Contentious environmental governance in polluted gold mining geographies: The case of La Toma, Colombia

Amid the expansion of the gold mining frontier in Latin America over the last three decades, competing property schemes and divergent visions over resource-rich territories have upscaled water and environmental conflicts. In the expansion of the gold mining frontier, mercury contamination from Artisanal and Small-Scale Gold Mining has called the attention of governments, international agencies and scholars across disciplines, who have ranked Colombia as the world’s highest per capita mercury polluter. Despite the efforts by diverse parties to reduce mercury emissions and reach long-standing comprehensive policies to tackle the harming consequences of pollution, there are still significant gaps in understanding the disputed environmental governance of gold mining geographies. By examining the case of La Toma in Colombia, this article highlights some lessons to be learned from transdisciplinary research on mining conflicts and mercury contamination over the last decade. We discuss pathways and schemes of state-led corporate dispossession, probe incomplete and selective governmental research and control of mercury contamination, and illustrate the on-going intracommunal challenges faced by traditional miners to ban mercury use in small-scale gold mining operations. We argue that mercury pollution is a political phenomenon that needs to be critically addressed from the entanglement of colonial trajectories of oppression and marginalization to ethnic communities, and the structural violence and environmental racism that capitalist extractivism wreaks in rural commodity frontiers.