By: Brent Patterson 

A massive march of more than 100,000 people took place in the city of Bucaramanga, Colombia on Friday May 10. All of the media coverage of that protest is in Spanish. What happened that day and why?

A mobilization to protect drinking water

El Espectador reports that the protest march was in opposition to "extractive projects in the ecosystem that supplies water to more than two million people in eastern Colombia."

The name of that ecosystem is the Páramo de Santurbán.

(Ottawa, Vancouver) On Wednesday, the Xinka Parliament of Guatemala drew over 1,000 community members to its press conference where Xinka Indigenous representatives called on Canadian company Pan American Silver (TSX: PAAS) to respect their right to freely participate in the court-ordered consultation process over the Escobal mine. Xinka communities demanded the company cease attemp

Learn about the secret weapon Canadian mining companies are using to extract money from developing countries when environmental measures, Indigenous rights and community resistance create democratic roadblocks to their extracting oil, gas and minerals.

(Vancouver/Victoria/Ottawa/Tatamagouche/Washington, D.C.) Ahead of Pan American Silver’s annual shareholder meeting in Vancouver today, the Xinka Indigenous Parliament released a statement calling on the company to stop attempts to engage with communities outside of the court-ordered consultation process over the Escobal silver project in southern Guatemala. It insists that the company’s community relations taking place in parallel to the consultation are coercive, heighten tensions and jeopardize the free nature of the process.

(Toronto) At the North Mara gold mine in Tanzania, Barrick’s subsidiary Acacia is using a brutalizing remedy mechanism to process victims of excess use of force by the mine’s private security, and by police that guard the mine under an agreement, even as some of these victims have filed legal action through UK-based lawyers Deighton Pierce Glynn.

(Toronto) National human rights, faith, and labour organizations along with concerned Torontonians rallied in Toronto to call for a Ombudsperson with the power to investigate corporate abuses abroad. The Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise (CORE) was created last month, 15 months after its first announcement, but its proposed powers were stripped. Sheri Meyerhoffer, once a lobbyist with the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, was named to the post, sparking disappointment and outrage across the country.

The Government of Canada has fundamentally broken its electoral promise of 2015 and its commitment of January 17, 2018 to create an Ombudsperson with: independence from both government and industry; strong investigatory powers to compel documents and witnesses, when necessary, in the course of investigating complaints brought against Canadian mining companies for human rights abuses perpetrated overseas; and the ability to make determinations of fact about whether a Canadian company had caused or contributed to human rights harm. Fifteen months after the commitment to create a strong ombudsperson was made in 2018, the government has created an advisory position to the Minister with a deeply flawed and inadequate mandate.

OTTAWA — Canada's international reputation will be damaged if it doesn't give real power to its new watchdog on responsible corporate conduct, warns a United Nations rights watchdog.

Canada's international reputation will be damaged if it doesn't give real power to its new watchdog on responsible corporate conduct, warns a United Nations rights watchdog.

We analyzed 38 multi-million dollar claims brought by the mining industry using ISDS and other investment protection laws; in over half, communities are fighting to protect Indigenous territory, water, and more.

During the last couple of decades—and particularly during the last ten years—mining companies have filed dozens of claims against Latin American countries before international arbitration panels, demanding compensation for court decisions, public policies and other government measures that they claim reduce the value of their investments. In a majority of these cases, the communities most affected by the mining projects have been actively organizing to defend their territories and natural resources.