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Contentious consultations: Black communities, corporate experts, and the constitutional court in Colombia’s coal region

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Abstract

Across the Global South, corporations and governments are displacing Indigenous and Afro-descendant groups in the name of development and economic advancement. International norms guarantee these communities the right to consultation over extractive projects that impact their traditional territories. Ethnic rights laws create spaces for communities to hold corporations accountable for their suffering; the same laws can also allow corporations to co-opt the process. Using a case study from Colombia, I argue that two Black communities filed a petition to seek reparations for a wide range of harms caused by mining yet found themselves on trial over whether they were really a community at all. Corporate officials positioned themselves as the experts on community identity and history and used the communities’ lack of collectivity to discredit the communities’ ethnic rights claims. This article brings together anthropological literature on the social life of corporations and scholarly critiques of ethnic rights laws to illustrate that when communities engage ethnic rights laws, they also undergo new processes of community formation in their interactions with corporations, courts, and international institutions.

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Data Availability

Select data that support the findings of this study are available by request from the corresponding author. The data are not publicly available due to the privacy of research participants.

Notes

  1. Translates to both people and town.

  2. The Constitutional Court reviewed the tutela, filed as Sentence 256/15, and decided on it in 2016. Four judges agreed with the prior consultation order and one dissented (Corte Constitucional de Colombia 2016).

  3. There are more than five Afro-descendant communites in the impact zone all together. These are the five that descended from Las Tunas.

  4. Australian lawyer Ralph Bleechmore was the first to file an OECD complaint. The Colombian plaintiffs included José Julio Pérez from Tabaco, lawyer Armando Pérez, and the communities of Patilla, Chancleta, Roche, Tamaquito II, and Los Remedios.

  5. Technically, Carbocol–Intercor expropriated Tabaco, but the three shareholding companies inherited the legal responsibility for the displacement when they purchased the Cerrejón concessions.

  6. The IFC does mention the need to respect free, prior, and informed consent in Standard 7 of these guidelines. However, this recognition is not legally binding, and in this case, Cerrejón’s use of the standards was voluntary.

  7. Before arriving at Cerrejón, Carlos Franco worked in the human rights office under President Alvaro Uribe. Before that, he was part of the left-wing guerilla group the Popular Liberation Army (Ejército Popular de Liberación, EPL).

  8. Remedios’ history also shows the difficulties in being read as a coherent Black community in the prior consultation because she was both Indigenous and a recent migrant to the settlements. The Constitutional Court acknowledged the presence of two Wayúu families among the plaintiffs and held that as Indigenous peoples, they had the right to prior consultation as well.

  9. Cerrejón often names pits after the community displaced from the area. There are also pits named after the communities of Tabaco and Oregenal.

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The National Science Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and Vanderbilt University funded the research used in this article.

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  1. Bucknell University, One Dent Dr, Lewisburg, PA, 17837, USA

    Emma Banks

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Banks, E. Contentious consultations: Black communities, corporate experts, and the constitutional court in Colombia’s coal region. Dialect Anthropol 48, 163–191 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-023-09705-9

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