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Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) and the national government reached an agreement with the U’wa indigious community which allowed NOC personnel to restart and secure the Gibraltar Gas plant after weeks of U’wa occupation.

Incidents per week dropped again in July. It was not the lowest four-week period we have seen but it was low for not being an end-of-year holiday period.

A report from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said that the government has been able to avoid the worst consequences of a fall in oil prices, but that with a price of US$60/barrel there are worrying signs for the midterm future.

In Yaguará, Huila, Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) insists that it has hired 100% of its unskilled labor locally and 30% of skilled labor, but individuals in the community have maintained blockades affecting five wells for nearly two months.

In every one of his public addresses over the last week, President Juan Manuel Santos urged Colombians to support the peace agreement, as the government and its supporters gear up for an intense political campaign for the “yes” vote.

For the first time in several months, the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MinMinas) has announced a change in fuel prices for the month of August: gasoline will rise slightly while diesel will fall, which the ministry says is a result of biofuels costs.

The International Federation of Human Rights (FIDH) issued a report blasting the environmental and social impact which it alleges Pacific E&P has caused in Meta, and it was picked up in national media.

GasMinMinas finally released the June production figures for gas and there was yet another monthly decline, the fifth such decline in a row. The graph shows quarterly data which perhaps shows more dramatically how much it has fallen.

The explosive growth of blockades, protests and social conflicts has a direct impact on the finances of the regions responsible for them, and a recent study from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) sought to quantify how much these conflicts are costing.

The government supplied more than CoP$12.723B (US$4.1M) to eight municipalities in the Cesar Department as production incentives for social or development projects. This and other Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) related stories in our periodic summary.