Cajamarca, Peru – 6th February 2015

Natural resources, it's a highly relevant issue and one of the major challenges for the next years. Both our energy consumption, and hence the demand for oil and gas, as the production of all kinds of electronic stuff, for which metals like gold, cobalt and others are neccessary, increase exponentiallly. But for the extraction of these minerals the people and the environment in the South pay a high price: their habitats are destroyed, the water is polluted, soils dry out,...

London-based human rights organisation Colombia Solidarity Campaign has published an Alternative Report about La Colosa, the AngloGold Ashanti gold mining project in Colombia’s municipality of Cajamarca (Tolima), entitled La Colosa: A Death Foretold.

The report unveils, for the first time, findings which clearly show that if the production phase of the La Colosa gold mine goes ahead, its implications to local communities would be much graver than previously anticipated. Community leaders and human rights defenders are already paying the highest price - their lives - for their opposition to the large-scale corporate mining project.

This report is a result of extensive research that included more than 100 interviews on the ground, legal document analysis, and technical assessment by Dr. Mark Muller, a highly respected international expert on mining.

The 2012 Olympics were to be the most sustaibable Games ever. In spite of this, Rio Tinto supplied all the medals. Rio Tinto is a mining company with a terrible reputation worldwide, and over 8000 complaints pending: violence, rape, forced evictions…

Whether you approach it socially or technically, to lawyer Mirtha Vásquez and engineer Reinaldo Rodríguez it is beyond dispute that the Conga mining plan in its present form is absolutely irresponsible and must not be carried out. Putting gold before water, the implementation of the project will have a huge and irreversible social and ecological impact. These two Peruvian guest speakers came to Belgium for a 2-week tour of lectures, informative evenings, lobby meetings and workshops.