Bishop in Brussels to lobby against Investment in Mining

Brumadinho delegation

A delegation from Latin America, including a Catholic bishop, has travelled to Europe to raise awareness and urge support for communities suffering from destructive mining. It called for disinvestment from mining.

The members of the delegation met with European parliamentarians in Brussels on 24 March to denounce the relationship between dispossession and extractive impacts in Latin America. Among the objectives are putting pressure on the European Union to promote a Due Diligence Law, pressuring companies to take responsibility for their actions and for the damage they have done to affected communities and the environment, and calling for a binding treaty on business and human rights.

Delegate Bishop Vicente Ferreira is the auxiliary bishop at Brumadinho within the Archdiocese of Belo Horizonte. Brumadinho is where a catastrophic tailings dam collapse in January 2019 killed 272 people. A tailings dam is an earth-fill embankment dam used to store by-products of mining operations after separating the ore from other components. Tailings are usually highly toxic. The iron ore mine at Brumadinho is owned and operated by a Brazilian mining company, Vale, in which British investors Aviva, HSBC, Legal and General, and others, have investments.

Bishop Ferreira has long described the tailings dam collapse at Brumadinho as a crime. He says: "We need to think and listen to communities and those affected by this crime. We need to listen to the indigenous people too. We have to change how we relate to one another and how we relate to the environment." Members of the local community affected by the Brumadinho tailings dam disaster were with the delegation. One of them, Marina Oliveira, said: "I still feel the pain of seeing how that disaster took not only my village, but also my friends, my relatives. And we are still living all the consequences of that spill, even after two years. We call for solidarity, to accompany the suffering of so many victims and families who have lost everything."

They were joined by mine-affected communities from other regions of Brazil, and communities from Colombia, Honduras and Ecuador. The Latin American organisation, Red Iglesias y Mineria (Churches and Mining Network), an inter-church network of grassroots church workers and community members in mining-affected communities throughout the continent, supported the trip and, in the UK, the London Mining Network. The Network has developed a strong critique of the mining industry, especially multinational corporations, denouncing the extractivist economy and calling for complete disinvestment from the mining industry.

The members of the delegation had meetings in Europe with different international organisations such as MISEREOR, CARITAS, CIDSE, COMECE and The London Mining Network. Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich SJ, President of COMECE (the Commission of the Bishops' Conferences of the European Union) heard the appeal of the delegation.