Colombia's Environmental Crisis Accelerates Under Duque

By Evan King and Samantha Wherry, NACLA

21 April 20

Despite President Iván Duque's campaign rhetoric about environmental sustainability, his administration has opened up conflict-ridden regions to foreign multinationals.

n 16 February 2020, six gunmen fatally shot Albeiro Silva Mosquera and his brother Luis Hugo and severely injured Indigenous leader and activist Daniel Remigio in Colombia's southwestern department of Cauca. The victims were all members of the Process for Popular Unity of Southwestern Colombia (PUPSOC), a grassroots organization that defends rural communities in the Colombian Massif from destructive mega-projects. 

The attacks were not isolated cases. In 2019, Colombia was the most dangerous country on earth for human rights and environmental defenders, with at least 250 killed, according to the Institute for Development and Peace Studies (Indepaz). Eighty percent of these deaths have been linked to powerful economic interests seeking to exploit the land and natural resources. As Colombia remains on COVID-19 lockdown, social leaders around the country continue to be murdered with impunity, with at least three environmental defenders killed in one week in March.

Under the current government of right-wing president Iván Duque, the situation is not improving. Duque's National Development Plan places extractive industries as a top priority for state-sponsored investment, making it easier for foreign multinationals to obtain mining concessions in biodiverse regions like the Colombian Massif, an Andean mountain range in the country’s southwest. Duque’s doubling down on this outdated development model in regions formally under rebel control could accelerate Colombia’s growing environmental crisis, setting the stage for the next major social conflict.

Duque’s National Development Plan

Colombia’s strategic location, diverse climate, hydrographic basins, natural resources, and fertile soils has made it into a key agricultural player in the region. Small-scale agriculture has historically been part of the way of life for campesino and Indigenous peoples living in rural Colombia. Although campesinos’ contributions to the country’s food production have been vital, the state has long refused to recognize campesinos as an important and distinct socio-political group. 

In fact, the state continues to displace many campesino and Indigenous communities for the implementation of “development” projects. The centrality of the energy sector in Duque’s national economic plan has facilitated the implementation of large-scale mining and hydroelectric projects across the country, marking a steady macro-economic shift away from small-scale agriculture towards energy and mineral resource extraction. 

One of the points outlined in Duque’s development plan is called "Mining-energy resources for sustainable growth and the expansion of opportunities pact." One of the objectives is to create “a responsible energy mining sector that is an ally to the territories” and will help diversify the energy sector by 2030. His countryside development with “progress” plan overlooks the role of the campesinos as agents of sustainable change through their ancestral agricultural models, which international bodies recognize as key to mitigating the impacts of climate change. Instead, the plan focuses on the privatization of land for monocultural agriculture and extractive mega-projects. Campesinos are only part of the equation if they join the production chain, give up their land, or join the agro-industrial companies.

This development model, Duque explains, has directly generated 35,000 jobs and indirectly more than one million. According to the government, mineral extraction contributes 2 percent of the country’s GDP. Duque’s minister of mines and energy, María Fernanda Suárez, emphasizes the importance of the mining sector for the development of clean and renewable energy, explaining that there would be no electric cars, wind turbines, or solar panels without mining. Suárez is also an ardent supporter of fracking. 

In October 2019, Duque’s administration announced plans to send 2,500 troops to Cauca—home to significant gold mining operations and one of the departments hardest hit by decades of armed conflict—further militarizing and escalating violence against rural communities living in lands concessioned for mining projects. This department has also become a hotspot for murders of land and environmental defenders, totaling over 35 killings in the first nine months of 2019.

Meanwhile, the ongoing state-sponsored gold rush taking place in Colombia’s countryside could cause a further increase of violence in communities already struggling to recover after decades of war. A study conducted by the University of Medellín, showed the links between the rise in global gold prices in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and a substantial upsurge in homicides in Colombia’s gold-producing regions. The global economic slowdown brought about by the COVID-19 crisis has already driven up global gold prices by 5.3 percent as investors seek safe investments during times of increased uncertainty, exacerbating the ongoing slaughter of environmental activists across the region. 

The Peace Process Opening Land

The exploitation and state violence in the Colombian Massif exemplifies broader national trends of resource extraction and insecurity of land defenders. The Colombian Massif is a territory rich in biodiversity and cultural heritage extending over 4.8 million hectares and 89 municipalities in the southwestern departments of Nariño, Putumayo, Caquetá, Huila, Cauca, Tolima, and Valle del Cauca—all areas with high levels of guerrilla activity during Colombia’s 50-year civil war.

Here, the country's western and central mountain ranges originate, as well as 70 percent of the country's fresh water. The Massif region houses not only a great wealth of biodiversity but also significant cultural diversity with a representation of various ethnic groups, including Indigenous peoples (10 percent), small-scale farmers (83 percent), and Afro-Colombians (7.5 percent). It is the ancestral home to 13 different Indigenous groups, including the Coconuco, Inga, Embera, Awa, and Yanacona peoples. Housing and infrastructure in the Massif region is precarious; few communities have access to electricity, roads, and sewage systems. The lack of government investment in basic infrastructure has forced the communities to rely solely on the Massif ecosystem for potable water. Despite being designated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in 1978, the Colombian Massif was opened up to large-scale mining during the Uribe and Santos administrations. 

For decades, the presence of the country’s largest left-wing guerrilla group, the FARC, in the Colombian Massif acted as a formidable deterrent against extractive projects in two main ways. 

First, the presence of the FARC served as a deterrent for large concession holders, primarily due to the real risk of being kidnapped or extorted by the guerrillas as well as the lack of basic guarantees for investors. Now, in the wake of the peace accords, the Colombian Massif is where most of the large-scale gold mining concessions are being granted.

Second, contrary to the Colombian government’s claims of being the primary drivers of illegal mining, the FARC enforced strict communal guidelines that included robust environmental restrictions on extractive activities. 

It is important to understand the FARC’s role as an environmental authority in areas under its control as it helps explain the sharp rise in illegal mining across many areas formerly under their control, starting with the 2015 ceasefire and further increasing after their demobilization process in 2017.

The FARC demobilization generated a window of opportunity. Transnational interests and paramilitary organizations sought to take advantage of the power vacuum to further their own economic interests.

The Colombian government has since failed to fill this vacuum with effective programs to mitigate the impacts of large-scale mining by placing community-led initiatives at the center of policymaking. Instead, the Colombian government has again opted to continue a policy of militarization and extraction that only serves to further marginalize the local population. 

The historic peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC marked a major shift for many communities who had grown accustomed to their relative isolation from destructive neoliberal policies taking root in other areas of the country. Suddenly, these areas— inaccessible to extractive industries during the country’s long civil war—became the next frontier for multinationals seeking to make short-term profits at the expense of the local inhabitants and the fragile ecosystems they depend on for survival. 

The Colombian Massif Under Threat of Disappearance

The National Mining Agency has approved concessions to international mining companies such as Johannesburg-headquartered AngloGold Ashanti and Canadian-listed Royal Road Minerals in areas where exploitation is prohibited by national environmental protection regulations. The government has issued concessions for about 10,200 hectares of the Massif. Community members of Cauca’s La Vega municipality explained that, although the Massif has six Regional Autonomous Corporations (CAR)—government entities responsible for environmental protection—they have done little to protect the territory. 

“The institutions haven't been particularly helpful. In fact, environmental institutions do not verify the information provided by the mining companies about their environmental impact,” said Genio Martinez, a community leader from La Vega. 

For example, in La Vega, which is known as “The Heart of the Colombian Massif,” 13 mining titles have been granted and around 68 concessions are in the process of being issued. Nearly 85 percent of La Vega is concessioned for mining—including an area known as the Carol Chomsky Forest, set up to commemorate the life and spirit of Carol Chomsky, the late wife of renowned linguist and political dissident, Noam Chomsky.

To protect the territory and confront large mining interests such as Royal Roads Mineral, the campesino community of La Vega has organized the Proceso Campesino y Popular del Municipio de La Vega (PCPMLV). PCPMLV member Oscar Salazar explained: “We don’t want the international community to start paying attention once the rivers have dried up, but rather act now and stop the mining projects on their tracks.” The campesinos maintain that their work consists of “defending the territories, preserving water resources, and fighting against megaprojects.” Their Marches for Life and Water, which began in 2013, raise consciousness about the importance of defending their territory, and their annual Peoples and Seeds Conference facilitates international exchanges on food sovereignty strategies. 

“We are designing policies that could serve as actual public policies since the government does not,” Salazar said.

The Massif’s rivers, lakes, páramos, and lagoons are at the mercy of illegal miners and large multinational companies. Often, foreign mining companies subcontract their hazardous mining activities to smaller, informal bands that often have links to paramilitary organizations known to use violence and intimidation against the local population to extract precious metals and sell them back to the concession holder—a process locals call “mercenary mining.” 

For communities like La Vega, the arrival of “mercenary miners” to their territories frequently means an increase in violence and environmental degradation, destroying forests and poisoning their drinking water with mercury and other highly toxic substances. Since Duque’s 2018 election, “mercenary mining” has boomed, reaching 98,000 hectares in 2019, according to the United Nations—a growth rate of 6.5 percent or 6,000 hectares a year. That's an average of 32 football fields every 24 hours.

According to local activists, this exponential growth in “mercenary mining” is due in part to a decree issued by former president Juan Manuel Santos in 2014. The decree incentivized the practice by expediting the process for becoming a legal miner. Under the new regulations, would-be “mercenary miners” are only required to pay 8,000 Colombian pesos (about $2) and present a valid I.D. to become an official “subcontractor.” Multinational corporations have since begun exploiting this form of legalized “subcontracting” in order to consolidate small-scale mining operations, particularly in areas deemed “too risky” for industrial-scale projects. 

Community organizers describe how entire Colombian Army battalions are at the service of these multinationals, known as “energy battalions.” According to local testimonies, there are at least 30 “energy battalions” in Colombia, where individual army commanders make bilateral agreements with multinational mining companies to act as private security.

“Commanders are allowed to make alliances with multinationals to protect their interests,” said Salazar, “in La Vega, we have one of these battalions.”

The Colombian Army is not the only institution accused of collusion with powerful multinationals. Members of local communities allege that, when the human rights ombudsman's office was asked to investigate a complaint made by a community affected by mining activities, the transportation costs, including gasoline and vehicle maintenance, were being paid for by AngloGold Ashanti, one of the largest mining concession holders in Colombia. 

In March 2018, Royal Road Minerals entered into a stock purchase agreement with Compañía Kedahda Limited, an affiliate of AngloGold Ashanti, to acquire Northern Colombia Holdings (NC Holdings). NC Holdings, in turn, owns Exploraciones Northern Colombia SAS, which owns a title package comprising mining concession agreements covering approximately 36,000 hectares of land, and the rights concerning applications that have been made to acquire mining concessions over nearly 215,000 hectares of land, in the heart of the Colombian Massif. 

Royal Roads Minerals specializes in setting up operations that profit from "post-conflict" environments. The company's website states: "Post-conflict environments can be dynamic and often confusing, but they are also a remarkable opportunity for the private sector." Despite corporate claims of environmental sustainability and community engagement, the communities of the Colombian Massif are soundly opposed to their industrial mining activities that threaten to destroy large parts of the high-altitude wetland páramo ecosystem so vital to the well-being of the global climate system.

Despite President Iván Duque's campaign rhetoric about environmental sustainability, his administration has doubled down on policies set in motion by the Uribe administration in the early 2000s, opening up conflict-ridden regions to foreign multinationals. These policies benefit corporations seeking profits at the expense of the environment and the lives of people already struggling to build peace after the longest and bloodiest conflict in the hemisphere. Far from being a solution to Colombia’s armed conflict, exposing the country’s rich environmental diversity and cultural heritage to the whims of multinationals could prove to be the catalyst for the next one. 

Strange Attractors: On Being Addicted to Trump and His Press Conferences

By Rebecca Gordon, TomDispatch

21 April 20

 

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He hosted 14 seasons of The Apprentice and its successor, The Celebrity Apprentice, and in all those years I probably spent seven minutes watching the show, or flipping past it as I looked for something else -- and, as far as I was concerned, that was seven minutes too many. I don’t want you to think that I didn’t watch my share of junk on TV. I did. But a blowhard New York real-estate (self-)promoter whose most memorable line was “You’re fired!” judging the business skills of a group of sycophantic contestants? I preferred Law and Order reruns any day of the decade.

And here’s the thing: now, I get to watch the “You’re fired!” show (“nasty!”) whether I want to or not. In fact, just about the only thing Donald Trump has proven good at is firing people in his administration, which has a turnover rate the likes of which is surely historically unprecedented. In fact, the Brookings Institution estimates that 85% of his “A team” has turned over in these years, sometimes many times. After all, he's had four chiefs of staff, five deputy chiefs of staff, five communications directors, four press secretaries, four national security advisors, at least six deputy national security advisors, three secretaries of defense (one “acting”), and so on.

Unfortunately, just about the only ones who haven’t been fired are the rest of us and, in our coronaviral moment, we have little choice (if we aren’t front-line workers) but to sit idly and watch, or force ourselves not to watch, you-know-who.

Once upon a time, if you had predicted such a future for me, I would have thought you mad. No longer. How appropriate, then, that today TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon, facing the slings and arrows of outrageous press conferences, focuses on Hamlet’s famous query, modernized for the era of The Donald: to watch or not to watch, that is the question, and it's one hard not to ask nightly in the Covid-19 era.

-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

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y partner and I have been fighting about politics since we met in 1965. I was 13. She was 18 and my summer camp counselor. (It was another 14 years before we became a couple.) We spent that first summer arguing about the Vietnam War. I was convinced that the U.S. never should have gotten involved there. Though she agreed, she was more concerned that the growth of an antiwar movement would distract people from what she considered far more crucial to this country: the Civil Rights movement. As it happened, we were both right.

She took off that fall for college at the University of California, Berkeley, where, as she says, she majored in history with a minor in rioting. I went back to junior high school. And we’ve been arguing about politics ever since.

So maybe it’s no surprise that, since the coronavirus pandemic exploded, we’ve been fighting about the president. Not about his character (vile and infantile, we both agree) or his job performance (beyond dismal), but about whether anyone with a conscience should watch his never-ending television performances. Since 2016, she’s done her best not to expose herself to either his voice or his image, and she’s complained regularly about the mainstream media’s willingness to broadcast his self-evident lies, to cover any misconceived or idiotic thing he might decide to say at rally after rally as if it were actual news. More recently, she’s said the media should send their interns to cover his Covid-19 “news” conferences. (Of course, MSNBC and CNN now no longer always broadcast those events, whose ratings the president so treasures, in full. In fact, by April 13th, CNN appeared to have let their chyron writer off the leash to run legends below that day’s news conference like “Angry Trump turns briefing into propaganda session” and “Breaking news: Trump refuses to acknowledge any mistakes.”)

For a couple of weeks now, I’ve been watching each live broadcast of the Trump Follies, otherwise known as the White House daily coronavirus task force briefings. Readers who, like me, remember the Vietnam War may also recall the infamous “Five O’Clock Follies,” the U.S. military’s mendacious daily briefings from the South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, during that endless conflict. There, its spokesmen regularly offered evidence, including grimly inflated “body counts” of enemy dead, that allowed them to claim they were winning a losing war. The question today, of course, is whether the present pandemic version of those follies offers at least a small glimmer of hope that the president may now be mired in his own Covid-19 version of Vietnam.

After I’ve spent a couple of irretrievable hours of my life gaping at the muddled mind of Donald Trump, I always feel a sickening sensation, as if I’d kept eating Oreo cookies long after they stopped tasting good. But it doesn’t matter. The next day, I just turn it on again. I wonder if it’s people like me who are responsible for that TV ratings bump of his?

It took my partner a while to catch on to what I’ve been doing. The reason: like an alcoholic whose bottles are stuffed away in secret corners, I’ve been hiding this perverse habit by sneaking down to the basement and watching while working on my loom. Or I would catch my Trump fix while she was out on the streets of San Francisco taking photographs for her 10-year project to both walk and record every voting precinct in the city.

But one evening, returning a little early, she walked in on me before I had time to slam the laptop cover down. “Nobody should be watching those press conferences!” she said emphatically, when she twigged to what I’d been up to. “How can you sit there and listen to lies? Why are you exposing yourself to that crap? Anything you actually need to know you can read in newspaper summaries the next day.”

What’s the Appeal?

And I have to admit that those were fair questions. Why am I exposing myself to such a pure, unmediated stream of falsehoods, ignorance, and preening self-congratulation day after day? Why, though I loathe his lies as much as she does, do I keep listening to them in real time? As he typically said at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on March 6th, “Anybody that wants a [coronavirus] test can get a test”; “The tests are all perfect. Like the letter was perfect. The transcription was perfect, right?... This was not as perfect as that, but pretty good." (No one knows what “letter” he was referring to, though he probably meant the summary transcript of his phone call to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky.)

Why don’t I switch the press conferences off when he begins to praise and congratulate himself as he always does? (“I've felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic”; “Every one of these [CDC] doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should’ve done that instead of running for president.”)

Why am I fascinated by the way just about everyone on the podium fawns all over him, starting with Vice President Mike Pence, the titular head of “the president’s” Coronavirus Task Force (unless, this week, it’s Jared Kushner)? Why do I keep listening to Pence intoning, “The president has directed that...” or referring to “President Trump’s 15-day coronavirus guidelines,” as if Trump himself had written them and designed the oversized postcard outlining them, which arrived in people's mail at the end of March? Why am I mesmerized as assorted business “leaders” like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell trip over themselves outdoing each another in praising the president? Lindell, in fact, used his minute and a half of fame to tell the world that God had essentially elected Donald Trump in 2016. (I guess that explains it! I knew I hadn’t voted for him.)

I think what provides me (and so many others) with that nightly hit of dopamine is the sheer brazenness of the president’s lies on show for all to see. Not for him the mealy-mouthed half-truth, the small evasion. No, his are, like the rest of his persona, grandiose in a way that should be beyond belief, but remains stubbornly real.

Here he is, for instance, in mid-March, speaking of Americans flying back from Europe: “If an American is coming back or anybody is coming back, we’re testing. We have a tremendous testing setup where people coming in have to be tested... We’re not putting them on planes if it shows positive, but if they do come here, we’re quarantining.” Anyone who saw the photos of weary travelers crammed together in U.S. airports then knows that none of this was faintly accurate. But no matter.

Then there’s Trump’s use of those television performances and the audiences they garner as the ultimate measure of presidential achievement. By now, who isn’t familiar with his delight in the ratings the coronavirus press briefings have attracted? As he tweeted on March 29th:

“Because the ‘Ratings’ of my News Conferences etc. are so high, ‘Bachelor finale, Monday Night Football type numbers’ according to the @nytimes, the Lamestream Media is going CRAZY. ‘Trump is reaching too many people, we must stop him,’ said one lunatic. See you at 5:00 P.M.!”

So it’s no surprise that he also uses media ratings as the metric by which he judges the performance of everyone working to slow down the spread of the coronavirus. For him, governing is nothing but a performance. At his March 29th briefing, for example, he gave himself credit for the media attention being paid to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and someone he called “the General” (whose name he seemed to have forgotten). After observing that the Washington Post, like my partner, thinks Americans should shun his pressers, he pointed out that he’d inaugurated other people’s TV careers:

“We’re getting the word out. We’re getting the accurate word out. And a lot of people are happy about it, and a lot of people aren’t. But they should be happy. When I have the General, when I have Seema [Verma, head of Medicare and Medicaid Services], and when I have Tony [Fauci], and when I have our -- our incred- -- these are, like, people that have become big stars, okay?”

Then there’s the astonishing ignorance he’s so happy to put on display regularly, as at the April 10th task force briefing. Asked whether “reopening” the country would depend on having enough Covid-19 tests available to make it possible to do surveillance and contact tracing, he replied that such tests would be unnecessary in “vast areas of the country” because they don’t (yet) have outbreaks. Given that no state by then lacked coronavirus cases, it was yet one more display of his inability to grasp the basics of the potential for exponential growth in a highly contagious disease.

Finally, there’s the eternal assumption in just about everything he says that no one could possibly know more about any subject than he instantly grasps. In a terrifying exchange on April 10th, a reporter asked what metrics he would use in deciding when and how to reopen the country, a decision he had just falsely claimed he has “absolute authority” to enforce.

“The metrics right here,” he replied, pointing to his temple and, presumably, the brain behind it. “That’s my metrics. That’s all I can do. I can listen to 35 people. At the end, I got to make a decision.” He went on to explain that he had just figured out how big a decision it was. “And I didn’t think of it until yesterday. I said, ‘You know, this is a big decision.’” Who could possibly have known how big a decision it was until that very moment when the president claimed to have grasped that reality?

Strange Attractors

In the end, maybe what truly draws me to those news conferences and keeps me hooked is the cognitive dissonance of it all. I’ve never been a fan of reality TV, partly because I don’t like watching people be mean to one another, but mainly because what happens on such shows is anything but “real.” Mean (or “nasty”) as he may be, Trump’s press conferences are real. And isn’t that the contradiction, the eerie fascination, of it all -- that the unbelievable is actually true? Donald Trump is, in fact, the president of the United States, even if watching each of those televised events is like encountering a creature from another dimension, a being who simply doesn’t conform to earthly reality. And that, in a terrifying way, is fascinating. I can’t look away.

The field of mathematics called chaos theory, which deals with extremely complex, dynamic systems like the movements of liquids or gasses, has a concept called “strange attractors.” An attractor is a point that a graph of the system keeps cycling around and returning to over time. (Not being a mathematician, that’s the best I can do.) Strange attractors are fractal, meaning that each part of one of them will display the same pattern no matter how much you magnify it, no matter how deep you go -- in other words, very much like the mind of Trump.

Some strange attractors are part of chaotic systems that don’t repeat at any regular interval and will vary greatly over time. The weather is like that; a small difference in temperature or pressure at a given moment can affect whether a local change becomes a hurricane. But if a chaotic system has strange attractors, then, over many years, the same initial conditions will most often settle into one of two results, the equivalents of a clear day or a bad storm. You can’t say what will happen in any given year, but you can say what is most likely to happen over 100 years. As Wikipedia puts it, “Thus a dynamic system with a chaotic [strange] attractor is locally unstable yet globally stable.”

Should -- the gods and statistics forbid -- Trump win reelection this November, we’ll have a real-life example of a system that is locally unstable, but globally horribly stable for the next four years. In his case, of course, we’re talking about how a “very stable genius” will be able to spin the chaos he creates into an ever more authoritarian regime.

Oh, and as that Wikipedia article adds, “Strange attractors may also be found in the presence of noise...” Let me apologize instantly for perverting some poor mathematician’s meaning, but how can I not point out that our presidential Strange Attractor is indeed surrounded by the constant noise of the media, fake and otherwise, cycling around and feeding off the one constant point that is Trump in the chaos of his universe.

So who’s right, my girlfriend or me? Just as was true years ago, I suspect we’re both right. No one should engage with that chaotic noise and the strange attractor at its center. All of us should deprive Donald Trump of attention of every sort, which is the oxygen that sustains him. And yet, someone has to watch, because strange as it is, our lives depend on it.

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Rebecca Gordon, a TomDispatch regular, teaches at the University of San Francisco. She is the author of American Nuremberg: The U.S. Officials Who Should Stand Trial for Post-9/11 War Crimes and is now at work on a new book on the history of torture in the United States.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel (the second in the Splinterlands series) Frostlands, Beverly Gologorsky's novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt's A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy's In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower's The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.