Human rights, health and safety
Every five years, each member country of the United Nations can choose to undergo a “Universal Periodic Review,” in which there is an evaluation of their human rights performance. China had its review in 2018, receiving 364 recommendations from 150 countries and accepting 284 of them.
Normally, countries also perform an update between reviews, but China has decided not to do that this time around. The CICDHA report is designed to replace the update for Latin America, and to urge the country to implement changes recommended in 2018.
“We hope that China will listen to the voices of local communities, review the behavior of its companies and financiers, and put in place the necessary procedures and tools to repair past damage and prevent future damage,” the report said.
Many of the recommendations made by the U.N. involved treatment of residents and workers. In the most extreme cases, some environmental defenders speaking out about the impact of the works were often threatened, attacked or killed.
In Colombia, six members of the Ríos Vivos Movement were kidnapped and tortured for opposing the Hidroituango hydroelectric dam. In Ecuador, Indigenous leader José Tendetza was murdered after speaking out against the Mirador open-pit mine, which polluted nearby rivers with toxic metals, the report said.
“It appears that Chinese investment is starting to become synonymous with conflict,” report contributor Javier Arroyo Olea, a member of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA), told Mongabay. “Over the last decade, Chinese investment has increased exponentially in Latin America but the Chinese state and companies have lagged behind in terms of how they behave.”
Mirador and other projects in the region also resulted in displacement of residents, often from areas that have ancestral importance for Indigenous communities. The report said seven of the 26 projects analyzed forced families from their homes and left them with few options for restarting their lives.
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, many China-backed projects continued construction, the report said, with at least six of them failing to implement adequate health measures to prevent the spread of disease. In Peru’s Marcona mine, workers were forced to stay as long as two months inside the mine, resulting in at least 24 COVID-19 deaths, the report said. Some of the employees were forced to sign statements saying they hadn’t developed symptoms while at work.
The Maya Train in Mexico was included in the report for deforestation and its treatment of Indigenous communities. (Photo via Fonatur)
Dim hopes for change
CICDHA’s report lays out numerous recommendations for improving the behavior of companies carrying out projects in Latin America.
Among them are the creation of new regulatory frameworks that better assess human rights and environmental impacts that Chinese companies are having abroad, especially in high-risk areas and conflict zones.
It also recommends that banks and Chinese companies develop a “due diligence review” of a project’s entire development cycle, which could help identify shortcuts being taken during environmental impact studies and prior consultation processes.
However, while China has already agreed to address hundreds of recommendations made in its 2018 U.N. review, it’s often hard to know how rigorously they are being addressed, if at all, some report authors said. Even if additional steps were to be taken to improve infrastructure development, there is a real possibility that problems would persist.
“Some recommendations are accepted but they don’t materialize concretely in the projects,” OLCA’s Arroyo said. “They accept them in theory but, in practice, when it comes to public policy or following up with guidelines, there’s very little that’s done. That’s what creates these problems.”
Banner image: The hydroelectric dam being built on Argentina’s Santa Cruz river could threaten surrounding ecoystems. (Photo via FARN)
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Biodiversity, Conservation, Dams, Deforestation, Energy, Environment, Environmental Law, Environmental Politics, Erosion, Forests, Green, Mining, Rainforest Destruction, Rainforests, Rivers
Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Latin America, Mexico, North America, Peru, South America, Venezuela
Source link : https://news.mongabay.com/2022/03/chinese-investment-in-latin-america-plagues-people-and-nature-report/
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Publish date : 2022-03-24 03:00:00
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