ESMAD personnel at Roche, 24 February 2016
For the last sixteen years, I have been working in support of communities in the province of La Guajira, Colombia, being displaced by the massive Cerrejon opencast coal mine. The mine is owned by London-listed companies Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Glencore.
Cerrejon Coal has a slogan, ‘Coal for the world, progress for Colombia’. Given the sufferings of the communities most directly affected by the mine, it’s hard to know what the company means by ‘progress’. And during my most recent visit, as part of a Witness for Peace delegation in June of this year, we heard the statistics from friends at the organisation Comite Civico para la Dignidad de La Guajira showing how the advent of mining to La Guajira has helped destroy food sovereignty and local jobs.
Travelling round to various communities around the edges of the mining concession and listening to the testimony of local people, we heard similar stories over and over again (1):
* the mining company had broken promises;
* it had caused divisions in communities;
* in the early days of the mine, it had broken up communities completely and paid totally inadequate compensation for loss of homes and livelihoods;
* more recently, although it had negotiated with communities and resettled them, it used the threat of forced eviction to make people accept conditions they found unacceptable, because they felt there was no real choice;
* it had removed rural communities where people lived from the land and replaced them with semi-urban communities where people had to seek waged labour as they could no longer support themselves;
* it had encouraged people to take up new livelihoods that proved impractical;
* the change in La Guajira from an agricultural economy to a mining economy had destroyed the way people lived before, growing food and exchanging it with other growers, and now people were going hungry, and children dying of malnutrition;
* houses in the new communities were poorly built;
* it had changed people from producers to consumers;
* it had polluted the air with coal dust, and people were getting ill as a result;
* it had removed huge numbers of trees and ruined agricultural land;
* it used far more than its fair share of water, and everyone else lacked water as a result;
* now it was planning to divert an important stream, the Arroyo Bruno, and almost everyone we spoke to was opposed to this; the only people who did not oppose it just thought it was inevitable, and wanted compensation for the damage it would cause them.
Many of these concerns were contained in an open letter sent to the company shortly before the delegation visited.
One community member told us that the imbalance of power between the company and the communities is so great that “It’s a struggle between a tethered donkey and a tiger.” Our delegation went with community representatives to meet representatives of the Cerrejon Coal company at the mine. The meeting began with young members of our delegation – students from the USA – giving their impressions of the area after several days of visiting communities. They had been horrified at what they had seen and heard. Then each community representative had a few minutes to summarise their community’s concerns. It was all unrelentingly negative, because the impacts of the mine on their lives have been so unrelentingly negative.
The Cerrejon Coal representatives were upset. They told the students and the community representatives that they should not say such nasty things about them – they were doing their best. Several of them gave the company’s perspective on what was being done on community relocation, water provision and other social and environmental matters.
After the meeting, one of the social responsibility department officials asked me whether I thought that the company had in any way improved its behaviour over the past 16 years. I said I would have to think about that.
One thing that has changed for the better is that, as a result of the review of its operations by an independent panel of inquiry in 2008, Cerrejon agreed to undertake negotiated community resettlements rather than talking to families one by one and paying them inadequate compensation to go away and find somewhere else to live. But there is an awful lot of dissatisfaction with the process and with the quality of the new communities.
Before 24 February this year, I would have said, well, at least they aren’t carrying out forced evictions any more, like they did at Tabaco in 2001. But then – on 24 February this year – they did it again at the village of Roche. Admittedly, this time it was only one family rather than a whole village. And apparently it was the Colombian State that insisted on using the notoriously violent ESMAD riot police to do it. But still…