Colombia – In 2017, the Colombian court forced the operator of the Cerro Matoso SA nickel mine to limit the harmful effects of its activities. But in the indigenous community of Pueblo Flecha, a ten-minute walk from the mine, both men and nature remain ill.
RFI partners with the international investigative consortium Forbidden Stories (Historias Prohibidas) to continue the work of Colombian journalist Rafael Moreno cut short by his murder on October 16, 2022, in circumstances that have not yet been clarified. Among his denunciations, Moreno had brought to light the dark practices of the large mining companies that operate in the south of the department of Córdoba: among them, Cerro Matoso SA, one of the largest open-pit nickel mines in the world. .
Angélica Pérez and Aabla Jounaïdi
On the way to Pueblo Flecha, nature offers its most beautiful spectacle. The exuberant vegetation gives us indications of the Paramillo Park, one of the largest protected natural areas in Colombia. So much greenery and yet it doesn’t smell like the countryside. It smells like metal.
“There it is”, we say in chorus when we see the hill appear on the horizon. For sixty years the nickel that it keeps inside has been extracted from it. The last forty has been done by a mining company that also extracted its name: Cerro Matoso.
Arrow Town: surviving at the foot of the nickel mining giant
It is the largest open-pit nickel mine on the Continent and it is with this neighbor that a community of indigenous descendants of the Zenú people has had to live. They have spent a decade fighting in the country’s courts to protect their fundamental and ethnic rights against the environmental and health damage caused by the activity of the Cerro Matoso SA mine.
“This is nothing,” says Luis Fernando Romero, the young indigenous governor of Pueblo Flecha, wryly. “In the morning it smells of sulfur, of burning coal. At dusk, on the mountain that we see there, it looks like the rain is falling. But it is the slag heap, the mine waste, that produces this effect” the leader explains.
The community is less than a kilometer from the site where the mining giant operates. 902 meters exactly. When its colossal furnaces process ore at very high temperatures, emissions made up of mixtures of fine dust, heavy metals and various complex oxides are released into the atmosphere. This was pointed out by him andn 2017, the Ministry of the Environment: presence of columns of pink smoke that escape, “uncontrolled”, from the chimneys of the complex.
Two years later, the journalist Rafael Moreno, murdered under circumstances that have not been clarified six months ago [ver ProyectoRafael] He captured with his camera that these smokes were still visible in the sky of Montelíbano. The mining group accused him of disseminating images from earlier dates as if they were current. Days later, the reporter took pictures of the mining complex again and the result was the same: pink clouds emanating from the mine.
Slag laden water from the mine
Since the appearance of the giant ovens and chimneys of Cerro Matoso SA in the early 80s, the atmosphere is no longer the same in Pueblo Flecha. “When there are downpours, I panic for my son,” says Aida, the mother of a small child, with horror. “I even fear for myself, who is 45 years old, because sometimes it makes me itchy, feverish and migraine.” In Pueblo Flecha there is no drinking water. “We supply ourselves with the tanks that collect rainwater” explains the woman.
Throughout its activity, the mining company has built channels in which it transports water from the surrounding springs, essential for its ferronickel production process. “The little water from the well that we manage to draw in winter is colored, and it is not drinkable,” denounces the village chief. He is convinced of one thing: the toxicity of this water, laden with scum residue, ended up taking his mother just two weeks ago. “She died, like many before her, of lung cancer. It is because of the water we use and the air we breathe”, says the young tribal chief.
Lung cancer is one of the recurrent diseases observed in the region and that it was referenced in a legal medical report commissioned by the Constitutional Court of Colombia. In 2017, in a historical sentence and after years of struggle, the indigenous communities managed to condemn the mining giant Cerro Matoso SA [Lea nuestro artículo “la minería legal no es tan legal”]
A mining giant above the law?
A sentence that the Australian South 32, owner of Cerro Matoso SA, managed to partially annul by challenging the existence of a direct causal relationship between its extractive activity and the negative impact observed on the health of the population and the environment.
Thus, Cerro Matoso SA was spared from paying millions in compensation to the populations for the damage caused. But justice managed to maintain some sanctions for the group. First, to organize prior consultations with the eight indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities neighboring the mine before embarking on a new project. Second, take measures to preserve bodies of water, air, and soil. Finally, permanently ensure the health of the members of the complaining communities.
By court order, Luis Fernando’s mother was treated at the Mina clinic located within the facilities of the Cerro Matoso SA plant, where people from neighboring communities and workers are treated free of charge and voluntarily. “We receive an average of four people a day,” says Jorge Ospina, its director.
Cerro Matoso SA also ensures that, in compliance with the ruling, it provides comprehensive care through the Panzenú Foundation and that it has informed the communities about this service, but that, to date, only one person has requested care under said protocol.
The mining company carries out “Health Brigades” made up of general practitioners. One of them arrived last October in Pueblo Flecha. Ana Karina opened the door for them. On the floor of a house that has less than what is necessary, her son Esteban plays marbles alone. At nine years old, he does not stand up. A bulge extends from his knee, the cause of which is unknown. He has a delay in his behavior. “The doctors told me that he had no problem. So, apparently, everything is fine,” says the young mother, her voice caught between sarcasm and pain.
During our report in Pueblo Flecha, we met other children and adolescents with deformed limbs, mental disorders, skin rashes (even a three-month-old baby) and some on the way to losing their sight for no apparent reason. The journalist Rafael Moreno was preparing a documentary to launch the alert about this health situation, the head of the community reveals to us.
Many of the 640 residents of Pueblo Flecha say they lack the means to travel to the company’s hospital in Montelíbano. It is even difficult for them to go to the Mina Clinic in the nearby mining complex, they emphasize. “Here we live from agriculture and in particular from food crops, cassava, corn. But, above all, of the flecha cane”, the long plant with which the “vueltiao hat” is woven, a national symbol. Due to lack of economic resources, the community introduced the cane bundle “as a form of exchange for tobacco, a chicken or a service”. And they even created their own currency: “the arrow dollar”.
But if the ancestral barter is maintained, little by little another patrimony has been disappearing: the Caño Zaíno. The watershed that was for a long time the main source of water for the community. “It was living water, pure water, we drank it directly. We fished there. Now there is nothing left,” laments Don Ever, a farmer in a land dispute with Cerro Matoso SA
In addition to the disappearance of animal species, the inhabitants lament the social cohesion that the river allowed them. “There we bathed, the women washed our clothes, it was the meeting place for the community” they narrate. Forced to restore this basin, the company Cerro Matoso SA explains that the National Agency for Environmental Tenders (ANLA) has already approved its restoration plan. (Resolution 1538 of 2022)
Likewise, the mining company claims to be working together with the community around the “Caño Zaíno restoration plan, which will have the participation of academic and environmental institutions” and to have agreed in this sense “a plan of six actions that will be executed by community”.
“False. Cerro Matoso SA made the restoration plan for Caño Zaíno hidden from the community,” the governor of Pueblo Flecha emphatically affirms. And he adds: “They hired companies and universities without consulting us and with the resources allocated to the community for the environmental issue. So, we rejected their plan and made them return that money.”
With the resources they recovered, the indigenous authorities hired experts who studied the document prepared by Cerro Matoso SA “Irregularities and even plagiarism were found in it,” says the young indigenous leader and explains that the community is making its own river restoration plan ” without being limited to arborization as the company intends”.
“We do not trust Cerro Matoso SA, nor ANLA, nor the Javeriana University because they fix everything. We wake up and no longer let ourselves put our fingers in our mouths. And if we let ourselves, it is to bite them” he concludes.
[Continuará: quinto episodio “San José de Uré: pueblo de mina, pueblo de ruina]
