HB: Okay, now let's talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?
AC: The main issues we've been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.
Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations—Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón's size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.
The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine—and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country's policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy—the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.
HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?
AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky—because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region—people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.
Unions in Colombia—especially those in the coal mines—are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country's natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.
In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.
HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels' effects on the environment, including global warming?
AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don't we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo's response really challenged all of us, I think. "There is no clean source of energy," he said. "You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world's energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal's. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects—from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers—and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food." Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction—like our overuse of energy. "As long as you want to keep using that much energy," he said, "we're going to keep mining coal."
There's always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that's narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don't get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we'll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBY-ism [i.e., "Not In My Back Yard"]—we don't want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That's how our system works—and that's how we're encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.
This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water—thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don't have to see where our energy comes from, and we don't have to see where our waste goes—we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away—all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth's resources!
HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and 'left of center' Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?
AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call "U.S. interests"—which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations—in Latin America. Ecuador's new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.
There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish—neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries' resources internally, to address the region's devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America's relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.
Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we're entering a new era, in which the United States will choose—or be forced—to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama's diplomatic language, he's already shown that he's quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors—the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet's limited resources—could contribute to some real changes.
HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?
AC: We're hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional "urgent action" requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia AT comcast DOT net if you want to get more involved in the planning.
Hans Bennett is an independent multimedia journalist. Check him out at Insubordination.blogspot.com.