3 Years of Impunity – Letter to the world by a victim of the crime of Mariana, Brazil

by Giuseppe Orlandini and Mirella Lino This is a "Letter to the world" by Mirella Lino, a resident of Mariana, written three years after the Bento Rodrigues dam disaster, when an iron ore tailings dam suffered a catastrophic failure, flooding a vast area of Brazil with toxic mud. Her words convey the consequences on personal and …

Of climate catastrophe and sacrifice zones – Battle for the Hambacher Forest

by Andrea Brock Activists have occupied Germany's Hambacher Forest for six years to prevent the area being destroyed and mined for coal. This month the forest has been making headlines as police brutality, coorporate power and state violence combine to attempt ousting the occupiers for good. This is a revised version of an article originally …

Two tales of terrorism from the Tía María conflict, Peru

By Alexander Dunlap. The Peruvian state is laying military siege to enforce extraction operations; ironically, land defenders are the ones branded as terrorists.

“Down with the fumes!” The Year of the Shootings and its relevance for mining today

by Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez On February 4, 1888, a demonstration called by the “League Against Calcinations” to protest against acid rain ended up with a massacre of civilians by the Spanish army. Researchers Félix Talego and Juan Diego Pérez argue that the commemoration of this event is an opportunity to spread the …

Rosia Montana’s movement for democratic justice

Rosia Montana is a small village in Transylvania, Romania, where, for the last fourteen years, a Canadian corporation has been pushing for the development of what would be the largest open cast cyanide-use gold mine in Europe. In the 1990s, Rosia Montana was declared mono-industrial, not allowing for any other form of business than mining …

Tales of dispossession in times of crisis: lessons from Greece

The case of gold-extraction in Halkidiki is only one chapter in the “book of dispossessions” in Greece during the crisis period.  Land, natural resources and public infrastructure in Greece comprise investment targets for local and international speculative capital; their current exploitation is now taking place to unprecedented extent, intensity and geographical spread.* In Halkidiki (northern Greece), from 2010 …

Who owns the world’s largest gold producers?

Institutional investors have become the dominant shareholders in the largest gold mining companies, with implications for their activities.* In the early 2000s, institutional investors (highly capitalised financial players such as hedge funds and pension funds) have increasingly turned to owning gold mining companies as a form of speculative investment. In a context of rising gold prices, holding gold mining stocks (thus …

Mining, water appropriation and latent conflicts

What if environmental conflicts do not manifest themselves? The Cobre Las Cruces mining company has managed to access and control common water resources thanks to a top-down, technocratic version of science, which silences social conflict.* The empirical case of the use of water resources in the Cobre Las Cruces mining project (CLC) demonstrates the importance …

Why is Bolivian mining still irresponsible?

A recently published study explores the reasons why the socio-environmental implications of mining have not improved under Evo Morales. Mining activities entail serious social and environmental impacts, which are well known to local communities in Bolivia. That is why many of these communities were excited about the adoption of indigenous and community rights, environmental protection principles and …

New commodity frontiers in Venezuela: extractivism’s new leap forward into the “web of life”

by Emiliano Teran Mantovani * The large environmental devastation that the expansion of these extractive megaprojects involves would have a deep impact on life in the whole country. Could the crisis of the accumulation model open a period for a greater “environmentalization” of social movements?   Venezuela’s current severe crisis is to be seen not only in …