British-based mining companies displace communities in Colombia

The biggest coal strip mine in South America has caused massive disruption and displacement of Indigenous and rural communities in northern Colombia. The majority of the coal is exported to the European Union.

Richard Solly and Aviva Chomsky with Roger Moody

British-based mining multinationals Anglo American and BHP Billiton each hold a one-third interest in a consortium that owns and runs Cerrejon Zona Norte, the biggest coal strip-mine in South America and one of the biggest in the world. (The remaining third is owned by Swiss-based mining company Glencore.) This mine has been responsible for massive disruption and displacement of Indigenous and other rural communities in the area.

The mining project began in 1977 with an agreement between the Colombian State mining company, Carbocol, and Intercor, a company owned by the US oil giant, Exxon. The project included not only the mine itself covering 38,000 hectares, but also a 150-kilometre railway from the mine to the coast, and a port. The railway was designed for three locomotives, each pulling 100 wagons carrying 100 tons of coal each. The port, Puerto Bolívar, is the largest port in Colombia. After exploration and construction, production was planned to start in 1986 and run until 2009. In 1999, Intercor obtained a 25-year extension on its lease, taking the project up to the year 2034.

The Anglo American/BHP Billiton/Glencore consortium bought Carbocol's share of the mine in October 2000 for $384 million, a price that the Colombian miners' union, SINTRAMINERCOL, and other Colombian organisations believe to be well below its true value. Enormous quantities of public money had been pumped into the mine's infrastructure, especially the railway, without which the project would not have been profitable. Because of its resulting massive debts, however, there was no way that the Colombian State could recoup its costs during the projected 50- year lifetime of the mining concessions. Moreover, Carbocol itself was sold under pressure from the IMF to open up the Colombian economy to greater foreign corporate control and to cut the state's losses. In February 2002, the Consortium purchased the remaining half of Cerrejon Zona Norte from Exxon at a much higher price.

The European Union imports over 70% of Colombia's coal, with Denmark, The Netherlands and Britain being among the biggest customers. The Cerrejon mines now have an annual capacity of 22 million tonnes (just under one-quarter of BHP Billiton's total annual production), which the Consortium plans to increase to 40 million tonnes at a measured pace, most of it intended for Europe.

From the beginning of the operations at Cerrejon Zona Norte, local communities were forcibly removed. The railway cut through the heart of the traditional territory of the Wayuu people, causing massive disruption to livelihoods and violating sacred sites such as graveyards. Around the mine itself, the small farming village of Manantial was violently broken up and the people dispersed without compensation.

In 1992, lawyer Armando Perez, representing the local villages of Caracoli and Espinal, brought a suit against the Colombian Ministry of Health, claiming that contamination by coal and other dust, and the constant noise of the mining machinery, were damaging the health of local residents. After several appeals, the court ruled in favour of the local people and ordered the company to guarantee their protection. But with the collaboration of the head of the Office of Indigenous Affairs in the area, the company's "solution" was to remove people from their homes to lands designated as an indigenous resguardo (reserve or reservation). At Espinal, police trucks arrived one day to remove the villagers to this resguardo. Those who co-operated received some funding for new community facilities. Those who refused were forcibly removed at night to an agriculturally unproductive, waterless place a few kilometres from the new site.

Residents in other villages close to the mine continued to suffer from the effects of blasting, coal dust pollution and loss of pasture land. Villagers in the African-Colombian community of Tabaco established a Relocation Committee in the 1990s to secure a formal relocation agreement with Intercor. They wanted not simply to be compensated financially, but also moved to a new site where they could continue living together as a community and farming the land. Intercor offered inadequate financial compensation only. The company attempted to persuade the residents to accept its offer by making life in Tabaco intolerable. The church was ruined: Intercor/ Carbocol bought it from the local bishop (even though it was the local people who had built it and paid for it) and wrecked it. The communications centre and the clinic were closed by the local authority at the company's insistence. The company hoped that the villagers would simply give up and leave.

In August 2001, Intercor workers, accompanied by hundreds of armed police and Colombian troops, moved in to Tabaco and demolished the houses of those residents who had vociferously resisted removal without an adequate relocation package. Unarmed villagers who attempted to stop the operation were injured. The company continued the demolitions in December 2001 and January 2002, by which time when the village's school, clinic and communications centre had been destroyed and the cemetery of village ancestors desecrated and bulldozed. The community's lawyer, Armando Perez, spent 37 days during December 2001 and January 2002 under house arrest for denouncing the complicity of a local judge in the company's actions.

Anglo American, BHP Billiton and Glencore already owned half of Cerrejon Zona Norte when Tabaco was destroyed, but they have attempted to avoid blame and responsibility by pointing out that Intercor, not the Consortium, operated the mine. The final destruction of Tabaco was Intercor's self-interested parting gift to its parent, Exxon, and its colleagues in the consortium. It meant that consortium partners could deny responsibility for the demolition while Exxon could say that it was no longer involved. This is exactly what the company argued at the ExxonMobil annual shareholders' meeting in Dallas, Texas, on 28th May 2002.

On 9th May 2002, the Supreme Court of Colombia ruled that Tabaco must be reconstructed on a new site, as the villagers had been demanding. The ruling has not been obeyed. The community believes that only continued international pressure will ensure that the Supreme Court's decision is implemented. Other communities face displacement as the mine expands.

Richard Solly works with the Colombia Solidarity Campaign and the Mines and Communities Network. Aviva Chomsky teaches Latin American History at Salem State College, Massachusetts, USA. Roger Moody works with Nostromo Research in London.

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