Webinar: Tabaco - 23 years of displacement by mining giants

Vast Cerrejon opencast mine on site of Tabaco. Image by Richard Solly.

Source: London Mining Network

Join the London Mining Network for a Spanish/English webinar on Friday 16 August, 9am Colombia, 10am EST, 3pm BST, 4pm CET

On 9 August, 2001, the African-descent community of Tabaco in La Guajira, Colombia were brutally evicted, and their homes demolished by hundreds of armed police and corporate security guards, to make way for the expansion of the vast Cerrejon opencast coal mine.

Over the years, the foreign owners (Exxon, BHP, Anglo American, and Glencore), have all profited handsomely from the dispossession and scattering of people from this Indigenous Wayuu territory. The inhabitants have lost lands, cultural ties and agricultural livelihoods. Today the Cerrejon mine is 100% owned by Swiss-based, London-listed diversified mining and trading company Glencore - the subject of our latest report 'A Bad Deal for Canada' Glencore easily has enough money to resolve this issue. It is time it did so.

Despite a Colombian Constitutional Court decision in 2002 ordering the reconstruction of the village and recommendations by an Independent Panel of Inquiry in 2008, the people of Tabaco are yet to receive justice. In the long, exhausting years of waiting and working for justice in the face of corporate and government indifference and paramilitary threats, community leaders of enormous skill and dedication have died too young after giving everything they had to their community's struggle. This webinar will honour their memory.

But the people of Tabaco have not given up. Join us to hear from them about their current situation and the poetry they have developed as a form of resistance. Professor Avi Chomsky will introduce the Tabaco case, and Reverend Max Sklar will share some words of wisdom on life and international resistance.

You can register you attendance at the webinar here:

https://actionnetwork.org/events/tabaco-23-years-of-displacement-territory-memory-resistance/

For more information and to sign a petition see: https://londonminingnetwork.org/2024/07/tabaco-23-years/