October 27, 2006

COLOMBIA: coal mining / exports to U.S. and Canadian consumers /
enviro-destruction / racism / repression!

BELOW: An article about the El Cerrejon coal mine in La Guajira, Colombia.

CANADIAN PENSION PLAN: The CPP is a major investor in two of the three main
companies that own this mine, with Cdn$5,145,000,000 shares in
Anglo-American, and Cdn$7,722,000,000 shares in BHP Billiton. Are your
private investments are profiting from these companies?

DELEGATION TO COLOMBIA: From Oct. 29 – Nov 4, Rights Action is joining a
delegation (organized by the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee:
nscolombia@comcast.net, 978-542-6389) to the El Cerrejon mine. Before and
after the trip, we will be distributing articles about the situation at the
El Cerrejon mine.

To get on/ off this elist: info@rightsaction.org. For more info:
www.rightsaction.org, 860-352-2152.

===

COAL MINING INDUSTRY GENERATING POWER AND POVERTY IN COLOMBIA
by Garry Leech, November 11, 2002 (Updated October 24, 2006)

Many of the communities in Colombia's remote northeastern department of La
Guajira exist on the periphery of the country's violence. The semi-arid
landscape is not conducive to guerrilla warfare and looks more like the
southwestern United States than any other part of Colombia. While the
region's geography is responsible for keeping much of the country's violence
at arms length, it is the cause of another form of conflict currently being
waged against numerous La Guajira communities: economic globalization.

In the early1980s, ExxonMobil — through its wholly-owned subsidiary,
Intercor — and Colombia's state-owned coal mining company Carbocol - began
extracting coal from the El Cerrejón mine in southern La Guajira. El
Cerrejón soon became the world's largest open-pit mine as it grew to its
current size of 30 miles long and five miles wide.

This continuing expansion has wreaked havoc on local communities, some of
which have already been gobbled up by the mine, and others that are targeted
for destruction over the next couple of years.

In January 2002, bulldozers completed the demolition of the village of
Tabaco after many of its residents had been forcibly evicted from their
homes in order to clear the way for the mine's expansion.

Some of Tabaco's 1,100 Afro-Colombian residents, many of whom are direct
descendents of the town's original founders, were violently attacked by the
more than 200 soldiers and police dispatched to remove those who refused to
voluntarily abandon their homes. According to one of the victims, Emilio
Ramón Perez, "The police beat and broke my head in four places and took me
out of the house. I was unconscious in the hospital for 20 days. They
destroyed my house without letting me take my things. They took everything:
my refrigerator, stove, television, chairs, they took all of my things."

Many of Tabaco's 350 families are now displaced. Some of them have fled the
region for a life of hardship in Colombia's cities, where the official
unemployment rate is close to 20 percent. Others have moved to neighboring
communities and are determined to continue their fight against the mine's
expansion while suing for compensation.

Tabaco families that refused to accept the money offered by Intercor prior
to the village's destruction received no compensation for the homes and
lands from which they were forcibly removed by soldiers and police.

In May 2002, Colombia's Supreme Court ruled that the municipality of
Hatonuevo, in which Tabaco was located, must allocate resources to build new
homes for the former residents of Tabaco. But such resources are scarce and
villagers have no means of ensuring that the court's ruling is implemented.

The Supreme Court also decreed that all future mining projects in indigenous
areas could not proceed without discussions being held with the affected
communities. While this ruling might provide some protection to the Wayúu
indigenous community of Tamaquito, it does little to alleviate the
threatened displacement of Afro-Colombian communities in the vicinity of El
Cerrejón.

One such community is Chancleta, some of whose residents have already
abandoned their homes due to the mine's encroachment. Seventy-three year-old
Juana Arregoces Dias has lived in her current house for 19 years and in
Chancleta her entire life. Like the majority of the region's residents, she
survives by growing a small amount of food crops, raising small animals and
fishing in the local river. But the mine has now seized the land through
which the river flows and the company refuses to allow local residents
fishing access. Those villagers who were dependent on fishing to sustain
themselves have already had to abandon their homes.

As a result, Chancleta is an eerily semi-deserted village of mud huts and
dirt roads patrolled by the mine's security guards who ride around in
pick-up trucks intimidating any villagers willing to talk with outsiders.

Juana's humble wooden house is less than 1,500 feet from the edge of the
mine. She endures the dust, pollution and blasting noise on a daily basis.
In all likelihood, she will soon have to decide whether to accept an offer
from the company or face forced eviction. Juana has no family left in the
region and, after a long life of rural subsistence living, is now faced with
the probability of having to adjust to the alien environment of a large town
or city with no job prospects.

The plight of Juana and other residents in the El Cerrejón region is typical
of that experienced by millions of impoverished rural victims of economic
globalization throughout the developing world.

In the 1980s, 60 percent of Colombia’s coal was used domestically, primarily
to generate electricity. But the globalization process brought companies
like ExxonMobil to La Guajira and Alabama-based Drummond Mining to the
neighboring department of César in search of cheap Colombian coal. As a
result, coal has become Colombia's third-largest legal export, a fact
illustrated in El Cerrejón where less than one percent of the 18 million
tons of coal extracted annually remains in Colombia.

Some 71 percent of the coal is shipped to Europe and 28 percent to the
United States and Canada. Colombia is now become the number one supplier of
foreign coal to the United States.

In March 2002, ExxonMobil sold its 50 percent share in El Cerrejón to its
partner, a multinational consortium consisting of three of the world's
largest mining companies — Anglo-American, BHP Billiton and Glencore — which
had acquired the Colombian government's share of the mine in December 2000.
Now that the consortium is the sole owner and operator of the mine,
ExxonMobil can conveniently say that it is no longer responsible for the
displaced citizens of Tabaco. However, the consortium that now owns the mine
in its entirety was co-owner with ExxonMobil at the time of Tabaco's
displacement.

In order to address some of the social and economic problems related to the
mine and the 115-mile railway line used to transport the coal to the
Caribbean coast, the mine's owners established the Cerrejón Foundation in
1984. But with an annual budget of only $80,000, which has to cover staff
salaries and the cost of its suite of offices in the departmental capital,
Riohacha, it is uncertain how effectively the Foundation can address the
needs of the 70 communities that fall under its sphere of operations.

Executive director of the Cerrejón Foundation, Yolanda Mendoza, says the
Foundation provides micro-credit programs to small businesses and indigenous
communities, while a field staff helps teach the communities new farming
technologies. But when asked what the Foundation was doing to help
communities displaced by the mine, Mendoza replied, "They are not really
displaced. They are not displaced because there are no communities where the
mine is at this time. There was a process a long time ago, but now there are
no communities there." When reminded of the recent destruction of Tabaco,
Mendoza became visibly tense and stated, "I don’t think that is true. But it
is a topic you have to speak about with the El Cerrejón mine company,
because I don’t have the authority to talk about it."

It appears that denial is the company's first line of defense regarding the
displacement of local communities. And when forced to address the issue, a
spokesperson for the mine, Ricardo Plata Cepeda, said the company is waiting
for the Colombian courts to determine how much it has to pay those forcibly
evicted from Tabaco. Undoubtedly, the mine's owners know full well that
there is little likelihood of any judicial rulings being effectively
enforced. Meanwhile, the Colombian government has extended the company's
operating contract until 2034, and at that time, given the mine's current
growth rate, the dominant feature in the landscape of southern La Guajira
will be an ecologically devastating 70-mile by 12-mile hole in the ground.

Current and future victims of the mine's expansion have begun focusing on
raising international awareness of their plight. There are groups in the
United States and Canada that are helping to shed light on the human
catastrophe unfolding in La Guajira.

In the United States, the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee in
Salem, Massachusetts, is working to increase community awareness that the
electricity generated by PG&E-owned Salem Harbor Power Station comes from
Colombian coal extracted at a great cost to Colombian peasants. "We’re the
consumer of the product that is throwing people off their land. We're the
beneficiaries of something that is unjust," said Avi Chomsky, a professor at
Salem State College and founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity
Committee.

Local council member, Colombian-born Claudia Chuber, met with Colombian
President Alvaro Uribe in Washington D.C. in September and presented him
with a copy of a resolution passed by the Salem City Council. The resolution
expresses concern about villagers displaced by the mine and urges that the
Colombian Supreme Court's decision calling for the building of homes for
Tabaco's former residents be carried out expeditiously.

The Cerrejón Mine is also a principal supplier of coal to the Canadian
provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. In fact, Nova Scotia Power
purchased $78 million worth of Colombian coal in 2005 to fuel its power
plants. The Atlantic Regional Solidarity Network (ARSN) has worked to create
awareness among Atlantic Canadians of the connections between the
electricity in their homes and human rights abuses in Colombia.

Sadly, the Uribe admininstration has failed to address human rights issues
related to the extraction of Colombian coal. The shedding of light on such a
human rights issue would only undermine the U.S.-led process of economic
globalization that lies at the root of Washington's escalating military
intervention in Colombia.

In the meantime, and in the face of great odds, 73-year-old Juana Arregoces
Dias and the other remaining residents of Chancleta, as well as those living
in neighboring communities also threatened by the mine's expansion, continue
to struggle for social and economic justice in their remote and often
forgotten corner of Colombia.

===

IN CANADA: Atlantic Regional Solidarity Network (ARSN), Steve Law, (902)
632-2497, www.arsn.org

IN UNITED STATES: North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee:
nscolombia@comcast.net, 978-542-6389

CANADIAN PENSION PLAN: Contact ACT for the Earth, 238 Queen Street West,
lower level, Toronto, Ontario, M5V 1Z7 Canada, Tel: 647-436-6398,
www.actfortheearth.org.