In Colombia, gold mining companies find fertile grounds but difficult to overrule communities. But to what extent popular consultations are empowered?
The last time the country hit the international front pages was when Colombians were asked to vote over the peace agreement negotiated between President Santos and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) on October 2, 2016. In that occasion, with a margin of 0.4%, people had rejected the deal. Nevertheless, less than two months later, the President and the FARC leader Timochenko signed the revised agreement, submitted, this time, to the Congress vote. Then as now, Colombians are struggling to make their votes count.
“If we win, we’d show the world that Cajamarca is able to defeat a huge multinational enterprise, a mining monster as big as AngloGold Ashanti”, says Camila Mèndez to the environmental organisation Mongabay, just before the announcement of the vote’s results come out in the Colombian town.
Camila is part of the local youth collective Cosajuca who, together with the other 98% of residents, voted to block the mining project.
The Colombian press suddenly has been talking about Cajamarca, the small village in the Tolima region, Central Colombia, that sits on a gold mine and is now rejecting a multimillionaire project. Social media and activist organisations show crowded squares, congratulatory messages, and reasons to hope. Cosajuca is just one of the many South American movements mushrooming in recent years in response to growing threats to turn villages and rural areas into mining hothouses.
In May 2016, the Colombian Constitutional Court invalidated a 2001 law which prohibited municipalities from declaring areas off- limits to mining companies and ruled that “municipalities have a constitutional right to hold referendums on and ban mining”, as noted by the Yes to Life No to Mining environmental organisation. According to the South African news agency GroundUp, although the leading global gold mining company based in South Africa AngloGold Ashanti was in the territory from 1999, only appeared in newspapers with interests in the Andes in 2007. Nevertheless, in almost 20 years of presence in Colombia, the company accumulated more than 442 mining licences, for a total of nearly 800,000 hectares, distributed in more than half of Colombia’s regions.
The human rights organisation ActionAid denounced AngloGold Ashanti for having violated human rights and environmental damage during gold mining in Ghana, back in 2007. People of the small village of Obuasi revealed to the NGO that the river water, which was used for drinking, fishing and irrigation, has been polluted with heavy metals such as arsenic, iron, manganese. “When experts came to measure the affected places they’ve told us it is poisonous because of the cyanide. Because I don’t sell my crops, my income has gone down” said Abi Tessa, a local smallholder, to ActionAid. Meanwhile, poorer people have no other choice that farming on polluted lands to feed their families.
As another farmer, Brian Fatusu, declared to the NGO: “Since we don’t have any option, we turn a deaf ear to the fact that it is dangerous. We have to eat.
So we eat this.”
Following its deplorable environmental and human rights record in Ghana, AGA was awarded the Greenpeace Public Eye Award for being “The World’s Most Irresponsible Company” in 2011. However, an imperfect victory came when AGA was ordered to pay out the communities affected.
The London-based peace organisation Colombia Solidarity Campaign revealed that in Mali, where the company also operated for many years, cases of AIDs, lung diseases, and miscarriages increased. “Local residents claim that new cases of serious water pollution and flooding are still occurring and that alternative sources of water provided by AGA, such as public standpipes, are dangerously contaminated, broken or obsolete”, alleged the organisation.
AngloGold Ashanti has also been linked with several paramilitary activities in Colombia and Democratic Republic of Congo.
According to a BBC report from March 2017, Colombia’s Mining Minister German Arce after the referendum results promptly declared: “the town’s decision could not be applied retroactively” therefore “if the project had already obtained environmental licenses AngloGold Ashanti should have the right to proceed.” To date, according to the organisation Yes to Life No to Mining, AGA only started exploratory work, which by law does not count as an active mining project because explorations do not involve acquiring any rights and licenses. Indeed, Chris Nthite, Senior Media and Communication Specialist at AngloGold Ashanti, told me: “The environmental licenses have not yet been requested”. However, he clarifies, “We have the mining concessions in place and therefore we have the right to request the environmental licenses when we are ready. If that filling is successful, and the license is granted, we can proceed with the construction of the mine eventually.”
The Constitutional Court rule in 2016, which recognised municipalities’ rights to vote over mining projects, has been considered a major victory for communities, as no previous courts truly empowered consultation processes. In fact, the only existing regulation on the matter, defined by the UN in 2007 tried to guarantee the mere consultation of indigenous tribes, without stating any binding power of such. In fact, The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) states that states shall consult with the indigenous people before proceeding with any project that could affect their lands and other resources. However, Moira Birss, from Amazon Watch organisation, denounces the misuse of the regulation since ‘consultation is often interpreted as a merely informative meeting’, often occurring when projects are already underway.
And in Cajamarca, although people have seen their rights recognised by the Constitutional Court, they will still need to battle to make such right recognised by the government and mining companies. In fact, after the referendum, the Minister of Mining and Energy German Arce declared he would appeal to the Congress or to courts to consider whether the national or local authorities should prevail. Many questions over who owns rights over natural resources still remain unanswered. Empowering people with the right to vote used to be considered a significant step for our societies, however, today we should re-consider the actual effectiveness of such democratic process where are not fully acknowledged.
A shorter version of this article was published on Shout Out UK in June 2017.
A journalist at large 
Good work
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Thanks a lot, Peter.
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