By Francisco Luis Valderrama A.
The company El Roble operates in El Carmen de Atrato, majority owned by ATICO MINING, a Canadian multinational. It mines copper, gold and other minerals. The family of the governor of Antioquia, Aníbal Gaviria, owns 5% of its shares. This gentleman, who is rightly hurt by the havoc caused by mining in the lower Cauca area of Antioquia, does not say anything about what is caused by the company of which he is a shareholder.
Characteristics such as precarious conditions and labor outsourcing, environmental, social, visual affectation, depletion of water resources, health impacts, infrastructure affectation, disregard for social standards, minimum value of people and nature, perpetual contamination tend to concur in mining activity. by accumulation of toxic waste, and worst of all, divide the community.
Many of them are present in El Roble. It is necessary to recognize that their activity is legal, generates employment and is recognized by the state. But it is a paper legality. Legal were the inquisition, racial segregation and slavery, just as the war on drugs is legal today. And in the name of that legality the worst atrocities were committed and are being committed. Legality is not born of justice but of power. Responsible mining, if it is not accompanied by a serious environmental and social commitment, is no more than an academic concept.
Currently, prospecting activities are being carried out in the El Carmelo sector, which provides water to the urban area, as well as in the village of La Argelia, an agricultural pantry in the region. If El Roble does well as a result of this exploration, the town will do very badly, because its future will be seriously impacted.
Mining that complies with the rules on paper is harmful, but in daily practice ignores or mocks them. That of El Roble would have to mean benefits for the owners of course, but also a responsible commitment to the region from which they extract their wealth. If it has to exist, it must at least be a clean production, pay royalties and do not limit your social responsibility to handouts and minor issues. The town deserves long-term benefits from the extraction of wealth from its subsoil. The possible extension of the concession that El Roble seeks today should never be given in the leonine conditions that have prevailed until today.
Many well-intentioned but poorly informed citizens support an activity that under current conditions will only leave Carmen de Atrato devastated environmentally and socially. Is that a desirable inheritance for the next generations? It is worth asking if today’s boom will be sustainable in the medium and long term.
The existence of a revolving door between the mine and the town hall is particularly serious. For a long time, the mayors, almost without exception, have been former workers of the mine and/or receive their electoral support. A minimum condition that citizens should demand of their candidates for mayor and municipal council is independence from the mining company. El Carmen needs leaders with their own flair, capable of promoting a culture that allows the people to survive when the
natural resources run out, which will happen sooner rather than later. The fact that the town is today a dependent miner should be cause for deep reflection.
Some figures, observable with the naked eye or easily deducible and calculable, give a full account of the seriousness of the situation:
Up to now, four tailings dams have been built, with storage capacities already full: An approximate calculation, from the bottom, allows us to ensure that the first two contain between 350,000 and 400,000 tons of waste each; a third 270,000 tons and the so-called dam 4, a threatening construction in front of the municipal hospital stores nearly 2 million. Since the second half of 2022, a fifth deposit has been used, with a different technology, which can contain close to 100,000 tons of waste and which, at the current production rate, in a very short term, on the order of two years, will also exhaust his capacity.
Where will the next threat be built?
Both the four already saturated dams, as well as the current one, have been built upstream of the urban area, near the Atrato River. Number five, whose retaining wall is 150 meters from the river, is separated from its bed by the tertiary road that connects Carmen with the municipality of Urrao. This wall was built with a mixture of borrowed material from the area and the mine’s own waste. It has a height of 50 meters from the edge of the road, which means that its upper level is 200 meters or more above the urban area of the town.
To summarize: in the town’s own leaks, El Roble has deposited close to THREE MILLION TONS of industrial waste and harmful residues, near the bed of the Atrato River, declared a subject of rights by the Constitutional Court, but turned into a king of ridicule by the authorities and institutions in charge of enforcing the sentence. Imagine the Carmelians 150,000 twenty-ton dump trucks dumping waste into the river basin, literally on top of their houses.
A perverse equation: The extracted wealth goes abroad, the waste remains in the town and threatens its very existence, there is no payment of royalties for the extracted copper because a paragraph, skillfully argued by those who profit from the business, has allowed even the time to evade them, and to complete the gloomy picture, El Roble intends to expand the concession.
It would be terrible if what happened at the time with the infamous Chocó Pacifico, which devastated a good part of the San Juan region, happened today with El Roble: it came, plundered, destroyed, corrupted, got rich and left. Let’s hope that the mining company will rebuild its business attitude in the face of collective needs. Otherwise, all that remains is to raise a requiem for our endearing people.