When Conservation Serves Capital: Global Lessons from Colombia's Mining Crisis

Image by Niels van Altena; Source: Unsplash

Introduction

In October 2024, Colombian miners organized mass protests across the departments of Santander, Norte de Santander, Boyaca, Antioquia, Caldas, and Choco. Through the intentional blocking of roads, the disruptions had drastic economic effects. Up to $26M USD worth of goods were delayed in transit, which reverberated in the supply chain. These groundbreaking protests erupted as a result of Decree 044, a measure issued by the Ministry of Environment that sought to establish Temporary Reserve Areas for environmental protection. But how could such a seemingly progressive policy create such anger?

Decree 044: Progressive Policy or Livelihood Threat?

Decree 044 was framed as a progressive climate policy, an instrument to safeguard paramo (tropical grassland) ecosystems and regulate land use in fragile mountain regions. It involved pausing new mining titles as the government evaluated the long-term ecological risks of continued activity. Yet almost immediately, it triggered widespread outrage. Miners, small-scale producers, and rural communities saw the supposed environmental stewardship as a top-down restriction that criminalized their livelihoods, froze their ability to work, and opened the door for the expansion of corporate control in their community.

Policies like Decree 044 are often presented as neutral environmental safeguards. In practice, however, they carry highly unequal impacts. Once a temporary reserve area is declared in an area, no new environmental licenses or mining concessions can be granted, potentially for five years or even longer. Miners who rely entirely on informal or small-scale licenses have their jobs rendered illegal overnight, even if their operations were longstanding.

Temporary Reserve Areas, the Criminalisation of Small Miners, and the Santander Case

Since the state freezes licensing in broad zones that often cover tens of thousands of hectares, the TRAs dramatically shrink the space available for informal mining and leave small miners economically stranded. Informal miners remain unformalized due to the prohibitive costs and technical requirements of legalisation, which include environmental permits, water and land-use assessments, and extensive documentation. The Colombian state has promised to ease the pathway to formalization for years, but it has never made any substantial moves in that direction, partly because doing so would engender real competition to transnational corporations.

The implementation of these policies in the region of Santander, and its associated mining project Soto Norte, provides a telling example. The resolution declaring the territory part of the TRA came in November 2024 and was implemented in March of the next year. Hundreds gathered in Bogota to protest in favour of their right to legal, regulated mining. The wealthy Canadian firm operating in the area, Aris Mining, developed a redesigned plan for the Soto Norte project that aligned with guidelines, and they presented themselves as ready to incorporate "local small-scale miners" under their own processing facilities. Other operations outside the reserve zone, such as Aris' Segovia operations and its Marmato mine, remained entirely unaffected, which ensured that the cash flow of the company at large was maintained while it waited out the TRA suspension.

This decree was much less of a threat than a strategic pause. It allowed them to adjust their operation and emerge with newfound leverage against local miners. They immediately partnered with a local association, Calimineros, to announce a "model formalisation project." Under this deal, small miners could keep working only if they worked under Aris' terms. Aris would handle environmental permitting and would sell the gold. The miners would simply become a low-wage workforce inside the company's concession, thereby turning generational miners into a dependent labour pool while consolidating Aris' hold over the region.

Thus, although TRAs are publicly justified on ecological grounds, they serve to centralise control over resource extraction in practice. They crush competition from small miners and hand over future licensing to firms with more capital, increasing their leverage over informal miners lacking resources. Furthermore, they transform informal miners from independent actors to subcontracted labor under corporate mining projects. Green policy becomes a tool of regulatory capture and concentration of capital instead of ecological justice or community protection, since Aris Mining and other transnational companies often do more damage to the ecosystem than groups of small miners do. Ethnographic research finds that environmental defenders explicitly contrast small-scale, community-embedded extractivism with the ambitions of large-scale mining, with the latter seen as a distinct threat to water, ecosystems, and local livelihoods.

Small and artisanal miners now face legal limbo, community discontent, and economic precarity. Meanwhile, large corporations benefit from the pause to rebrand, reposition, and prepare a "sustainable" reopening. The case of Santander shows how environmental legislation can be wielded as a mechanism of control to preserve extractive power in fewer, more financially and politically embedded hands. Extraction remains, but access and control are increasingly centralised, institutionalised, and framed under the legitimacy of environmental compliance.

Conclusion

The entire Santander-Soto Norte saga reflects a wider pattern across many developing countries: environmental discourse gets deployed, not always to halt extraction, but to better serve capital. Under pressure from global climate agendas and sustainability frameworks, governments and extractive firms embrace labels like “sustainable mining” which disguise structural inequalities in access, power, and environmental impact.

In this sense, policies like the TRA can possibly provide genuine environmental safeguards but can also function as regulatory filters that privilege large-scale, capital-intensive operators. Smaller miners thereby lose their individual agency. Extraction continues, but under the control of firms with the resources to comply with new bureaucratic demands.

Similar dynamics have played out elsewhere. In many parts of the Global South, “green” regulatory reforms have been exploited to restructure mining or resource sectors. In Peru, for example, the same formalisation issues persist and continue to clear the way for better-resourced operations to expand. These reforms often coincide with increased foreign direct investment, corporate consolidation, and a stronger bond between capital and state. The logic of profit remains, now rebranded as “green.” Meanwhile, local communities face dispossession and are forced into subordinate labour under corporate regimes.

The case of Santander underscores a critical lesson: not all environmental policy is progressive. In contexts of stark inequality, green governance can easily become a tool for exclusion, dispossession, and consolidation. Any evaluation of climate-oriented reforms must therefore ask: who benefits, and who pays the cost? If environmental protection is to be meaningful, reforms need to be coupled with democratization of land and resource rights, support for community-managed mining, and guarantees for livelihoods beyond corporate subcontracting.

Written by Daniel Loncaric

Edited by Val Reguera-Couturier