RE:Interesting read from Soto The municipalities of Soto Norte are home to around 1,300 traditional ancestral gold miners. There are more than 15,000 people, along with their families. Of these, it is estimated that 70% are not formally registered, that is, they work in mines and in areas of the Pramo de Santurbn. What will their future be? The Minister of the Environment answers.
76.1% of mining activity for the extraction of gold and silver in the province of Soto Norte, in Santander , would be frozen for five years, extendable for the same period. Where does this figure come from?
The Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, Mara Susana Muhamad Gonzlez , in an interview with Vanguardia , explained that of the 24,300 hectares of Soto Norte that have current mining titles or applications for mining titles, 18,500 hectares are in areas with environmental determinants, that is, protected areas because they would be ecosystems of environmental importance or have values for the conservation of water resources that supply aqueducts.
In addition, the head of the Environment and Sustainable Development portfolio assured Vanguardia that there were inconsistencies in the delimitation of the Santurbn Pramo in the municipality of Vetas, which would end up favoring 12 mining titles of Canadian companies to operate in the Santurbn Pramo.
The Environment Minister defends the declaration of temporary reserve zones in Santander , while the miners point out that such a decision puts at risk the legal stability of their sector and the livelihood of some 1,300 miners, who currently subsist from informal mining in the territory. “We would be left without work,” they claim.
The Ministry of the Environment admits that the State was wrong years ago when it granted these titles in environmental conservation zones, but now a ruling by the Council of State forces them to reorganize these territories with mining activity . The miners of Soto Norte reject this decision because they claim that it condemns them to illegality, while they accuse the National Government of issuing this decree without consultation. In fact, communication between the miners of Santander and the Government is so broken that on June 12, Minister Mara Susana Muhamad Gonzlez left California amid cries of rejection of her proposal for reserved areas.
In turn, the Minister of the Environment also pointed out that the California miners only want to formalize with the large multinationals that are interested in exploiting gold and silver in Santander. In California, the so-called ' Soto Norte Project' operates, owned (51%) by Aris Mining, a Canadian company, and (49%) by Mubadala Aris, a multinational with its main headquarters in Abu Dhabi.
“…What the big mining owners want is to use small miners as a lever to allow them to carry out medium and large-scale mining,” said Muhamad Gonzlez.
Questions and answers
* Vanguardia: The Soto Norte area in Santander has been experiencing a conflict for years between mining and the defence of water from the Santurbn Pramo. Several marches have been held (the next one on 18 October) in Bucaramanga, while the ancestral miners demand their right to work and recognition as protectors of the Santurbn Pramo. What position does the Ministry of the Environment take in this conflict of interests?
* Minister of Environment: We seek to fulfill the first axis of the National Development Plan, which consists of organizing the territory around water. It is public knowledge that we have a conflict between water and gold mining. This conflict has to do with the entry of multinational companies legally, based on titles granted by the State, which have been in place for more than 15 years, and where there has been opposition to this scale of mining, because it can put the structures of the moor and the water at risk.
The first conflict concerns the delimitation of the Santurbn Pramo , which has a ruling from the Constitutional Court, which obliges the Ministry of Environment to review this delimitation based on a participatory process with criteria that the Constitutional Court imposed. We received (at the beginning of Gustavo Petro's government) a process with a single municipality with a delimitation agreement. The delimitation must be done with 40 municipalities of Santander and Norte Santander (located in the area of influence of the Santurbn Pramo). In this government, in 18 months, we have ten municipalities with delimitation agreements.
As I said from day one, in 2022, water does not only depend on the Pramo de Santurbn. It is the entire massif and the entire basin that we have to protect to guarantee that water service. We also know that there are two types of mining. One is carried out by traditional miners in Vetas and California, and some small ones that are also in Surat, and the large-scale mining (in Santander) that was delivered by title.
* Vanguardia: Given this scenario, how can we organize the territory under these criteria of water protection and guarantee mining without creating a risk to the water supply for an entire region, including Bucaramanga?
* Minister of the Environment: This is a responsibility that we have to assume from the environmental sector. This is not limited to protecting the Santurbn Pramo. It would be like protecting the head, but from there on down you can do whatever you want with the body. In 2010, the Council of State urged the National Government, in a ruling that is of last resort, to fix the mining disorder caused by the granting of titles to environmental determinants (this is what areas with special environmental protection in a territory are known as). It ordered that, on a technical basis and using the precautionary principle, the areas that should be temporarily reserved (freezing mining activity) to stop mining activity be defined, while in-depth studies are carried out, which define what is included or excluded from mining for the protection of an area.
The Ministry of the Environment, seeing that Santurbn is one of the most important conflicts, and that the water for the entire region, including Bucaramanga, is at stake, began the first analyses of these watersheds that supply the aqueducts, where mining titles were granted in the area of the Santurbn Pramo. For example, the mining title of Greystar, which was later bought by the company Eco Oro. We also reviewed where there were conflicts between this mining title, the scale of mining, and the water cycle. We began to identify, by crossing more than 25 variables (such as soils, protected areas, Hydrographic Basin Management and Planning Plans, Pomcas, integrated management districts, among others) some areas around two rivers that supply water to this entire area.
* Vanguardia: What did you find in that analysis?
* Minister of Environment: We found that these two basins, which include municipalities such as Matanza, California, Vetas, Tona, Charta and Bucaramanga, cover an area of 76,000 hectares. Of this territory, 24,300 hectares currently have valid mining titles or applications for mining titles. In addition, 18,500 hectares of these accounts have mining titles in protected areas with environmental determinants, that is, critical areas for the functioning of the water cycle (this figure corresponds to 76.1% of the territory).
* Vanguardia: Does the Ministry of the Environment propose that temporary reserve zones be established in these areas, that is, five years, renewable, without mining activity?
* Minister of Environment: We would seek to temporarily reserve these areas to resolve the conflict between mining and these water protection areas, and thus comply with the ruling of the Council of State, and establish a criterion for environmental protection. Now these temporary environmental reserve zones would not be detrimental to the mining formalization processes, which must be agreed upon in California and Vetas , because we understand that environmental governance also involves an agreement with them (ancestral miners). However, we have a conflict there in Soto Norte, in relation to the scale of mining that they want to do.
* Vanguardia: One of the criticisms leveled at the Ministry of the Environment is that no one in Soto Norte, starting with the miners, mayors, councillors, and the community, is aware of this study, that is, they do not know where the 18,500 hectares that would remain unmined for almost a decade are located. This situation generates uncertainty and rejection in the area, as you perceived during your last visit to California on June 12.
* Minister of Environment: We wanted to methodologically begin the process of socialization at that meeting in California. We promised that such an important definition for the territory cannot be made without the knowledge and participation of the people. However, there is a fundamental problem. It is that the people (in Soto Norte) do not even want to talk about this issue. With some miners we are advancing in the formalization processes from the National Mining Agency, we have even opened a permanent office in California. There are some reserved areas that the National Mining Agency has, which can be destined for formalization, including territories that were from the old Eco Oro for the miners of California. The case of the Vetas miners is different, and I will refer to them later. What we are saying is that the temporary reserved area would respect the areas where there can be formalization of miners, and we would obviously enter into a process of detailed socialization of those areas.
So why do they (the miners of Soto Norte) not even want to move forward in the dialogue? Why has there been an attempt to stigmatize Decree 044 (which establishes the criteria for identifying, delimiting and declaring temporary natural resource reserves with the objective of contributing to environmental mining planning) as if it were a definitive restriction on all mining? They see it as if it were an imposition on the territory, when in fact it is the fulfillment of a sentence of the Constitutional Court, as if protecting water together were not a duty of all actors in the territory.
* Vanguardia: But Minister, the Soto Norte community claims that it is full of environmental determinants, and that now including the temporary reserve zones will leave them with nowhere to carry out mining, because those zones, according to what you have said, occupy 71.6% of the current territory. That leaves them with nowhere to work.
* Environment Minister: No. I think there is a misinterpretation. Since we were unable to have a calm dialogue at the meeting in California, there were very misinterpretations of what the Government intends. I would like to separate the cases that occur in Vetas and California, because they are different in terms of environmental determinants.
* Vanguard: What's happening in California?
* Environment Minister: The miners said that we are going to put more environmental determinants with the temporary reserve zones. No, there are already some environmental determinants on which there are mining titles. What we need is to resolve the conflict over the mining titles requested in zones with environmental determinants already established by the Autonomous Corporation (for the Defense of the Bucaramanga Plateau, Cdmb) such as the planning and management plans for the basins that can affect the water cycle. In addition, the temporary reserve is not an additional environmental determinant, it is a measure to resolve this conflict where mining was put in place without considering environmental protection. We have to define what to do there based on in-depth studies.
A second point of debate is the scale of mining. This is the underlying conflict that prevents us from even working with certain sectors in California. One sector (of the miners) wants formalization to be done with the large mining companies, which are going to carry out large-scale mining.
* Vanguardia: Are you saying that a portion of the California miners only want to formalize their operations with the Soto Norte project?
* Environment Minister: That is what the California miners want. What does the Environment Ministry say? The scale of this mining is not compatible with the water cycle. Extracting a ton of gold a month is very different from extracting a small portion of it, which is a completely different scale. The environmental license that the project called 'Soto Norte' today presented to the ANLA (Environmental Licensing Authority) more or less spoke of gold extractions of one ton a month, with immense infrastructures that are precisely going to destroy the water cycle process.
The Government says that mining formalization should be developed with titles, with good environmental practices, in defined areas for all miners who are from California and Vetas, with the titles in their hands for small-scale mining, in which we can relatively control the impacts on the water cycle. Then the National Mining Agency will seek to buy that gold directly, sell it as 'green gold', as traditional gold, with added value based on good environmental practices. We are talking about small-scale mining in the hands of the inhabitants of the area. That is the Government's proposal for formalization. We do not agree with some mining sectors in California and Vetas, because they really want to do mining on a different scale, with the help of the titles of the large mining companies that are in the territory.
* Vanguardia: The miners of Soto Norte say that there could be around 1,300 small miners in the area, 70% of whom are not formally registered, that is, they work illegally in mine shafts, with the dangers that this activity represents. Hence the resistance to the temporary reserve areas. They claim that two years of this government have passed and the formalization processes “have not advanced at all.” What do you say?
* Minister of Environment: I heard three important observations made in the dialogue by the miners at the meeting in California. The first is that this delimitation of the Pramo de Santurbn has taken a long time, and they are right. But we have done more in 18 months than what was done by the previous government. Two, that the environmental authorities should not implement more environmental determinants. I agree with them. That is why we must create joint and collective governance around water. Three, they are in a legal uncertainty regarding the issue of the delimitation of the Pramo de Santurbn. The Government proposes ending this legal uncertainty, let us move forward in the processes of formalization and titling, and that is why we are in the area.
For example, the State has already received the titles from Eco Oro. We already have a formalized reserve area, which we can begin to work on. The Geological Service is doing prospective mineral studies for California. The National Mining Agency and the Agrarian Bank already have the credits ready to work with them, but there is a sector of miners who do not want this process.
There is a sector of miners who want formalisation to be done with the large mining owners . I asked this sector if they believe that the large mining owners are a development agency, or if they became overnight the patrons of the small miners, or if on the contrary, what the large mining owners want is to use the small miners as a lever so that they are allowed to do medium and large mining. That is the underlying debate in all this.
I know that the miners in California and Vetas want to conserve water and want to do mining, and the Government agrees with that. What we do not agree with is that other interests are involved in scaling up mining. There is a sector that resists because it believes that the only way to become formal is through the large multinational.
* Vanguardia: You spoke of a study of mining potential in Soto Norte and the characterization of the miners in the area. When will the results of these studies be available? The miners say that they have already been thoroughly diagnosed and are demanding urgent formalization.
* Minister of Environment: The mining perspective studies by the Geological Service began in April of last year and we hope to have enough data to be able to begin delimiting the polygons in August of this year. Secondly, an agreement was made with the mayors of Vetas and California by the National Mining Agency to do the characterization, because in the delimitation dialogues last year progress had been made. We were going to close a great pact for traditional mining, which unfortunately with the change of mayors was somewhat suspended. It was said that mining activity would be in the hands of people who have lived in the territory for at least the last 15 years, or who were married to a Californian man or woman who had tradition. Unfortunately with the entry of large-scale mining, they sold their lands and their titles, and that is what we would like to recover.
* Vanguardia: What is happening in Vetas? In an interview with Vanguardia, the mayor, Anglica Mara Garca, said that if temporary reserve zones were implemented, the municipality would be left without mining activity.
* Minister of the Environment: The temporary reserve zones do not affect Vetas. They do not touch it. The municipality is in the area of the Pramo de Santurbn and obviously traditional mining exploitation is also there. Vetas is the highest municipality in the country. We reviewed the delimitation agreement that Vetas signed with the previous government. We agree with its principles, but we saw that at the end of the document, in its conclusion, there is basically a contradiction, and we officially responded to that to the Administrative Court of Santander.
* Vanguard: How does it contradict itself?
* Environment Minister: What we found is that Vetas says they want to do traditional mining. We say that we agree. We clarify that Vetas does not use mercury for gold extraction, but there is informal mining that is getting involved and is already using it, but I believe that the miners who are formalized are serious miners. But, when we went to review the delimitation agreement we found that of 16 mining titles, only four were in the hands of people and families directly from Vetas. The rest of the 12 mining titles are in the hands of Canadian companies. So there we have that conflict again. One thing is to tell the Constitutional Court that we are going to have differential criteria to allow mining in the Pramo de Santurbn. But when one goes to review it, one finds that the remaining 12 mining titles are from Canadian multinationals. So the criteria for exemption are no longer met. In addition, they are multinationals with which we are in international litigation.
* Vanguardia: What will happen now? That is, will this delimitation agreement be challenged in any way?
* Minister of Environment: She is not contesting. Each municipality makes its agreement and then a single resolution of delimitation must be drawn up and an explanation of why the moorland line will change. Whether to extend it or reduce it. That is why we are reviewing the agreements. What we have noted is that we see inconsistency in Vetas. There is a contradiction that we cannot turn a blind eye to. Let me clarify, we are willing to leave areas in Vetas for the mining formalization for the owners of the region. As the agreement stands today, it basically enables these Canadian multinationals to activate their mining titles in the Santurbn Moorland again. When the complete resolution of the limitation is issued, the Ministry will make a decision, based on that agreement that was made with Vetas.
* Vanguardia: When is the resolution of the Santurbn Pramo line expected?
* Environment Minister: Our goal is to have the resolution issued before the end of this Government. In that, I am with the miners. We cannot maintain this uncertainty any longer. At this moment there are six municipalities with which we have already closed agreements. They are Vetas, Matanza, Charta, California, Piedecuesta and El Playn. Three decided that they will not enter into agreements, and the corresponding minutes have been left. They are Santa Brbara, Guaca and Tona. Surat is in the process of being finalized. We still need to move forward with the three municipalities in the lower basin, that is, Bucaramanga, Girn and Floridablanca. In Norte de Santander, of the 20 municipalities that have a relationship with the Pramo de Santander, we only have one agreement. There, the context is not mining, but rather peasant.
* Vanguardia: Last June you were in California and the meeting was a failure. What are you planning to do now with the miners of Soto Norte?
* Environment Minister: The first thing to say is that there was a total stigmatization of temporary reserves and the whole issue was taken out of context. A critical mass of dissatisfaction was generated, without us having been able to really discuss the implications of what it means. The second is that there is great resistance to more environmental determinants, and I can understand that given the situation, and I find it understandable. We are going to seek dialogue with the Government of Santander, and we are going to seek mediation to see if we can achieve a more assertive dialogue with the specific actors, who are also interested in seeing if we can achieve a more in-depth solution, with more clarity on which polygons the Government is working on. We definitely failed in the methodology. President Gustavo Pedro has been absolutely clear, with the commitment he signed in Bucaramanga as a candidate, which was later included in the Development Plan on territorial planning around water, that there cannot be large-scale mining that ends the water cycle in the Pramo Santurbn. We will seek to work on mediation processes with the National Mining Agency to advance the mining formalization processes and we will seek to find ways to understand each other, but at this time we do not understand each other.