• These findings provide valuable insights for improving mine water management strategies and informing sustainable mine closure planning to mitigate long-term environmental risks.

• For some people, questioning comes easily. Their natural inquisitiveness, emotional intelligence, and ability to read people put the ideal question on the tip of their tongue. But most of us don’t ask enough questions, nor do we pose our inquiries in an optimal way.

• This page shares a complete list of quality questions I’ve gathered from reading more than 100 of the best non-fiction books of all time. You’ll find more than 100 quality questions, organized by category.

• Compared to the increased energy demand in the 21st century, Hydropower (also known as water power) is traditionally considered one of the “Green Energy”. Some advanced researches clarifies that various renewable generations have been performed well to fight back the drastic climate impacts. Though some of them are not as suitable for clean eco-friendly production due to the impacts on eco-system.

• We are adding 110 to 115 million people into the middle class each year, despite all the difficulties the global economy is presenting. But that’s what’s powering the world economy forward.

• What is happening with the Cerrejón mine and the communities in La Guajira is an example of what Eduardo Gudynas calls ‘extrahections’², a term that refers to the violent ‘appropriation of natural resources’ which involves the violation of human rights and the rights of nature. ‘There are many examples where extraction has led to such violations, such as harm to human health caused by pollution, the forced displacement of communities and others, including the assassination of social leaders’, Gudynas says.
• At the turn of the century, high prices for raw materials on international markets stimulated growth in export-oriented extractive activities. This so-called ‘super cycle’ put even more pressure on the affected territories and communities. Resistance grew, led mainly by indigenous and peasant movements, as well as social organisations from the cities. The level of conflict intensified throughout Latin America, as did state-sponsored repression, the criminalisation of protest and the assassination of environmental and social leaders. Maristella Svampa calls this the era of ‘neoextractivism’.³
• Changes in international prices and the growth of the Chinese economy  reshaped many Latin American government budgets. Around 2010, governments began to promote more projects of mega-mining, extraction of conventional and unconventional fossil fuels, agribusiness expansion and the construction of mega-dams. They also began to build infrastructure related to extractive operations, such as highways for transporting exports. The fall in commodity prices in 2013 and 2014 exacerbated the intensification and expansion of resource extraction to order to compensate for loss of export earnings. Consequently, there were more socioenvironmental conflicts and violent repression of communities in extractive zones.

• The assassination of environmental leaders during this period were also cause for alarm. Global Witness reports that between 2002 and 2013, 908 such murders were reported worldwide, of which 760 – 83% – were in Latin America. In 2016, over half of the 200 activists killed were in this region.

   

  “Extractivism is a structural feature of capitalism as a system of world accumulation. For this accumulation to take place, it is necessary that there be sacrificial, colonial zones”, explains Argentinean sociologist Horacio Machado.
• The ‘re-primarisation of the region’s economy’ exacerbated the ‘dynamics of dispossession and pillaging of land, resources and territories for progress. This process reproduces a pattern that dates back to colonial times in which the region was a source of the world’s raw materials. Today, each country extracts and exports what cumulatively represent a huge range of natural resources. And just as in colonial times, this extraction involves violence and destroys territories. The operators of this capitalist extractivism are mostly transnational corporations (TNCs) working in partnership with the state, whose role is to provide security and generate favourable economic conditions for foreign investment in this kind of activity.

• For Oscar Campanini⁶, from the the Bolivian Centre for Documentation and Information (CEDIB), “the state is essential to carry out extractivism.” First, because it needs to make operations viable through the normative and laws. It is also a protagonist through state-owned companies. But mainly, it is the state that resolves the contradiction in conflicts through violence exercised by state apparatuses, such as the police and the armed forces.

   

  In recent decades, several Latin American governments have created tough police units designed to control protests and intervene in socio-environmental conflicts. One such unit is the Mobile Anti-Riot Squadron (ESMAD for its acronym in Spanish) in Colombia. Created in 1999, this unit is in charge of ‘riot and crowd control, blockades, accompanying evictions from public or private spaces that occur in urban or rural areas on national territory’.

   

  ESMAD has become notorious for its brutality, especially when repressing indigenous and peasant communities who resist eviction from their land to clear the way for mining, oil exploitation and the construction of mega-dams. They are consistently deployed in the midst of socio-environmental conflicts. In Colombia, 25% of the conflicts reported between 2001 and 2011 were related to oil, gold and coal.
• In Peru, for example, Earth Rights International (ERI) has brought to light how the law ‘empowers the Peruvian National Police… to create agreements with extractive companies that allow the Police to provide private security services within the facilities and other areas … of extractive projects in return for profit’. According to ERI, at least 138 agreements were signed between 1995 and 2018, of which 109 had been signed before 2017 and 29 were still in effect in 2019. In effect, the state is turning into a private police force for transnational capital.
• Gigantic TNCs, such as Anglo American, BHP, Glencore, Southern,  Newmont, China Minmetals Corporation, have shares in operating companies that have signed agreements with the police in recent years. The companies provide the police logistical support, basic services, communications equipment, food, vehicles, internet, office supplies and more. According to ERI, between 2010 and 2018, the police were paid 45.5 million soles (more than US$ 12.2 million) for their security services.
• These battalions function by order of the government, but companies can also hire their services. In 2014, the existence of several security contracts between extractive companies and the mining and energy battalions came to light. The Colombian government justified them by referring to the internal armed conflict. Investigations by the Colombian organisation Tierra Digna found that as of 2015, there were at least 21 special energy and road battalions in Colombia. It also revealed that between 2001 and 2013, 103 contracts were signed for which companies handed over the sum of 45 billion Colombian pesos to the state for the battalions’ services (around US$ 12 million). Companies, such as Glencore, Anglo American, BHP, AngloGold Ashanti, Drummond and others, have paid for these services.
• It is clear that the establishment of this entire legal and economic architecture has been made possible through the corporate capture of the state – a mechanism that TNCs use to exert influence to implement laws for their own benefit in various domains, which range from the relaxation of environmental standards to security laws. ‘Legislation by dispossession’, as Miller Dussán of the Association of People Affected by the Quimbo Megadam (ASOQUIMBO) in Colombia calls it. However, it is important to note that this legal framework that prioritises extractivism is not just limited to serving private corporate interest, it also serves state-owned companies.

• This political, economic and judicial framework can  be situated in what William Robinson calls the ‘transnational stage of global capitalism’, which is characterised by the rise of ‘truly transnational capital’ and the integration of countries into the ‘globalized production and financial system’ and ‘global circuits of accumulation’. In this stage, the new ‘transnational state’ generates the conditions for globalised accumulation, promoting regulatory frameworks that facilitate it, financing the infrastructure that transnational capital needs and becoming an instrument of coercion and control.

   

  In the era of transnational capital, a supranational power exerts ‘de facto’ power over state sovereignty in the form of  a global regulatory structure based on a vast network of free trade and investment protection agreements. In practice, this governs and regulates trade and the global economy via the ‘Lex Mercatoria’, which shapes the global economic and legal order in favour of transnational capital. This economic order also “overprotects” companies when popular resistance or public policies for the benefit of the population affect their interests. It is not by chance that most of the Investor-state dispute settlement cases (ISDS) lawsuits of transnationals against states, are in extractive sectors, mainly mining.
• This new ‘wave of dispossession’ has intensified extractive activities, triggering resistance from people living in the affected territories and an increase in conflict, repression and violence on the part of the transnational state. This is what Robinson calls ‘militarized accumulation’ or ‘accumulation by repression’.

• ‘Defending human rights is hard… especially in La Guajira because of the coal mining’, says Jakeline Romero, an indigenous member of Force of Wayúu Women, an organisation that also resists the expansion of coal mining. ‘In our organisation, we have had to endure many situations of violence including threats, stigmatisation and false accusations’..

   

  Front Line Defenders say that ‘44% of the attacks between 2015 and 2019 [in Colombia] were against defenders who expressed concern with the operations of five companies… Cerrejón is one of them’. Moreover, this company has a security agreement with a ‘mining and energy battalion’.

• In the case of Peru, repression has also increased in areas of resistance to mining activities. The situation is particularly critical in the southern Andes, which includes the most mining concessions in the country and the so-called ‘mining corridor’. Minerals pass through the corridor to the point of export. Most of the extractive companies that have security agreements with the police have projects in this ‘mining corridor’.

   

  This area, Espinar province, is home to the Antapaccay copper, gold and silver mine, owned by the Swiss-based transnational mining corporation, Glencore, and is now constantly militarised as a result of successive ‘states of emergency’, a legal provision that suspends the communities’ rights and protests despite the mines environmental impact on water, air and land. High amounts of heavy metals have been found in the blood samples of dozens of adults and children in the communities.
• After the 2012 protests in Espinar, the state prosecuted three social leaders charged with instigation and other crimes. The trial lasted more than eight years and during that time, the affected people were forced to bear the costs in terms of economic resources and their time, not to mention the psychological and social impacts on them and their families. Rodrigo Lauracio from Red Muqui says that in some cases these processes are driven by companies and in others directly by the state. “It seeks to prevent future social protests and intimidate organizations that question extractive projects,” he says.

• ‘We are seeing neoliberal traditional extractivism and a new kind of progressive neoextractivism, where the state plays a more active role in the capture of the surplus and the distribution, which is legitimised, but that produces the same impacts on the environment and rights’, Gudynas explains.

   

  One of the cases in Bolivia that drew the most attention was the TIPNIS conflict. In August 2011, 1,000 indigenous people began a 400-kilometre march from the eastern department of Beni to the seat of government in La Paz. The goal was to demand a halt to the ‘unconsulted’ construction of the highway that was to go through the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS), which is home to many Amazonian indigenous peoples. The communities were seeking to prevent the incursion of extractive activities into the nature reserve.

   

  The government discredited the march in several ways by linking it to particular NGOs and other political groups. In the end, the government violently repressed the march when it was 80 kilometres from La Paz, initially ignoring national and international criticism but eventually forced to abandon the project temporarily. 

• The growing violence associated with extractivism exposes the systemic crisis engulfing the transnational capitalist model as well as the planet’s ecological limits. Thus, it is a good opportunity to think about building a new civilisational system. 

   

  These proposals range from advocating for just energy transitions, changing the productive matrix, to rescuing and articulating the experiences of communities that live based on their ancestral knowledge about the land. Other proposals to curb extractive activities promoted by the communities have emerged from the popular consultations and assemblies that have been developed successfully in Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina and other countries.

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