One day, just before New Year, a ship registered under the Panamanian flag sailed up the Limfjord. The ship was carrying 77,447 tonnes of coal to keep the people of Northern Jutland warm through the winter.
The coal also held an important story about one of this year’s most powerful and controversial companies, a much-debated mine and a large group of people in Colombia who believe the coal is tainted by their blood.
In the spring of 2022, the coal was hastily ordered by Aalborg Forsyning. At the time, the Northern Jutlanders received all their coal from Russia, but the EU had banned such imports in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
As a result, Colombian coal, among other things, suddenly became popular again around the world after years of declining demand.
Last year, Aalborg Forsyning received a total of 125,000 tonnes from Colombia, 30,000 tonnes from the USA and 240,000 tonnes from South Africa to keep the people of Northern Jutland warm when winter returned.
One day in early December, the 77,447 tonnes of coal were shipped out of Puerto Bolivar on the La Guajira peninsula in northern Colombia. The small village was once populated by fishermen and farmers living off the lush nature, now everything is covered in coal dust and people have left.
Every day, trains arrive with 120 wagons loaded with coal from the famous Cerrejón mine 150 kilometres inland. Tens of thousands of tonnes of coal are unloaded into large bunkers at the port, from where it is loaded onto ships that sail to destinations all over the world, including Aalborg.
A few people have remained in the city. Among them is 52-year-old José Tomas Freile Gonzales, who Danwatch met in his home, where the furniture is covered in dust. He feels surrounded by the Cerrejón mine and its owner, multinational commodities trader Glencore, known for corruption and environmental destruction around the world:
“We are just watching the coal pass by here on the train. The coal, the dust pollutes us, kills us and dries us out,” says José Tomas Freile Gonzales.
He’s far from alone in those feelings.
In March this year, Danwatch went on a 10-day reporting trip to the area around the Cerrejón mine. And from here, the message is very clear: despite repeated promises from the mine’s owner, Glencore, and demands from customers and investors, nothing has changed.
The mine is still rumbling on and still making people sick, opponents are persecuted and the mine is an environmental disaster for the entire local area.
Few companies have a wilder and more scandalous history than Glencore. At the same time, hardly any company is more centrally positioned in this year’s energy crisis.
Glencore trades and produces everything from wheat to green minerals to coal. Some describe Glencore as a “vampire squid”, a squid that has wrapped itself around our entire civilization, ready to pounce on anything that smells like a good deal. The company’s tentacles extend far into our lives, and whether it’s your electric car, your smartphone or the heat in your radiator, there’s a good chance that Glencore made a profit from it before it got to you.
In 2022, Glencore entered into several large settlements, which in total meant that the company had to pay more than 11 billion Danish kroner for committing corruption and money laundering over many years. Nevertheless, 2022 was a record year for Glencore with earnings in excess of 230 billion kroner.
This can also be seen in the wealth of Glencore’s largest shareholder, 66-year-old South African Ivan Glasenberg, who has been involved in the company since 1984. According to Forbes’ 2023 report, he is worth 61.75 billion kroner.
As the world’s largest coal trader, Glencore and Glasenberg have benefited from the energy crisis, and as one of the largest suppliers of critical minerals, they are capitalising on the green transition. According to observers, Glencore has achieved this pivotal position in the global economy by being cynical and unafraid to cross the line.
Glencore was founded in 1974 by Belgian-born commodities trader Marc Rich, then known as Marc Rich + Co. AG. In the early years, the company made its money by trading oil with countries and people others wouldn’t trade: South Africa’s apartheid regime, Chile’s dictator Augusto Pinochet and a sanctions-hit Iran during the 1979 hostage crisis.
The company quickly became adept at tax evasion, sanctions avoidance and bribery. And by being in places where no one else would be – from DR Congo to Colombia – Glencore has gained access to resources and grown bigger than anyone else in their field.
For the first 37 years of its existence, Glencore enjoyed peace and quiet that comes with being headquartered in the Swiss town of Baar, where discretion is a virtue. For a long time, they were even nicknamed ‘the biggest company you’ve never heard of’. But when the company went public in 2011, they had to open up to their investors. Stories emerged that Glencore had traded with corrupt regimes; speculated on the price of grain while people in developing countries rioted for lack of food; and caused major environmental problems in African countries, such as acid rain in Zambia.
Since then, the scandals have abounded. Last year, when the Danish pension fund AkademikerPension had to explain why it would no longer invest in Glencore, it cited “allegations of corruption, poor working conditions, discrimination, child labour, forced displacement of local populations, excessive use of force, tax evasion and environmental pollution.”
So far, the scandals have culminated in the bribery cases that they settled last year.
Over a 10-year period, Glencore employees bribed the most powerful people in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Equatorial Guinea, Brazil, Venezuela and DR Congo. Glencore flew money in suitcases to bribe judges and dictators. They have bribed their way to lucrative contracts and to the disappearance of lawsuits. As a US attorney general said last summer, the scale of bribery is “staggering”.
In one of the cases, investigators reviewed more than a million documents and found, among other things, that a commodities trader from Glencore’s West Africa division had withdrawn almost 50 million Danish kroner from Glencore’s cash desk at its headquarters in Switzerland and used it for bribery 25 times between 2012 and 2015. One of the directors who authorised the withdrawal of the money was responsible for business ethics.
No sooner had South Sudan gained independence in 2011 than Glencore was sending people on a private jet with 5.5 million kroner in bribes. Within days of the money landing in the right hands, Glencore’s fortune was made and they won a number of valuable contracts.
And so the list goes on.
In 2000, Glencore bought into the Cerrejón mine along with the two mining giants BHP and AngloAmerican, and in 2002 they took full control. The mining companies immediately began expanding the mine, encroaching further and further into the lands of the indigenous Wayuu people and Afro-Colombians, descendants of West African slaves who had come to the area in the 16th century.
The expansion was done in a way that the local population saw as destructive. Entire communities were forcibly relocated. Rivers that provided essential drinking water were diverted. And the people who didn’t move were contaminated with toxic heavy metals and coal dust from the mine. It’s still like that, the locals say.
In 2021, BHP and AngloAmerican sold their stake in the mine because, with climate change and the Paris Agreement in mind, they could not reconcile their businesses with being part of the mine. Glencore bought it all, became the sole owner of Cerrejón and promised to be a “responsible administrator”. Yet among workers in the mine and the communities surrounding the mine, Glencore is far from being perceived as responsible.
Today, the mine is the largest of its kind in Latin America and one of the largest in the world, with almost 70,000 hectares and 5,000 employees. That’s the equivalent of almost 100,000 dry, dusty football fields, filled with machines and trucks that emit a constant noise to the surrounding world. An area that has slowly eaten into its surroundings, turning it into a place where life doesn’t stand a chance. Everything takes place behind large fences; the mine is off-limits to outsiders.
One of those who has experienced the mine from the inside is Jelix Enrique Torres Bolivar, who we meet in the mining town of Fonseca, under a tree in the courtyard of the Sintracarbón coal miners’ union. For two decades, he breathed in the dust of the coal mine.
“If I had known what mining was, I would never have worked in a mine,” he says through the face mask that covers his nose and mouth:
“It is harmful to health, to the respiratory system, to the skin, to the musculoskeletal system. Today I am a patient, I suffer from everything.”
Jelix Enrique Torres Bolivar is the first Cerrejón mine worker to have it recognised that the dust in the mine destroyed his lungs and gave him silicosis, also known as black lung.
However, he is just one of many miners whose health has been destroyed in the mine, says José Brito, who has been health secretary of the Sintracarbón union for 15 years and has been a member of the National Council for Occupational Risks.
“I know that people are working with a very dangerous material in Cerrejón. With the help of the union, we managed to discover more than 1,500 examples of workers who have fallen ill from working in Cerrejón, some of them with carcinogenic diseases. People suffer a lot from gastritis, irritable bowel syndrome, insomnia problems and psychological problems,” says the former union leader.
Near the small village of El Rocio, the Cerrejón mine is also intruding. The town is located on the banks of Bruno River, which Glencore and the Cerrejón mine want to divert because there are large coal reserves underneath.
If that happens, it would be catastrophic for the indigenous Wayuu people who live in El Rocio and other villages along the river.
According to a 2017 court ruling, at least 30 Wayuu villages depend on water from the Bruno watercourse. And the diversion now planned by Cerrejón will directly affect the water supply for a population of more than 200,000 people. At the same time, it threatens key parts of the Wayuu people’s culture, where water is connected to their spirits and spirituality.
However, Glencore is far from accepting the decision of the Constitutional Court and the protection of Bruno. Glencore has sued the Colombian state over the decision not to allow coal mining under the Bruno, claiming that the court’s decision was discriminatory, unfair and arbitrary and denied them “fair and equitable treatment”.
And the Bruno is just the latest example. Over the years, Cerrejón has diverted at least 17 rivers to extract coal. But the Wayuu people have also succeeded in preventing diversions. 57-year-old Leobardo Sierra, who we met in El Rocio, hopes to succeed again.
“On the one hand, I feel calm because I’ve been fighting. But it’s exhausting. I also see that there is hope, that dreams can come true. We also don’t want them to continue destroying or killing streams or depriving people of their territory.”
Danwatch and El Turbión, the Colombian media outlet we have been working with, tried to get a comment from Glencore through the press department at its headquarters in Switzerland. However, the press department never returned.
Glencore’s Chairman of the Board Kalidas Madhavpeddi could not hide from the criticism during Glencore’s annual general meeting on 26 May in Zug, Switzerland, where El Turbión was present.
Here, Kalidas Madhavpeddi started by praising Glencore’s CRS policies:
“Wherever we operate, we are committed to placing a high value on doing so in an ethical and sustainable way. We employ 10,000s of people, support local businesses and service providers, and invest in local education, healthcare and infrastructure.”
Kalidas Madhavpeddi probably didn’t expect that the NGO Yukpa Solidarity Network had flown in a local indigenous woman who had experienced Glencore’s fatal devastation of the population in the Becerril and La Jagua de Ibirico regions of Colombia.
Just over an hour into the general meeting, she took the floor:
“I am a Yukpa woman from an indigenous reserve where Glencore has established itself, and I have seen the transformation and pollution of the environment that is causing the deaths of children. More than 40 children have died in our territory caused by pollution from open pit mining,” she says.
Kalidas Madhavpeddi then answered briefly:
“From our perspective, we do everything we can in terms of operations in our facilities. I’m not aware of that development.”
Danwatch and El Turbión have also posed a number of questions to Glencore through the local administration directly at the Cerrejón mine in Colombia.
In an email response, the mine’s ESG manager, Inés Elvira Andrade, primarily refers to Glencore’s website for answers to questions related to the company’s past corruption cases.
In response to the allegations of air pollution, sick employees, threats against critics and the diversion of watercourses, Inés Elvira Andrade denies that Glencore in Cerrejón has failed to live up to its responsibilities.
“Cerrejón’s commitments in La Guajira extend far beyond the investment, the payment of taxes and the creation of quality jobs. We strive to apply the highest standards of ethics and respect in our relationships with all our stakeholders. Similarly, we are committed to developing our operations in an environmentally responsible way and leaving a natural legacy for future generations,” she explains.
“We act on the principle of continuous improvement to strengthen our human rights due diligence processes. For this reason, we comply with various international standards and our human rights policy is in line with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.”
Read the full answer at the bottom of the article or click here to go straight the answer.
Danwatch first visited the Cerrejón mine in the autumn of 2009, when a quarter of the Danish coal consumption came from the mine.
Many of the problems were the same then as they are now. Forced relocations, pollution and sick coal workers. The stories in 2010 caused most Danish power plants to stop buying coal from Cerrejón.
Over the following 13 years, there have been several critical stories about the conditions in Cerrejón in both Danish and international media. Despite this and Glencore’s controversial reputation, Aalborg Forsyning chose to buy coal from Cerrejón in the spring of 2022.
When Danwatch spoke for the first time last summer with Per Clausen (EL), chairman of the board of Aalborg Forsyning and Nordjyllandsværket, about the conditions in and around Cerrejón, he reacted with surprise and a guarantee to initiate a dialogue with Glencore.
Danwatch has now confronted Per Clausen with the fact that conditions in Cerrejón are still horrible. In a written response, the chairman of the board maintains that Nordjyllandsværket has not entered into any new contracts with Glencore since the 77,447 tonnes of coal that arrived in December.
In addition, Per Clausen explains that they are in an ongoing dialogue with Glencore and have, among other things, presented the articles that Danwatch wrote last year about the mine’s negative impact on the local area.
“Aalborg Forsyning has been and is still in an ongoing dialogue with Glencore about our CSR requirements. With regard to the specific criticism from Danwatch about negative environmental impacts, Glencore has communicated in detail about a due diligence effort with a system for monitoring and measuring the effectiveness of the effort.
“Furthermore, Glencore has confirmed that it implements all elements of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the UN Guiding Principles on Human Rights. Aalborg Forsyning has also shared its own impact assessments with Glencore, so they know the minimum level of information we expect to receive.”
Per Clausen will now consider the new information provided by Danwatch, but does not want to rule out doing business with Glencore again.
“We find that it is useful to make demands on Glencore and to follow up, and we will continue to do so. We believe that Glencore is one of the suppliers we can choose in terms of CSR, and therefore, also for security of supply reasons, we will not rule out buying coal from them again at some point.”
“We will include the statements you have made from your field trip in our further work and compare them with the other information we have.”
Shortly before this story is due to be published, chaos ensues at El Turbión.
El Turbión has been threatened and is in the process of clarifying whether this has anything to do with their investigation of the Cerrejón mine and Glencore.
Everyone we speak to in Colombia who has been fighting against the mine and Glencore has been threatened or harassed. None of them can prove that this comes directly from Glencore, but in the past Glencore has been criticised for its close ties to the country’s paramilitary movements.
In 2014, for example, the peace movement PAX presented testimonies from employees of one of Glencore’s subsidiaries explaining how they had helped fund the paramilitary group Juan Andrés Álvarez Front.
Samuel Arregoces is one of those who has felt the threats. He is an activist and comes from a town that has been cleared to make way for the Cerrejón mine.
For a number of years he has been fighting against the mine, but along the way he has had to go into hiding elsewhere in Colombia when the threats to his family became too intense.
A few days after we interviewed Samuel Arregoces, he suddenly writes. He was driving with another journalist and his security guard when a motorcycle pulled up alongside the car. When Samuel Arregoces looked out the window, he saw that the motorcyclist was wearing a balaclava. He instinctively hit the accelerator to get away, but the motorcycle followed him for several kilometres until they approached a police checkpoint.
Samuel Arregoces doesn’t know who the man was, but he knows for sure why he was there.
“There is no doubt that it is related to my activism against Cerrejón and against coal mining, and we are in the middle of a tough fight to defend the Bruno watercourse. This is what I do and I have no other enemies,” he explains.
Lise Josefsen Hermann
Jonathan Tybjerg