Mercury is a metal that has recently gained global visibility and notoriety as a toxic pollutant due to the environmental and human health effects of its past and present use in artisanal and small-scale gold mining (ASGM). Present in more than eighty countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa, ASGM employs between 15 and 20 million people and has been deemed the most significant contributor to global mercury emissions. After decades of interventions and millions of dollars spent, many have asked why it is still a challenge to deal with pollution coming from ASGM. In many countries, the problem of mercury pollution is typically seen as the transgression of toxicity thresholds or laws, the inevitable outcome of environmentally irresponsible miners, or as the governance of another commodity or supply chain.
In recent years, Colombia has been labeled the largest mercury per capita emitter in the world, as some twenty percent of all global mercury flows in the atmosphere are emitted from the country’s ASGM activities. This makes the South American nation the third-largest absolute emitter of mercury after China and Indonesia. It has also been shown to be the second-largest mercury importer in Latin America in the past decade, despite bans on the mercury trade. Colombia has been a top gold producer since colonial times and is in the top sixteen world gold exporters, a status that state-sanctioned mercury use in the metal’s extraction helped make possible. Today, the country sustains a significant ASGM sector of around 500,000 people. ASGM globally produces between fifteen to twenty percent of the entire gold supply; in Colombia, ASGM miners extract an estimated eighty-six percent of the nation’s gold. Therefore, the country is one of the eight prioritized sites of the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Planet Gold initiative (formerly GEF GOLD), the flagship project launched in 2019 under the UN Minamata Convention to eliminate mercury from the supply-chain of gold produced by ASGM.
Drawing on concepts from political ecology, science and technology studies, and the social studies of toxicity, this dissertation provides a relational history of gold mining in Colombia and its entanglements in global efforts to first promote and then phase out the mercury amalgamation technique. Specifically, I provide situated histories of mercury's chemosocial lives and trajectories in Colombia and the broader context of the Americas to provide a nuanced interpretation of the contemporary persistence of a technique and a metal that the international community wants to eradicate. I conceptualize mercury as a chemosocial substance embedded in complex bundles of social and ecological relations and infrastructures of knowledge, technology, and power. From that perspective, the work situates mercury use in ASGM as a toxic residue within broader political ecologies of knowledge, technology, and colonial, corporate, and nation-state practices and power relations. Said conceptualization supports an understanding of the mercury problem in ASGM as a practice that indexes the intersection of power and control over resources and people, changing markets, and histories of extraction, rather than something to be blamed on individual miners’ behavior.
To achieve this, I weave qualitative and archival work done in Colombia, California, Spain, and UN meetings on global mercury management in Geneva between 2017 and 2019. Across six chapters, I demonstrate how historical practices have interacted with mercury’s biophysical characteristics, specifically its irreversible persistence in the environment, to co-produce the current “problem” of global pollution. I examine the connections between contemporary science and scientific work and the colonial era’s long-term residues in mining environments and beyond. I explain how policies of the nation-state have flip-flopped from support of mining and mercury use to their condemnation when conducted by small-scale miners, and failed to recognize the needs of people pushed into small-scale mining as they lose access to other forms of livelihood.
The chapters demonstrate how external narratives of history, disciplinary practice, selectively deployed science, and of mercury as part of ASGM, conceal the long and sedimented histories of colonial, corporate, and state power and knowledge production that have characterized mercury’s chemosocial life in the region and globally. These inequities have epistemic, technical, political-economic, and representational dimensions in mining policy and practices, as expressed in the scientific community and bureaucratic institutions studying and regulating it. I argue that the persistence of mercury use in ASGM in Colombia and elsewhere has to do with the persistence of past practices, policies, and privileges in the present.
