing that is so complex to understand, is our best capital. Biologically, it makes a lot of sense because biodiversity is like chaos, an apparent disorder that stresses us, because we have this view that is so compartmentalized, gridded, when it should be the best attribute of this territory.

Mongabay: What are your dreams for Surikí in the next 10 years?

Enilda Jiménez: I have that dream where we are like a laboratory, where it is possible to talk about what we find difficult to talk about; a place where we will be able to recognize the richness in a different way, a place that will give us back the story of our worth based on our diversity. I think Surikí has the power to become a metaphor for healing. I think it is a precious metaphor that one can take all this development model, which has cost what it has cost to heal all that pain, but also from a place like Surikí, show that from there can emerge energies and forces capable of returning resources to that place, for the improvement of its wealth and its well-being. To me, that is what peace looks like.

Mongabay: Since we are talking about metaphors, I would also like to ask you a slightly metaphorical question: If you could plant a symbolic seed, what kind of tree would it be, what would it represent for you and where would you sow it?

Enilda Jiménez:Well, in terms of trees, I have dedicated myself to germinating and dispersing cativo (Prioria copaifera). For me, this is a very important tree because it has been the great botanical victim of the flora of this place [Urabá]. What we did to the cativo was unprecedented in terms of hyper-exploitation; today it has been [locally] declared at risk. And I like the cativo very much because, in the end, it is the tree that closes the circle of the water regime.

“It is like the main hero of maintaining the water flow and dynamics in order. Its seed needs the water to spread, it dances with the water to grow. It needs the flood, it needs it to go away, and back and forth. In that rhythm, the cativo grows, thrives, and when it does, the water regime also calms down, the water slows down, the water starts to be again a factor of protection and care and not a factor of destruction. So I would plant cativo as I have been doing. I would continue to plant it in Surikí, but I think that Urabá should also plant cativos everywhere [laughs].

Banner image: Enilda Jiménez holds a cativo branch. Image courtesy of Rubén Torres.

Credits

Karen Coates Editor

This story first appeared on Mongabay

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