In Puerto Bolívar, the water that fed the Wayúu jagüeyes was diverted four decades ago to supply South America’s largest coal mine. El Cerrejón needed it to wash the ore and control dust; the Wayúu and Afro-descendant communities of La Guajira needed it for their animals, their crops and their rituals. The megamine’s appropriation of water displaced entire hydrosocial territorialities, and it was women who carried the response, demanding a bond with the territory foreign to extractive engineering.
The theological genealogy of ecofeminism
In 1974, a woman gave that bond a name. Françoise d’Eaubonne, French writer, militated in the Communist Party between 1946 and 1956, co-founded in 1971 France’s first revolutionary homosexual movement and published that year, within the incipient front of ecology and feminism she was animating inside the women’s liberation movement, Le féminisme ou la mort. It was there that she coined the word ecofeminism. Her thesis was stark, the oppression of women and the destruction of nature share a single root, patriarchy, and the two crises, the ecological and the one of gender, cannot be resolved separately. The book took decades to be translated into Spanish. Her idea crossed the Atlantic almost at once.
It did so first in theological form. In the early nineties, amid the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit and the fifth centenary of the European invasion, a group of Latin American feminist theologians decided to break with the anthropocentrism of liberation theology. Con-spirando was born, a Chilean collective founded in 1991 by, among others, the Uruguayan-Venezuelan Gladys Parentelli, and it became the regional epicentre of what came to be called ecofeminist theology. Its most influential figure, the Brazilian nun Ivone Gebara, defined the project in terms still cited today.
“Ecofeminism can be regarded as a wisdom that attempts to save the ecosystem and women.”
Con-spirando published sixty issues of its namesake journal between 1992 and 2009, addressing abortion, domestic violence, agroecology, the AIDS epidemic and the sexual division of labour, matters still barely acknowledged within Latin American liberation theology at the time, while giving space to the outlook of Mapuche, Aymara and Maya peoples. Its influence extended well beyond Chile, feeding parallel debates among Christian base communities in Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, the very countries from which its principal exponents came. It ran an annual school of ecofeminist theology, still active today, through which successive cohorts of pastoral workers and researchers have passed. And it left behind a genealogy of names, Coca Trillini in Argentina, Fanny Geymonat-Pantelís in Bolivia, Marcia Moya in Ecuador, Gladys Parentelli in Venezuela.
These theologians did not arrive at ecofeminism through the university. Most militated in the Ecclesial Base Communities, the pastoral arm of liberation theology, among the continent’s poorest women. That set them apart from the ecofeminism of the United States at the same time, closer to university departments than to working-class neighbourhoods, and it exposed them to a double rejection, that of an ecclesiastical hierarchy that judged their rereading of the Trinity heterodox, and that of sectors of feminism itself, which accused them of essentialism for their spiritual language. The label failed to extinguish the political work they carried on in parallel.
The turn towards territory
Ecofeminism’s second Latin American moment arrived with the extractivist boom of the last two decades and shifted the axis from spirituality to territory. In a work published in 2018 in the journal Ecología Política, the Venezuelan collective LaDanta LasCanta identified at least fifty organisations defining themselves as ecofeminist or operating under what they call an “ecofeminist imaginary”, present in Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Guatemala, Mexico and other countries of the region, active since the late eighties. The same collective coined another term to name the scale of the problem, the Phallocene, a way of renaming the Anthropocene by pointing out that the global environmental crisis is not the work of humanity in the abstract but of a concrete patriarchal order. Among the fifty organisations is Comunitar, in Colombia, established in 1987 as the Corporación para el Ecodesarrollo Comunitario and reconverted in 2010 into an explicitly ecofeminist organisation. Its work has focused on the psychosocial and legal support of victims of sexual violence within the armed conflict.
Two episodes precede this turn and explain its urgency. In the late eighties, the indigenous women of Sarayaku, in the Ecuadorian Amazon, rose up against oil exploitation of their territory and against patriarchy within their own community. And in Honduras, the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas (Copinh, founded in 1993 and later led by Berta Cáceres) waged a struggle that was at once antipatriarchal, anti-imperialist and antineoliberal. Its best-known fight was against the Agua Zarca dam, on the Gualcarque river, a hydroelectric project that Cáceres and her organisation managed to halt after years of Lenca resistance. Neither organisation called itself ecofeminist at the time. Both were read, retrospectively, as part of this genealogy.
The defence of the territory-body, the phrase that would come to sum up this second moment, is no decorative metaphor. It joins two scales of dispossession that extractivism produces at once, that of the land and that of the bodies of the women who inhabit it. Rosa Dominga Trapasso, Peruvian ecofeminist theologian, put it this way in 1993, in the pages of the journal Con-spirando.
“Feminism necessarily had to evolve towards ecofeminism, bringing to light the links between every form of oppression.”
In Colombia, this evolution took institutional shape in 2015. From 18 to 20 August of that year, forty-one women from across the country and four international guests gathered in Fusagasugá for the National Gathering of Women Defenders of Life against Extractivism, convened by Censat Agua Viva, the Women and Mining School, the Urgent Action Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean, and Ammucale. The gathering’s stated aim was to discuss the direct harms that extractivist advance inflicts on the bodies and territories of women, drawing on the experiences of resistance already carried by grassroots organisations and collectives. Among the guests was the Honduran activist Berta Cáceres, assassinated a few months later, in March 2016, for her leadership of the fight against the Agua Zarca dam. The Women and Mining School, an itinerant project launched by Censat in 2007 within the Friends of the Earth International network, continues to train women linked to territories subjected to mining and energy megaprojects, seeking their direct participation in shaping mining policy.
El Cerrejón, water and dispossession
The case of El Cerrejón condenses what this activism confronts on the ground. Operating since the eighties, the mine has diverted or altered several waterways to sustain its extraction, among them the Bruno stream, whose diversion the Constitutional Court suspended in 2017 through Ruling SU-698, protecting the rights to water, food security and health of the affected Wayúu communities. Through capture, contamination and diversion of waterways, this appropriation produced a territorial dispossession that confined the communities to ever-narrower margins. Against this mining territoriality, centred on resource accumulation, the Wayúu communities hold a relationship with water that is not reducible to the productive; the water that irrigates crops also carries memory and sustains ritual. The very monitoring of the Bruno stream ruling found, years after the judgment, disagreements over water quality upstream and downstream of the diversion, and over whether the flow ought to be restored to its natural bed. Wayúu and Afro-Guajira women led the organisational response to this disagreement, and also contested the racist and colonial logics that the mine brought with it, alongside the pollution.
This dispossession finds, further, a second and more recent judicial backing, and a harsher one. The Constitutional Court declared, through Ruling T-302 of 2017, an unconstitutional state of affairs over the widespread violation of the rights to water, food and health of Wayúu children in Riohacha, Manaure, Maicao and Uribia. The Special Monitoring Chamber for that ruling remains active nine years on. During a judicial inspection carried out between 26 and 28 August 2026, it found that communities such as Waimpiralein still draw water from a surface run-off reservoir contaminated with animal excrement and plant matter, and it ordered interim measures to supply them with water fit for human consumption. The unconstitutional state of affairs, nearly a decade after its declaration, remains unresolved.
To this dispute is added a figure that rarely crosses paths with ecofeminist discourse; according to the gender-equity sectoral study of the Ministerio de Minas y Energía, women make up only 13% of Colombia’s mining workforce, a proportion that falls to 20% in operational posts, those that directly produce the ore, and that reverses only in subsistence mining, without a mining title, where they are the majority and where they are more exposed to gender violence and armed conflict.
The organised response
The Urgent Action Fund for Latin America and the Caribbean, from its headquarters in Bogotá, documented in 2016 the same impacts, repeated with local variations across the region. Loss of economic autonomy when subsistence agriculture gives way to the mining economy. Loss of food sovereignty when water and soil become contaminated. Deterioration of the right to health of the women and communities living alongside the extractive enclave. Erosion of cultural identity in communities where territory is also memory and the ground of their own language. And a pattern the organisations document again and again, rising domestic and sexual violence in the zones where extractive enclaves settle, tied to the arrival of outside labour and the militarisation of the territory.
The response has been neither individual nor recent. It has organised itself into NGOs, environmental collectives and coalitions cutting across the ethnic and the sectoral, indigenous, Afro-descendant, peasant and urban women meeting in assemblies, itinerant schools and regional networks that do not always share an origin or a language, but do share a common adversary, and sometimes not even the same name for it.
The Uruguayan researcher Lucía Delbene-Lezama, of the Centro Latinoamericano de Ecología Social, proposed in 2015 a definition that serves as a provisional close to this genealogy; ecofeminism is not a single current but a broad set of outlooks and practices addressing the simultaneous domination over women and over nature. In certain territories, according to the same researcher’s observations, women react differently from men when the environment they live in becomes contaminated or threatened; they are the ones who, first, organise the response.
This breadth is also its practical use. It allows a single category to name what happens when a river is diverted in La Guajira, what happens when a constitutional court finds, nine years after ordering it, that clean water still has not reached a Wayúu territory, and what happened when a French writer, in 1974, decided that the ecological crisis and the crisis of women were, at bottom, the same crisis…
A.B.
Sources
- Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras (Copinh), “Quiénes somos”
- Corte Constitucional de Colombia, Sentencia T-302 de 2017 y seguimiento (auto de medidas cautelares, agosto de 2026)
- Corte Constitucional de Colombia, Sentencia SU-698 de 2017 (caso arroyo Bruno)
- Françoise d’Eaubonne, Le féminisme ou la mort, 1974
- LaDanta LasCanta, “De la teología al antiextractivismo: ecofeminismos en Abya Yala”, Ecología Política n.º 54, 2018
- LaDanta LasCanta, “El Faloceno: redefinir el Antropoceno desde una mirada ecofeminista”, Ecología Política n.º 53, 2017
- Lucía Delbene-Lezama, “Las mujeres no se rinden: ecofeminismos y desarrollos en América Latina”, CLAES, 2015
- Censat Agua Viva, Escuela Mujer y Minería / Escuela de la Sustentabilidad
- Cosal Uviéu, “Documental: Mujeres defendiendo territorios”, sobre el Encuentro Nacional de Mujeres Defensoras de la Vida frente al Extractivismo, Fusagasugá, 2015
- Sandra Teherán Sánchez, dir. William Sacher Freslon, “Megaminería de carbón en Colombia, caso El Cerrejón: apropiación del agua y defensa territorial de las mujeres”, 2025
