by Todd Gordon
Clashes between protesters and police took place in September 2011 at the oil fields of Pacific Rubiales, forcing the shutdown of its Rubiales and Quifa oil fields in Meta. At the time of the strike, the two fields were producing an average of 225,000 barrels of crude per day, roughly one-quarter of the 953,000 barrels the country averaged in daily output in August that year. The government sent in hundreds of anti-riot police to Puerto Gaitán, the biggest town near the rural area where the oil fields are located. The Colombian National Police also declared a curfew in the town. The police were called in once protesters had set up blockades that prevented company vehicles from entering and leaving the oil fields. PRE was instrumental in having the police escalate the conflict given that the company insisted it had broken no Colombian laws, and therefore was justified in repeatedly calling on the Colombian coercive apparatus to restore order and production in the region. The protests first began as early as July 2011, when the oil fields were first shutdown, and there were periodic blockades and clashes between the July and September actions. Pacific Rubiales was not the only Canadian company targeted. Earlier in September 2011, Petrominerales, the abovementioned Canadian oil corporation subsequently purchased by Pacific Rubiales, was briefly forced to shut down production in two fields in nearby Casanare state after residents from proximate communities blockaded roads to protest against pollution and heavy truck traffic on rural roads connected to the company’s oil fields.684
Dave Coles, President of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (the CEP and Canadian Autoworkers were replaced by Unifor in 2013), participated in a seventeen-person Canadian delegation to investigate the activities of Pacific Rubiales in July 2012. During his visit, he was a juror at a preliminary hearing of what was called the Popular Tribunal Against Extractive Policies in Colombia. The tribunal took place close to the oil fields of Pacific Rubiales near Puerto Gaitán. According to Coles:
The testimony was heart-wrenching. Representatives of indigenous communities told the Tribunal about how oil exploration on their lands had forced them to move to makeshift villages in housing constructed of plastic sheeting, cardboard and sticks. Women from outlying communities showed the jury bottles of orange and charcoal-coloured water, which they said was from their local water source, a river carrying effluent from PRE’s extractive process. Union officials described the living conditions of workers forced to rotate off their shift to catch a few hours of sleep in a bed occupied by three other workers on different shifts.685
Coles reports that during the strike in the summer of 2011:
Colombian Senator Alexander López, who testified at the tribunal, said he was blocked by public security forces from freely travelling on a public road to the Rubiales oil fields. López concluded that PRE’s actions in Colombia warranted their expulsion from the country.
There were also anonymous death threats levied at key activists among the workers involved in the strike, directed both toward them and their families. In a context of generalized right-wing paramilitary terror against trade unionists in Colombia at the time, these threats could not be dismissed as idle chatter. Coles explains how the Canadian delegation
brought the information we had learned about PRE’s abuses to the Canadian embassy in Bogotá. But officials there were nonplussed, saying they meet monthly with their “customers” such as PRE. In fact, the ambassador’s representative expressed more concern about PRE’s lack of interest in Canadian Export Development Corporation financing than in the company’s social practices.686
In 2013, workers initiated a campaign against what they claimed was an effort by the company to break the union by blacklisting members from work. Ninety percent of the company’s approximately five thousand-person workforce was fired for supporting the union. Unionists also reported receiving death threats for their activism—something that, predictably, received no mention in Canada’s FTA human rights reports.687
If the situation for Colombians living in oil and mining zones is evermore unbearable, the environs for capital are something approaching paradise. Pacific Rubiales is hardly unique in its plans to expand operations still further in the country. In the Conference of Oil and Gas of Latin America in April 2012, in Punta del Este (Uruguay), Colombia was awarded first place status as the country with the most attractive investment climate for the hydrocarbons sector, beating out Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. In 2013, Pacific Rubiales sunk roughly US$7.1 billion into exploration and development.688 In 2014, the company expects that its investments in the country will surpass US$2 billion, and it hopes to double the number of barrels of oil it extracts per day over the next five years.689
Talisman
The Calgary-based oil giant Talisman has been facing resistance for several years as a consequence of the company’s drilling for oil on indigenous reserves, located in regions that have experienced violent repression since the 1990s by paramilitiaries, and which have been under periodic military occupation, funded, in part, by oil companies themselves.690 Ecopetrol, the Colombian state oil company, announced in December 2013 that it had discovered oil in two deposits in the department of Meta (an area in which Talisman is engaged in joint contracts with Ecopetrol). The new deposits mean that Ecopetrol’s proven reserves are now 40 million barrels richer than their previous count of 1,877,000. Colombia, it should be remembered, is the fourth largest producer of hydrocarbons in Latin America, with known reserves of 2,377,000 barrels. The problem for Canadian companies and the Colombian state is growing opposition to oil exploration and extraction. In the area of Meta where the new deposits were discovered, direct action against companies—which the state has labelled “terrorist attacks”—numbered 163 in 2013 alone.691
Meanwhile, community anti-oil plebiscites and blockades of exploratory activity in the area went from 308 in 2012 to 432 in 2013. The communities of Guamal and Catilla, near the municipality of Acacías in the department of Meta, where a separate Ecopetrol-Talisman joint operation is located, recently carried out a two-hundred-day occupation in order to prevent Ecopetrol from exploring a potential oil site that they thought would result in negative effects for a river that services all three communities. In a popular consultation in the municipality of Tauramena, 4,426 people voted against oil exploration in their hydrocarbon-rich area, against 151 residents who voted in favour. In response, the government said they would negotiate, but stressed that what is under the subsoil of this community is the property of the nation. Environmental consciousness, a phenomenon quite underdeveloped in Colombian social movements until recently, has now become a central priority in many municipalities struggling against hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation involving joint contract operations between Canadian oil firms and the Colombian state company.692
Talisman and Ecopetrol are so far undeterred by environmental opposition to their planned oil operations in Acacías, in which Ecopetrol owns 55 percent of the production contract, next to 45 for Talisman. “We will move forward to agree on a development plan and to obtain the necessary environmental licences. This important milestone reflects a significant step forward toward the realization of the potential of our company in Colombia,” Talisman president Hal Kvisle reported to the Colombian media in June 2014. For his part, the president of Ecopetrol, Javier Gutiérrez, affirmed that, “Acacías constitutes one of the biggest exploratory successes of the last few years in Colombia, and clearly shows the potential of heavy oil in the eastern plains.” The department of Mata, it is important to note, is a region of fragile plains and diverse jungle areas in eastern Colombia.693
Gran Colombia
In the town of Marmato, in the department of Caldas, the Canadian mining company Gran Colombia (after its merger with Medoro Resources) has operated as Colombia’s biggest underground gold and silver producer. At the time of writing, Gran Colombia is hoping to move an entire village and blow up a mountain to build a gold mine in the area. According to the company’s assess
ment, the Marmato project is potentially one of the richest gold deposits in the world. The drastic extraction technique is being proposed for an area in which steep hillsides, heavy rainfall, and abundance of waste rock have already increased the risk of landslides.694 The development would involve displacing five thousand inhabitants, and has generated concerted resistance, particularly on the part of small-scale artisanal miners who have worked the veins of the mountain for decades.695 Company manager Juan Carlos Santos, a relative of president Santos, stated blithely that “we can compensate them with our checkbook.” Reflecting on the possibility that villagers might have the temerity to resist petty buyouts, he stressed matter-of-factly that “when a country like Colombia needs to exploit areas, and our country is full of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, we have to think in the big picture.”696 The big picture for Gran Colombia, in other words, does not include land rights for indigenous and Afro-Colombian peoples. Adding to the tension surrounding Gran Colombia’s plans, in September 2011 the body of Father José Reinel Restrepo was discovered.697 An active mine opponent and leader of the Comité Cívico Prodefensa de Marmato (Civic Committee in Defence of Marmato), he had criticized the plans to displace the community and the “Canadian imperialism” behind it.698 With potentially 11.8 million ounces of gold deposits at stake, Gran Colombia is unlikely to leave quietly.699
In July 2011, a union leader working for Gran Colombia at another project in El Campo was assassinated.700 In early 2014, in the northeast of the department of Antioquia, conflicts with Gran Colombia persisted. Four hundred protesters—artisanal miners, their families, and sympathizers—gathered to march through the streets of the city of Segovia, calling for the Canadian mining corporation to respect the labour rights of 500 workers, 340 of whom are members of the Sindicato de Trabajadores Mineros de Segovia y Remedios (Union of Mining Workers of Segovia and Remedios). The immediate company in question is Estrategias y Minas, but this company is ultimately doing the contract work for Gran Colombia. According to the workers, with the historic fall in gold prices over the course of 2013—28 percent—the corporation suspended its mining operations in Segovia and Remedios, in violation of its contract with the workforce. The company is now asking workers to voluntarily rescind the contract, with the possibility of being hired back on to work in the near future, but for lower wages and benefits.701
Partly in response to the controversies surrounding their activities, some Canadian mining companies have fostered connections with political elites in Colombia, hiring former politicians with important political ties to help advance their interests. Gran Colombia is a good example. The company’s board of directors includes former Minister of Mines and Energy, Hernán Martínez, who during his tenure issued the most mining permits in Colombian history, according to former Colombian Environment Minister and head of the U.N. Forestry Forum, Manuel Rodríguez Becerra. Gran Colombia’s former president was María Consuelo Araujo, who served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and has two family members (a sibling and a parent), both politicians, who have been investigated for links to paramilitaries.702
Eco Oro/Greystar
The Canadian multinational mining company Eco Oro (formerly Greystar) has invested US$220 million in the last six years in search of gold in the municipality of California, near Bucaramanga, the capital city of the department of Santander in northeastern Colombia. The various projects proposed have not yet taken off because part of the potential mining site overlaps with the moorland habitat of Santurbán. The operations of the company have sparked reaction from communities in the area who fear the environmental consequences for adjacent rivers and the wider ecology. The company still awaits definitive delimitation of the borders of the moorland habitat by the Ministry of the Environment.703
The mountainous plateau of Santurbán, which crosses the borders of the departments of North Santander and Santander, has in many ways become one of Colombia’s most important battlegrounds between mining companies and the state, on the one hand, and anti-mining environmentalists, on the other. Through their exploration activities, Eco Oro discovered what could be one of the most important deposits of gold on the planet. The company calculates that it could extract 240 tons of the metal if its plans are allowed to proceed. However, in order to get at the gold, it proposes to open a massive hole in the mountain range, two kilometres long and one kilometre wide. The idea that this might transpire has led to massive marches of resistance in Bucaramanga, and has set off alarm bells for environmentalists across the country. The principal ecological problem has to do with the fact that these mountains are the originary source point for the fresh water of huge tracts of the country. It is from this mountainous plateau that 70 percent of water consumed by Colombians originates. It is also believed that roughly 2 million Santandereanos (residents of the department of Santander) depend on Santurbán for their access to water.704 Another concern of community residents has been the fact that Eco Oro’s original proposal noted the company’s expectation that the mine would use forty tons of cyanide per day during the extraction process. In response to these concerns, the Committee for the Defence of Water and the Santurban Páramo managed to gather 75,000 signatures for a petition protesting against Eco Oro’s presence, another factor stalling the company’s forward momentum in the region.705
A separate petition signed by Colombia’s most important environmental activists and leaders was sent to President Santos in June 2014. The letter demanded a new mining code and an immediate moratorium on the granting of titles and environmental licenses to mining corporations. One of the key targets of the petition was Eco Oro’s Santurbán initiative. Never has a mining project in Colombia generated a controversy as great as that which is ongoing in Santurbán. The intensity of social pressure around this project over the years was the reason Greystar retracted its original application for an environmental license several years ago, and changed its name to Eco Oro. Most significantly, the socio-environmental struggles in Santander have forced the Colombian government to set aside 11,700 hectares of the region as National Park land. At first glance, it was a victory for the environmentalists. However, in order for the newly established park to effectively halt Eco Oro’s ongoing interest in blowing up parts of the mountain range, and to definitively protect the moorland habitat in the area from the consequences of large-scale, open-pit mining, the park’s borders would need to be quickly and clearly defined. Thus far, the borders remain distinctly ambiguous and open to contention.706 As of the summer of 2014, Eco Oro remained hopeful that it would eventually be given a green light to exploit its proposed open-pit mine in Santurbán. Company officials insist that that the gold deposits they are interested in are located outside of the zone which was declared a part of the newly established national park territory.707
In one of the most thorough case studies of Eco Oro’s activities in Santander conducted to date, Land and Conflict: Resource Extraction, Human Rights, and Corporate Social Responsibility – Canadian Companies in Colombia, the NGOs Mining Watch and CENSAT-Agua Viva bring to light a series of damning conclusions flowing out of their extensive review of investment documents in the Colombian mining sector, interviews and focus group sessions with local community activists, and discussions with politicians of different persuasions, company representatives, and officials from government institutions involved in the mining sector.708 The conclusions turn on the pivots of displacement and dispossession, ecology, and the economic disruption of small-scale artisanal mining and peasant agriculture. The report finds that, based on available evidence, there are “medium to high potential risks” that Eco Oro (still Greystar at the time of the study) is
benefitting from dislocation and displacement of local populations; inadvertently rewarding people or groups who have committed human rights violations; imposing serious environmental impacts, especially on crucial water supplies; and imposing undue costs to local people’s economic livelihoods and food security.709
In terms of displacement and dispossession:
The Colombian Army’s efforts to regain control of the region and end the long-term presence of the FARC in the project area were at least partially intended to allow Greystar to return to its operations; paramilitary groups also became involved. The violence had the effect of temporarily and permanently displacing local people and permanently destroyed their food production capacity.710
Regarding ecological impact, the results of the study are equally sharp:
Local and environmental authorities have raised serious concerns about significant and unmitigable ecological impacts, especially to local and regional water supplies. The Angostura project is located in an ecologically sensitive area that is already suffering contamination from small-scale mining. Instead of improving small-scale mining practices and technologies, the project will increase water use and pose an additional risk of contamination.711
And, finally, in terms of the disruption of the livelihoods of artisanal miners and peasants in the area, the report concludes: “Small-scale miners are being displaced with little or no compensation or relocation plan. The local agricultural economy will have a more difficult time recovering from violence and dislocation as the mine occupies increasingly large areas of productive land.”712
As in the case of Gran Colombia, and many other Canadian mining companies, Eco Oro has made a study of establishing links with Colombia’s political elite in an effort to manage social resistance to their mining developments in the country. After running into difficulties from local authorities with the Angostura mine, for example, Eco Oro named former Justice Minister Rafael Nieto as its president.713 According to Mining Watch, Eco Oro has also “provided logistical support to establish a base for security operations” in the department of Satander, where it has its most important operations to date, as we have seen. “There are two military camps currently within the company’s exploration area and the High Mountain Battalion there has the capacity to house up to five hundred soldiers. The company also has retired military personnel within its private security detail.” Paramilitaries also maintain a presence in the area. Mining Watch notes further that the company has managed a CSR campaign with Canadian (and American) government support, in which it has “channelled funds from USAID and CIDA through a foundation it established to provide a number of community programs in the area, where there is notably weak presence of the state,” though it has not properly consulted with the local community about its mining plans.714
