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Mining in Colombia and the British Connection - public meeting Oct 3rd

Pete | 28.09.2006 02:43 | Ecology | Repression | Social Struggles | Workers' Movements | Oxford

Big Mining in Colombia:
destruction, displacement
and the British connection

7.30 – 9.30pm, TUESDAY 3 OCTOBER 2006

Plowman Room, Oxford Town Hall

Richard Solly is currently on a human rights observation trip to
Colombia. It promises to be a very interesting talk so - if you are interested in Latin America/ indigenous rights/ corporate responsibility or ecology - COME!

The world’s biggest coal strip mine is in the north of Colombia. It opened in the 1980s, enabling the British Government, assured of plentiful cheap Colombian coal, to destroy the British coal mining industry.

To build the Cerrejon mine, the mining company and the Colombian State forcibly removed Black and Indigenous Colombians from their ancestral lands with inadequate compensation – or no compensation at all.

The companies that now own the mine – Anglo American, BHPBilliton and Xstrata – are all listed on the London Stock Exchange and have offices in London. Anglo American has its headquarters there.

Meanwhile, a gold mining company is exploring an area in Bolivar province cleared of small scale miners by brutal paramilitaries. The company is owned by AngloGoldAshanti – a subsidiary of Anglo American.

British companies are profiting from massacres, human rights abuses and environmental destruction in the most blood-soaked country in the Western hemisphere.

Richard Solly, who works with Partizans and the Colombia Solidarity Campaign, will give an illustrated eye-witness account of the impacts of multinational mining in Colombia and ideas for action.

The Colombia Solidarity Campaign campaigns for a socially just and
sustainable peace in Colombia based on a respect of human rights and an
end to foreign military intervention.

Pete