Imagine sitting on your balcony in the Colombian town of Bosconia. You want to sip a coffee, but you can’t. Every 20 minutes, for 24 hours a day, a train screams past. It is miles long, carrying thousands of tons of “black gold.” By the time the coal caboose passes, your coffee is covered in a fine, grey pepper. Don’t worry. It’s just a layer of dust that lands on your lungs, your laundry, and your life. For 30 years, that train was headed to one place: the bellies of, amongst others, Dutch ships.
You’ve heard of “Blood Diamonds” from the Hollywood movies. It’s a story we recognize instantly: luxury at one end, violence at the other, neatly connected by a supply chain we’d rather not think about.
Well, coal has a similar twin. Between 1996 and 2006, as the mines grew, Colombian coal country became a “Wild West.” Paramilitaries—illegal armed groups—cleared the land to make way for mining. In 2001, the village of Tabaco was literally erased. People were evicted from their homes. Bulldozers flattened the church and the school. Today, that village is just a hole in the ground. Why? Because the village sat on a seam of coal that the world wanted.
Evelio Aguirre Vargas comes from Colombia’s coal heartland, the department of Cesar. He survived what many there do not. Paramilitary gunmen first shot him to force him off his land. When that attempt failed, they came back—this time to the hospital where he lay recovering—to finish the job. Vargas escaped, but the message is clear. Vargas has no trust left for the mining companies that operate in the region.
Are Mining Companies Responsible?
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Mining companies in conflict zones can say “We hired contractors. We can’t control every security guard. We’re just here to dig.” But there’s a name for that strategy in criminal law: the ostrich instruction. If you’re operating in a war zone and not asking questions about who’s clearing your land, that’s not ignorance. That’s a business model.
And like in the Netflix-hit Narcos, every good organisation has a “fixer” so that they don’t have to do that dirty work themselves. In this case, it was a man named Salvatore Mancuso. He was a real warlord who acted as the “Bisagra” (The Hinge). Wherever the contracts ended, he began. He was the bridge between the suit-and-tie world of big business and the camouflage-world of the gunmen. Eventually, he started talking, confirming what locals knew all along: the mining companies and the gunmen weren’t strangers; they were partners. Gunmen cleared the land. Companies profited.
Trying to be the Good Student
The Netherlands, haunted by such stories, tried to be the “good student” of the energy world. They created The Coal Covenant, a set of rules to make sure their coal was more ethical. They called it Bettercoal.
The Netherlands was in the middle of breaking up with Colombian blood coal when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine and keeping on the lights suddenly mattered more than the principles. In a reluctant reunion with an old flame, we quadrupled our Colombian coal imports. Swapping Russian gas for Colombian coal wasn’t hypocrisy, just survival, and everyone did it–even though we knew the blood on that coal wasn’t metaphorical.
What’s Behind the Blood in Blood Coal?
However, the persistent violence in Colombia wasn’t only coal’s fault. Paramilitaries, land grabs, and civil war were already common. Mining just poured fuel on the fire. But the violence around Colombian coal happened because armed groups, corporations, states, and global markets aligned in a way that made abuse profitable and accountability unlikely.
So yes, the problem is real—but Colombia did chose coal. It actively courted foreign investment, signed contracts, and taxed exports. Coal wasn’t imposed by Rotterdam; it was embraced in Bogotá as a development strategy. And however brutal the mines were, coal revenues funded roads, schools, and parts of the post-conflict state. Without extractive income, Colombia might not have had the cash to demobilize armed groups at all.
Leaving is Harder than Arriving
However, by now, the mines aren’t as profitable as they used to be. So the coal companies want to leave. But leaving, it turns out, is harder than arriving. So what is the situation like now?
Think of it like this: Imagine a guest stays at your house for 30 years. They pay rent, but they break the windows, stain the carpet, and leave the stove on. Then, one morning, they just leave a “Goodbye” note and vanish without cleaning up. In 2025, Colombia’s highest court said: “No.” They ruled that companies cannot just “walk away.” They have a “historical debt” to the people and the land. For example, to the Indigenous Wayuu people. They have watched rivers be diverted just to wash the coal, while their children go thirsty.
Clean Up Your Mess!
So a cleanup is needed. It turns out the invisible hand of the market is really good at picking winners. It’s just terrible at picking up after itself.
But the Big Tobacco precedent matters because it established something simple: profit is not a shield. In the 1990s, U.S. states forced Big Tobacco to pay for the health damage they caused—not because tobacco was illegal, but because the harm was undeniable and the profits were enormous. Colombia is essentially asking: Why should coal be different?
But forcing companies to stay and clean up may freeze the transition rather than enable it. If leaving triggers massive lawsuits, companies have every reason to stay—they may delay closure, underinvest in clean-up, or litigate endlessly — prolonging coal’s afterlife instead of ending it.
Moreover, companies can’t fix history. However justified the court ruling feels, “historical debt” is legally murky. How far back does responsibility go? Who calculates the bill? If liability becomes infinite, investors may simply flee — leaving polluted land and no money for solutions. Sudden mine closures leave communities stranded, since municipalities will lose their tax income from these coal companies just when they need money the most to transition to new industries. Justice, clearly, is not only about the destination.
Finding the Leverage
If sticks don’t work, how do we find the carrots to get companies to clean up their mess? The race for tomorrow’s minerals—lithium, cobalt, nickel—is already underway, stretching from Greenland to Argentina. It’s the new gold rush. The race for minerals is also getting much more aggressive than in the past. And the companies leading the charge? Many are the same ones that left Colombia’s coal towns in ruins.
Men like Salvatore Mancuso also don’t retire. They relocate. The same brokerage between corporate interest and armed muscle that cleared land in Cesar is already operating in the cobalt regions of the DRC.
But when states coordinate, the power shifts. Suddenly, they can make one rule stick: clean up after yourself, or you don’t get to mine what’s next. What if we stopped the train, or at least slowed it down? Cleaned up the mess. Let it run again only after. A train that never stops but just changes cargo while coal communities and the environment fall further behind, might be headed for a wall.
The Santa Marta Conference
Luckily, to solve problems such as Blood Coal, Colombia and the Netherlands are reaching for the stars. In November 2025, as global climate negotiations in Brazil stalled and the latest COP30 text dropped with no mention of fossil fuels at all, two unlikely partners stepped forward with a bold and rebellious announcement.
Colombia and the Netherlands—nations bound together by decades of coal trade and all its violence—declared they would co-host the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in April 2026. The location they chose was deliberate, even provocative: Santa Marta, the very port city where Colombian coal has been loaded onto ships bound for Europe for thirty years.
People like Evelio Aguirre Vargas, the man who was shot and then attacked again in his hospital bed, were never invited to the table where those contracts were signed. The question for the Santa Marta conference is whether they’ll finally get a chair. Having people like Evilio at the table can help to bring the business side into a human perspective.
It won’t solve everything. It can’t bring back the school or church in Tabaco, or restore the Indigenous Wayuu’s rivers. But it does something rare: it puts buyers and sellers in the same room, forced to look at what their partnership actually built.
Those partnerships are coming for lithium, cobalt, and nickel whether we’re ready or not. We can board it the same way we did with coal—eyes closed. Or we can finally learn that the cheapest extraction today becomes the most expensive cleanup tomorrow. The train doesn’t have to run the same way forever. But first, we have to be willing to stop it long enough to see who’s been left behind on the tracks.
