"Germany's dirty Colombian coal", 26 May 2022

...Local people call it "The Monster." It sprawls across more than 69,000 hectares, an area the size of 100 soccer fields, and gulps down 30 million liters of water every day in the barren semi-desert of Colombia's second-poorest department, La Guajira...

El Cerrejon is the biggest open-cast coal mine in Latin America...If Germany's chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has his way, "The Monster" will play a large part in ensuring that Germans don't have to freeze next winter. The chancellor spoke to his Colombian counterpart, Ivan Duque, about it in early April – because if Germany is to end its reliance on Russian coal, it must urgently find an alternative...

"The people who are employed there work 12 hours at a stretch: the early shift from 6am till 6pm, or the night shift from 6pm to 6am They get sick from this, and from all the coal dust. It's maximum exploitation. If they fall ill and demand compensation, they have to sue for it; the company never pays of its own accord"...

There is a lot the human rights lawyer Rosa Maria Mateus Parra could tell German Chancellor Scholz about El Cerrejón. It is not a pleasant story. Its grim chapters bear titles like: exploitation, expropriation, forced resettlement, expulsion, destruction, irreparable environmental damage. Furthermore, in recent years the childhood mortality rate has risen sharply. Around 5,000 Wayuu children have died of starvation and thirst in the region around the mine. This horrifying figure even prompted the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to get involved...

...160 organizations from 30 countries...initiated the campaign "Life Not Coal" earlier this month. They called on Scholz and Duque to stop exploiting the coal in El Cerrejon...

...According to this law, German companies are also obliged to trace and remedy any deficiencies when importing coal from Colombia.

Energy companies such as Steag and EnBW are therefore subject to this requirement. Uniper and RWE also buy coal from Colombia...