Mine explosion leaves 32 dead in Colombia

[Judi Lynn]

Published: 05/02/2007 12:00 AM (UAE)

Mine explosion leaves 32 dead in Colombia
AP

Sardinata, Colombia: An explosion that roared through a makeshift coal mine has killed 32 miners in northeast Colombia, most still buried in gas-filled tunnels below ground, a civil defence official said.

Yesid Arias, who is helping to coordinate the rescue operation, made the announcement shortly before midnight on Saturday after rescue crews recovered three bodies. They located 29 more bodies buried about 400 metres underground but were unable to safely remove them from the mine in the remote hamlet of San Roque, 410km northeast of Bogota.

Family members, who had rushed to the mine shortly after the Saturday morning explosion, were relocated to the nearby town of Sardinata, where they awaited news.
(snip/)

http://www.gulfnews.com/world/Colombia/10101847.html

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More news on Colombian mines:

Feb. 2, 2007, 10:58AM
Attorney Seeks Drummond Coal Case Files

By BOB JOHNSON Associated Press Writer
© 2007 The Associated Press

MONTGOMERY, Ala. — An attorney for a journalism professor asked a federal appeals court Thursday to allow the public access to thousands of pages of documents filed in a civil case accusing a Birmingham coal company of involvement in the killings of union mine leaders in Colombia.

But an attorney for Drummond Coal Co. told a three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that unsealing the documents could prejudice a jury when the case goes to trial.

Two of the three judges indicated in remarks that it would probably not influence potential jurors if the documents are unsealed, as sought by Stillman College professor Stephen Flanagan Jackson, who is associate editor and reporter for the online newspaper LatinAmericanPost.com.

He intervened in the case, a civil lawsuit filed in federal court in Birmingham that accuses Drummond of involvement in the killing of three workers at a Drummond mine in Colombia.

One of the documents sealed is a sworn statement from a Colombian citizen who says he saw a former Drummond official pay hit men $200,000 to kill union leaders. The statement was the subject of a Miami Herald story before it was sealed by U.S. District Judge Karon O. Bowdre, who turned down Jackson's request to unseal the material.

An attorney for Drummond, Paul Enzinna, argued that the records are not relevant to the case and would prejudice a jury if made public.
(snip/...)

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/fn/4521425.html

[Judi Lynn]

1. The Political Economy of a Narco-Terror State: Colombia and corporate profits

The Political Economy of
a Narco-Terror State
Colombia and corporate profits
by Rachel Guevera
The Progressive magazine, October 2002


Colombia is an extreme example of the local oligarchy colluding with multi-national corporations and U.S. militarism to make grotesque profits while the people and environment are devastated. Billions of dollars from the U.S. and the drug cartels are keeping the people from overthrowing the oligarchy, which kills 5,000 to 10,000 people every year. More than half of all legal Colombian exports travel to the U.S.-if you add the value of cocaine and heroin, the percentage goes to 80. Colombia has become a lucrative profit center for the U.S., one based on violence and ecological destruction. The Colombian oligarchy is the business partner for many U.S. corporations and it is the ally of the U.S. and its foreign policy.

CZN and Exxon-Mobil Corporation
This Texas-based mega-corporation is also known as Exxon-Mobil Coal and Minerals, Imperial Oil, ESSO and Monterrey Coal Company, Compania Minera Disputada de Las Condes Limitada (Chile), Intercor (Colombia), and dozens of other companies that produce a wide range of chemicals, plastics, and consumer products. With $1.4 billion in revenues from its Colombian operations in 2000, ExxonMobil was the second largest corporation in Colombia after the state-owned Ecopetrol. It no longer holds that title since it sold the massive Cerrejon Coal mine to CZN and its copper mining operations to Anglo-American this year.
Colombia is the fourth largest exporter of coal. For the last 15 years an average of 15 million tons per year has been extracted from the opencast El Cerrejon Coal Mine under its subsidiary Intercor. It is one of the largest open-pit mines in the world (30 miles long). The CZN Consortium purchased Intercor and Exxon's share in April. The area of the mine is inhabited by the Wayuu Indians who have opposed the mine since 1980. At the start 5,000 Indians were employed, but most of them were dismissed when the mine began operations two years later. In 1988 the last Indians were fired for union activities. Intercor evicted all residents of the indigenous community of Tabaco to make way for the expansion of the mine. Residents are resisting and claim that the relocation arrangements made would break up communities and not give people sufficient funds to buy land to live on. The Colombian army guards the mine and has assisted strike-breaking in the past.
To extract the coal, Exxon sucked up the groundwater, dried up the rivers, and, in the process, denuded the grasslands on which the Wayuu depend for subsistence. Indians have also suffered from respiratory diseases caused by coal dust and heavy noise pollution. An international campaign organized by Greenpeace is targeting Exxon-Mobil as one of the main obstacles to greenhouse gas reductions. Twenty-one percent of stockholders recently voted for Exxon-Mobil to adopt a renewable energy plan. CZN also has mining operations in Cerrejon Central and they are actively pursuing new mining opportunities in Cerrejon Sur. Mine expansions are imminent.

Drummond Inc.
Drummond has fallen from the 318th largest private company in 1999 to a rank of 492. In 2001 it generated revenues of $615 million with 2,800 employees. It mines coal, produces coke, and develops real estate. Drummond's ABC Coke plant in Tarrant, Alabama is the largest single producer of foundry coke in the U.S. Most of Drummond's coal and profits come from the La Loma mine in the Cesar region. Each year Drummond exports about six million tons of coal from Colombia to U.S. electrical utility companies.
(snip/...)http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Drug_War/Colombia_Narco_State.html

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Colombia Solidarity Work

Hans Bennett interviews Aviva Chomsky
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. She is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector.

BENNETT: What happened to the community of Tabaco in 2001?
CHOMSKY: Tabaco was an Afro-Colombian village in the northernmost Guajira province. It was the largest of a network of small indigenous and Afro-Colombian villages, the only one with paved roads, a school, a post office, and other government services. In August 2001 this village was violently displaced as part of an expansion project by the Cerrejon coal mine, the largest open-pit coal mine in the world. The mine was then jointly owned by Exxon and a consortium made up of BHP Billiton (an Australian company), Glencore (a Swiss company), and Anglo-American (a British company).

As one resident described the events: “We didn’t know what was happening. All of a sudden we saw the police, the riot police, and the army surrounding our houses and people coming into the town in trucks, in bulldozers. We went into our houses to watch what was happening and they began to raze the town, to raze the houses. And we were shocked, we didn’t believe that the mine could be doing this.”

Has anything been done to compensate the Tabaco community?

When our delegation was there in November 2006, we interviewed 61 heads of households from families displaced from Tabaco, all living under squalid conditions in the nearby town of Albania. We heard the same story again and again. We are peasants, we are farmers, people told us. We used to be productive people, we used to support ourselves and our families. We were not rich, but we worked our land and we provided our children with what they needed. Since the company took our town and our land, there is nothing for us to do. There is no work.
(snip)

Too often, we get overwhelmed by the enormous power of multinationals, by how implacable the global system is. Here we have some of the most powerless people in the world—indigenous people with no resources, no electricity, no water—and some of the most vulnerable, a union in a country with the highest rates of assassination and repression against union activists in the world—taking on some of the most powerful multinationals in the world today. We have a lot to learn from their example.
(snip/)http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2007/bennett0207.html



The Colombian state Institute for Family Wellbeing pushed papers at the Tabaco families. "They told me that if I didn't sign over my land rights, they would take away my children," a Tabaco woman told us.



The Tabaco community is asking to be relocated. The Colombian government does not recognize them as displaced, because they were displaced by economic violence, not armed conflict. (Does a bulldozer demolishing your house while armed police shoot tear gas at young women and split open the heads of adult males count as armed conflict?)



The Cerrejon mine began in 1977. In 2000, the Tabaco community was prohibited from fishing, hunting, or cutting wood on their land; their diet depended on these activities.



The Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco is now 200 meters underground. The town of 400 families was destroyed by the mining expansion. Houses were bulldozed by Cerrejon employees and local police in 2001-2002.
http://carolinapeace.org/gallery/LaGuajira?page=20

[Judi Lynn]

2. At least 18 Colombian miners killed in explosion

At least 18 Colombian miners killed in explosion
Sun 4 Feb 2007 15:39:00 GMT

(changes dateline, pvs Bogota. Adds color, quotes)

By Daniel Munoz

SARDINATA, Colombia, Feb 4 (Reuters) - Explosions killed at least 18 workers in a Colombian coal mine in the northeastern province of Norte de Santander on Saturday, and another 13 were feared dead, an official said on Sunday.

"There were 31 men in the mine at the time of the explosions," Fernando Rosales, head of the province's civil defense corps, told Reuters.

Rescue and recovery attempts, complicated by deadly gases remaining in the mine shafts, resumed at daybreak on Sunday after being suspended the night before. The bodies of 18 miners were recovered from the La Peciosa mine near the town of Sardinata while 13 others were trapped underground.

"It is impossible that those still in the mine are alive due to the high amount of poisonous gas in the mine shafts. It would be a miracle if they are alive," Carlos Garcia, head firefighter leading the rescue attempt, told Reuters.

Rescue workers face the danger of more explosions due to combustible gasses, local officials said.

"I can't believe what is happening. I would not wish this on anyone," said Jorge Vergara, brother of two of the trapped miners, sadness etched on his face as he stood at the entrance of the mine with other victims' family members and friends.
(snip/...)

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N04364427&WTmodLoc=World-R5-Alertnet-2

[Omaha Steve]

3. Wonder what the stock will do tomorrow?

Nobody cares about a few lives lost.

[Judi Lynn]

4. That's right. They see Latin America as an endless supply of "energy"

to operate their business interests. If they lose a few or a lot, it's no big deal.

Wouldn't you hate to think you could ever fall that low that you fail to see people as human beings any longer?

As _Bush's professor said, he told him that the poor deserved to be poor as they were lazy. If only these people had the ability to see themselves as we see them, they'd have nightmares.