When Luz Myriam began her fight against the construction of the hydroelectric facility that the far-right president Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002-2010) had announced in her area, her children were three and ten years old. In spite of years fighting to prevent the construction of this extractivist mega-facility in her capacity as a community leader with the Association of People Affected by the El Quimbo Hydroelectric Project (ASOQUIMBO), in 2011 Restrepo was forced to witness the inauguration of the dam, with Italian and Spanish capital provided by the companies ENEL and ENDESA under the Colombian trade name of ENEL-EMGESA. This inauguration brought with it the flooding of 8,500 hectares of rural land, with more than 28,000 people affected and some 15,000 forcibly displaced. A wall of environmental, economic and social upheaval had been erected in her region.

A development model founded on extractivist principles has imposed activities such as open-pit mining, fracking, extensive monoculture for agrofuels, and large hydroelectric facilities on rural areas of Latin America, with all the negative consequences that these entail for local communities. "The government said the dam would be an exemplary development initiative for the local area, that it would create many jobs, that people would have a better quality of life... none of that happened", says Luz Myriam. "Quality of life is not making us go hungry, destroying our families, uprooting us from where we live”.

For the past four years, Luz Myriam has been cleaning houses in the city of Neiva, the capital of Huila. "I started working in a family home where I came in at six in the morning, left at seven in the evening, and earned 400,000 pesos (€110) a month.”

"The launch of the El Quimbo construction project brought about the total destruction of small-scale fishing, what with the digging work, the chemicals that were dumped, the trees that were cut down... the fish either left or, if they didn't, died off", the fisherwoman explains. The 95,430 square metres of cement brought the connection between local communities and the river and natural environment to an end, and forced them to move to urban areas where, in the case of Luz Myriam and so many other women, they have been forced almost by default into the care work economy. For the past four years, Luz Myriam has been cleaning houses in the city of Neiva, the capital of Huila. "I started working in a family home where I entered at six in the morning, left at seven in the evening, and earned 400,000 pesos (€110) a month. The hardest thing is knowing that I used to be self-employed and now I have to go work for others, people who are upper-class and who treat you badly", complains Restrepo. With this salary, which is equivalent to less than half of the Colombian minimum wage, it is impossible to travel every day from her local area to the city. Transportation costs 70,000 pesos per round trip, and it can take up to two hours to get to Neiva, so making the move to the city –whether one wishes to or not– is inevitable.

"These extractivist initiatives not only remove materials, or natural resources, which is the term they use," explains Luis Eduardo Barrios, an ASOQUIMBO activist. "They also destroy the social fabric of the population, they remove their link with the land and their livelihoods, which are no longer the same after these initiatives get under way”. Indeed, Luz Myriam's way of life –like that of so many rural, indigenous and Black people who are continually forced to migrate to the city due to the consequences of a development model imposed by a colonial capitalist system– has changed absolutely in that it has moved away from a community-focused outlook of family care and subsistence, to an individualistic and commercialized paradigm that creates novel needs and alienates basic care practice.

The enemy is "a multinational monster... a capitalism that is now in its most ruthless, most unhinged, and most destructive phase”. The fight is on "for land, for water and for life itself", says Barrios.

"We've been forced to beg and humiliate ourselves before other people and it shouldn't be like that, because here –on the banks of the Magdalena– we never wanted for anything, we had everything. Now I come home exhausted, I barely have time for my kids, and then it's off bed...because you have to keep up your routine. It's a very cruel life", laments Luz Myriam, who on many occasions has had to delegate the care of her children to her mother. Eight years after construction, ASOQUIMBO's struggle against the El Quimbo dam goes on, and they are now calling for its immediate decommissioning. "We're fighting against extractivist energy policy, this is our struggle: to raise a voice against all these projects that destroy the land, break the supply chains, violate human rights, and destroy the environment", says Luis Eduardo Barris. According to the activist, the enemy is "a multinational monster...a capitalism that is now in its most ruthless, most unhinged, and most destructive phase”. The fight is on "for land, for water and for life itself", says Barrios.

However, the modern-day colonial-capitalist system and its Eurocentric development model has, for many decades, uprooted these guardian communities of the Estrella Hídrica and forced their displacement to urban areas. At the age of twelve, Consuelo Canchala, like her six siblings, had to leave Los Robles for the first time in order to continue her secondary education.

“My childhood was idyllic, I spent it all in the countryside where we could play out in the open”, she explains. "When we left to study it was very traumatic, being away from my father and my mother was terrible.”

Having turned 18, despite the obstacles she faced as a woman from a modest rural background, and with her daughter Andrea in tow, she and her partner Hernán tried to make a living as agricultural workers. However, “my husband went to do military service –in Colombia, it's for 18 months– and it was up to me to look after my daughter. So, I left home to work for the first time, taking care of another girl the same age as my own. That was terrible, leaving my little girl in the care of my mum and dad", remembers Consuelo. Being away from Andrea was the only option on several occasions, "because of the lack of financial resources: there's no work for you as a woman in the countryside, for men there is, but for us there isn't". As a result, she had to "go to the city to look for work, for opportunities", she says. "I left out of necessity".