The agreements of the municipal councils that prohibited the mining tasks in several places of the country are falling like castle of cards.
Only in the department of Antioquia, the Administrative Court has thwarted 13 of the 16 agreements that between 2017 and 2018 the cabildos advanced to stop mining and oil operations.
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And in the coming weeks, the aforementioned departmental court will end up burying the municipal agreements that are needed for deliberation.
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But not only in Antioquia is this happening. Last week, the Administrative Court of Huila also overturned the municipal agreement that prohibited mining in Acevedo.
Thus, between the two departments, more than 20 head offices whose councils had banished the extractive activities, not only can not veto it, but also, both the mayor and the lobbyists are subject to investigation by the control organisms.
This is the case of the mayor of the municipality of Jericho (Antioquia), who together with the council members, are now the subject of a preliminary investigation by the Attorney General, for irregularly advancing a session of the council to veto the mining.
"The main thesis to which the magistrates refer is that the municipality can not prohibit an activity that takes place in the subsoil and that belongs to the nation. They also invoke that the general interest prevails over the individual ", explained the Secretary of Mines of Antioquia, Dora Elena Balvn.
The official stressed that even the departmental court is referring the cases to the disciplinary body for anomalies in the proceedings of the sessions.
In Antioquia, of the aforementioned number of agreements, the Administrative Tribunal declared invalid those of Jericho, Tmesis, Titirib, Caicedo, Pueblorrico, Concordia, Fredonia, Caasgordas, Tarso, Carolina, Valparaiso, Salgar and Betulia.
"Mining has a national interest and the decision of a locality, through a municipal agreement or a popular consultation, can not be imposed on that of the Nation," said Silvana Habib, president of the National Mining Agency.
The official stressed that in the ruling of the Constitutional Court, which unifies the judgments regarding extractive activities, it is necessary to clarify that mining can not be prevented throughout the country because it is the decision of a single municipality.
In the department of Huila, in addition to the municipal agreements that prohibited the extraction of minerals in Tarqui Oporapa, Altamira, Pitalito and Elas, there are the popular consultations that prohibited it in El Agrado and Timan.
For the country's mining sector, 2019 will be marked by the reactivation of projects that the popular consultations or the agreements of the councils stopped. The tasks can be resumed in Cajamarca (Tolima), Pijao (Quindo), or Cumaral (Meta).
RECENT SENTENCE
On January 31, the Administrative Court of Antioquia declared the invalidity of Municipal Agreement 13 of 2017, by means of which metallic mining is prohibited in Tarso, a municipality located in the Southwest of Antioquia. For the departmental court, the initiative of the Tarsus council has no validity, since it is not the competence of a municipal authority to make determinations of this character on the use of land. "There were overreaching, since in the hierarchy of the National Environmental System the municipalities are in the last order," says the litigation in the ruling. This decision is made after the General Secretary of the Government of Antioquia asked the Administrative Court to review the municipal agreement, as has happened in other similar cases such as Thames, which ultimately ended up invalidated.
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