On 6 September 2026, Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara announced a reform that will process prior consultation and environmental licensing as two parallel procedures rather than one sequential procedure, and he presented the measure with a phrase Colombia’s leading media outlets reproduced immediately, we say no to extortion in the name of prior consultation. The reform prioritises the Sirius project, the largest natural gas find in the country’s history, operated by Ecopetrol, Colombia’s majority state owned oil company, alongside Brazil’s Petrobras, owner of the offshore section where Taganga is located. Four days earlier, both companies had publicly accused that community, in Santa Marta, of demanding a disproportionate sum in exchange for advancing its own prior consultation over the Sirius pipeline. The governor of the Taganga indigenous cabildo, the community’s self governing authority, Ariel Daniels De Andréis, rejected the accusation and explained that the figure corresponds to the real cost of the social, environmental and cultural impact studies the law itself requires him to submit.
Taganga, the Cabildo Ecopetrol Never Called
Taganga is not a new name on the map of Colombian prior consultations. The cabildo that occupies the coastal strip of Tayrona park, in Santa Marta, has taken part for two years in two separate processes tied to Sirius, one concerning the exploitation of the field and the other concerning the pipeline that would cross a hundred and sixteen communities on its way to the coast. “In two years we have not even established contact with Ecopetrol,” De Andréis told El Tiempo, a detail neither the oil company nor the government mentioned in their initial statements, the talks took place solely with Petrobras, the operator of the project’s offshore section.
The figure that triggered the accusation, between three thousand and six thousand million pesos, corresponds, according to the cabildo, to the cost of the social, environmental and cultural impact studies required by the prior consultation regulations themselves, boat transport, hired specialists, food, field technicians. Petrobras and Ecopetrol consider it twenty times higher than what was paid to the other hundred and sixteen communities along the route. Neither company has published the itemised breakdown that would allow the two figures to be compared side by side.
The Asociación Colombiana del Petróleo, the trade association grouping the sector’s main operators, went further than the government itself in its initial statements on the case. It called for dismantling the extortion rings that have seized upon certain prior consultations, a formulation that treats as organised crime a conflict that, in Taganga, is for now reduced to a disagreement over figures for the cost of a technical study. Petrobras operates Sirius’s offshore section, Taganga depends on those same waters for its artisanal fishing, and none of the sources consulted by the Colombian press has yet explained why the community should accept without question the amount the company considers reasonable.
This outlet documented the same right being violated on the other side of the continent in May, in Chile’s Lithium Triangle, where Atacameño communities face a similar pattern, the energy transition demanding critical minerals without first securing the consent of those who inhabit the exploited territory.
Sirius holds more than six trillion cubic feet of gas, a volume sufficient to cover close to 40% of national demand, and is the largest confirmed reserve in Colombia’s history.
Portafolio and La Razón, 2026
Ninety Six Hours Without a Single Technical Study
On 2 September, Infobae published the extortion accusation attributed to fishermen and spokespeople from Taganga. On 6 September, Lara presented the reform that detaches prior consultation from its role as a precondition for environmental licensing. The sequence did not go unnoticed among opposition senators, who pointed out that no technical study underpinned, in those four days, the diagnosis on which a measure applicable to the entire country, not only to Taganga, was built. Nor did Lara specify whether the change would require a legal reform approved by Congress or whether the government would apply it by decree, an ambiguity the very senators promoting a legislative reform flagged that same day.
Fabio Arjona, the environment minister, had already made similar remarks weeks earlier, declaring that prior consultation must not become a mechanism for extortion, without then naming any specific case. The stance was not new in his rhetoric, on 3 July, as minister designate, he had already staked out a position on another sensitive issue, fracking, declaring that no insurmountable technological barrier existed, though he expressly excluded national parks and protected areas, and limited eligible territory to under 2% of the country. He also promised to keep the Anla, the authority that issues environmental licences, and to speed up its procedures, an agenda Lara’s reform directly complements, less processing time, less de facto veto power for consulted communities.
Senator Juan Espinal, one of the reform’s most visible promoters in Congress, had warned on social media, weeks before the Taganga controversy, that Sirius was the country’s most important gas project and could not remain stalled for lack of rules governing the prior consultation process, and he called for a law setting those rules for Sirius, the Canal del Dique and other projects held back by the same regulatory vacuum.
The list of projects the reform declares priorities grew quickly, Sirius, the Canal del Dique, and Buenaventura’s pier 13.
Thirteen Thousand Processes Before Taganga Even Existed
Taganga’s case is just one among more than thirteen thousand prior consultation processes Colombia has carried out between 2011 and 2026, according to figures Senator Juan Espinal presented during the legislative debate. The country accounts for eighty five per cent of all prior consultations on the continent, a concentration far above its share of the region’s population, according to the deputy minister of Mines and Energy, Luis Francisco Madriñán. Of the processes opened in the last four years, only sixteen per cent reached the formalisation of an agreement. Seventy seven per cent remain active. Nearly a third of those active processes, thirty one per cent, have been completely stalled for more than four years.
Part of that concentration has a census based explanation. DANE identified a hundred and fifteen recognised indigenous peoples in the country in 2018, twenty two more than in the 2005 census, spread across territory where most mining and energy projects happen to sit precisely in reservation zones or areas of ethnic influence. Each newly identified people adds, in principle, one more party with the right to be consulted before any project on its territory can move forward.
Colectora, the power transmission line meant to bring renewable energy from La Guajira, illustrates the scale of the problem outside the hydrocarbons sector, eight years of negotiations, a number of consulted communities that rose from two hundred and thirty five to more than two hundred and fifty.
The debate over how to unblock these processes did not begin with Sirius. Deputy Minister Madriñán himself describes it as a backlog built up over fifteen years, during which prior consultation was applied without a centralised registry of communities or legally defined deadlines, allowing each process to be negotiated case by case, without common rules either party could invoke in advance.
Facing this bottleneck, three proposals circulate that do not agree with one another. The government wants to run the procedures in parallel and strip prior consultation of its status as a suspensive condition, that is, the requirement that must be met before the licence can take effect. The Centro Democrático proposes fixed deadlines and a centralised information system, the Sicop, with an official characterisation of communities within six months. Fedesarrollo calls for a statutory law and a single registry of peoples, as well as moving consultations ahead of project tendering, not after. All three agree on one diagnosis, the current system cannot keep up, but they differ on exactly where they locate the solution, before the project for Fedesarrollo, in parallel for the government, with deadlines and without touching the suspensive condition for the Centro Democrático.
Colombia carried out more than thirteen thousand prior consultation processes between 2011 and 2026, eighty five per cent of those recorded across the continent, and only sixteen per cent of those opened in the last four years culminated in a formalised agreement.
Senate of the Republic and Ministry of Mines and Energy, figures cited by Juan Espinal and Luis Francisco Madriñán, 2026
What Changes When Consultation Stops Being a Condition
Convention 169 was not the ILO’s first instrument on indigenous peoples. It replaced, in 1989, an earlier convention, 107 of 1957, which treated these communities as populations on a path to assimilation rather than as subjects of their own collective rights. Colombia ratified the new convention through Law 21 of 1991, the same year the new Constitution recognised, for the first time, the nation’s ethnic and cultural diversity as a founding principle, not a tolerated exception.
The distinction between consultation and consent is not a semantic nuance. Convention 169 obliges the State to consult in good faith and seek agreement, but it does not require the community’s consent as a veto condition, except in cases of forced relocation or resettlement. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, of 2007, went further by enshrining free, prior and informed consent as a standard, though it is a text without direct binding force. Colombia therefore operates on the weakest rung of that international architecture, and Lara’s reform weakens it further still.
The Constitution of that same year, in its second article, sets as an essential purpose of the State facilitating everyone’s participation in the decisions that affect them and ensuring the effectiveness of the rights it enshrines. Neither Convention 169 nor the Constitution’s second article makes that right conditional on the speed at which the State needs to carry out an energy project.
Turning prior consultation into a procedure running parallel to the environmental licence does not merely shorten a timeline, it changes the nature of the negotiation. As long as consultation remains a precondition, the community retains a real capacity to shape the project before a licence authorising it even exists. Once both procedures run at the same time, the licence can advance while consultation remains open, and the community then negotiates against a project the institutional apparatus already treats as approved.
Taganga asked that the real cost of a study the law itself requires it to produce be paid. Ecopetrol and Petrobras called that demand extortion, and in under four days that word travelled the distance from a fishing community to a national reform touching the country’s other thirteen thousand consultations. The government asked for trust on 6 September. The Constitution’s second article never asked for it, it imposed it as an obligation of the State, thirty five years ago…
A.B.
Sources
- Interior Minister Rodrigo Lara announced changes to prior consultation to speed up projects such as Sirius and Canal del Dique
- ‘We say no to extortion in the name of prior consultation’, Lara makes Sirius a government priority
- Sirius project, community spokesperson in Taganga accused of extorting Ecopetrol speaks out
- Fishermen in Taganga allegedly extorting Ecopetrol
- ‘Extortion rings that seized certain prior consultations must be dismantled’, ACP warns of risks of delaying Sirius
- More than 13,000 prior consultations in 15 years, where the debate to reform this process in Colombia stands
- Sirius will resolve the gas shortage, how one of Ecopetrol’s flagship projects is progressing
- Indigenous population of Colombia, results of the 2018 national census
- Law 21 of 1991, Congress of the Republic of Colombia
- Political Constitution of Colombia, article 2
