The voicing spaces of the Atrato guardians: Choreographies,choralities,and testimonial strategies weaving territorivers

Malecón of Quibdó - February 27, 2020

The Ruling supports this premise of viewing the river as a living being.

At six in the morning, Ramiro—lawyer and community leader in the Atrato ruling process—and I messaged on WhatsApp to coordinate our meeting point to travel together to the Environmental Public Hearing (audiencia pública ambiental, APA) on the El Roble mining project by MINER S.A., scheduled for the next day. We met at one of the corners of the Alameda. Ramiro got out of the car to greet me while talking on his phone. He wore a white T-shirt that read “Somos Guardianes” (We are Guardians). I got into the back seat as he said: “I present to you the famous Alexander Rodríguez, guardian of the Atrato. Now we’re going to pick up Isis and then we’ll head to El Carmen.”

The journey to El Carmen de Atrato took about seven hours due to road construction. This route connects Medellín (Antioquia) and Quibdó (Chocó). Along the narrow curves that follow the river's winding path, emberá community families are settled. Trucks carrying goods, heavy machinery, and buses pass by. Against the current—like the bocachico—we observe shifts in incline, rhythm, and force. During the journey, we talked about what brings me to Chocó, Ruling T-622 (2016), and the situation of the river. Alexander told me that, in addition to being a lawyer, he is also a poet, and he recited a couplet from verses he dedicates to the Atrato river basin, recognized as subject of rights (2016):

I remember that the Atrato

Alexander's copla also echoes a wider fluvial memory in Colombia. As Alejandro Camargo (2023) suggests in “R de río,” rivers hold not only sustenance and movement, but also disappearance, sedimented violence, and remembrance. Read in this light, the Atrato as “mystery” and “cemetery” is not merely a local metaphor, but part of a broader repertoire through which riverine communities register how flow and sediment become entangled with war, memory, and re-existence.

In this article I submerge into the gap the bocachico's snoring opens: between what the river makes perceptible in everyday life and what institutional procedures will recognize as admissible knowledge when river rights are on the table. My argument is that the Atrato's legal personhood becomes actionable through voicing spaces—contact zones where claims are composed, translated, and contested across unequal infrastructures of credibility, and where riverine claims become legible—or remain unheard—through unequal conditions of reception.

In these spaces, what is at stake is not only what is said, but how reception is organized: the grammars of listening that decide what can enter the record as knowledge, evidence, and responsibility. What is cast outside audibility as “noise,” affect, “mere experience,” or simply as that which does not make sense (Acosta López, 2023; Ochoa Gautier, 2014). I treat these grammars not as a failure of attention but as a historically produced aural regime, a set of institutional habits, formats, and thresholds that make some realities legible while rendering others inaudible—not heard, not sensed, not recognized as evidence. The ruling itself is a listening response, as guardian Alexander Rodríguez puts it, the Court “gave us reason” because it heard their struggle and included them in the process so their territory would no longer be governed from outside. This is why the bocachico's low-frequency insistence matters: it points to forms of river defense carried in vibration, rhythm, and absence, stored and transmitted through embodied memory, gesture, fear, and everyday attunement—forms that often exceed the state's sensory and bureaucratic capacities to register harm.

To track how voicing becomes possible—and how it is interrupted—I work with three analytic devices. Choreographies name how participation is arranged through sequencing, pacing, time limits, and role-assignment. Choralities name how collective voicing and reception are sustained as distributed resonance—through applause, murmurs, fatigue, interruptions, and coordinated silences that keep a space open under unequal conditions. Testimonial strategies, drawing on Acosta López (2023), name the practical work of rendering harm publicly consequential by contesting the conditions of reception through which harm is either registered—or neutralized. In this article I elucidate how voicing rivers is practiced through voicing spaces. How do these spaces shape what can be received as knowledge and responsibility? And how do guardians and allies—through choreographies, choralities, and testimonial strategies—keep river harm from dissolving into procedure?

In the basin, guardians name their work as vocería: being voceros del río and practicing vocear. I work with this term—and propose voicing rivers—to name a practice that is not “speaking for” the river, nor a metaphor of giving it a voice. It names a situated labor of making reception possible across these grammars: cultivating conditions under which river signs, injuries, and obligations leak, are registered and carried—through speech and silence, documents and gatherings, images, gestures, and mediated circulation (Gallón Droste, 2023).

Between 2019 and 2023, as part of my PhD research process Vocear Ríos Atrato, I developed a multimodal, multi-sited research practice to follow how the CCGA enacts and expands Judgment T-622 across meetings, public forums, and beyond institutional encounters—through fieldnotes, recordings, and conversations with guardians and allied actors—tracing how vocería is composed, negotiated, and made to travel. I call this stance the arts of listening: a situated practice of attunement and response to the river's multiple existences—its registers, rhythms, and manifestations—and to the thresholds that make some of them publicly hearable while others remain beyond capture. The El Carmen APA functions as an ethnographic aperture into this longer struggle because it is a legally mandated, public listening scenario: a moment where an environmental authority must receive claims on record, and where audibility itself—who is heard, how, and with what evidentiary weight—becomes part of the dispute.

Before returning to El Carmen, I situate the Atrato basin and the political-legal stakes that shape what can be received, contested, and acted upon as validated knowledge.

Atrato

The Atrato River, spanning approximately 750 kilometers, meanders through most of Chocó and links it materially and politically to Antioquia. As Peter Wade (2004) notes, the proximity of a racialized, resource-rich region to a more developed mestizo region pursuing economic growth has long reproduced Chocó's inequality and exclusion. This history is sustained by an extractive imaginary: Chocó repeatedly rendered as baldío—a “vacant” frontier—available for concession and capture, while Black and Indigenous life has been treated as disposable. In this legal-geographic grammar, the region appears as a reservoir of “nature” rather than a dense inhabited world, enabling extraction to be justified as development, even as it unravels riverine life (Asher, 2009; Escobar, 2018).

For many inhabitants—mostly Black and Indigenous communities—Atrato is not a backdrop but an infrastructure of life: a basis for transportation, fishing, economy, and diverse social, cultural, and spiritual practices. This aligns with hydrosocial approaches that treat rivers not as ‘nature’ plus ‘society,’ but as socio-natural formations co-produced through governance, infrastructure, violence, and everyday practice (Oslender, 2002). River life is organized through continuities between water, land, and social relations; the basin is a more-than-human network of interwoven beings, rhythms, and obligations (Rogelis et al., 2022). At the same time, the basin faces layered socio-environmental conflict: extractive economies ((i)legal and criminal), toxic contamination, deforestation, armed control, forced displacement, and long-standing structural racism and state neglect—violences that sediment in water, bodies, and everyday life (González-Serrano, 2024; Rogelis et al., 2022). In 2015, Black and Indigenous organizations filed a tutela against state agencies for failing to regulate mining and protect fundamental rights; the Court's response became Judgment T-622 (2016), recognizing the Atrato basin as a subject of rights and mandating guardianship (González-Serrano, 2024; Melo-Ascencio, 2024).

The legal and political background of T-622 did not begin with river rights. It emerged from longer Afro-Colombian and Indigenous struggles over territory, participation, and collective life in the Pacific. In Colombia, Black ethno-territorial claims were partially constitutionalized through Transitory Article 55 of the 1991 Constitution and developed in Law 70 of 1993, which recognized collective property, cultural rights, and forms of participation for Black communities in riparian Pacific regions, while Decree 1745 of 1995 formalized Community Councils as representative-administrative bodies. T-622 should therefore be read not as an isolated legal rupture, but as a reworking of this longer field: one that extends ethno-territorial defense beyond collective territory alone by recognizing the Atrato itself as a rights-bearing subject.

The Atrato ruling is now central within rights-of-nature debates, yet critical political ecology insists that legal personhood can circulate as promise while extractive governance persists. The relation between the ruling and El Roble was not explicit in the judgment itself. Its relevance for El Carmen emerged later, through the implementation of the ruling and through the efforts of riverine and allied organizations to insist that defending the Atrato also required attention to its upper basin and source zones, where extractive pressures were already reshaping water, land, and social life. The law at stake here is not a single legal event but a layered field: longer ethno-territorial struggles, the 2016 ruling itself, subsequent guardianship arrangements, and the environmental participatory procedures through which mining conflicts are publicly contested.

The El Carmen APA should therefore be understood as a double scene. Formally, it was not a rights-of-nature procedure, but a citizen-participation mechanism convened around extractive governance. Politically, however, guardians and allies worked it as a river-defense forum. This distinction matters because it shows why the hearing became consequential: not because river rights automatically governed it, but because actors on the ground strategically connected source-zone mining conflict to basin-wide guardianship. Scholars warn that implementation is often routed through permits, monitoring files, and technocratic verification, and that participation can be managed as procedure rather than transformation (González-Serrano, 2024; Tanasescu, 2022). Asher's work is crucial here because it shows how participatory democracy can operate as an apparatus of inclusion that contains dissent—without eliminating the possibility that these same forums can be tactically worked to build coalitions and claims (Asher, 2009). Melo-Ascencio's critique likewise matters because it cautions that river-as-subject frameworks can be absorbed into racialized dominance when the political economy of extraction remains intact (Melo-Ascencio, 2024). Rather than presenting legal personhood as resolution, I stay with these tensions and ask what it takes—practically, procedurally, and affectively—for river injury to remain publicly consequential.

This tension is also debated through the figure of the guardian and the unequal politics of representation it installs. Across rights-of-nature cases, guardianship is typically split between a state appointee and a “community” representative; in Colombia, this arrangement unfolds amid routine threats against environmental and social leaders, making spokespersonship itself a risky political exposure (Murcia Riaño, 2019). These risks intersect with epistemic hierarchies: in state-scripted forums, expert voices—backed by academic and institutional authority—tend to travel as the “legitimate” voices of nature, while community voices are more easily contained as testimony, experience, or “ancestral knowledge.” Law thus works as both an infrastructure that can stabilize extractive governance and a contested tool through which authority may be turned against itself, even as participation is disciplined by procedural form (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2007; Góngora-Mera, 2012; Lemaitre Ripoll, 2009). Political ecology has long warned that linking indigeneity/ethnicity to environmental stewardship can operate as strategic essentialism while also re-entrenching the trope of the “ecological native” and enabling state control of difference (Ulloa, 2004; Wade, 2004). These are struggles over audibility—over what becomes publicly hearable and credible within institutional regimes of listening—and this is precisely what the voicing spaces I follow make visible: not only what is said about the river, but how reception is organized and authority is assigned.

T-622 mandates the “protection, restoration, maintenance and conservation” of the Atrato watershed through 13 orders to be implemented via action plans led by a guardianship commission—one spokesperson on behalf of riverine communities and one on behalf of the state (Corte Constitucional de Colombia, 2016). Implementation documents cast 2040 as a horizon of “restored” river life, yet this horizon is continually pulled into institutional pacing and extractive realities. This is where public forums become decisive: as Andrea Ballestero shows, hearings are not only sites of participation but modern state mechanisms of role-performance—procedures that can stage responsiveness while disciplining the conditions under which demands become consequential (Ballestero, 2019). It is in this terrain that I return to the El Carmen APA: a state-regulated forum, but also a hard-won civil-society tool through which guardians and allies navigate choreographies, choralities, and testimonial strategies to keep river harm from dissolving into procedural closure.

The voices of the Atrato

The fourth order of Judgment T-622 mandates the formation of the Commission of Guardians of the Atrato, charged with mediating the river's representation between state agencies and riverine communities—and thus, as the Guardians insist, the river's vocería. Following the Court's recommendations, then-president Juan Manuel Santos appointed the Ministry of Environment (MADS) as guardian on behalf of the state through Decree 749. From the beginning, however, community organizations in Chocó contested the idea that a single institution could speak for the river. For them, the basin is multiple and heterogeneous: what is called “Atrato” changes with where and how one inhabits it—agricultural rivers, mining rivers, sacred rivers—each with distinct rhythms, injuries, and becomings. Being a voice for the Atrato is inseparable from one's relationship with those flows (Cagueñas et al., 2020).

Through sustained negotiation with MADS, riverine organizations expanded the figure of a “community guardian” into a body of guardians—a first, decisive translation of the ruling's institutional design into riverine political practice. The resulting Collegiate Body of Guardians of the Atrato (CCGA) articulates seven organizations spanning the basin, from springs to mouth: COCOMACIA, FISCH, COCOMOPOCA, ASCOBA, the Permanent Dialogue Table of the Indigenous Peoples of Chocó, Community Councils of Río Quito, and the Environmental Committee of El Carmen de Atrato (MSACA) (Guardianes del Atrato, 2024; Revet, 2022). Each organization is represented, in most cases, by one woman and one man, forming a heterogeneous and intergenerational collective in which, as Cagueñas, Galindo, and Rasmussen write, “[i]ndigenous, Mestizo farmers and Black peoples try to speak the same language that, without ignoring the different ways of relating to the river, aims at the reinvention of riverine life” (2020: 192). As Luz Enith Mosquera, Guardian for FISCH, puts it: “like the river, we are a collective body…” (March 17, 2020).

MSACA's incorporation into the guardianship architecture is especially important here. Its inclusion gave one platform from El Carmen a formal place within the representation of the Atrato's upper basin, making it possible for local extractive conflicts to travel within the ruling's implementation spaces. At the same time, formal placement did not resolve the politics of representation in El Carmen. The practicality of institutionalized representation and the legitimacy of grievances did not always coincide. Some inhabitants depended on the mine, others denounced it, and many calibrated what they could say according to shifting relations of risk, retaliation, and credibility. The hearing thus reveals that representation of the Atrato is not exhausted by a decree or by a single organizational channel; it is a moving, uneven field in which authority is negotiated among guardians, community actors, state institutions, NGOs, experts, and those who remain silent or speak through others.

The CCGA assumes legal representation of the river within implementation plans and bureaucratic dialogues, but it also insists that representation cannot remain confined to documents, meetings, and procedural time. In practice, the “community guardian” demanded by the ruling is articulated through the CCGA: a collegiate body that expands representation across the basin's multiple river-worlds while negotiating with the state guardian (MADS) inside implementation (Gallón Droste, 2023). Guardianship is practiced as spokespersonship: through the co-creation of voicing spaces where riverine communities articulate how life is co-constituted with the Atrato—its ecologies, tempos, and injuries—while also building pedagogy, alliances, and public advocacy across local, national, and translocal arenas. In these voicing spaces, the river appears not as background “nature,” but as a relational subject whose existence is braided with those who live-with its waters.

Territorivers

Taking up Luz Enith's words—we are territories as collective subjects—and returning to the question of how rivers are defined, I propose territorivers to name a lived continuity of river–territory relations. Territorivers names not a river contained by territory, but a territory woven with water. Oslender's acuatório opens an important threshold here, helping us sense that rivers are never only geographic settings or lines on a map, but lived worlds woven through movement, relation, memory, spirituality, materiality, and territorial practice. In the Atrato, however, this fluvial weave is also shaped by racialization; by Black and Indigenous organizational and legal struggles; by mining, deforestation, and extractive dispossession; by fishing, singing, and everyday practices through which life is enacted, sustained and repaired; and by the unsettled afterlives of violence that continue to course through bodies, forests, rivers, and more-than-human relations (Cagueñas et al., 2020; González-Serrano, 2024; Quiceno Toro, 2016; Quiceno Toro and Villamizar Gelves, 2020; Riaño-Alcalá and Quiceno Toro, 2020; Rogelis et al., 2022; Ruiz-Serna, 2023). Territorivers grows from that wider current as a moving fluvial fabric through which bodies, sediments, voices, memories, infrastructures, and more-than-human lives remain linked across uneven scales and times, often beyond the maps, borders, and development schemes that seek to contain them.

Territorivers refuses the river as line, border, or neutral corridor. As Taussig writes of Colombia's southern Pacific, “there are no rivers and there never were. It's water and mud and trees all mixed, and words no longer correspond to things like they do in ordinary language or in geography textbooks” (2004: 194). From this perspective, territorivers challenges both the idea of territory as static ground separate from beings and the idea of the river as a boundary dividing rivals on opposite shores—exceeding even the Latin rīvus that lingers in rivalry ¹ . It points instead to amphibious ways of living and to the shifting interplay of earth and water through which ecosystems, encounters, and collective bodies take form. Following Michel Serres (1991), what we call Earth does not appear as a fixed surface but as a plurality of forces, tremors, and connections. Territorivers names that reverberant field: from the micro to the macro, from mud to law, from bodily memory to extractive infrastructure, linking dispersed geographies while making palpable what is so often ignored, submerged, or actively marginalized.

Territorivers also names a corporeal, planetary relation that unsettles the imaginary division of the senses. Thinking with Tim Ingold (2022), bodies act as viscous antennas through which worlds make themselves felt from situatedness; in riverine life, the Atrato's rhythmicities take form through repertoires of daily practice, movement, and attention. Territorivers is continually reenacted through beings, traces, and layers across temporalities and relations: echoes and material reverberations that do not merely represent worlds, but participate in their making (Mathews, 2009). These becomings can be sensed as constellations of mimesis—sensuous attunements and reenactments of what and who a river is (Taussig, 2020)—unfolding across relational registers and contested imaginaries.

This is why the CCGA's central motif matters: “Atrato es, Atrato soy, Atrato somos y debemos seguir siendo”—a proposition resonant with Ubuntu's Soy porque Somos (Mosquera et al., 2018). It signals not only embodied continuity—being-with the river as a collective body—but also a temporal interdependency, a cosmomorphic experience in which “the substance of nature actually lives in the person… the same flux of life circulates in the person, in the sap of a plant, in the color of a stone” (Taussig, 2020: 176). In this sense, spokespersonship is not anthropomorphism—projecting human attributes onto “nature”—but a practice of grasping one's own being within the river's organic rhythmicities. To say Atrato soy / somos is to disrupt dominant imaginaries of what a river is, to persuade others to care for these relational temporalities, and to contest the conditions that treat riverine life as expendable.

In Rivera Cusicanqui's (2020) terms, the CCGA can be understood as a community of affinity: a collective bound by sustained relations with the river and its basin, called together—con-vocados—by the river's presence and demands. Territorivers, then, is not an idyllic outside to politics: it is a lived continuity forged under pressure, where plural attachments to the river must be voiced across unequal infrastructures of credibility and authority. With this in mind, I return to the journey with Alexander, Isis, and Ramiro as we begin to approach El Carmen.

El Carmen de Atrato | February 27, 2020

When we arrive in El Carmen de Atrato, the first thing we do is go for lunch. Members of the Regional Autonomous Corporation for the Sustainable Development of Chocó—CODECHOCÓ ² —are also having lunch there. Everyone greets each other; they all know one another. Alexander explained to me that the environmental public hearing is for CODECHOCÓ to be publicly accountable to the people of Chocó regarding the El Roble mine—its environmental monitoring and the permits granted for the mine's expansion.

El Roble, active since 1987 and operated by MINER S.A., is still the only copper mine in Colombia. The mine is 90% owned by the Canadian company Atico Mining Corporation, and 10% by the Gaviria family from Antioquia (the department that borders Chocó), whose interests are entangled with continuing mining activity at El Roble. Copper, together with lithium, is framed as one of the “key” minerals in the so-called transition to green energies (Centro Siembra, 2025). The public hearing—convened by the MSACA with the support of the CCGA, Tierra Digna, FISCH, and the Diocese of Quibdó—had been postponed by CODECHOCÓ for more than a year, Alexander explained.

After T-622, the tutela plaintiffs invited the MSACA to articulate with the ruling's implementation—specifically to bring campesino–mestizo defense processes from El Carmen into a basin-wide struggle, and to insist that the river must also be protected at its source. Through this articulation, MSACA entered the CCGA and helped position El Carmen's extractive conflicts within basin-wide advocacy and institutional spaces, including those of the Ministry of Environment and CODECHOCÓ. Within MSACA's denunciation and rights-claiming work around El Roble, the APA in February 2020 was decisive: with 239 signatures, MSACA formally requested it as a citizen-participation mechanism to demand information about environmental control of the project, given serious concerns about MINER S.A.'s compliance and the risk of grave damage (Centro Siembra, 2025). The audience mattered because, for the first time, both the environmental authority and the company were forced into an open public accounting of El Roble, while Carmeleño inhabitants congregated massively not only to listen but to voice and confront official narratives with their own evaluations—leaving unresolved questions about the mine's environmental and social management.

After lunch, we went to a coordination meeting regarding the diverse inputs that would take place the next day at the public hearing. The aim was to develop a strategy for a sequence of coordinated interventions. Members of the MSACA were present, as well as Moncho and Alicia, guardians of the Atrato at that moment for El Carmen de Atrato. During that meeting, it was decided who would speak and when, which experiences and complaints would be shared, and they agreed on nuances of expression and tone—taking into account emotions and the allotted time for each intervention. They reviewed the topics each person would address in relation to the mine and mining in El Carmen in general: health impacts, air and water pollution, transformation of landscape and traditional practices, insecurity, acculturation, prostitution, and drug addiction linked to the mine, damage to roads due to truck traffic, workers’ rights, and prior consultations with communities.

The meeting also made clear that the hearing would not unfold through a simple opposition between “community voices” and “bureaucratic voices.” Different actors would carry different evidentiary burdens: guardians, local residents, NGO lawyers, diocesan allies, and scientific experts each entered the hearing with unequal credibility and distinct strategic roles. This layered mediation was politically necessary in a forum where technical authority often traveled farther than lived experience alone.

They composed a choreography and a narrative for their interventions to avoid repetition, as time had to be used to the fullest. They also coordinated silences: who would hold back details for security, who would refrain to avoid retaliation, who would let another voice carry a point, and when indignation would be translated into a tone that could pass as “reasonable” within CODECHOCÓ's script. Of course, these silences mark what cannot be said under threat and unequal credibility. But they are also part of vocería as a longer, future-oriented process: a way of pacing exposure and preserving what must be carried forward, so that what cannot be voiced here can re-emerge later—through another speaker, another format, another hearing, another medium. Listening and silencing were not only imposed from above; they were also tactics inside the spokesperson process, shaped by risk and unequal credibility. This is not only preparation for speech but an internal practice of care in listening: reading risk, anticipating interruption, and deciding what can be safely carried by whom.

I noticed during that meeting, from insights shared by members of CCGA and FISCH, that Alexander and Ramiro were already experienced in these kinds of voicing/advocacy spaces. Both were raised within COCOMACIA's organizational processes and became lawyers; from a young age they participated in public hearings and other advocacy arenas, demanding recognition for their ethnic organizations. Alexander told me that their legal training is part of this struggle over the legitimacy of Black voices: learning the state's language to reduce the distance between riverine testimony and what institutions will recognize as a “valid” claim, and to continue giving the fight, as their ancestors have done, through the legal path. Becoming lawyers is also a tactic for being listened to—an attempt to shift who can speak with authority in voicing spaces shaped by expert hierarchies. This also shows that the legal path is one of the spaces where vocería is enacted, and that law can function as a peaceful tool of struggle and resistance—an alternative to the racialized violence produced by structural racism that so pervasively marks the Chocó region (Lemaitre Ripoll, 2009).

From the MSACA, some individuals expressed insecurity and nervousness about the next day: they were about to confront the mining company's strategy, which they perceived as stronger, while feeling themselves to be the weaker collective in the encounter. They were about to face a long session in front of CODECHOCÓ and the mining company—a face-to-face encounter—where both the legitimacy of CODECHOCÓ and the demands of the MSACA would be staged before the community of El Carmen and the state institutions present. Moncho tried to reassure everyone, emphasizing that they had evidence and that allies—including miners’ unions from Jericó and Marmato in Antioquia, scientists from Bogotá, and Indigenous communities from La Carretera—would arrive on time to strengthen the interventions. At this meeting, I had the opportunity to attune to the Atrato spokespersons behind the scenes, preparing strategies for the coming voicing space and assigning roles to perform the choreography during the public hearing.

To be the voice of the Atrato

Alexander Rodríguez describes spokespersonship for the Atrato in these terms:

In my view, a person who takes on the responsibility of being a spokesperson for the Atrato River bears a significant degree of responsibility. They must not only know T-622 Ruling but also the entire cosmology and culture of the peoples who inhabit the Atrato. This spokesperson must know and respect the life of the ethnic communities. Being a spokesperson anywhere in the world means being able to bring visibility to the entire problem of mining in Chocó, to make it visible. We are aware that it's not just Chocó that faces this problem; many countries and rivers are in the same or even worse situations. Therefore, it is crucial to raise awareness of these rights through spokesperson roles, through creating spaces, sensitizing, and calling for greater consciousness in global society—not just in Chocó—because these issues affect all of humanity. We are the representatives and spokespersons of the Atrato, legally, as mandated by the Court, and with the help of others, who are our allies, we work to create these voicing spaces […] (Alexander Rodríguez, March 2021).

As CCGA, they voice the Atrato as uncommons (Blaser and de la Cadena, 2018), negotiating heterogeneity without exclusion in order to build a common inhabiting with the river—and to craft a common voicing of Atrato within a cosmopolitical process. I follow Eleni Ikoniadou's (2022, 2023) proposal of a radical reimagining of voice, where “chorus” and “choral speaking” exceed a singular, cultivated voice to become a constellation of atmospheres, vibrations, and rhythms that move beyond the limits of what is easily received as “audible.” In her critique of the cultivated voice in Western tradition, the chorus becomes a site of performative excess that can open possibilities for worldmaking through resonance.

Voicing rivers enacts territorivers by manifesting the interconnectedness of the river with its ecosystems and more-than-human relations as a collective chorality. As Alexander Rodríguez states, “in defense of the river, we are one voice. We know that we are different and have different conceptions, but the defense of the Atrato River is the common because what happens to the river affects us all” (March 14, 2021, Quibdó). Acting as the river's spokesperson involves voicing rivers as territorivers—a collective body that resonates and echoes with the earth's vibrations.

Advocacy around the Atrato did not begin with T-622, but emerged from longer Black and Indigenous organizational struggles that preceded and exceeded the ruling (Gallón Droste, 2021; González-Serrano, 2024; Macpherson et al., 2020). From Black and Indigenous organizational processes, they expanded law through practices of voicing from relationality—introducing themselves not only as political subjects, but also rivers as relational beings and political agents, exceeding and transforming what is understood by nature and thus by rivers.

With the organizational processes of Chocó, voicing also unsettles what it means to “speak for nature.” Eckersley (2011) argues that the challenge has always been how to represent what has been defined as nature without reducing it to an object, instrument, or backdrop. This implies ethical and ontological claims, as well as institutional innovations (Eckersley, 2011: 328). The invitation is to recognize continuities, commonalities, and interdependencies between humanity and what has been defined as nature (Plumwood, 2009). Therefore, speaking for in this case is always a speaking with—shaped by constant relationships and becomings with the river. Voicing rivers are constant reenactments of who a river is and who the CCGA are, from embodied inhabiting of memoryscapes continuously reshaped through relationships with the river (Gallón Droste, 2023). In the El Carmen APA, how does the CCGA secure credibility for its voicing of the Atrato within these unequal conditions of listening?

Before the public hearing | February 28, 2020–6:30 am

With Isis, we got up early and headed to the church. In one of the parish offices, some members of the MSACA were gathered with Julio Fierro, a geologist from the National University and researcher at TERRAE. ³ He had arrived early that morning to support the case with his research on the geological faults of the Western Cordillera, where El Carmen and the El Roble mine are located. He was sharing some of the research results with the community. Collectively, we made our way to the public school where the hearing was to take place. We stopped at a store to buy water. When we asked the owner if he would be attending the hearing, he responded with an irritated tone that the mine is the essence of El Carmen. The atmosphere felt tense and divided. Many people supported the mine because the municipality's economy largely depended on it, and MSACA members felt that much of El Carmen was not on their side.

As the hearing began, we exchanged perceptions with members of MSACA about how the event would unfold. They were nervous and waiting to see what El Roble would bring to the table. When they saw the mine's representatives arrive with models and PowerPoint presentations set up on a computer connected to a projector, they expressed their insecurity, comparing their handwritten interventions on loose sheets to the scene before them. At the same time, they remembered their organizational processes and that there were people who traveled from afar to support them and that they were not alone. Although they had planned their interventions, they knew there could be surprises, that they did not have full control over what would happen that day, and that if the atmosphere heated up, everything could be canceled.

Participants gradually took their seats. The mine's representatives sat on the right side of the auditorium, and the community from El Carmen was on the left side. In front of MSACA members sat representatives from the Ombudsman's Office, the Attorney General's Office, and the Diocese of Quibdó, who were observing the session. Opposite to them were the members of CODECHOCÓ, who moderated the session. The auditorium quickly filled up, especially when the chivas –colorful rural public form of transportation– from the emberá katio indigenous communities and members of the mining union from the towns of Jericó, Sabaletas, and Marmato arrived, having traveled from Caldas and Antioquia, other mining departments, to support the El Roble mining union. There were not enough chairs for everyone. By the time the hearing began, there were over 300 people present. The atmosphere was tense.

CODECHOCÓ's director, Arnold Rincón, started the session. The Colombian national anthem was sung, followed by the anthems of Chocó Department and El Carmen de Atrato. Then, the objectives of a public hearing and “the rules of the game” were presented. The audience was also reminded that this was not a debate or discussion forum but “a space to receive opinions and information, documents that would be considered when making decisions by the environmental authority” (Arnold Rincón, February 28, 2020).

The public hearing – 10:30 am

Following the choreography, the first speaker moved to the front, positioning themselves on the stage to face the audience with a microphone in hand. Moncho, the guardian of the Atrato, began with 30 min. He thanked the authorities present for having “heeded the call and hoped that today we would achieve many successes, that this would not become a fight or a rift among ourselves, but that this hearing would lead us to seek solutions to the social and environmental issues our municipality and the Atrato River are facing”. While Moncho was speaking, some people around me commented, “Moncho is very nervous”. The guardian concluded his intervention and ceded more than half of his time to Julio Fierro, the expert voice, MSACA's strongest card. With the support of PowerPoint, he presented his research on the geological faults in those mountains, the transformations in flora and fauna, and the risks posed by the chemical-filled tailings ponds and, therefore, the entire ecosystem and its inhabitants if these were to spill. This gave strength and confidence to the members of MSACA who, following the choreography, were meant to speak later. “We’re off to a good start”, could be heard from the left side of the audience.

After Julio, CODECHOCÓ and the mining company had their interventions. “That's part of the mine's strategy,” was murmured among the seats. Their strategy in the choreography was to exhaust the audience and use the morning hours for their presentations. Through PowerPoint slides, models, and studies on the river's waters, they argued that everything was fine with the tailing ponds and toxic waste and that they were highly qualified to work in this field, also emphasizing their credentials, training, and affiliations with renowned universities and institutions. It was past lunchtime, and after the interventions of the state entities, MSACA members took the floor. In her presentation, guardian Alicia Villegas voiced:

El Carmen de Atrato, like Chocó, has been declared a special conservation area in over 90% of its territory, but all that beauty contrasts with the realities occurring in many parts of our territory, particularly mining […]. I take this opportunity to address some concerns regarding the mine, which showed that there are no water samples between pond No. 4 and the town. And why does the river change color at certain times of the day and have so much foam? This is one of the concerns (Alicia Villegas, February 28, 2020).

Next, Alexander from the CCGA came to the front for his intervention. He referenced the Atrato Ruling and concluded with the following:

As guardians, we support the proposal made by my predecessors for a second hearing […] so that the community of El Carmen is clear about what is happening with the project being carried out in the territory […] Surely today we are left with many gaps; the community will not hear what it wants to hear from the mine company because they did not know the file that would provide much more clarity and allow them to precisely identify what they really want to see improved. This is not meant to generate discussions. The mine is already here, […] it is not going away, but we need to see where we are failing or where things are going wrong to correct it and provide an objective response to what the community is asking and waiting for. Thank you very much (Alexander Rodríguez, February 28, 2020).

After Alexander, Francisco from the Argelia community expressed, among other points the following:

We are starting to fall asleep. I don’t have a master's presentation because I am just a simple farmer. I come from a village within the mine's influence area. It makes me feel either sadness or laughter to sing the Chocó anthem and the El Carmen anthem. Many of the mine's employees stayed silent because they lack a sense of belonging. When you stand up to sing the anthem at events like these, your blood trembles, and you feel like a Carmeleño and a Chocoano. We have addressed many issues in a formal manner. Experts at glossing things over… A heavily glossed-over issue is suspicious. Gentlemen, mining acculturation, as my colleagues have already mentioned, has caused a sort of rupture in the social fabric of our municipality that can no longer be glossed over. It is a matter of finding substantive solutions… Employing the daughter of someone on the MSACA so she doesn’t cause trouble. Hiring so-and-so so they don’t speak… When a foreigner is given more consideration because they are a partner and an asset of the mine, they are paid double simply for doing the same job as someone else […] (Francisco ⁴ , February 28, 2020).

Choreographies, choralities and testimonial strategies during the public hearing

I read the audiencia pública ambiental with Ballestero's account of hearings as modern state mechanisms for role-performance—scenes where participation is staged through procedure, and where responsiveness can be enacted without ceding control (Ballestero, 2019). In El Carmen, models, PowerPoint slides, monitoring reports, permits, and missing files did not simply “support” positions; they helped distribute authority and decide what could count as real in the room. The hearing made the geologic publicly present as a mode of verification, and it did so through what Ballestero calls hydro-geo-social choreographies: the entanglement of technical, scientific, legal, emotional, financial, and relational elements required to bring geologic entities into social presence (Ballestero, 2023: 272; Ballestero, 2023). Following Massey (1994) and Crang and Thrift (2000), I therefore treat the APA not as a neutral container for “opinions,” but as an event composed through relations, devices, and temporalities—an encounter where riverine worlds, institutional procedure, and extractive governance meet unevenly, and where audibility is actively made.

Choreographies

In El Carmen, the hearing's choreography did not begin when the microphone switched on; it was built into the format. CODECHOCÓ opened with hymns and with the “rules of the game,” emphasizing that this was not a debate but a space for receiving information that could be considered in decision-making. That distinction mattered less as a description than as a boundary: it installed a genre of participation in which disagreement could be reclassified as disorder, and in which “listening” could be performed while the horizon of what counted as relevant was narrowed in advance.

Timekeeping and sequencing deepened this boundary. The long morning block of company and institutional presentations—supported by slides, models, and credentialed biographies—did not only convey content; it set the tempo of the room. Fatigue became procedural: the slow wearing-down of attention through which critique becomes easier to neutralize. Francisco's remark—“We are starting to fall asleep”—registers this choreography not as inconvenience but as political pacing: a management of collective stamina that shapes what can still be held, contested, or remembered by late afternoon. Read alongside Melo-Ascencio's analysis of El Roble's extractive orientations, this pacing can also be understood as part of an extractive participatory apparatus: a structured mode of interaction in which technical authority, procedural sequencing, and corporate performance help normalize mining operations while channeling dissent into manageable forms. My interest, however, is not only in how the hearing orients extractive subjects, but in how guardians and allies struggle within that arrangement to keep river injury publicly audible and consequential (Melo-Ascencio, 2025).

The attempted interruption of Tierra Digna clarified the stakes of the script. When CODECHOCÓ tried to close the hearing before the lawyer could finish, what came into view was not simply a dispute over time, but a dispute over admissibility: whether the exposure of missing files and absent follow-up “belonged” to the hearing's sanctioned agenda. The room pushed back—shouting, agitation, mediation—and the intervention was partially re-opened. Choreography here is therefore not total control; it is a contested arrangement. It can be stretched, negotiated, and momentarily re-routed, but always under a format that retains the power to end the scene.

Choralities

Choralities name what cannot be reduced to individual turns at the microphone: the collective atmospheres through which voicing and reception circulate as distributed resonance. In El Carmen, the Atrato did not enter the room as one stable object described from different perspectives. It arrived as a plurality of river-worlds enacted through distinct modes of address—Atrato as life, road, deity, extractive zone, ecosystem, or subject of rights—each carrying different obligations and injuries (Blaser, 2009). Chorality is the work of holding these enactments together without letting the forum flatten them into one authorized version.

Chorality also names how attention is composed and re-composed in real time. Applause, murmurs, interruptions, the drifting of bodies in and out for air, and the return of energy after long expert stretches were not merely “reactions”; they were part of how the room calibrated what mattered. When applause erupted—after Francisco's confrontational intervention, for instance—it did not just express agreement; it amplified that moment as a shared register of truth-telling and re-anchored attention against procedural exhaustion.

Chorality moved, crucially, through voicing-for. When someone stated, “I will speak for myself and many others who are afraid to speak,” fear entered the hearing as an active condition shaping audibility: who can risk exposure, who must be represented through another, and which kinds of speech are punished socially or economically. Chorality is not simply “many voices.” It is a distribution of risk and resonance—who can carry which point, who must defer, who speaks through coded phrasing, and which registers travel more easily as credible.

What remained unsaid also belonged to chorality. Euphemism, strategic vagueness, and calibrated omission circulated alongside explicit denunciation, not as absence outside the forum but as part of its acoustic politics—ways of managing volatility and avoiding retaliation while keeping the struggle legible enough to continue (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020). Under these conditions, collective voicing is inseparable from collective protection: the room's chorus includes both insistence and withholding.

Testimonial strategies

Testimonial strategies name the practical labor of making harm difficult to neutralize within institutional habits of reception (Acosta López, 2023). In El Carmen, testimony did not appear as a single genre. It moved through multiple evidentiary modes: the river's changing color and foam; dust that forced doors and windows shut; asthma becoming ordinary; medical certificates presented by Emberá Katío representatives; and, decisively, the exposure of administrative absence—permits granted without adequate follow-up, unclear obligations, and files that could not be produced because they were lost.

These testimonies did not simply report damage; they attempted to shift the hearing's criteria of consequence. They pushed against the routine downgrading of lived accounts into “complaint” or “emotion” by coupling sensory experience with documentary and institutional failure. The friction around Tierra Digna's intervention shows this clearly: the struggle was not only over what could be said, but over what could be entered into the hearing's official memory—what could be treated as belonging to the forum rather than as an external accusation.

The bocachico's snoring names how riverine knowledge often arrives as vibration, rhythm, and absence before it can be translated into administrative proof. Testimonial strategies are one way communities attempt to carry those registers across a procedure that prefers clean files, stable objects, and bounded genres of legitimacy.

The hearing also showed that testimony moved through relays. Community accounts did not circulate alone: they were amplified, translated, and sometimes stabilized through expert reports, medical certificates, legal argument, and organizational accompaniment. This does not diminish the force of lived testimony; rather, it reveals the unequal conditions under which some harms become institutionally receivable. In El Carmen, NGOs, allied scientists, and diocesan actors did not replace community grievance, but often helped it cross the threshold of admissibility.

Rather than summarizing the hearing as a set of “lessons,” this analytic triad stays with the work of the forum itself: how participation is arranged, how collective resonance is sustained, and how harm is made to persist as publicly consequential even when the event is designed to absorb it into procedural completion. These choralities and testimonial strategies emerge because audibility is governed: the forum's “openness” depends on institutional formats and thresholds that sort river worlds into admissible evidence, harmless “opinion,” or disruptive noise (Ballestero, 2019; Rivera Cusicanqui, 2020). Following Ballestero, the hearing's choreography stages participation while disciplining consequence; following Rivera Cusicanqui, it also produces a scene where what matters may have to travel through euphemism, omission, or indirect address under conditions of risk. Chorality and testimony are thus techniques of survival and insistence within a regulated—sometimes punitive—regime of listening.

Giving the fight from El Carmen 5:30 pm

After the hearing, calm quickly returned. Some members of MSACA were pleased and satisfied with what had been achieved; in the end, hopeful agreements had been reached. They continued to think about strategies with renewed enthusiasm. Isis, Alexander, and Ramiro headed straight to Tutunendo, near Quibdó, for a meeting convened by FISCH. Meanwhile, members of Tierra Digna (Siembra) would stay in El Carmen for two more days to visit the source of the Atrato River and the mine's tailings dams with Moncho. I decided to stay and visit one of the Atrato's many springs, in the mountains, with them. We remained with Moncho talking in the square. He was happy and satisfied, repeating several times that it had been a very good event and emphasized the importance of fighting the fight from El Carmen: “If we don’t protect the river from its source, how are we going to protect it and invest so many plans and so much money in the middle and lower parts of the basin?” (Moncho, February 28, 2020). As I complete this text, the conflict around El Roble's extraction has also moved in the register of royalties and state accountability. In early March 2025, an arbitration tribunal ruled in favor of Colombia's National Mining Agency (NMA), ordering Minera El Roble to back-pay copper royalties dating back to 1994. Regional actors in Chocó have framed this decision as part of a longer struggle over how extractive value is accounted for—and who bears the costs of decades of irregular oversight. ⁶ The APA forms part of this longer process of building testimonial evidence—a public record through which irregular oversight, harm, and accountability claims can be carried forward and later re-enter institutional disputes such as royalties and state responsibility.

Some echoes between networks and currents

The arts of voicing rivers in the Atrato basin are not episodic interventions but a sustained, intergenerational and transcalar labor—carried through constellations of guardians and allies across songs, meetings, journeys, documents, and silences. What holds these efforts together is not a single arena or a single “voice,” but a repertoire of openings that communities keep activating across the basin: in assemblies and riverbank conversations, in implementation encounters, in advocacy networks, and in public scenes where extractive governance is forced to answer. These practices do not follow neatly from the ruling; they precede it and exceed it, insisting on defending life where life has been made precarious.

I therefore do not treat river rights as a resolution to celebrate. They are a contested foothold—sometimes an excuse, sometimes a lever—for larger fights over extraction, racism, governance, and survival. Legal platforms can be appropriated as tactical openings, but they can also contain, delay, and metabolize dissent. Law is thus one voicing space among others: a partial and unstable terrain where obligations can be asserted, but also rerouted into procedure. In El Carmen, this meant that river rights did not govern the hearing directly; rather, they provided one political-legal horizon through which guardians and allies could connect a local mining conflict to a broader basin-wide struggle over representation, accountability, and survival.

Read through the El Carmen APA, voicing rivers is practiced through voicing spaces: contact zones where claims are composed, translated, and contested across unequal infrastructures of credibility. The hearing did not simply “host” participation; it organized reception. What is at stake in these openings is aurality understood as infrastructure: the material coupling of sensing, inscription, authority, and response. Voicing spaces shape what can be received as knowledge and responsibility because they pre-align some registers with legitimacy—technical reports, files, expert performance—while forcing other registers into translation, interruption, or dismissal as “noise,” affect, or “mere experience.” In El Carmen, this infrastructure of audibility also hinged on the geologic: models, PowerPoint slides, permits, and expert reports did not simply support arguments; they helped decide what counted as reality in the room and who could speak with authority about it. If there is something like acoustic justice here, it is not an ideal of equal speaking-time, but the struggle over what can be heard as evidence, under what genre, and at what cost.

Through territorivers—wider ecologies of water, soil, metals, bodies, and histories—the Atrato enters public and legal scenes not as a line on a map but as a living field of relations. With Taussig in mind, the river refuses to become a tidy object: it comes as mixture—water and mud and vegetation and rumor—and that mixture keeps slipping past the state's need for clean evidence. This is not metaphorical “mess”, but an ontological condition that defeats mastery: a river-world that cannot be stabilized without violence. In such a field, voicing is inseparable from listening: not a moral posture, but a situated labor of making reception possible across state and riverine grammars—where silence can be both imposed and tactically coordinated, and where fear, fatigue, and courage circulate as part of what is being negotiated.

The CCGA's insistence—Atrato soy / Atrato somos—does not personify the river as human. It marks an amphibious condition of relation: a mode of being-with in which the river's tempos and disturbances are not external “environment,” but circulate through bodies and everyday conduct in transcalar and transtemporal realms.

Returning to the bocachico's snoring—and to its fading—keeps the question of evidence open. It names a riverine pedagogy of noticing: rhythm, vibration, seasonal insistence, absence. It also names how the river exceeds the law's capture: it leaks into public life as affective disturbance before it can be stabilized as institutional proof. The labor traced in this article is how such registers are carried across hostile conditions of reception—how guardians and allies sustain voicing spaces as onto-epistemic openings where what the river is, what counts as harm, and what can obligate response remain contested and publicly consequential.

In that sense, the river's excess becomes politically operative not because everything enters the record, but because it keeps pressing on the thresholds of what the law can bear. Read back through the hearing's choreographies, this pressure gathers as a polyphonic mourning chorus of reenactments and remediations—where the individual submerges into the collective—and through which territorivers insists, in mixture and non-mastery, that the Atrato cannot be reduced to a file. Voicing-with and listening-to the river thus remain continuous enactments of an aquatic sense of the future.

Highlights