Join us for a Spanish/English webinar on Friday 16 August, 9am Colombia, 10am EST, 3pm BST, 4pm CET
On 9 August, 2001, the African-descent community of Tabaco in La Guajira, Colombia were brutally evicted, and their homes demolished by hundreds of armed police and corporate security guards, to make way for the expansion of the vast Cerrejon opencast coal mine. Over the years, the foreign owners (Exxon, BHP, Anglo American, and Glencore), have all profited handsomely from the dispossession and scattering of people from this Indigenous Wayuu territory. The inhabitants have lost lands, cultural ties and agricultural livelihoods. Today the Cerrejon mine is 100% owned by Swiss-based, London-listed diversified mining and trading company Glencore – the subject of our latest report “A Bad Deal for Canada“. Glencore easily has enough money to resolve this issue. It is time it did so.
Despite a Colombian Constitutional Court decision in 2002 ordering the reconstruction of the village and recommendations by an Independent Panel of Inquiry in 2008, the people of Tabaco are yet to receive justice. In the long, exhausting years of waiting and working for justice in the face of corporate and government indifference and paramilitary threats, community leaders of enormous skill and dedication have died too young after giving everything they had to their community’s struggle. This webinar will honour their memory.
But the people of Tabaco have not given up. Join us to hear from them about their current situation and the poetry they have developed as a form of resistance. Professor Avi Chomsky will introduce the Tabaco case, and Reverend Max Sklar will share some words of wisdom on life and international resistance.
You can register you attendance at the webinar here:
https://actionnetwork.org/events/tabaco-23-years-of-displacement-territory-memory-resistance/
CALL FOR ACTION!
We are also inviting you to write to Glencore and Cerrejon so they don’t forget about their responsibility to the people from Tabaco.
Twenty-three years after the violent displacement from Tabaco, there is no collective relocation nor collective and individual reparations for members of the Tabaco community.
The displacement of the African-descent community of Tabaco in La Guajira, Colombia, gave way to Cerrejon open-cast coal mine, the largest in Latin America. The mine is owned by Glencore, a London-listed Swiss corporation.
In these 23 years, the lives of generations of Tabaco people have drastically changed, leaving them in a condition of poverty and lacking the sovereignty they had when they had access to their land, the river and its multiple benefits, the forest and all its food and materials, their cemetery, church, school, their community which was their support.
It is time for Glencore and Cerrejon to stop making excuses and commit to justice and comprehensive reparations for the community of Tabaco.