Eliezer leaves his street in the Natahoyo neighborhood and heads towards Cimadevilla. On his way, on the left, a few streets further, heading north, are the sea and El Musel, the seaport of the city of Xixón or Gijón. It is the largest in Asturias and one of the largest in northern Spain and that is why it receives many goods that land in this country from other parts of the world.
Eliezer Arias found refuge in Asturias for a few months to rest from the persecution he has suffered for years in his home country, Colombia. Thanks to the Asturian Program of Attention to Victims of Violence in Colombia (PAV), of the organization Sol de Paz Pachakuti, Eliezer spent time as a refugee in Xixón.
As the Asturian Youth Council explains, this program was initially a response of Asturian internationalist solidarity to the call of Colombian trade unionism due to the high number of union leaders assassinated and threatened and now has a history of more than 20 years. One of its missions is to provide temporary accommodation to human rights defenders who, during their stay here, are responsible for raising awareness of the violations in this area that occur in Colombia and to recount their experiences.
This is what Eliezer did during his stay in Asturias: taking advantage of the meetings to report on the situation in his country, while temporarily leaving years of activism to rest in Colombia. As a representative of the indigenous peoples of the Sierra de Santa Marta in Colombia and for his defense of nature against coal mining, Eliezer has repeatedly recounted how he saw his life in danger.
It seems a paradox of world geopolitics that Eliezer disconnected from persecution and threats for a few months in Asturias, in front of the Spanish port that receives thousands of tons of coal from Colombia. And the fact is that anyone who knows a little about Asturias and its history knows that traditionally it was the port used to release the coal that, until a few years ago, was extracted from the bowels of the Asturian earth.
Despite the closure of the Asturian mines, coal continues to be used in Europe in various industries. Those who live in Gijón will have seen ships loaded with coal entering Spain through El Musel. These ships often come directly from Colombia. And the activist took advantage of his stay in Spain to tell how the mining industry in northern Colombia affects local communities and the environment.
The Perpetual Drought in Northern Colombia and the Coal Crossing the Atlantic
Coal mining in northern Colombia began decades ago. It all started in La Guajira, a region that is also one of the driest in the entire country, with the El Cerrejón mine.
The writer visited La Guajira in 2015, a key year in which local indigenous organizations managed to put this territory in the eye of the hurricane: they estimated that 5,000 boys and girls had died of malnutrition due to lack of water. Something the government denied, but which drew attention and criticism to the Cerrejón mine, the open-pit coal mine from which much of the coal it receives in Asturias comes.
In this representative year of 2015, the Ranchería River, a great source of relief for the Wayúu, the indigenous people who live in La Guajira, was dry. It turned out that there was a lot of coal to be extracted under the river and in 2014, the National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA) had authorized the Cerrejón mine to partially divert the 21-kilometer-long stream to allow the exploitation of the coal that underlies its natural bed. This decision and the accusations of local communities remained a cause for protest that reached the Constitutional Court of Colombia in 2023. The drought of this river has the added gravity that in La Guajira rain is scarce and the heat lasts all year round.
While all these stories may be shocking, they are even more symbolic for those who come from the Asturian mining basin, where in 2014 one of the main coal mines in the Nalón region, the Sotón mine in El Entrego, closed. An area where employment and future prospects are as bleak as the coal that remains buried underground.
On the other hand, as Eliezer recounts, being an environmental activist in Colombia can be deadly. This same media outlet reported in 2022 that at least 78 human rights defenders had been murdered in Colombia in 2021, according to the UN Human Rights Office in the country. There have been previous years when these numbers were much higher.
Family Murders and Years of Displacement: Eliezer’s Story
The Asturian Program for Attention to Victims of Violence in Colombia (PAV), of the organization Sol de Paz Pachakuti, as the group itself explains, welcomes in Asturias, for a period of up to six months, people who are in a situation of proven risk of losing their life or physical integrity due to their activities as human rights defenders.
Eliezer Arias, now back in his country, was part of this program. Javier Arjona, an activist of the Committee of Solidarity with Latin America and Soldepaz Pachakuti, confirms that many people have followed the program throughout its history, fleeing persecution directly related to the exploitation of coal in the American country.
Eliezer is from El César, a neighboring department of La Guajira, where, in addition to mining operations, trains and roads have been built in recent decades to provide better accessibility to the mine. 90% of Colombian coal production is extracted in the mining areas of El César and La Guajira.
Arias is now over 40 years old and his life has been marked by this since 1996, when they began paving the roads of his town, in his guard. A guard It is a legal institution of a territory for an indigenous community. When the sidewalk arrived and good connections arrived, paramilitary groups also arrived to move into the area, according to Arias.
In a country like Colombia, marked by violence for so many years, the connection of a village with the world can end in death. Among other problems faced by Eliezer’s community is the fact that the infrastructure being built has begun, in the words of the activist, to “invade” the sacred sites of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a place that local communities have protected since the time of the Spanish colony.
Eliezer’s stories, from a cafeteria in Xixón—with his white robe and hand-woven brown-and-white backpack on the table—dealt with a long list of violent incidents against him, his family and his neighbors since 1996 when paramilitaries began roaming the region and murdering people, publicly accusing them of being guerrillas or collaborating with the guerrillas.
These stories are so serious that they could seem like science fiction. But, for anyone who knows the history of recent Colombia and the resistance against the plundering of peasant and Amerindian lands, they know well that each story described by Eliezer was not the isolated story of a single family. He spoke of disappearances, murders, threats, forced displacements, armed groups with hoods over their faces, without identification, entering family homes at night … and, in turn, of resistance.
Activism by obligation and need for survival. Eliezer is Kankuamo, an Amerindian people estimated at 15,000 people who are considered responsible for ensuring the fraternity and well-being of the community, as well as guarantors of promoting respect for the environment. When he became an adult, activism was a choice. First at university. He ended up forcibly moving to Bogotá, the capital of Colombia, where he lived for years. However, his family name and origins betrayed him and the risks to his physical integrity continued over the years, according to his own story.
The reasons why Asturias receives so much coal
Now, Asturias being a land with coal in the subsoil and with the infrastructure created to exploit the mines, the question is: why so many imports of this mineral from Colombia? In 2023 alone, the year in which Eliezer came to find a space of peace for a few months in this region of northern Spain, the headlines highlighted that coal imports into Spain had skyrocketed more than ever.
Paco Ramos, spokesman for Ecologistas en Acción, recalls that coal and its use have decreased in Asturias and Spain, but that countries like Germany, which used to import coal from Russia, now bring it from other countries like Colombia (due to the blockades after the invasion of Ukraine). At the same time, the port of Rotterdam is full and our European neighbors need other ports of entry, like Musel.
In Asturias, Ramos recalls, coal has been used in recent years for the Aboño thermal power plant (the last in Spain) as well as for Arcelor Mittal.
Ramos also adds that the Asturian mines have been closing for 40 years, not for environmental reasons, but because they were not economically viable. This would be a subject that has a lot to do and that would require an analysis of the working conditions of those who extract coal from the earth in Colombia.
