A Colombian court last week ordered Occidental Petroleum Corp. to halt temporarily all work on a large oil drilling project in a rainforest area that the native U’wa tribe claims as ancestral land. The court ruled that the U’wa had not been properly consulted about the development. Occidental and its partner in the project, the state oil company Ecopetrol, plan to appeal the court’s ruling. The U’wa have blockaded the test drill site since November, and international environmental groups have been getting the word out about the U’wa tribe’s plight.
