by Todd Gordon
The long-standing armed conflict in Colombia has provided a useful cover for the employment of state and paramilitary violence in potential zones of mining and oil extraction on behalf of multinational capital. The dynamic typically goes something like this: The corporation demands “security” for their investments, which means, in the first instance, the clearing of the relevant geographic area of insurgent groups in order to avoid attacks on the equipment or personnel of large-scale mines. However, the demands for “security” and “protection” also facilitate a violence that far exceeds the routing of armed insurgent groups. The flexibility with which opposition of any kind is associated by the state with the guerrilla movements is notorious.652 Under the mantle of security, virtually any expressions of resistance by local communities to the presence of mining and oil corporations can be dealt with using force from above, once the lines between armed insurgency and social movement mobilization have been sufficiently blurred. There is no innocence on the part of multinational mining and oil companies in this process. According to the Colombian sociologist Yohana Cuervo Sotelo:
In this way, when a transnational company situates itself in a territory of a country in conflict like Colombia, it represents itself as being a victim of that conflict, as a neutral actor, and it fervently insists on the intervention of the state and its military forces, to carry out actions to guarantee the stability of its investment. The reality is that the necessity to provide security and stability to large mining companies, or, to create propitious conditions for their entrance without large-scale resistance, and to reconfigure these regions in accordance with the logics of extraction, is what in the end drives and augments the implementation of violent measures on the part of the state.653
The Colombian Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement points out that there is a significant presence of military and paramilitary forces in the mining regions, and not surprisingly, according to the National Mining Company Minercol Workers Union, 87 percent of displaced persons have fled mining regions, and 80 percent of human rights violations occur in these zones.654
Indeed, instrumental to Uribe’s “democratic security” strategy was the dedication of huge numbers of military troops to extractive zones in order to protect the infrastructure of the mining and oil economies. Under Uribe, the defence budget was spiked to 5.6 percent of GDP by 2008, from 2.2 percent in 1990. As noted above, the connections of his regime to the paramilitaries, and their role in the repression systematically carried out in areas of extractive capitalism are well established. A full third of the lower house of Congress and a third of the Senate during the Uribe period were later investigated for links to paramilitary organizations.655 “There is a particularly controversial characteristic of the entrance of transnational corporations and the mining boom in the country,” writes Cuervo Sotelo, “the utilization of violence, militarization and repression as a mechanism to ensure foreign investment, which is to say, to carry out territorial appropriation on behalf of the corporations.”656
As we discuss in Chapter 9, as a result of the actions of both Liberal and Conservative governments since the 1990s, Canada is becoming more deeply implicated in Colombia’s security apparatus, which benefits Canadian capital, both in Colombia, as well as much of the rest of Latin America.
CANADIAN INVESTMENTS AND GRASSROOTS RESISTANCE
The second phase of the Canadian investment invasion, rolling out since the mid-2000s, has predictably faced opposition and led to violent confrontation between opponents and government and company security forces. Clearly anticipating an anti-mining push back, the Colombian government preemptively advertised to investor groups in New York, Calgary, Toronto, London, and Sydney, among other destinations, that it would provide security in the form of military battalions for companies during their exploration activities in the mining and oil and gas sectors.657 Military security, in other words, was an incentive for Canadian and other multinational oil and gas companies to enter the country.
Human rights organizations and trade unionists in Colombia have reported their concerns over Canadian companies’ complicity in atrocities carried out in the mining industry since the first major wave of investment in the 1990s. Conquistador Mines Ltd. was identified by activists, for example, because it was exploring gold deposits in southern Bolívar, where it was well known that “guerrillas and paramilitaries have battled for sympathies of local residents,” and where human rights groups argue “massacres carried out by paramilitaries have sown terror among peasants and [artisanal] miners who are opposed to foreign firms’ activities.”658 Amnesty International and Friends of the Earth also “raised the alarm about alleged abuses surrounding…Canadian projects.”659 The Toronto Star reported in 1999, “These companies are functioning inside a civil war zone, a war that has everything to do with wealth and power. Nobody—least of all the foreign gold miners—are [sic] neutral.”660 One report, stemming from a 1997 Canadian human rights delegation to Colombia of trade unionists and church members, reached the following damning conclusion:
The presence of Conquistador Mines and its interest in the South of Bolívar appears to have encouraged the murder of local community leaders and the massive displacement of peasant miners and their families. The other Canadian companies in Colombia are not directly linked to human or labour rights violations, but they still benefit from the “economics of repression.” The systematic massacres and displacements of Colombian citizens by a combined military-paramilitary assault have the dual effect of creating a vast pool of cheaper labour and giving foreign companies access to valuable natural resources they may not otherwise have been able to obtain. Repression serves to greatly reduce the price and organized resistance of labour and clears the land of people who would resist the takeover of Colombian natural wealth by multinational capital.661
Multinational corporations functioning in the extractive resource sectors in Colombia in the 1990s and 2000s have commonly turned to paramilitaries for “security” purposes. “Given that private property rights [are] contested in much of Colombia,” notes Forrest Hylton, “it is not surprising that foreign corporations [pay] protection money to paramilitaries as a ‘capitalist insurance policy’.”662 On more than one occasion, Canadian mining companies hired the notorious American mercenary aviation firm, AirScan, for security purposes. AirScan’s employees, “have been linked to a bungled 1998 airstrike on rebel forces in Colombia that killed 18 unarmed civilians, including nine children.”663 The Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs stated in a 2002 report that Colombia offered rich commercial opportunities in mining, limited only by security concerns: “The report concludes, ‘The challenge is to balance the commercial opportunities with a wise intelligent approach to personal security’.”664 Ken Luckhardt, a national representative for the Canadian Auto Workers, expressed the sentiments of many human rights and trade union activists when he argued in 2002, “If Canadian mining companies require military forces to operate, they shouldn’t be there.”665
The two Uribe administrations (2002–2010) had a lot to do with the resurgence of investor confidence, after the relative waning of the first wave of Canadian mining interests in Colombia by the close of the 1990s. Business press reports during the Uribe administrations noted that, “Mr. Uribe…has implemented some of the most competitive taxation conditions in the world, not just in Latin America.”666 Peter Baxter, exploration manager of Vancouver’s Bema Gold Corp., was impressed with Uribe after seeing a presentation by him at a mining conference in Medellín: “Colombia is a lot better than I thought. Seeing President Uribe was impressive.”667 The reasons for the positive reception of Uribe by multinational mining capital were straightforward. At the same conference in Medellín, Uribe declared: “Colombia will be attractive for investors.…Colombia is ready to be a major mining country.”668
Community resistance to large-scale mining and oil extraction in Colombia began to pick up pace in the 2000s. Opposition to Cana
dian companies is drawn from indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, small farmers, and environmental activists who fear ecological disaster in the wake of massive mining development. But movements of resistance also include small-scale artisanal miners. Many of the areas Canadian companies are entering have been mined for decades, and in some instances centuries, by small-scale miners trying to eke out a living in impoverished and long-neglected regions of the country. State infrastructure and social service provisions are sparse in such districts. Describing small-scale mining practices as illegal despite their long history, and violating their property rights, Canadian companies have put pressure on the Colombian government to take action to defend Canadian investments. This paid dividends in April 2013 when the Colombian airforce—which, as we note below, has trained in Canada—bombed artisanal miners in Antioquia and Caldas, locations where Canadian companies are looking to expand.669
Indigenous movements, artisanal small-scale miners, Afro-Colombian communities, environmentalists, and small peasant farmers have engaged in various tactics, such as strikes, petitions, blockades, and direct action of increasing intensity, in an effort to prevent, or at least to slow, the expansion of multinational mining capital in their territories. When Juan Manuel Santos assumed the presidency in 2010 he faced a new phenomenon of popular consultations in local communities affected by mining. The phenomenon of popular consultations with local populations about whether or not to allow mining or oil exploration and development in the relevant municipal areas has been taking off for the last decade across much of South and Central America. Beginning in 2012, the tactic of formalized, popular consultation has also been advancing in Colombia. The present political conjuncture in the country, with a relative decline in violence, and peace talks taking place between guerrillas and state officials in Havana, Cuba, has meant that the organization of such experiments in local democracy has been less dangerous to carry out.
National legislation from 1994 seems to back the authority of municipalities to conduct such consultations and to implement their results. Article 55 of Law 134, in particular, indicates that “the decision taken by the people in a popular referendum is obligatory.”670 However, after three municipalities in the southeast of the department of Antioquia passed anti-mining agreements in 2013 following popular consultations, the Ministry of Mines and Energy at the federal level began to worry. The national government, under President Juan Manual Santos, issued decree 0934 on May 9, 2013, which intended to clarify the implementation of Article 37 of the existing Mining Code. Through this decree, the Minister of Mines and Energy was able to establish that no local or regional authority has the remit to exclude mining activity from its area—that is, no municipal or regional body has the authority to regulate mining, which remains a federal duty of the national government. The decree, contradicting as it does the 1994 legislation, was being challenged in Constitutional Court as of mid-2014.671 Popular consultations are merely the latest in a long line of techniques employed by communities in resistance to which the Colombian state and Canadian mining capital have had to respond in myriad ways.
The following sections cast light on a number of specific Canadian companies involved in the extractive resource sectors of the Colombian economy today. Each corporation has encountered particular expressions of opposition to its presence. The sample list of companies dealt with here could easily be expanded, but it does provide a representative illustration of dynamics that stretch out much more widely across the oil and gas and mining sectors.
Pacific Rubiales
The second largest oil company operating in Colombia, Pacific Rubiales Energy (PRE), is headquartered in Canada. Pacific Rubiales is an oil and gas company based in Toronto, with assets throughout different parts of Latin America. In September 2013, it struck one of Canada’s largest energy deals of the year when it agreed to pay US$935 million to buy Petrominerales Ltd. This move will provide Pacific Rubiales considerably more weight in Colombia and Peru. The deal with Petrominerales (also a Canadian corporation, with its head office in Calgary) will also give Pacific Rubiales access to light oil with which it can dilute its extant heavy oil deposits, allowing the company to use a pipeline to get its heavy oil to market, rather than much more expensive transport by truck. As part of this new acquisition process, Petrominerales is, meanwhile, buying out its partner in a Brazilian oil exploration project, allowing Pacific Rubiales to create a new exploration and production company in Brazil with roughly C$100 million to operate with immediately.672
Pacific Rubiales was only able to secure its first oil concessions in Colombia after security forces swept through and cleared populations that were standing in the way of extraction. It was a veritable campaign of terror and assassination.673 A 2009 article in Forbes magazine stresses the importance of the assault on the guerrillas, and the displacement of resident populations as a backdrop to energy sector expansion in the case of Pacific Rubiales:
Exxon abandoned the Rubiales field in the 1980s. Until recently, production there was constrained by how much could be trucked out—an armada of 1,500 tanker trucks hauled about 60,000 barrels of crude per day to civilization, much of it along dirt roads. Pacific Rubiales and analysts say that the region, once flush with rebels, is secure, and none of the trucks have been attacked.674
Interestingly, the chief executive officer of Pacific Rubiales is Ronald Pantin, a Caracas-born, Stanford-educated oil baron who cut his political and economic teeth as a member of the senior management team of the Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. He held that position until the government of Hugo Chávez defeated the oil lockout that PDVSA’s senior management orchestrated in 2002–2003, in an effort to destabilize the democratically-elected administration in Venezuela through the debilitation of the country’s oil industry. Claims persist to this day that Pacific Rubiales, under Pantin’s direction, is financing right-wing opposition to Chávez’s successor as Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, although Pantin insists that, “the allegations are absurd and have no factual basis.”675 Indeed, most of the management team of Pacific Rubiales are former PDVSA officials who were sacked by the Chávez government once their role in the destabilizing lockout had been revealed.
According to John Galante, a Latin America energy analyst at ESAI Energy, a consultancy, “The company benefited especially from a combination of energy sector reform in Colombia, access to capital through its listing in Toronto and the integration of know how from Venezuelan expatriates.”676 “The situation that has occurred in Venezuela, with Mr. Chávez throwing out the good management at PDVSA, is fortunate for us,” according to Andrés Jiménez, head of equity research at Colombia-based investment firm Interbolsa. “They are people with a lot of expertise, especially expertise that you need to extract the heavy oil in Colombia.” As early as 2009, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) listed Pacific Rubiales as a “sector outperformer.” According to a report from CIBC analyst Robert Pare published that year, CIBC “believe[s] the company continues to offer further upside on strong operational momentum and ongoing drilling activity.”677
Pacific Rubiales began extracting 25,000 barrels of oil per day when it began operations in 2007. By 2013, that pace had risen to an estimated 250,000 barrels per day. Its activity was part of Colombia’s more general acceleration in oil production over the 2000s, solidifying the country as the fourth largest oil producer in Latin America, after Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil. According to the Financial Times:
Timing has also contributed to the company’s success. In the past decade Colombia has ridden a commodities boom. At the same time the government has enacted a security crackdown that has put its guerrilla insurgents on the back foot—though they are still active. Resource companies have been able to operate in territories that were previously in the crossfire.678
Pantin has confidence in his Canadian investors and thus bold plans for expansion in Colombia and elsewhere in the region. “Canadian investors
are comfortable with exploration risk,” and as a consequence the corporation’s “greatest investments will be in exploration in the coming 5 to 10 years, this year Pacific Rubiales will be investing $405m in exploration.”679 “Pacific Rubiales and its management team changed the dynamic of the oil sector in Colombia,” according to Rupert Stebbings, vice-president of equity sales at Bancolombia. “They are agile, know exactly what they are doing when it comes to heavy oil and know how to exercise their plans and take seriously their responsibilities on all aspects, not just getting oil out of the ground at any cost.” From another perspective, the FARC have labeled Pacific Rubiales a “transnational vampire.”680
The initial displacement of people for the establishment of the oil field was followed by conflict between the company and its workers in Campo Rubiales, located in the eastern department of Meta. In the summer of 2011, the workers struck against terrible working conditions, including in some cases eighteen-hour work days and forty straight days without time off, unpaid salaries, and unhealthy work environments. The strikers were met with a large police and military presence, and the requisite death threats.681 The strike of ten thousand workers took place in Puerto Gaitán, and was sparked initially by the firing of over one thousand workers who the strikers demanded be reinstated, while also insisting on the improvement of working conditions and better wages for all workers.682 Pacific Rubiales shares in Toronto fell as much as 5.4 percent during one day of protests in late October 2011. The Colombian government sent four hundred additional police to guard the oil fields of Pacific Rubiales in Meta. The troops were sent when the company repeatedly threatened to suspend operations unless reinforcements were deployed to quell what it said were violent demonstrations. “Security forces have been reinforced by way of the National Police. A general law has been sent to take command of police activities with very specific instruction to arrest anyone who breaks the law,” claimed Mauricio Cárdenas, Minister of Mining and Energy at the time.683
