9 August 2019

…On 9 August 2001 the Afro-Descendant community of Tabaco was forcibly displaced from their ancestral land to give way to the biggest open cast coal mine in Latin America: Cerrejon. The mine is currently owned by Anglo American, BHP and Glencore, three multinational mining companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, with very high profits…Members of the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, London Mining Network, War on Want and many others in more recent years, have been witness to the suffering and losses caused to the people of Tabaco and the environment during all these years…Today, after those 18 years, [according to them, the community] is still not relocated. [Their] rights have been transformed by the Cerrejon Company and the Colombian State into mere promises, and sometimes into privileges that are offered to a few in exchange for silence and misleading the community…Extractivism takes over the territories of the communities. It imposes a war against those living a peasant lifestyle, to subsistence and autonomy. The damages that it creates to human and non-human communities are irreparable…In addition, [their] struggle for [their] rights, [their] complaints and [their] desire that this kind of thing will never happen again to any other community, has also been criminalised, stigmatised and threatened…