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| EFE

Local stories of justice and reparation in the face of extractivism in Latin America

The question persists on how to address this tension from the perspective of the territories, considering the way indigenous communities construct justice, prioritizing their views over those of companies and states.

Latin America coexists in a fragile tension between extractivism and territories, where geographies and business activities may vary but the effects on communities show common patterns. In El Aguilar in Argentina and La Guajira in Colombia, indigenous peoples coexist with extractivism and face structural barriers to justice. From their systems of thought, justice is a demand for life, for harmony with nature, for respect for land and water: in El Aguilar, the indigenous community of Casa Grande and the women defenders of habitat and the environment struggle not only for reparations, but for a complete healing of the territory; in La Guajira, Wayuu women leaders demand respect for their water sources, their winds, and the integrity of their communities torn apart by extractivism. Meanwhile, the question persists on how to address this tension from the vision of the territories, taking into account the construction of justice from the indigenous communities over the visions of the companies and the States.

Extractivism at Aguilar, Jujuy, Argentina

In January 2015, as every first Saturday of the month, the indigenous community of Casa Grande (Jujuy, Argentina) meets in assembly in their community hall. At seven o’clock in the morning, community members begin to arrive from different places. Before the assembly begins, Maria arrives, frowning, with a bottle of dark water in her hands. When asked what it is, she replies: “it’s the mining company”.

The El Aguilar Mining Company was established on the homonymous hill back in 1918, being one of the first large-scale mining ventures in Argentina, which extracted silver, lead and zinc uninterruptedly for almost ninety years. Its capitals have varied since its incorporation, among the last owners is Glencore, who retired in 2021 and passed to INTEGRA, a group of national capitals. The company has been there longer than Doña Mauricia, a community member whose breeding llama died after falling into a pit on the side of the road. The gully or pit is a consequence of the roads that are being built for the exploration of twenty-three new mines. For years, the community and women defenders have been denouncing the effects of heavy metal mining on their territory. Lead, silver and zinc are extracted at an irreversible cost to natural life and human health. Plants no longer grow the same, harvests are scarce, and animals, which once grazed freely, are now sick, have disappeared or are lost in the old pits that have not been closed.

This is not the first time that complaints, claims or lawsuits have been filed against the mining company for violation of human rights. In the 1970s, workers were detained and kidnapped at its facilities, among them the historic union leader Abelino Bazan, who is still missing. The legacy of impunity and non-reparation is the calling card of this company.

Extractivism at La Guajira, Colombia

“Mining and I are contemporaries, the year I was born also came the boom of people looking for coal from La Guajira”, used to say in another time Jakeline Romero Epiayú, or Jackie, as she was known by her friends. “The illusion of all the people was to go to work in the mine” she would say about El Cerrejón, also owned by Glencore, the largest open pit coal exploitation in the world, which for four decades has been operating in the central area of the Rancherías river basin, in Baja Guajira. At the same time, in Cabo de la Vela, in Alta Guajira, the communities witnessed how the wind turbines of the Jepirachi pilot project were installed at the beginning of the 21st century; they watched them spin and extract energy from the sacred winds for almost two decades; and now they observe them motionless in the Guajira horizon, as huge orphans of copper and steel, abandoned by the energy company EPM.

In the Wayuu ancestral territory, the rumor of the energy transition spreads with dozens of wind energy projects, waving the flag of environmental sustainability and climate mitigation, while coal mining persists, which has already caused countless health ravages due to the effect of dust in the lungs, divisions and family wars or the withering of the Rancherías, now declared a subject of rights. In any case, corporate activity continues to expand over time, generating distrust, tensions, displacements, degradation of sacred territory, water sources and biocultural practices. This development also leads to a progressive loss of autonomy and of the communities’ capacity to exercise self-government and make decisions about their territory.

Territories cry out for reparations

Justice for the indigenous peoples and communities that inhabit El Aguilar and La Guajira is deeply linked to land and water. It is not only about economic compensation, but also about reparation that includes remediation of environmental damage, water cleanup, and above all, respect for life in harmony with Pachamama. Justice passes through the sadness produced by the ravages on rivers and streams, or those that are coming on the different winds and their spirits, family division or community fragmentation, all propitiated by extractivism. In both cases, reparation is not an abstract issue, it is an urgent demand for life itself.

It is particularly the women in these communities and peoples who shoulder the defense of the territory. “We know that we cannot stop mining completely,” says Nancy, one of the women defenders, ”but we can demand that we be respected, that what has been destroyed be repaired.” They are the ones who demand in both places that the companies take responsibility for cleaning up the tailings dams, removing the industrial waste scattered throughout the territory, closing and cleaning up the mine mouths that are still open, repairing the riverbed and the streams, preventing more families from getting sick from the mine coal that fills their breath, respecting the sacred sites and the grazing areas, and not damaging the endemic biodiversity.

But local environmental and mining regulations do not provide for robust remediation systems to restore ecosystems, compensate affected communities and effectively prevent future harm with a human rights perspective. The paths they can follow in the ordinary courts place them in a situation of power asymmetry, facing economic, technical and social barriers in the face of companies that have almost unlimited resources to prolong cases, hire lawyers and control key technical information. In addition, limited access to courts in rural areas, a shortage of specialized experts and gaps in legislation aggravate this inequality. The lack of effective mechanisms of reparation for consummated and accumulated damages, coupled with weaknesses in the civil and criminal liability systems, makes it difficult for affected populations to access justice. This ranges from the provisions on the burden of proof to the impossibility of sanctioning legal entities, among others.

This situation demonstrates the urgent need to strengthen regulatory frameworks to guarantee access to justice and fair reparations in the context of extractive activities. This challenge is exacerbated in the context of the energy transition, where the wind industry and heavy metal mining are deeply interconnected. The manufacture of wind turbines depends on resources such as copper, zinc and rare earths, the extraction of which is concentrated in Latin American countries such as Argentina, Chile and Bolivia. These countries, possessing large reserves of critical minerals, have chosen to relax their environmental and mining regulations to attract foreign investment, to the detriment of the rights of communities and the environment.

Meanwhile, the indigenous peoples and communities that inhabit both El Aguilar and La Guajira have learned to coexist with these companies. This coexistence has reconfigured how justice is understood and exercised: from these territories, “juridical” forms are constructed based on community justice systems and forms of mediation and resistance, revealing the distances between regulations and local claims. Faced with a scenario where the impacts are concrete and reparation mechanisms are scarce, instruments of resistance and mediation come to life: the former, from re-editions of the 1964 miners’ march to social protests and road blockades; the latter, from mechanisms of direct negotiation or palabreo, such as an ancestral Wayuu mediation system, where communities seek dialogue with the companies through their own justice system.

In any case, these mechanisms have had varying degrees of success, but they have made it possible to sustain this fragile and forced coexistence within a certain tension with the old and new extractive companies, which, although they arrive with different discourses, reflect more continuity than rupture. For this reason, portraying local conceptions of law and justice allows us to focus on the voice of the communities that live and exercise justice in the territories, highlighting the problematic knots that the States should prioritize, in order to guarantee these rights before the economic actors that must respect and repair them.

To break this tension and build alternatives, perhaps we should bet on strengthening systems that are based on a genuine intercultural dialogue, listening to the voices of the territories, and that focus on material, formal and symbolic dimensions, contemplating reparations that go from the recognition of the violation of rights to economic compensation and beyond. It is these communities that experience extractivism first hand and that, therefore, can contribute significantly to imagine effective and situated reparation mechanisms. These stories from different sectors and geographies within the Global South exemplify the urgency of adopting a human rights approach to extractivism and transitions.

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