In Gustavo Petro's Colombia, a New Plan Is Promoting Green Energy and Indigenous Rights

BY
KURT HOLLANDER

For too long, multinational energy companies have extracted resources from Colombia’s Guajira Desert region without sharing any of the benefits with indigenous residents. A new green initiative spearheaded by President Gustavo Petro aims to change that.



Citizens take part in a demonstration in support of President Gustavo Petro and the measures implemented in La Guajira on June 29, 2023, in Riohacha, Colombia. (Adri Salido / Getty Images)

Colombian president Gustavo Petro has just declared a one-month economic, social, and environmental emergency in the country’s La Guajira region. By declaring the situation an emergency, President Petro, who spent one week in the region in order to expedite the paperwork and ensure the implementation of the emergency measures, was able to pass laws that include sorely needed investments in education, health, tourism, and the water supply in the region.

La Guajira is a vast desert region in the extreme northeast of Colombia. It’s one of the main sources of energy in Colombia, home to a multibillion dollar coal mining industry and a prime spot for new wind farms. La Guajira is also home to the largest indigenous reservation in the country, the Wayúu reservation.

For too long, the Colombian government has cleared the way for huge national and multinational energy companies to extract resources from the region without distributing anything to the Wayúu, who have faced severe neglect. A new initiative by President Petro aims to rectify that, devoting resources to the development of renewable energy in a way that more equitably redistributes wealth to the indigenous people who live on the land.

Plundering La Guajira

Representing a fifth of the country’s indigenous population, Wayúu communities are spread out throughout the desert, with small clusters of homes known as rancherias representing different families and clans. The Wayúu are among the most marginalized of all communities in Colombia, and lack access to most basic services. About one-third of the Wayúu population live in poverty (with one-quarter in extreme poverty), while more than one in four Wayúu children under five suffer from malnutrition, with an infant dying every week in La Guajira.

. . .

Since the Spanish conquest, Europeans and others have made fortunes extracting precious metals and minerals from La Guajira, all while local indigenous communities wallow in poverty. This long history of extractivism has generated extremely uneven development within the region, in which two radically different worlds coexist. In La Guajira, a single mine, El Cerrejón, has generated billions of dollars extracting and exporting coal for multinational corporations for decades while locals have had to subsist with the bare minimum of resources scraped from the surface of the desert.

More:
https://jacobin.com/2023/09/gustavo-petro-wayuu-guajira-desert-colombia-coal-mining-green-industry-indigenous-rights-pact-for-a-fair-energy-transition/

Viva Gustavo Petro.

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Cerrejón Coal in Colombia: Access to justice and reparation become a chimera

30 Mar 2023

Author:
Amanda Romero, Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (in collaboration with the Collective Rights team at CAJAR)

For 20 years, there have been numerous reports of serious human rights abuses associated with the Cerrejón Coal mine, the largest open-pit coal mine in South America. Violations of the rights to housing, access to water, and a safe and healthy environment, amongst others, have been raised repeatedly, directly impacting women, the Indigenous Wayúu, the Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco, and peasant communities that live in the department of La Guajira, in Colombia. No less than six UN Special Rapporteurs and four members of the Working Group on Business and Human Rights issued a statement in 2020 which called on the Colombian State to suspend some of the mine’s operations, "because it is seriously damaging the environment and the health of the country’s largest indigenous community ".

This blog discusses the journey of these communities in their search for remedy for all they have lost. Their quest highlights not only the challenges marginalised communities face in overcoming the power and information imbalances that exist between them and transnational companies, in this case including Glencore, Anglo American and BHP, but also spotlights the need for further regulation of cross border corporate practice. Mandatory human rights due diligence legislation and the proposed binding treaty may offer some answer in cases like these.

Over time, Colombian courts have recognised in numerous rulings the violations associated with the Carbones del Cerrejón operation, but have repeatedly failed to sanction the three transnational shareholder companies directly. In each instance, they evaded responsibility by arguing they were only "minority shareholders" to the operation and thus had no operational control of the mine. However, one of Carbones del Cerrejón’ s sustainability reports stated that "we have no minority shareholders". In 2022, BHP and Anglo American sold their shares to fellow shareholder Glencore, allegedly without fully redressing and accounting for their human rights abuses.

The only relevant proceeding in which BHP, Anglo American and Glencore have been mentioned is a Constitutional Court ruling (T-614 of 2019) that ordered Carbones del Cerrejón to translate into English the ruling regarding the negative health impacts on the Provincial community and send it to these companies. Additionally, the ruling said that, the companies, as third parties, are free to consider whether or not to adopt additional measures to those stated in the ruling. However, even after receiving the judgement, communities and their representatives report that the companies did not adopt any additional measures. Instead, Cerrejón filed an appeal before the Colombian Constitutional Court requesting the annulment of the order.

More:
https://www.business-humanrights.org/en/blog/cerrej%C3%B3n-coal-in-colombia-access-to-justice-and-reparation-become-a-chimera/

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URGENT ACTION: Paramilitary death threats to indigenous critics of Cerrejon mine
May 2, 2019 | News

Some of our friends in La Guajira, including members of Wayuu indigenous organisation Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu, other community leaders and members of mine workers’ union Sintracarbon, have received fresh death threats.

Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu has been constant in its calls for justice for communities affected by the Cerrejon coal mine in La Guajira, Colombia.

The mine is owned by London-listed multinationals Anglo American, BHP and Glencore. Threats were issued on Monday 29 April, the day before the AGM of Anglo American in London. The last time such serious threats were issued was just before the October 2018 London AGM of BHP. It is unclear whether the timing was deliberate. Further threats have been received more recently.

Please read the comunique below from Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu and send a protest email to the Colombian government offices listed below it.

Comunique from Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu


We denounce stigmatization, persecution and threats

We declare ourselves in permanent defence of
Wounmainkat – Our Land, Wüinkat – The Water,
Kataa o’u – Life and Anajirrra A’in – Peace.

This time the threats have been targeted towards our movement and the people it comprises. We have completed 14 years of tireless work, in which our only weapon has been The Word that we raise in defence of what we consider just, for the protection of Wounmainkat – Our Mother Earth, our rights and the right to life in peace.

We denounce and repudiate the new strategies of threats that have been carried out this time by “Aguilas Negras – Bloque Capital D.C.” through fake profiles on social media that, since April 29 at 3.50 pm, have published a flyer in which we are persecuted, stigmatised and threatened.

We refer here to the facts in detail which demonstrate a new collective threat against our movement Wayuu Women’s Force – Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu – Sütsüin Jiyeyuu Wayuu, and which specifically identifies the names of persons in our movement.

THE FACTS

Many of us in the movement started to receive message alerts from people close to us, that there was a flyer circulating on social media in which we were threatened.

Around 4 in the afternoon on 29 April, using a profile from the social media Facebook under the name of “Pedro Lastra”, two images were published and shared: one referring to threats in 2018 in which the logos of our organisation appeared together with those representing the Movement Wayuu Nation – Movimiento Nacion Wayuu, the Wayuu Organisation Araurayu – La Organización Wayuu Araurayu, and the National Organisation of Indigenous of Colombia – ONIC. The second image has the logo specifically of La Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu, and it also directly identified the names and surnames of 6 of our members: Karmen Ramírez, Miguel Ramirez, Jakeline Romero, Deris Paz, Luis Misael Socarras and Dulcy Cotes.

The publication from the “Pedro Lastra” Facebook profile has comment that tags two other people: Carlos Daniel Hernández and Rosa María Cano. When checking back on Facebook to obtain information about “Pedro Lastra” by around 9pm, the profile had already been deleted.

It is not the first time that misogynist and hate campaigns have been launched against La Fuerza de Mujeres Wayuu; we have also been threatened with death, and the persecution that we have had to face has even obliged some people from our movement to flee the territory. Despite the complaints we have raised with the appropriate institutions, this has not secured that we can continue doing our work for the defence of peace, our rights, the rights of Wounmainkat – Mother Earth – and our own lives without danger.

https://londonminingnetwork.org/2019/05/urgent-action-paramilitary-death-threats-to-indigenous-critics-of-cerrejon-mine/

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It has been common for decades for corporations in Colombia to use paramilitaries to terrorize people they feel are a problem for their profits, including labor rights activists. People have been tortured and murdered. At some point this must end, somehow. Evil eventually will have to lose.