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Alarm Sounded on Panama-Colombia Electrical Project |
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By Yadira Ferrer*
Environmentalists fear that a project to connect the Colombian and Panamanian electrical systems will hurt Central America's largest protected area. The route of the power lines will be determined in six months.
BOGOTA - The Colombian Ministry of Mining and Energy has its environmental impact statements ready for four possible routes of a controversial electrical connection project between Colombia and Panama, a region of vast biological diversity.
Environmentalists fear the project would harm the jungles of the Darién region, whose Panamanian territory includes the largest natural protected area in Central America, although it has not been decided if the energy pylons would traverse that area, or run further to the north, along Colombia's Gulf of Urabá, on the Caribbean Sea.
Two of the possible routes are by land, and the other two combine land and underwater stretches. The Panamanian-Colombian energy connection would run 500 to 600 kilometers, and cost between 172 and 221 million dollars.
The Cerramatoso substation, in the northern Colombian department of Córdoba, thus would be united with the Panama II substation, allowing transmission of 300 megawatts from Colombia to Panama, and 200 megawatts in the other direction.
Colombian Mining and Energy Minister Luis Mejía says the aim is for interconnectivity to be achieved by 2008.
Hugo Ortega, with the non-governmental Fundación Darién, which has been working for the past 12 years to protect the region, said the local communities have not been consulted on the project, as required by the Colombian constitution for development projects in their territories.
''Local residents are always the last to find out, and we are left wondering how those four environmental impact studies were conducted without anyone here realizing,'' Ortega said in comments to Tierramérica.
In the opinion of the Fundación Darién, any Colombia-Panama electrical integration project would cross the Darién jungles, a border region that has suffered tensions due to incursions by armed Colombian guerrilla groups, and the site of the Darién National Park, Central America's largest.
Established in 1980 to preserve the zone's rich biological diversity, the park covers 597,000 hectares. UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recognized it in 1983 as a heritage of humanity site and a biosphere reserve.
The Darién region extends from the Panama Canal to the east, and runs along the Colombian coast on the Pacific to northern Ecuador. It also reaches the foothills of the western Andes in Colombia and Ecuador, rising from sea level to 4,000 meters. Its ecosystems run the gamut from lowland tropical rainforest to Andean plateaus.
Its vegetation types include mangroves, scrub, grasslands, marshes, and humid, arid and mountain forests.
The Darién's human inhabitants come from three major groups: the indigenous Emberá-Wounaan and Kuna, Afro-Colombians and Afro-Panamanians, and immigrants from other regions.
Several threatened or endangered species live in Darién jungles, including the harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja), Baird's tapir (Tapirus bairdii), and the puma (Felis concolor).
A route for connecting the Panamanian and Colombian electrical systems must be chosen by mid-year 2005. Afterwards, the two countries will have to incorporate the project into their own energy development plans, begin applications for the respective environmental impact permits, and finally, open bidding for construction, a government source told Tierramérica, requesting anonymity.
According to the official, the environmental assessment of the alternatives made by Colombia's state-run electrical integration agency, ISA, and its Panamanian counterpart, ETESA, produced the four potential routes, taking into account the environmental and other regulations in force in each country.
ISA and ETESA presented updates in August 2004 of electrical and energy studies, which showed that the integration of the two countries is ''technically feasible''.
The studies considered the characteristics and performance of the Central American and Andean markets, and in the opinion of the Colombian Ministry of Mining and Energy ''allowed a preliminary statement that the project could generate benefits as a result of savings in operating costs.''
Marcelo Antinori, head of infrastructure for Central America for the Inter-American Development Bank, said in September that the bank could support the electrical integration project if the countries involved so requested.
On Nov. 6, Líder Sucre, head of the Panamanian National Association for the Conservation of Nature, protested a different Colombia-Panama integration project that involved the Darién: construction of a 96-km stretch of the Pan-American Highway, a route that would ultimately connect Alaska to Patagonia.
Sucre said the highway would have negative impacts for the plant and animal wildlife of the eastern Panamanian province because it would foment unregulated human settlement, indiscriminate logging, and intentional fires set to extend the farming frontier.
But Panama's Foreign Minister Samuel Lewis Navarro told the press in November that his country '' would not allow highway construction in the Darién if it has a negative impact on the environment or the population.''
* Yadira Ferrer is a Tierramérica contributor.
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