Once again, we mobilize massively like rivers of life through the streets of Bucaramanga, demanding the full protection of the Santurbán páramo and forests, our main water source which is being threatened by the voracious appetite of transnational companies and their mining projects.
Recently, the transnationals MUBADALA-MINESA from the United Arab Emirates and Canadian ARIS MINING, who have already polluted our water, made a dirty business deal to destroy and plunder our Santurbán through their SOTO NORTE PROJECT. ARIS MINING, headquarted in Vancouver Canada, became the main operator of the mine and the majority partner of the project with 51% of the shares. In exchange, the company granted MUDABALA 9.9% of the shares of its parent company.
In May, these companies announced a new mining plan inSanturbán, which divides their large mining project into a medium scale project named “SOTO NORTE”, after the region that they intend to destroy, and another small scale project called “CALIMINEROS. Their intention is that the environmental license will now correspond to the Autonomous Corporation for the Defense of the Bucaramanga Plateau (CDMB in Spanish). CDMB is controlled by extractive economic interests, to whom we have denied access to the area. We have demanded that CDMB be denied the environmental license which would allow them to perpetually contaminate the Santurbán and the Suratá River with the more than 50 toxins present in the rocks, such as uranium and arsenic, damaging the water and the health of the Colombian northeast and its various sources of life.
Behind Aris Mining are its foreign directors Neil Woodyner, Ian Telfer, and Frank Giustra, personalities of the Canadian mining sector, who have become rich from gold extraction, the commodification of nature, lawsuits in transnational arbitration tribunals and from the sacrifice of territories and the violation of human rights. The lawsuits were made possible by Free Trade Agreements, such as the one signed by the Álvaro Uribe Vélez government and Canada.
This company already has a track record in Colombia. Using the mining code and the policy of the formalized outsourcing of small-scale miners, a legacy of the Andrés Pastrana, Iván Duque and Juan Manuel Santos governments, the company has total control of all mining and has plundered every last ounce of gold in the areas where it operates, such as Segovia, Antioquia and Marmato-Caldas, outsourcing and violating mining and rural campesino communities, and contaminating water sources with toxic spills such as cyanide and mercury. These practices have been recorded in various court rulings and environmental sanctions.
The governor of Santander, Juvenal Díaz Mateus, has been the main promotor of ARIS MINING economic interests. He manages a deceitful discourse of delimitation of the paramo – a discourse that shatters the integrity of watersheds and favours mining transnationals. The governor says “NO to mining in the area delimited as the paramo,” but YES to mining further down in the forests and rivers that supply water to Santander. We tell the governor that we reject his deceitful discourse and his intention to peddle ARIS MINING and militarization as the only solutions to the environmental conflict in Santurbán, and we demand respect for the lives of water and land defenders.
High-altitude wetlands, forests and rivers are territories for peace and harmony with mother earth. That is why we support Decree 044 of 2024, issued by the government of Gustavo Petro, which allows the declaration of reserve areas for the protection of water against mining. We also demand the immediate granting of the Environmental Reserve Area in Santurbán, which would bring an end to the invasion of ARIS MINING and all transnational companies that intend to destroy our future, demanding reparations for the damages caused.
We also demand that national, departmental and municipal governments carry out investments that guarantee that the inhabitants of Soto Norte have the kinds of economic, productive and educational alternatives that are in harmony with Nature and that allow for the regeneration of life and water for our future generations.
Finally, we demand that the national government, the Congress of the Republic and the judicial branch, make cultural, social, political and legal transformations that guarantee an environmental structuring of the territory to care for its diverse sources of life and those who defend them.
For our Water and Santurbán, as Santanderians and Colombians, we will always move forward – never backward. Transnationals, get out of our Territory!
Committee for the Defense of Water and the Santurbán Paramo
