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Colombia – “We are standing in the richest territory in Latin America in nickel exploitation and there is no drinking water, no solid companies, no parks or recreation areas for children, there are no digitized libraries, no signal,” says one of the leaders angrily. of San Jose de Uré. One of the six palenques in the country, the only one in the department of Córdoba where Afro-descendants of rebellious slaves, indigenous people and peasants live together. A human wealth target of the social havoc caused by the nickel giant Cerro Matoso SA Here is the third and final part of the fifth episode of our special investigation.
RFI partners with the international investigative consortium Forbidden Stories (Historias Prohibidas) to continue the work of Colombian journalist Rafael Moreno cut short with his murder on October 16, 2022, in circumstances that have not yet been elucidated. 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. .
Report by Angélica Pérez and Aabla Jounaïdi
“Of the thousands of mine workers, most come from other regions. Currently, only 10 people from the municipality are employed by the company, but they have to live in Montelíbano because Cerro Matoso SA does not provide a route to travel here”, complains Yair Perez,prosecutor of the Community Council of Black Communities of the municipality of San José de Uré.
For 500 years, Afro descendants of rebellious slaves, indigenous people and peasants have coexisted in this palenque – one of the six in the country and the only one in Córdoba – whose human wealth is only comparable to that of its nature. But San José de Uré has also had to forcefully house the protagonists of the atavistic war that bleeds the country: guerrillas from the extinct Popular Liberation Army (EPL) and the FARC’s 18th Front, extreme right-wing paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) operated and demobilized here.
Also read the first part of this fifth episode of the Rafael Project
Today, control is exercised by residual structures of these groups united in the Gaitanista Self-Defense Forces of Colombia or Clan del Golfocriminals dedicated to drug trafficking who, with blood and fire, have seized power from another structure of the same nature: the Caparrapos. Precisely, the violence exerted by the Clan del Golfo to gain control of the strategic region of the Nudo de Paramillo, placed San José de Uré as the municipality with the highest victimization and forced destination of displaced people from rural areas. In 2019 she broke the sad record of country homicides.
It is in this landscape that one of the largest open pit nickel mines in the world operates. Cerro Matoso SA The company says that, between 2018 and 2022, and based on the prior consultation processes with the communities ordered by the Constitutional Court, it allocated 58.100 million pesos in social investment: 1,100 hectares of productive land, 1,250 houses, participation of 460 families in productive projects and more than 200 scholarships for higher education.
Another leader from San José de Uré, who for security reasons we found anonymous in Montería, the capital of the department, exposes the shortcomings of the social investment of Cerro Matoso SA.: “The company offers training that is limited to two or three month courses that do not solve the labor problem or the quality of life of the population.” As for the job offer, he points out that the mine “links people on ‘unemployment’ for one or two months and the elected come from the social organizations that the company controlsthat’s how they rotate their people”.
Also read the second part of this fifth episode of the Rafael Project
Being the leader of a peasant organization, the social leader was able to verify that Cerro Matoso SA proposed pay peasants from rural areas of the municipality in exchange for permission to carry out soil drilling studies on their farms. “They filled their farms with very deep holes that they did not cover and they built roads without control. Finally, they did not generate benefit or development for those peasants in territories where there is nickel”, he says.
While money flows in abundance in the ferronickel colossus, which pays taxes and high salaries to its employees, the uresanos have fallen into social ruin, concludes Yair Pérez: “Here only the sexually transmitted diseases after the waves of workers who came from different regions of the country for the big ‘paradas’‘ of the company The highest family basket in the entire region. And one youth without present or future whose only options are illegal mining, employment at the service of drug trafficking or joining the ranks of illegal armed groups. Many of our young people die when they are only 15 years old. They are the great victims of Cerro Matoso”.
Victims of a development model associated with extractivism that condemns the inhabitants of these territories to be sacrificial communitiessays the environmentalist and human rights defender Mauricio Madrigal.
When asked what will remain if one day Cerro Matoso SA leaves its palenque, Leovigildo Vivanco, an Afro-Colombian leader and documentary filmmaker for the Truth Commission, answers: “There will be a big hole left. The misery of a people with their bodies, air and polluted waters, the illusion of a wealth that they never had in hand and the debris of a clean fight based on the defense of human rights ”.
