|
September 2, 2002 Coal Mines and Communities in Colombia: The Salem Connection Since the early 1980s, the Cerrejón Zona Norte mine in Colombia's Guajira peninsula has been producing and exporting coal. The beneficiaries of this project are many: ExxonMobil, also known as Esso, and its shareholders (half owners of the mine until 2001); U.S. energy companies that purchase the high-quality, low-sulfur, clean-burning coal and can comply with environmental regulations without spending money on cleaning up their plants; and U.S. residents who benefit from cleaner air and cheap, reliable electricity. Those harmed in Colombia are perhaps not so many, but the harm they suffer is incalculably greater: the loss of health, land, homes, livelihoods, and even life.
On May 23, Remedios told Salem residents: The coal that is mined in El Cerrejón, located on indigenous Wayúu and Afro-Colombian lands in Colombia, comes to Salem to provide electricity, benefiting this city. We want to tell the people of Salem that this coal has its origins in violence. Our communities have suffered greatly. Their human rights have been violated, their territory has been usurped, their houses destroyed and demolished, and they have had to shed their blood in order for this coal to arrive in Salem and other parts of the world. The acts that have been committed by El Cerrejón could be considered as war crimes, and they should be condemned by the world. PG&E has an indirect responsibility, for it is using a mineral that comes from the sacrifice of communities like Tabaco (destroyed last summer) and other communities that are threatened with destruction, like Tamaquito, Roche, Chancleta and Patilla. We beg the city of Salem to express their solidarity with us, because we have a relationship with them because of this situation. Salem can influence PG&E. We would like PG&E, as a customer of the Cerrejón mine, to demand justice for the people who live in the mining zone, who were born and raised in the zone, and who have lived their lives there. Remedios and her partner, Armando Pérez Araujo, had two related stories to tell us during their stay in Salem. One was the story of the Wayúu, the largest indigenous group in Colombia, who over the past 500 years have retreated to the barren, desert-like lands of the northern Guajira and have preserved their language, Wayuunaiki, and their culture. The other was the story of villagers in the fertile southern Guajira, some of them Wayúu, many of them Afro-Colombian migrants who have fled violence elsewhere in the country over the past 100 years. The indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities have been under siege from the mining complex--until 2001 owned and operated as a joint venture between ExxonMobil and the Colombian government, now run by a consortium of European-based mining companies, BHP Billiton, Glencore, and Anglo-American. The mine itself occupies a 30-mile by 5-mile swath of land in the southern Guajira, and its operations have rendered much of the surrounding land uninhabitable due to blasting, dust, contamination, and loss of pastureland and work opportunities. A 90-mile railroad transports the coal through ancestral Wayúu lands to the coast, where a new port has destroyed several fishing villages. Salem residents showed an outpouring of support for Remedios and Armando when they visited the community. The two Colombians met with the mayor, who agreed to write letters urging the relocation of the town of Tabaco, which had been bulldozed in the summer and fall of 2001 to make room for mine expansion. Residents of Tabaco--many of them belonging to several interrelated extended families--had asked ExxonMobil and the Colombian government to provide them with land on which to rebuild their community, but the company refused, negotiating instead with individuals and simply expropriating those who refused to agree to their terms. While Armando and Remedios were in the United States, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled in favor of the villagers, but they feared that without international pressure the ruling calling for the reconstruction of Tabaco on a new site would never be carried out (visit Mines and Communities for details and updates on the situation in Tabaco). Salem Mayor Stanley J. Usovicz wrote to the appropriate authorities urging that the sentence be carried out fully and expeditiously, and offered to have the city of Salem provide material aid for the rebuilding of Tabaco.
We had requested a meeting with the management of the power plant, but after some debate they refused to meet. Mike Fitzgerald, the general manager of the plant, did, however, issue a brief statement: "As a customer, we urge our vendor to enter into negotiations and find a just settlement on this issue." The local daily paper, the Salem Evening News, interviewed Remedios and Armando and published an extensive and sympathetic report, which is available on-line. The two also met with several different school and college groups (Marblehead High School, Salem State College, and Harvard University) and local organizations, and gave two public presentations. Their visit--and the amazingly positive public reaction--inspired us of the NSCSC to work on several other educational activities over the summer. We set up tables at the Salem Maritime Festival to distribute information about Colombia and collect signatures in support of the City Council resolution. We produced several documentaries that were aired on public access television in Salem and surrounding communities (see below for video information). Most excitingly, we are planning to host Francisco Ramírez, president of SINTRAMINERCOL, the Colombian mineworkers union, here in Salem in October. Ramírez's union has been researching the links between energy production, foreign investment, and human rights violations in Colombia. He plans to speak on Colombia, mining-energy development and genocide. His visit will help us to tie together labor, environmental, and human rights issues. In organizing our committee here, we have been fortunate to be able to work with and depend on other local organizations. HealthLink, a local environmental organization that has been working to clean up the power plant; the North Shore Labor Council, whose president Jeff Crosby was already active in anti-globalization and Colombia solidarity work; and Neighbor to Neighbor, an organization with roots in Nicaragua solidarity but that now works primarily with low-income communities in the United States, have all provided us with great human and material resources. We are excited to be part of what we hope is a growing national movement to urge a U.S. foreign policy promoting peace and human rights in Colombia, reversing the current trend towards greater militarization. We hope that building people-to-people ties, or perhaps more accurately, by making visible the ties that already exist between Salem and Colombia, we can contribute to this goal. Aviva Chomsky is an associate professor of Latin American history at Salem State College and a member of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee. The following videos are available for $15 each from Salem Access TV. To order, call (978) 740-9432): The Destruction of Tabaco. Original footage by Colombian journalists, along with commentary, depicting the bulldozing of the town of Tabaco in August 2001. Coal Mines and Communities in Colombia: The Salem Connection. Filmed power-point presentation by Aviva Chomsky showing the history of the mine and the Wayúu. What's the Cost of Your Coal? Public presentation by Armando Pérez Araujo and Remedios Fajardo, Salem State College, May 2002. Coal: The Ties that Bind. Panel discussion with documentary clips on coal mining in West Virginia and Colombia. This article originally appeared in Colombia Report, an online journal that was published by the Information Network of the Americas (INOTA).
Copyright © 2003 Colombia Journal. All rights reserved. |
On
a recent visit to Salem, Massachusetts--where the PG&E-owned
Salem Harbor Power Station burns coal from the Cerrejón Zona
Norte mine--Remedios Fajardo, a leader of the Wayúu indigenous
organization Yanama, told us that "we have been fighting this
struggle for twenty years, and no one has ever listened to us."
One of the goals of our 
Colombian-born
Salem City Council member Claudia Chuber met extensively with Armando
and Remedios, and introduced a resolution, later passed unanimously
by the Salem City Council, condemning the violations of human rights
carried out in the expansion of the mine, expressing solidarity
with all Colombians working nonviolently for social change, and
calling for the establishment of an ongoing relationship between
Salem and Tabaco (the text of the resolution can be found at