Window created in the Santos government to quickly legalize mining activities could fall on the Council of State

The “mining window” was a proposal created by the Ministry of Mines in 2012, which sought to open the door for mining companies to submit applications for the granting of permits that allow them to carry out their activities. This means that they could operate in legally excluded areas, where they can generate serious and/or irreversible environmental, social and cultural impacts.

In 2013, environmental organizations, communities living in mining areas, academics and Senator Iván Cepeda filed a lawsuit with the Administrative Court of Cundinamarca that sought to stop the program that also became known as the “mining locomotive”, preventing the application for licenses in territories protected as nature reserves.

The lawsuit filed with the government had a report from the Attorney General's Office, which stated that there were mining titles in 34 natural parks; including a so-called “mining cadastre”, where they stated that black communities and indigenous territories had such titles.

Senator Cepeda had stated that

the application was accepted and sanctioned in 2018.

The resolution determined the suspension of mining activities until such time as the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development establishes, within a period of not more than three years, the respective delimitations and/or reserve areas of natural resources, such as wetlands, paramos, natural parks, groundwater, and other areas of ecological importance, based on technical, appropriate, comprehensive, accurate, adequate and effective studies that guarantee the preservation of the environment and natural resources. The Administrative Court of Cundinamarca suspended the resolution until 2021.

The institutions demanded at that time were: Ministry of Mines and Energy, the National Mining Agency (ANM), the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, the Ministry of the Interior and the National Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA). The government appealed the Court's decision in the first instance, where it ordered it to comply with its environmental obligations before continuing to issue mining titles.

This appeal reached the Council of State, where the corporation decides to ask the Office of the Attorney for Environmental Affairs for a report on mining in protected areas to document the investigation and decide whether to suspend the mining titling procedure, without compliance with the environmental planning of the territory. According to El Espectador, the documents are in the office of Judge Roberto Serrato, who will make the decision after Easter.

In addition to approving the appeal of the judgment or not, Serrato must consider requests for environmental care and populations that may be affected if mining licenses are allowed to be issued again.

According to the Sustainable Development Network, there are three major fears in the event of the return of the “mining window”; first, that there are no guarantees that titles will be granted irregularly; secondly, there is no public information that allows citizen oversight, which violates principles such as transparency; lastly, there is great concern about what may happen in the Amazon, there is a special interest in the exploitation of gold, coltan, vanadium among other “strategic minerals”.

It is then expected that the Council of State will define which areas are excluded for mining, this will make it possible to define the locations of natural resources and thus determine whether or not the “mining window” returns.

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