Category Archives: Human Rights

The Luna Human Rights Amendment in Context

Leave a reply

The amendment Anna Paulina Luna crowed about on Twitter today would appear to give no quarter to bad foreign actors in the mining sector.

A closer look reveals that it’s actually a stripped-down version of a much more robust and far-reaching amendment introduced by Representative Raul Grijalva earlier in the day, which Republicans strenuously opposed. Notably, this narrower version cedes significant ground, giving mining companies a pass on environmental damage and destruction of cultural heritage sites.

Here are a few highlights, just to give the flavor of the discussion.

On The Reliability of Cobalt Red

Leave a reply

In my last post, I promised to have more to say about Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives, and in particular about Kara’s reliability as a narrator. This post tries to make good on that promise and set out some markers for further discussion of an issue that comes up repeatedly throughout Cobalt Red — and in all human rights reporting. Highlighting it can, I hope, offer ways to engage critically with Kara’s work and help others do the same.

“Our daily lives are powered by a human and environmental catastrophe in the Congo.”

In Cobalt Red, Siddharth Kara sets out to confront that catastrophe, and to demonstrate that “the ongoing exploitation of the people of the Congo by the rich and powerful invalidates the purported moral foundation of contemporary civilization and drags us back to a time when the people of Africa were valued only by their replacement cost.” This “moral reversion” to the colonial past, he argues, is “itself a form of violence.”

Kara advances that argument in an unapologetically first-person account. Cobalt Red invites readers at every turn to see the conditions in the Copper Belt of the Congo through Kara’s eyes. The book is informed throughout by Kara’s reading of the history and literature of the Congo and colored by his own imagination. How could it be otherwise? Yet the very qualities that make the writing here so compelling, so readable and moving, are those which make it unsettling and disorienting.

At several points, Kara himself has a hard time getting his bearings or coming up with a satisfactory answer to the question put to him by a Congolese man named Josue: “What are you doing here? What are you doing here?…What good will it do?” (Even the Congolese ambassador to the United States tells Kara he does not think a “foreigner” like Kara should be the one to report the Congolese people’s story.) In his attempts to gain access to mining sites, Kara has to invent different answers to Josue’s question; and these cover stories contribute to the sense of uncertainty throughout the book.

To his credit, Kara doesn’t shy from the problem: he foregrounds and tries to make a narrative virtue of it. As a result, the main impression of the Congo one takes away from Cobalt Red is of a world that is often inaccessible, reluctant or afraid to reveal itself to outsiders, only disclosing its harsh and inconvenient truths in moments of frenzy, violence, death, and human suffering.

It’s a difficult storytelling project. It doesn’t help that Kara’s access to the artisanal miners and the artisanal mine sites themselves is checked at every turn, often with the threat of violence, and everything having to do with cobalt mining in the Congo is murky, “opaque and untraceable by design.”

Inevitably, Kara oversteps, imposing on his encounters or filling in where his interlocutors would prefer to remain silent. One striking instance comes about midway through the book, when Kara meets Nikki, a fifteen-year-old mother with a baby strapped to her back as she digs for cobalt in a trench. She works alongside a fourteen-year-old mother named Chance. They rise at dawn, walk thirty minutes from their village to the artisanal mining area, dig, and wash stones together. In a day, they can fill about one raffia sack with cobalt-bearing heterogenite, which will earn them between one and two dollars. Kara counts “at least two hundred children and several hundred adults” digging in the same trench.

Kara starts to interview the two teenage mothers, but Nikki’s daughter is crying and Chance tells him she can’t talk more because she has to get back to work.

Nikki was having no success at consoling her daughter. She tried to feed her, but the infant did not respond. Her cries turned to shrieks. Was she colicky? Had she soiled herself? How did one care for a baby in circumstances such as these, especially when the mother herself was a child? [Kara’s guide] Arthur motioned to me that we should continue down the trench.

Moments later, Kara and Arthur find themselves surrounded by guards, “red-eyed and stinking of liquor” and firing Kalashnikovs into the air. After some back and forth, and an examination of Kara’s phone and documents, a cool-headed Arthur persuades the militia to let them go.

As we exited the artisanal mining area, I caught a glimpse of Nikki one last time. Her daughter had finally calmed down and was sleeping on her back as she dug in the trench. Nikki stared at me blankly, coldly…then with the slightest tremble in her eyes, her expression changed to that of a terrified child. Our eyes locked in recognition. I think we both understood that she was doomed.

Of course, this may not be the moment of mutual understanding Kara makes it out to be. It reads like a re-telling of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, which would line up with Kara’s depiction of the Congo as “hell on earth,” a “hellscape,” but how much is Kara reading into this moment of “recognition”? What does Nikki’s expression convey? Why the dramatic use of ellipses? How much of this is projection? The last we saw of her, Nikki was tending to her child; Kara didn’t stay with her but followed Arthur down the trench. Nikki might well have drawn other conclusions about Kara’s passing interest in her or his intentions.

Kara makes similar moves elsewhere: at a brothel in Kasulo, Kara sees “a young girl wearing a deep violet dress, with her hair tied in pigtails” who gives off a “childlike radiance”; at a church service in Fungurume, “a child looked at me, his wide eyes alight and comforting.” From this look, Kara “understood at last how the people of the Congo survived their daily torment–they loved God with full and fiery hearts and drew comfort from the promise of salvation.”

At other moments in Cobalt Red, nothing so clear comes of such looks and shared glances. At Tenke Fungurume, “no one smiles,” or at least not in Kara’s presence. At the Shabara mine, after a fight distracts Kara’s official minders, Kara “locked eyes with some of the nearby workers. Some gazed back curiously, others defensively, and some looked right through me as if I were just another chunk of stone in the dirt.” Another teenage mother, fifteen-year-old Elodie, orphaned and forced to turn to prostitution to survive, grows “weary of [Kara’s] presence. I was just another unwelcome burden.”

For Kara, Elodie “was the nullity of the world,” and his meeting with her seems to move him more than any other encounter he has in the Congo. Upon hearing that Elodie has died, he sits beneath a tree to pray and ends up imagining her final moments. He cannot: he can only wonder what she thought and knew and felt, but he ends up imagining Elodie, too, praying “to whichever God might be listening, ‘Please take me home.'”

At times Kara has to leave out important details on purpose, to protect his subjects; at others, it’s unclear why he would. To take just one example: a distraught mother living near the Tenke Fungurume mine asks Kara for help for her child Makano, who was badly injured in a mining accident and is now dying. After agonizing over the risks of giving a source money, Kara admits: “I did what I could to assist Makano as discreetly as possible.” What, exactly, did he do?

The uncertainties that attend so many of the encounters in Cobalt Red are compounded by the fact that most of Kara’s interviews are conducted with the help of “numerous guides and translators” like Arthur, Oliver, and Augustin. How much gets lost in translation is impossible to say. At one point, Kara meets a girl named Aimee, who looks to be about eight or nine, rinsing and stacking stones.

I started to speak with her about her work as a group of women gathered around in a protective formation. I had just about managed to learn that Aimee’s parents were dead and that she lived with an aunt in Kanina when she suddenly began to scream at the top of her lungs. The women shouted angrily at me and moved to console the child. The commotion escalated, and the…soldiers rushed over. My translator tried to calm the situation, but Aimee would not stop screaming. I did not understand what I had done to upset her.

He leaves Lake Golf “amid a storm of protest” that he himself caused. Just a few moments earlier, he has been hearing from other workers about “the men” who buy the heterogenite at Lake Golf, but given “all the talking, shouting, and sloshing going on,” he can’t follow up.

His account of a meeting in Tenke seems to involve a similar lapse of understanding: a man named Kafufu tells Kara he has “something urgent” to show him — a village carpeted in sulfuric acid powder — but it is never clear in Kara’s telling why Kafufu is so insistent that it cannot wait. At yet another moment, Kara’s translator Augustin is “distraught after several days of trying to find the words in English that captured the grief being described in Swahili. He would at time drop his head and sob before attempting to translate what was said.”

There are no ready solutions to the brutalities Kara witnesses in the cobalt mines of the Congo, and there are no easy ways to ensure the reliability and truthfulness of what he, or any human rights researcher, witnesses. Kara seems painfully aware of his own project’s limitations, and he embraces the difficulties of translating the suffering of the Congolese people for readers in the rich world.

In an epilogue, he sets out what he considers a “first step” in surmounting these problems: “advancing the ability of the Congolese people to conduct their own research and safely speak for themselves.” We can believe him when he says that “voices on the ground tell a different, if not antithetical, story to the one told at the top.” Ultimately, we at the top have much more to fear from the truth than those at the bottom.

Kara on Mutoshi: A Note on Cobalt Red

Leave a reply

Siddharth Kara’s Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives offers another view of the Mutoshi artisanal mining pilot site discussed in Dorothée Baumann-Pauly’s recent white paper. Kara draws many of the same broad conclusions as Baumann-Pauly:

There were several improvements at the Mutoshi mine compared to other artisanal mining sites in the [Democratic Republic of Congo], especially for female workers. Women endured constant harassment and sexual assault at most of the sites I documented. They received pitiful wages for their work and were still expected to run their households and manage children. Even if they were earning anemic wages at [Mutoshi], the reduction in sexual assault was a considerable improvement in their lives. Supplying clean water, toilets, and at least some protective gear also helped mitigate illness and toxic exposure. The mine was not crawling with children or visibly pregnant women. There also did not appear to be any sort of tunnel digging, which prevented the worst tragedies from occurring.

Other parts of Kara’s discussion are hard to reconcile with this picture. Kara has been led to expect that pilot sites like Mutoshi provide “ironclad assurances” that cobalt supply chains are “untainted by child labor or other abuses.” He is disappointed (but not surprised) when he discovers lax oversight and neglect:

Based on everything I saw and heard during my tour of the Mutoshi mine, as well as my subsequent interviews with artisanal miners who worked at the site, the conditions at the…model site did not match what I had been told by some of the [Washington, DC-based NGO] Pact staff in Kolwezi. Specifically, there appeared to be child-mined cobalt entering Mutoshi through the spaghetti-wire fence. Teenagers worked at the site with fake voter registration cards. The radiation officer was not regularly checking radiation levels. Bags of cobalt were not tagged, and cobalt from unknown origins was purchased from external depots and mixed at [a] refining facility in Lubumbashi. Crucially, reduced or delayed wage payments appeared to be a major disincentive for many artisanal miners and was compromising the viability of the entire operation. The purported supply chain transparency and traceability turned out to be a fiction.

For Kara, this fiction is part of ”a shrewd scheme of obfuscation adorned with hypocritical proclamations about the preservation of human rights”; and it is “the latest in a long history of ‘enormous and atrocious’ lies that have tormented the people of the Congo.”

Kara is quoting Joseph Conrad there, and Heart of Darkness is one of the texts to which he returns throughout the book: “spend a short time watching the filth-caked children of the Katanga region scrounge at the earth for cobalt, and you would be unable to determine whether they were working for the benefit of [King] Leopold [II of Belgium] or a tech company.” His emulation of writers like Conrad and Morel, his eagerness to draw historical parallels, and his tendency to dramatize some of his encounters in the Congo all make Cobalt Red both powerful and unsettling – and not least because this kind of writing raises some questions about the narrator’s reliability.

That observation does not discredit or diminish the importance of the account of artisanal mining in Cobalt Red. To the contrary: it’s a place to start engaging with the book and the inherent difficulties of Kara’s project. I’m still grappling with it, and taking some notes to illustrate the point, so I am not going to address it right now.

For the moment, and by way of wrapping up the discussion of Mutoshi, I’ll point out that Kara fails to mention that the Mutoshi pilot was shut down “just a few months” after his September 2019 visit in response to the Covid-19 pandemic (as Baumann-Pauly notes). Kara attributes its closure instead to a failure of “will,” which he casts as a betrayal: the withdrawal of CHEMAF or Chemicals of Africa from the pilot program. I hope to have more to say about all this at some point soon.

Another FOIA Lawsuit? I’m Not Sure

Leave a reply

The latest from the Department of State on my outstanding FOIA requests. I’ve written back asking for clarification on an incorrect case control number used here and in previous correspondence.

Way back in October of 2018, I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the US Department of State concerning an April 2017 meeting at the US embassy in Chile between Ivan Arriagada, CEO of Antofagasta plc, and Carol Z. Perez, who was then US ambassador to Chile. About a month later, I followed up with a second request for embassy communications regarding Trump’s nomination of Andrew Gellert to be ambassador to Chile.

These documents could help highlight the use of the US embassy in Santiago as a business backchannel for Antofagasta’s Twin Metals project in northeastern Minnesota, and perhaps shed some light on the Trump administration’s (botched) effort to appoint a close Kushner family business associate to be Perez’s successor. With Kushner’s $2 billion deal with the Saudis and the financing of the 666 Fifth Avenue deal under scrutiny, these records might also shed some light on the grey area where Kushner operated, mixing financial and other emoluments with Trump administration policy.

Over four years later, those FOIA requests are still outstanding. After a long delay, several blown deadlines, a denial of my request for expedited processing, then a denial of my appeal of that decision, the Department of State now tells me that I should expect a response to the October 2018 request by November 20, 2023. The November 2018 request is now expected to be completed by May 31, 2024. State complains of a FOIA backlog and setbacks due to the COIVD-19 pandemic, but it’s hard to square those complaints with any reasonable interpretation of the FOIA statute, which stipulates that records will be made “promptly available.” And, of course, these soft deadlines are likely to change again.

A lot has changed in the years since I made these two requests, and with the Republicans now taking the gavel in the House, a lot more changes are coming. The Biden administration restored the status quo ante when it issued a legal opinion saying that Antofagasta’s mineral leases near the Boundary Waters had been improperly renewed; the Forest Service completed the withdrawal study that Sonny Perdue, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture, abruptly canceled due to political pressure; and the Bureau of Land Management proceeded with the Rainy River Withdrawal.

As Antofagasta and its Twin Metals subsidiary contest these actions in a yet another lawsuit against the federal government, the mining company has stepped up lobbying efforts.

Republicans now say the administration’s actions leave the US vulnerable and over-reliant on supply chains controlled by China. They say the Twin Metals project and other sulfide mining projects in the Lake Superior region will provide American jobs and help prevent human rights abuses abroad.

It’s clear the Twin Metals project will remain a national political flash point in the 118th Congress and in the 2024 election. But so much has changed over the past few years that it’s hard to say whether the records I’m asking for will be of anything more than limited historical interest. What might they contribute to the larger story I am trying to bring into focus, or the current public debate?

That’s weighing on my decision whether to write another complaint, pay the $400 filing fee, and try to force the State Department’s hand. Any case filed in US District Court now would probably take at least until summer or fall to produce responsive records, at which point the State Department promises, sort of, to have its act together. Or they could just put me off again.

Holding Up Political Props Will Not Uphold Human Rights

Leave a reply


When American politicians like Bruce Westerman talk about mining cobalt in the United States, they are almost always talking about copper and nickel mining. According to the US Geological Survey, the US has only 4 percent of the world’s cobalt reserves; and with the notable exception of the Jervois cobalt mine in Idaho and some unexploited reserves in Missouri, “any future cobalt production” would be a “byproduct” of copper and nickel mining.

Most of that mining would be done in the Lake Superior region. In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Lundin’s Eagle Mine has produced cobalt-bearing nickel concentrate. Rio Tinto-Talon Metals already control copper and nickel development from Ishpeming to the Keweenaw. In addition to this massive 400,000 acre land package in Michigan, the joint venture also controls the 31,000 acre Tamarack project in Minnesota, the state where most US cobalt reserves are located.

Even here, the primary target resource is nickel, followed by copper, as Tamarack’s own estimates clearly show. In 2017, Antofagasta briefly floated the idea in its annual report that its Twin Metals project near the Boundary Waters would be a significant source of cobalt, but this looks like nothing more than an attempt to position the mine as a source of critical minerals, and the company abandoned that posture. (Trump’s Department of Interior toyed with the idea, too.)

In light of these basic facts, Westerman’s arguments look specious and his moral posture deeply cynical. It’s concerning to see the Chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources use the artisanal, small-scale miners of the Congo as a political prop – I use that word advisedly – and trade on serious human rights concerns without any plan to address them. Amnesty International’s Mark Dummet fears this kind of “wholly self-serving” virtue signaling could even harm the people it pretends to protect.

Westerman seems to be taking his cues from Minnesota Republican Pete Stauber, who made the same argument after the Biden administration announced the 20-year mineral withdrawal to protect the Boundary Waters:

Joe Biden banned mining in over 225,000 acres of Minnesota’s Iron Range, and locked up development of taconite, copper, nickel, cobalt, platinum group elements, and more…not even one month ago, Joe Biden signed an agreement [presumably the Minerals Security Partnership] to fund mining projects in Chinese-owned mines in the Congo, where over 40,000 children work as slaves in forced labor and inhumane conditions with no environmental protections.

Stauber has made similar shows of concern about human rights in the Congo in the past. This time, just a couple of days later, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal repeated the talking point: “The reality is that if minerals aren’t mined in the U.S., they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards.”

A small correction: the reality is that even if minerals are mined in the United States, they will be extracted in countries with far less stringent environmental and labor standards.**

The focus instead should be on taking steps to raise those standards, as Dorothée Baumann Pauly of the Geneva Center for Business Human Rights argues in a new white paper. Trying to eschew artisanally-mined cobalt from the DRC is tantamount to “denial of market realities,”* she writes:

global companies buying cobalt need to encourage the formalization and responsible extraction of the mineral rather than engaging in a futile attempt to avoid cobalt associated with ASM [artisanal small-scale mining] — an attempt that also ignores the sustenance that artisanal mining provides to millions of poor people.

In the Mutoshi pilot formalization program studied by Baumann-Pauly, mechanically prepared (open pit) small-scale mines improved safety. “Formalization stopped children and pregnant women from coming to the mine site.” Other measures encouraged women to participate in mining. The pay these women miners earned could double household income, and in interviews they said the extra income helped offset educational expenses for their children, who were now in school instead of working at a mine site. (Though the pilot program ended during the Covid-19 pandemic, a local cooperative continues to try to enforce these new standards at Mutoshi.)

None of this amounts to a perfect solution, but there’s clearly an opportunity to build on what this pilot accomplished, and it’s encouraging that Microsoft’s Michele Burlington, who accompanied Baumann-Pauly on her trip to the Congo, called for a “coalition” to address ASM in the cobalt supply chain.

If Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) want to address human rights abuses in the DRC, then they should focus on taking constructive steps. And if they are really concerned about China’s outsize influence in the mineral supply chain, then they might want to take a closer look at China’s ownership stakes in companies like Rio Tinto, the very companies that promise to bring jobs and economic development to their own districts.

*This chart from The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) nicely illustrates the point.

** A briefing from the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre also warns against the complacency behind these arguments: “assumptions [that] localisation of supply of transition minerals and their production in Europe and North America will guarantee respect for human rights and a sustainable, ethical provision of these materials are misguided.”

Lithium Executives, US Military, and Diplomats Discuss Shovel Ready Projects in South America

Leave a reply

A clip from this Atlantic Council presentation posted on social media by Bolivia’s Kawsachun News has already caused some fear and loathing. It shows General Laura Richardson, Commander of the US Southern Command, unapologetically discussing US interests in Latin America’s natural resources: lithium, oil, gold, fresh water, and the forests of the Amazon. I was struck, as well, by another moment: Richardson’s description of a meeting she had last week, on Wednesday, January 18th, with US ambassadors to Chile and Argentina along with executives from Livent and Albemarle, two US-based lithium companies operating in South America. Here’s that moment. It merits some careful attention.

Update, 26 March 2023: Two months later, Richardson’s remarks still rankle. Just this past week, in a speech commemorating the Battle of Calama, Bolivian President Luis Arce reiterated calls for an OPEC-like lithium cartel and commented, “We don’t want our lithium to be in the Southern Command’s crosshairs, nor do we want it to be a reason for destabilizing democratically elected governments or foreign harassment.” To tamp down the controversy, the US embassy in Bolivia issued a communique earlier this month calling for “international cooperation” and saying the United States respects the sovereignty of states and their right to develop natural resources free from outside interference.

Will the 118th Congress See A Green Right Coalition?

1 Reply

Yesterday’s post about Nancy Pelosi’s remarks on China belongs to one strand of a larger story that’s coming into focus.  It’s a story about China and human rights, to be sure, but also about what role human rights issues will play in the transition to renewables and in the politics of the transition.

House Republicans on the Natural Resources Committee have already cited reports of human rights abuses in China and in the Democratic Republic of Congo (where Chinese companies control cobalt mining operations) as an argument for boosting extraction of critical minerals here in the US. As the gavel passes in the coming year, their position is likely to attract even more support.

In fact, the 118th Congress could see the emergence of a Green Right coalition: hawkish on China, touting the magic of markets, openly hostile to the administrative state, and more interested in achieving energy dominance (to borrow a phrase from the Trump years) than in paying lip service to a just transition (as some Democrats do).  The incoming Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, plans to “outcompete China on climate:” that phrase sums up a whole political and geopolitical agenda. 

The program could be a political winner: anti-China, pro-growth, industry-captured climate policy may accelerate organized labor’s rightward drift; and the Green Right may even enjoy an uneasy honeymoon period with more left-leaning advocates of permitting reform.

Over the past year or so, as Joe Manchin tried but failed to advance his permitting deal, reformers have shown themselves ready to take an axe to environmental law, they have regularly dismissed public opposition as NIMBY whining, and some of them have done more public advocacy for extractive industry than seasoned lobbyists and flacks could ever dream of doing. 

Pelosi on the Moral Authority to Talk about Human Rights in China, or Anyplace

1 Reply

Asked this morning about Republican plans to create a Select Committee on China in the coming year, Speaker Nancy Pelosi noted that there is already a bipartisan, bi-cameral committee on China and made this “statement” about human rights.

Corporate America has [been] largely responsible for the situation we’re in, in terms of the trade deficit and the rest…but from a standpoint of values, from the standpoint of economy, and from the standpoint of security, China poses a challenge to us….We want to work together on climate issues and the rest, but, but we cannot have our workers disadvantaged by China having prison labor manufacture products or contribute to the manufacture of products that just provide unfair competition for us….My statement is that if we refuse to talk about human rights in China because of economic issues, we lose all moral authority to talk about human rights anyplace in the world.

Predictably enough, the press conference moved on quickly from there. A follow-up question on legislation to ban TikTok failed to elicit anything more on US economic interests and human rights in China. Here’s video of the moment:

How did the DFC Handle Human Rights Concerns about Alto Maipo? Part Two

Leave a reply

When presented with an opportunity to review human rights risks at a major hydropower plant in Chile, the Development Finance Corporation and affiliated international development banks reacted defensively and responded with boilerplate.

In a July post, I set out some context for records I received in response to a Freedom of Information Act request made to the Development Finance Corporation. It’s probably best to review that post before reading this follow up. Briefly, in August 2020, five UN Special Rapporteurs on Human Rights sent a detailed letter to DFC CEO Adam Boehler, warning of serious human rights risks at Alto Maipo Hydroelectric Project in Chile. The DFC is a major funder of the project.

A second set of responsive records, which DFC tells me is the final release, arrived yesterday. I’ve put them online here.

These are emails circulating within DFC and with other members of the Alto Maipo Lender Group in August and September, 2020, in response to the rapporteurs’ letter. The Santiago office of Norwegian bank DNB apparently received the letter first, on 18 August 2020, and emailed others in the Lender Group to alert them that it was on its way.

I don’t know what else the Office of Investment Policy (OIP) had heard about the Alto Maipo project before receiving Uauy’s email, or what exactly prompted OIP’s Jean Kim to remark “It Just keeps on coming.” Maybe Alto Maipo was already a source of concern or bureaucratic headaches, or maybe (given the email was sent at 8PM) it was just an especially busy day at the office.

The correspondence that follows Jean Kim’s email is pretty thoroughly redacted, making it difficult to assess the DFC response, but a few things are tolerably clear.

As suggested by Uauy’s email, DFC, DNB, International Finance Corporation, the Inter-American Development Bank, and other members of the Lender Group (like Germany’s KfW Development Bank and Brazil’s Banco Itau) will coordinate their response to the UN letter. The Lender Group’s Independent Environmental Consultant, ERM, will lead this effort.

ERM organizes a call to bring everyone up to speed, and after the call, a Social Risk Officer at DFC emails colleagues with a summary of the letter’s contents: “apparently the letter is claiming that the Project did not complete FPIC [Free, Prior and Informed Consent, as established in the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples], amongst 5 other comments.” The 26 August chain of correspondence also includes a summary of a UN press release on the topic, with this quotation called out in bold:

“The Chilean Government would not be fulfilling its international human rights obligations if it prioritises economic development projects over the human rights to water and health,” said Léo Heller, UN special rapporteur on the human rights to drinking water and sanitation. He referred specifically to the Alto Maipo Hydroelectric Project, southeast of the capital, Santiago, and the avocado business in Petorca province in the Valparaiso, region north of Santiago.

Heller focuses his remarks on the Chilean government’s obligations to protect human rights. He goes on to suggest that steps taken by the government have been inadequate:

“Not only may this project reduce the main source of drinking water for residents of Santiago de Chile, it could also make air pollution in the capital worse,” Heller said, by damaging the “green corridor” of the Maipo River basin that has helped offset pollution.

During implementation of the project, which is due to come online in December, “although the Government has investigated damages to the environment no effective measure was taken to guarantee the human right to water for people affected by this megaproject”, Heller said.

There is clearly a role — or an opportunity — for the Lender Group to help the Chilean government address these challenges. As funders, the DFC and the Lender Group have a shared, concomitant responsibility to respect human rights in the economic development projects they back; to this end, DFC has its own environmental and human rights policies and compliance procedures in place.

But by September 4, the DFC appears to have assumed a defensive posture. “The letter,” writes Kate Dunbar of the Office of Investment Policy, “has reiterated key issues claimed by the opposition group throughout the Project.” She no doubt has in mind the group — “the opposition” — led by the Center for International Environmental Law, the Chilean NGO Ecosistemas, and Coordinadora No Alto Maipo. These organizations have been monitoring the project and raising concerns over human rights due diligence since its inception.

By September 21st, as the deadline for responding to the letter approaches, this defensive stance has hardened among some members of the Lender Group: the UN letter “contains a series of allegations than contain with [sic] no support whatsoever,” writes one member of the International Development Bank, dismissively. A strategy takes shape:

DNB is on board with the suggestion that the Lender Group keep the response non-confrontational, “high level and pointing to public information and bank’s general procedures.” ERM produces a draft and revisions follow, but all of that is redacted.

It’s hard to say how much these redactions could matter. Overall, the impression is that the Lender Group had decided, by late September, to stonewall. If that impression is mistaken, I welcome corrections. 

Why I Revised Dan Rapoport’s Wikipedia Page

Leave a reply

Reports of Latvian-American financier and Putin critic Dan Rapoport’s death are rife with contradictions and uncertainties. He fell, or jumped, or was pushed from a building on August 14th in Washington, DC. When Metropolitan Police responded to reports of a “jumper,” they found Rapoport dead in front of his apartment building, wearing orange flip-flops and a black hat and carrying his phone, car keys, and $2,620 in cash.

Entertainment journalist Yuniya Pugacheva was first to report Rapoport’s death, claiming that he had abandoned his dog Boy in a nearby park with a suicide note and some money; Rapoport’s wife Alyona disputes Pugacheva’s account along with the allegation that she and her husband were on the outs and that Dan had been spotted in London in the company of other women.

Alyona is not the only one who doubts it was suicide. Friends of Rapoport have cast doubt on Pugacheva’s account. He was, after all, well known for his criticism of Putin, his support for Alexy Navalny, and his association with other Putin opponents, such as Vladimir Ashurkov, Executive Director of the Anti-Corruption Foundation.

I share these suspicions but I don’t pretend to have any special knowledge or insights into Rapoport’s death. I can, however, speak to some of the sloppy reporting of the story, especially as it concerns Rapoport’s ownership of a mansion at 2449 Tracy Place NW in Washington DC.

That’s the same Kalorama mansion I’ve written about before (e.g., here, here, and here), in connection with Antofagasta’s plans to mine near the Boundary Waters.

Nearly all of the reporting I’ve seen — not just the tabloids, but publications like the Daily Beast and National Review — claims that Rapoport sold his mansion to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in 2016.

That is simply untrue. And now this untruth has been copied, pasted, translated, and spread around the world.

I wrote a long Twitter thread on the subject. You can pick it up here.

I’ve also revised Rapoport’s Wikipedia page — my attempt to create some kind of buffer against this piece of mis- or dis-information. Here’s the rewrite:

This fact check will not do much to stem the tide of sloppy clickbait journalism, I know, but why let it stand? Reaching for scandal, lazy reporters overlook corruption. They erase the true story of how Antofagasta tried to renew its mining leases near the Boundary Waters, or how the owner of that Chilean mining company purchased a luxury property in Washington, DC right after Trump’s 2016 election, then rented it to the new president’s daughter and son-in-law. They give Antofagasta, Andronico Luksic Craig, Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner a pass.

The Kalorama story has worked this way since 2017, as I remarked on Twitter. Even when it gets the facts right, reporting wants to insinuate that something must be amiss at 2449 Tracy Place NW, but it fails to say what, exactly, and it rarely addresses the serious questions about ethics, foreign emoluments, and government corruption this story presents.

Update, 26 November 2022: having completed its autopsy, the DC medical examiner’s office has listed the cause of Rapoport’s “sudden” death as “undetermined.”