The International Court of Justice has admitted two new lawsuits in the long dispute over the waters to the east of the Archipelago. The court will review Nicaragua’s next claim to sovereignty, its designs on what it sees as an extension of its continental shelf. An enclave, that’s what we’ll become: trapped by invisibility. Oil, oil is the only ‘blackness’ in the Caribbean. It spurs the hungry, who think it’s furiously calling their names, wants to wake from its rest. Nicaragua doesn’t care about anything else.

Rudy has sent me a photo I haven’t yet been able to download. I wait a few minutes. He’s holding out his hand to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, a Colombian flag in the background. ‘I’m in The Hague.’ What?! I yelp. He’s not sure if he’s just passing through: he was named advisor on ethnic affairs to the Embassy of Colombia in the Netherlands. We have Raizal representation in The Hague, or at least that’s what the state can say now.

But Rudy isn’t Raizal and I can already picture the drama this will unleash. There will be a march to protest his appointment. Here they’ll accuse him of spying for the state; there they’ll accuse him of spying for the Raizals. They won’t show him all the documents, won’t invite him to all the meetings. The French lawyers who have never set foot in the southwestern Caribbean, the Chinese, Russian and African judges, the employees of Mr Government – as some indigenous elders call the system that can never be spoken with – won’t take his explanations lying down.

First of all, the Colombian diplomatic elite, where all ambassadors are hand-picked by the president, must be disgusted to receive invitations from Africa and these countries in the New Mediterranean. Rudy’s going to collect evidence with the liaison group on the island, his email says. He’ll be back soon. He signs off with a link to an academic article about traditional fishing, the presence of the first natives among the shoals and cays of the Archipelago, four hundred years ago now. It fits perfectly. Sovereignty. The state will argue that it has attained sovereignty through its citizens: that will be the thesis of the defence, and that is what we natives will be. So now it is our territory, and we are elements, as the army says. Elements of the Colombian state, which possesses cays and shoals and rocks; that’s how the borders are drawn, because the native spirit knows them like its own reflection. If only there were some coherence about it all; if only protective measures against the loss of land were an active government priority, that there was education behind it and alternatives on offer, that lawsuits for land ownership were supported, that the truth had been rebuilt after the fires in the seventies. It’s a dream, an islander’s dream.