What the Lat Am Mining Congress is bringing to Miami, and what Mining Companies want to do from here.....

Debora Barros, a leader of the indigenous Wayuu nation was in Miami the week of March 2, 2010. Not being her first visit, she again shared with audiences across the city about her community´s struggle to return to their ancesteral territory of Bahia Portete, la Guajira , Colombia. On April 18th, 2004 the community was brutally diplaced due to a massacre executed by a right wing paramilitary groups that left at least 12 people dead , 33 forcefully disappeared and over 300 displaced. Currently the survivors are still living in Maracaibo, Venezuela awaiting a right to return.

South of Bahia Portete is the Cerrejon, one of the largest open pit coal mines in the world; owned and operated by a consortium of companies including BHP Billiton, Anglo American & Xstrata. Adjacent to Bahia Portete is Puerto Bolivar, this is the port where the company owned train takes the coal to be loaded on to barges going to the coal burning in the power plants on the Atlantic regions of USA, Canada and the European Union. While Cerrejon television commercials plaster the imagination of Colombian viewers with poorly executed greenwashed scenes of smiling Wayuu children releasing red footed land tortises into a river, the original peoples, the Wayuu as well as Guajiro and Afrodescendent inhabitants have not benefited from this "progress & development" that has been enforced onto them.

On the other side of the country, this past Wednesday, April 7th, 2010, eight local, small scale gold miners were killed by unidentified, heavily armed men. The Afrodescendent community of Suarez, Cauca has had history of confrontations with different resource extractive industries. In relation to mining, the region has identified by the South African gold mining company, Anglo Gold Ashanti, that has persistently tried to acquiere the region as a mining concession regardless of the wide spread, local opposition.

The examples of local inhabitants harmed by large scale, foreign owned mining are not limited to Colombia. The Canadian owned company GoldCorp, has had such a widespread impact on Mayan communities in Guatemala that many of these people now live in Florida communities like Immokalee, Lake Worth & Indiantown. Another Canadian gold mining company, Barrick, operates the massive Pascua Lama mine between Argentina & Chile as well as other operations they have in Peru and Dominican Republic. As a matter of fact many regions in Latin America and all over the world where conflicts are growing, are doing so because the residents are the victims of marcoeconomic development that favors their nations elite and a handful of multinational corporations.

An important group of mining companies, including Xstrata, Barrick & Goldcorp, will meet in Coral Gables from April 28 through the 30. They are looking for investors willing to take advantage of business opportunities in Latin America to expand and create new projects just like the ones mentioned above. The problem is that the indigenous, campesino, black and working communities, like the people affected by the West Virginia mining tragedy, do not share in the wealth and prosperity these opportunites claim to bring.

A group of organizations, based in the USA and Latin America will make their presence heard during the Latin American Mining Conference so the public at large understands that mining is much more than heavy metal and mine shafts.

Specifically on the afternoon of Thursday, April 29th, these organizations are inviting others to join them in a confluence of muscians, street performers and other artists of cultural resistance to come and join us and have your voice, rhythms and performances heard for environmental and economic justice. For more information click here.