Blood and Coal

By Garry Leech

In early October, Francisco Ramírez was walking with his two nieces down a street in the Colombian capital of Bogotá when he saw two men on a motorcycle slowly approaching. The passenger held a gun in one hand as he stared fixedly at Francisco. Suddenly realizing what was happening, Francisco grabbed his nieces and hid behind a large concrete pillar. Thankfully, the traffic lights turned green and the flow of traffic forced the motorcycle to move on. Francisco, president of the Colombian Mine Workers’ Union (Sintraminercol), had survived the seventh assassination attempt made against him in recent years. The United Steelworkers of America quickly arranged to bring Francisco to the safety of North America for a few months, where he is now speaking out against the Colombian government’s ‘dirty war’ against union leaders.

Francisco recently visited Sydney, Nova Scotia, to speak at a Centre for International Studies event that examined the human cost of importing Colombian coal. Because of the closure of the Phalen and Prince mines, Nova Scotia has become dependent on imported coal for its power plants—80 per cent of which are coal-fueled. Nova Scotia is the final destination for 34 per cent of the Colombian coal that Canada imports annually. But it is not just Colombian coal that is cheap, so are the lives of the country’s labour leaders. Of the 213 unionists killed worldwide in 2002, an astounding 184 of them were Colombian. Most of these killings were committed by right-wing paramilitary death squads closely-linked to the Colombian military.

Multinational corporations operating in Colombia benefit from the cheap labour that is a direct result of the repression of unions by paramilitaries. It is no coincidence that the killings of unionists increase during periods in which labour contracts are being renegotiated. This labour repression, along with economic policies imposed on Colombia by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) intended to create an investment-friendly environment, have contributed to multinational companies closing down North American mines that cannot compete with Colombia’s low wages, unsafe working conditions and lack of environmental regulations.

Alabama-based Drummond Corporation is one U.S. mining company that may have done more than simply benefit from Colombia’s ‘dirty war’ and IMF-driven economic globalization. According to a suit filed in U.S. Federal Court in 2002, it has been directly engaged in human rights abuses. In March 2001, employees of Drummond were traveling to work at the Loma Mine in northern Colombia when the company bus was stopped by paramilitaries. Valmore Locarno Rodriguez and Victor Hugo Orcasita were removed from the bus and executed by the gunmen. The two workers were the chairman and vice-chairman of the mine’s union. Drummond had previously denied their request for permission to sleep at the mine because of paramilitary threats. Seven months later, the union’s new chairman, Gustavo Soler Mora, was also killed by paramilitaries. The suit charges the company with hiring right-wing paramilitaries to murder the three union leaders.

Multinational mining companies have also been involved in the forced displacement of Colombian villagers. In the early 1980s, ExxonMobil began extracting coal from the Cerrejón Mine, also in northern Colombia. Cerrejón soon became the world’s largest open-pit coalmine, growing to a size of 50 kilometers long and eight kilometers wide by 2002. This expansion wreaked havoc on local communities, some of which were gobbled up by the mine and others that were targeted for future destruction.

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 who were direct descendents of the town’s original founders, were attacked by more than 200 soldiers and police dispatched to remove those who refused to voluntarily abandon their homes. Many of Tabaco’s 350 families became part of Colombia’s ever-growing internally displaced population—the second-largest in the world after the Sudan.

In March 2002, a multinational consortium consisting of three of the world’s largest mining companies—Anglo-American, BHP Billiton and Glencore—took over the Cerrejón Mine. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil says that it no longer owns the Cerrejón Mine and, therefore, is not responsible for the displaced citizens of Tabaco.

The availability of cheap coal from the Loma and Cerrejón mines contributed to the closing of Cape Breton’s mines, which could not compete with multinational operations in Colombia. Nova Scotia, however, now has a golden opportunity to simultaneously protest the Colombian government's unwillingness to defend the rights of workers and create much-needed jobs in Cape Breton. The opening of the Donkin Mine, which is currently being discussed, would achieve both objectives, reducing the Province's reliance on imported coal while boosting prosperity in local communities. As Francisco makes clear, the cost of Colombian coal must be measured in more than dollars. His life, and the lives of his colleagues, may well depend on our grasping this reality.

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