1 Introduction1
Minerals are critical for the transition to a post-carbon future. They are crucial for renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbines, solar panels and batteries, which require significant amounts of copper, lithium, nickel, zinc, rare earths and other minerals (iea, 2021; World Bank, 2020). The rising demand for these ‘transition minerals’ has led analysts to anticipate a ‘next
In studying ‘the narrative and performative aspects of corporate practice’ (Rajak, 2011a, 93), this chapter draws on and contributes to anthropological work on corporations that seeks to shed light on the social and moral practices and sentiments that animate them (Dolan and Rajak, 2016; Foster, 2017; Rajak, 2011a; Sawyer, 2018; Welker, 2014). Attention to the social dimensions of corporate practice is crucial for advancing a grounded understanding of the functioning of corporate capitalism. Furthermore, in attending to the performative nature of the processes through which geological substances in the subsurface are rendered into exploitable resource deposits, and territories are rendered into extractive frontiers, the chapter contributes to scholarship on the politics of geology, in particular work on ‘resource making’ (Kama, 2020; Richardson and Weszkalnys, 2014; Weszkalnys, 2015).
This chapter focuses on the exploration campaign of AngloGold Ashanti (aga) in Colombia during the early 2000s, and on the narratives surrounding this campaign at the time and afterwards. aga is a South African transnational mining corporation listed on the Johannesburg, New York, Australian and Ghanaian stock exchanges, and one of the world’s leading gold producers. I draw on my ethnographic study of aga in Colombia (Hoff, 2020), for which I conducted 15 months of fieldwork, in part ‘inside’ the company, and in part among members of an anti-mining movement that had formed in resistance to the company’s activities. In this chapter, I particularly draw on my fieldwork with the personnel of aga’s so-called Greenfields department, the section of the company focused on the discovery of new deposits. This fieldwork involved informal conversations and semi-structured interviews with employees, most of which were exploration geologists of varying levels of seniority. In addition, I base my analysis on a large number of publicly available corporate presentations and industry-oriented publications. The dynamics of mining exploration described in this chapter are characteristic of greenfields exploration, which is the exploration of previously unexplored or underexplored terrain, as opposed to near-mine or ‘brownfields’ exploration. This process typically starts with a
In the chapter, I examine the stories surrounding aga’s greenfields campaign in Colombia to show how narrative, imaginative and performative practices are integral to the making of resources and mining frontiers, as well as that of corporate and professional identity in the extractive industries. In the first part, I focus on the ‘outward-oriented’ narratives that, I argue, helped conjure Colombia as the ‘last Andean frontier’ in corporate, shareholder and investor imagination. In the second part, I provide insight into ‘internal’ practices of storytelling in aga’s Greenfields department, and show the importance of these practices to the self-understanding and identity of exploration geologists, as well as to corporate identity more broadly. In these different ways, the chapter elaborates how extractive activity is rendered possible through narrative and imagination. At the same time, it highlights that the capitalisation of exploration success is not a given, and that in the highly uneven and speculative process of frontier expansion (see Weszkalnys, 2015), alternative stories are also possible.
2 New Frontiers
At the turn of the millennium, aga sought to expand its global portfolio.2 The price of gold and other minerals on the global market was on the rise, driven by
The term ‘New Frontiers’ invokes the idea of uncharted territory, ‘empty land’ awaiting discovery and development, reminiscent of Turner’s (1921) depiction of the nineteenth century American West as a wilderness to be colonised and civilised. Such an imagination of frontier lands often has an erasing effect, as critical scholarship on resource frontiers has noted: it strategically overlooks the presence of people with a long-standing relationship to the land and its subsoil minerals, a relationship that existed long before the entrance of new forms of exploration and exploitation (Luning, 2018). The frontier concept nevertheless continues to be widely used in mining scholarship, but in a ‘post-Turnerian’ way, to critically examine the changing territorial dynamics following the arrival of new forms of extraction (Rasmussen and Lund, 2018). In this chapter, I build on the idea that resource frontiers are not simply ‘out there’ to be discovered, but that they are actively ‘made’. As Mattias Rasmussen and Christian Lund put it, a frontier is ‘not space itself’, but rather ‘something that happens in and to space’ (2018, 388).
Anna Tsing describes the frontier as a ‘zone of not yet’—‘an edge of space and time […] not yet mapped, not yet regulated’ (2005, 28). One such ‘zone of not yet’, which aga’s ‘New Frontiers’ strategy targeted, was Colombia. In contrast to other Andean nations, it had not been explored with modern technology due to the protracted armed conflict that had plagued the country since the 1960s. An industry journal referred to Colombia as the ‘last Andean frontier’, which ‘in the international race by majors to replace their reserves […] represents a true elephant hunting opportunity’ (Global Business Reports, 2011, 80, 82). ‘Elephant’, here, is industry lingo for ‘major long-life orebodies with reserves of at least five million ounces’, the type of mineral deposits aga’s exploration strategy targeted (aga, 2005, ep9). In this chapter, I explore how Colombia came to be imagined as this ‘last Andean frontier’ for gold exploration.
Mining exploration starts as a speculative enterprise, which requires significant investment before the presence of a mineral deposit can be reliably confirmed. To attract this investment, greenfields exploration programmes seem to need to emit an air of promise, opportunity and adventure. As Tsing puts it, ‘the possibility of economic performance must be conjured like a spirit to draw an audience of potential investors’ (2005, 57). Gold, in particular, seems to possess a ‘mythic power’ to inspire excitement and incite a ‘gold fever’ in investors (Ferry, 2020; Taussig, 2010; see also Weszkalnys, 2013). In her discussion of the Bre-x scandal, which involved a gold prospecting company fraudulently claiming an enormous gold find in Kalimantan (Indonesia), Tsing highlights the speculative drama the company cultivated around its (non-existent) discovery to attract investment for further exploration. Such ‘self-conscious making of a spectacle’, ‘a performance, a dramatic exposition of the possibilities of gold’, she argues, is ‘a necessary aid to gathering investment funds’, not only for a sham such as Bre-x, but also for non-fraudulent endeavours, as a ‘regular feature of the search for financial capital’ (Tsing, 2005, 57). The mining exploration industry thus involves what she calls an ‘economy of appearances’, in which dramatic performance serves as a prerequisite for economic performance. In Marieke de Goede’s words: ‘the magical storytelling of investment opportunities […] performatively constitutes “real” economic performance, in the form of measured international capital flows, investments, stock prices, etc’. (2005, 8). While this is particularly true for junior mining companies,
Corporate meaning-making in the production of extractive frontiers involves the imagination not only of potential, but also of its counterpart: risk. Typically, companies and investors assess the risk of investing in a certain frontier territory on the basis of tools such as ‘political risk’ rankings and ratings. In his ethnographic account of London’s junior mining market, Paul Gilbert (2020) discusses the imaginative work that goes into the construction of such rankings and ratings. Rather than viewing them as purely calculative devices, he treats them as ‘technologies of the imagination’ (see also Bear, 2015; Sneath, Holbraad and Pedersen, 2009), and highlights their capacity to produce images of territories as stable or unstable in the investor’s imagination. For Gilbert such technologies ‘animate speculative activity oriented towards opening up new resource frontiers’ (Gilbert, 2020 18), and serve to attract and allocate capital to speculative projects. In the next sections, I draw on his insights to explore the role of corporate storytelling in the imagination of both potential and risk in Colombia.
3 País minero
A team of aga geologists first visited Colombia in early 1999 (aga, 2016). At the time, only a handful of foreign gold mining companies were active in the country, all of them juniors. Even though no large-scale industry players were active, artisanal, small- and medium-scale gold mining was an important economic activity in Colombia, and has been throughout its history (Álvarez, 2016). In the country’s recent history, mining has played a significant role in fuelling Colombia’s armed conflict, as illegal gold mining and drug trafficking were the most important source of income for various illegal armed groups (Rettberg and Ortiz-Riomalo, 2016). This conflict had also prevented large corporations from entering the country.
In November 1999, aga established its first joint venture in Colombia, with US-based junior Conquistador Mines, which had been active in the country since 1996 (AngloGold, 1999). Working with juniors was a central aspect of aga’s ‘New Frontiers’ strategy, enabling the company to share financial risk, leverage previous exploration findings made by junior companies, and attract experienced geologists previously employed by these juniors (aga, 2004).
As early as in the second quarter of 2000, aga reported to shareholders it had obtained ‘highly encouraging results’ in Colombia (AngloGold, 2000). Similar excitement speaks from a corporate report on an early field visit to the area in the department of Tolima where the company would later make its most significant discovery. It narrates how two North American aga geologists gathered rocks along a creek near an old artisanal mine that was no longer operational, where they found several boulders that indicated the presence of another gold source further upstream. They were keen to continue following the creek, but Conquistador’s security guards, who accompanied them, urged them not to go any further (agac, 2008, 10). At the time, the guerilla movement farc controlled the area, and North American white men gathering rocks in a remote rural area were likely to attract suspicion. They risked being kidnapped, as had indeed happened to personnel of Canadian junior Greystar Resources in another part of the country two years earlier (Harris, 2006a). The geologists would have to wait for over five years before they could visit the area further upstream.
In the meantime, while the company still considered field visits too dangerous the Greenfields team prepared its Colombian exploration strategy on the basis of desk research, drawing on its initial field visits as well as geological information from the Colombian government and Canadian juniors. Even though the team had hardly been able to spend time on the ground, at the end of 2003 ‘the decision was made to focus the majority of the South American exploration budget on the “new frontier” of Colombia, given the interpreted
Political and policy changes following the turn of the millennium were also of great significance to making Colombia imaginable as a mining frontier. During the 1990s, in the wake of the ‘Washington Consensus’, many Latin American countries reformed their mining legislation (Bury and Bebbington, 2013; Hogenboom, 2012). The current Colombian Mining Code (Law 685 of 2001) is a late product of this neo-liberal wave. It prioritised international investment through tax incentives and by opening the process of obtaining mining titles to foreign corporations (Echavarría, 2014; Vélez-Torres, 2014). In a newspaper interview on the subject of the legislative reform, the Minister of Mining argued that ‘if good mining conditions are not put in place soon, [Colombia] will no longer be competitive, and natural rivals, especially within the region, will attract the capital that Colombia will definitively lose’ (El Tiempo, 2000). His statements echoed the findings of a World Bank report, which concluded that in order to attract international investment Colombia needed to follow neighbouring countries and reform its mining legislation (World Bank, 1996, 7). Under the new mining law, the Colombian state remained the owner of the subsoil and its resources, but handed over control over production to the (international) private sector, while taking on the dual role of regulator as well as facilitator and promotor of extractive activity (upme, 2006). Especially in this latter role, the state’s narrative and performative practices, in conjunction with those of companies such as aga, were crucial to conjuring Colombia as a gold mining frontier.
When aga started its Colombian exploration campaign, Colombia had just elected a new president. Álvaro Uribe would be in power from 2002 to 2010. He sought to change Colombia’s image as a country plagued by narco-violence and guerilla kidnappings to that of a stable and attractive investment destination, in particular for mining corporations (upme, 2006). Uribe implemented a conservative security policy aimed at weakening the farc through a systematic, US-backed military counter-insurgency operation. The policy successfully weakened the farc and, in the eyes of many Colombians, restored security and stability in many parts of the country. This increased stability, however, came at the expense of marginalised communities. Many vulnerable people, in particular from peasant, indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities, fell victim to extrajudicial killings and forced displacement by the Colombian army and paramilitary groups (Isacson, 2010; Rojas, 2009).
Uribe actively sought to present Colombia as a ‘país minero’ (‘mining country’) to international investors. To reassure investors, and mitigate the risk that the presence of armed groups constituted from an investor perspective, his
The way the narrative on Colombia in the international investor community gradually started to shift is illustrated by international mining industry journals from this period. Articles from around 2005 to 2010 typically highlight the country’s great gold mining potential alongside an improving security situation for foreign miners, with headings such as ‘Colombia’s troubles pale next to golden opportunities’ (Harris, 2006a) or ‘Colombia’s untapped gold potential lures wary miners’ (Danielson, 2008). In an often spectacular tone, they talk about Colombia, a ‘country once dangerous from civil war’ and ‘a pariah for most mining investors’ (Harris, 2006a), now ‘rapidly becoming a sought-after destination for mining investment’ (Harris, 2007), and quote mining analysts speaking of it being ‘very probable that there exist large undiscovered reserves’ and ‘gigantic potential to develop gold mining activity’ (Harris, 2006b). In the words of Canadian industry journal The Northern Miner, ‘One of South America’s historically richest gold-producing nations appears poised to regain a crown that was stolen by years of endemic corruption, crime and warfare. Colombia is finally awakening from the social and political nightmare that robbed it of foreign direct investment for the last many decades’ (Vaccaro, 2009). The interest Colombia was generating was, for instance, clear at the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada conference in 2007, one of the largest international mining exploration conferences, where a presentation on Colombia was ‘standing room only’ (Hoffman, 2007). According to a Canadian embassy representative, ‘Colombia is the poster child of the mining world and people are excited to come and work here now’ (quoted in Harris, 2007).
A further indication of the shift in the way investors imagined Colombia was the country’s inclusion in the Fraser Institute’s Annual Survey of Mining Companies in 2006. This survey ranks a selection of countries based on their ‘attractiveness’ in terms of geological potential and regulatory framework,
4 Mining Title Bonanza
The reform of the Mining Code, combined with the growing interest in Colombia, led to a strong surge in applications for mining titles—the concessions through which the state gives a person or company the right to explore the subsoil of a certain area. The state agency in charge of granting and controlling these titles at the time was the Colombian Geology and Mining Institute, Ingeominas. Before 2001, Ingeominas granted 80 to 100 mining permits per year. Under the Uribe Administration, it granted 7,869 mining titles in a period of eight years, thereby increasing the number of hectares of land under mining concession from 1.13 million to 8.53 million (Osorio, 2010). Colombian media referred to this fast-paced process of title applications, and the speculation that ensued, as the ‘mining titles bazaar’ (feria de títulos mineros).
As the first mining major to invest in Colombia, and aided by the timing of the legislative reform, aga was in an ideal position to stake its claim for mining titles. It referred to this position as its ‘first mover advantage’. In what an industry publication called a ‘blitzkrieg staking program’ (Harris, 2006b), aga applied for a very large number of titles. Exact figures are unclear, but according to a 2007 corporate report, aga applied for an area covering 13 million hectares, which it reduced to 3.7 million hectares after initial exploration activities (aga, 2008a, 2). An article by the lead geologists involved speaks of systematic reconnaissance exploration ‘covering about 10.5 million hectares’ (Lodder et al., 2010, 19).
aga obtained its titles through a complex web of tax haven–based holding companies and Colombia-based subsidiaries, as well as separate subsidiaries created for joint ventures with other mining companies, which together provided the capital needed for its exploration activities in Colombia. From 2003, it operated through a Colombian subsidiary called Sociedad Kedahda, in 2007
We walked into the old licensing department, and people thought we were crazy. ‘Where did you guys come from? People don’t invest in our country’. We had the place to ourselves, it was ludicrous. There were immeasurable amounts of opportunity and resources all over the place.
kwantes and humphreys, 2015
In its communications to investors and shareholders, aga frequently prided itself on its ‘first mover’ position and the mining titles it was able to acquire as a result. ‘aga will continue to push its first-mover advantage and dominant land position, particularly as major competitors realise the potential of Colombia, which has not seen a major gold mine development for decades’, the multinational’s 2010 annual report states (aga, 2011, 131).
AngloGold did a very bold thing by going into Colombia several years ago, when it was still a very dangerous place. They were able to tie up so much ground because many other companies feared to tread there. I tip my hat to them for that.
Global Business Reports, 2011, 91
aga […] came in in the early 2000’s and staked all the good bits, this even as the war was in full swing [and] bombs were going off in Bogotá. The people at the mine office thought the Anglo people were crazy, which might not have been too far from the truth.
pollitt, 2020, 7
Given the internal conflict in Colombia, aga was well aware of the risks it faced when it entered Colombia. […] Our objective is to find viable projects in Colombia, projects that can be developed into mines which will form an economic hub in the areas where they are situated. It is our hope that this will lead to other commercial ventures being established, bringing greater stability and improved living standards to the communities concerned.
aga, 2008a, 2
Nevertheless, aga’s sweeping entry also had a flip side, as my conversations with aga officials made clear. Many employees I spoke to retrospectively saw the mass accumulation of mining titles as a strategic mistake. They
5 Speculation and Superlatives
In 2006, the Greenfields team returned to the area where, as I described earlier, aga geologists had previously found indications of a mineral source but had not been able to continue their fieldwork due to security concerns. In its report on the second quarter of 2007, the company started to make cautiously optimistic announcements about its find, named ‘La Colosa’, calling its interim drilling results ‘encouraging’ (aga, 2007). La Colosa would become aga’s most important discovery in Colombia.
La Colosa, aga’s flagship project in Tolima, has gone from big to huge. […] The size of the gold resource is astonishing: less than 2% of gold projects
Colombia Gold Letter, 2012have a resource of over 10 Moz Au [million ounces of gold], and La Colosa has now grown to become one of the most important gold projects in the world, and the most important discovery in recent times, making it by far Colombia’s largest and most important gold project.
The size of the deposit would eventually be estimated at over 28 million ounces (aga, 2021), making La Colosa a key symbol of aga’s conquest of the ‘new frontier’.
aga executives frequently presented their exploration activities in Colombia at large international mining industry conferences. These conferences gather large numbers of mining companies, investors and analysts, and constitute an important place for the creation and promotion of industry narratives. This makes them a key venue for corporate storytelling. The presentations companies give at these conferences may be seen as ritualised performances that serve to attract mining investment and sustain investor confidence (see also Rajak, 2011b). aga’s presentations on Colombia typically figure slides with a map of the country, on which the company’s large ‘area of interest’ is marked out, visualising the company’s territorial dominance by showing its widespread presence across the Western and Central Cordillera of the Colombian Andes (see, e.g., aga, 2006; aga, 2012a). Other common elements in these conference presentations are an emphasis on the company’s ‘first mover advantage’ and its resulting ‘strong position in the world’s most prospective new gold district’ (aga 2012a). La Colosa in particular is often discussed in superlative terms, for instance as ‘the most significant new gold discovery of the current era’ (aga, 2009), or ‘a global tier-one deposit […] a large world-class gold resource [that is] getting bigger, and is only the tip of the iceberg given a wealth of targets in Colombia’ (aga, 2012b). aga’s presentations at industry conferences illustrate how, through spectacular language and visuals, the company fostered a dramatic narrative of conquest and discovery to entice investors and sustain its high-risk greenfields strategy in Colombia.
6 Greenfields Mythologising
aga’s narrative practices were not only directed towards investors and shareholders, but also played a vital role inside the company, especially for the Greenfields department. As I have already discussed, during my fieldwork inside the company Greenfields employees recounted legends of the early days
Discovering a deposit viable for exploitation is what makes or breaks the career of an exploration geologist. This makes the fact that aga’s exploration team made three discoveries that could be developed into mining projects all the more exceptional. In addition to La Colosa, the team made two smaller but substantial discoveries: Gramalote, in 2007, and the more recent find of Nuevo Chaquiro or Quebradona, in 2014. On its web page on exploration, aga proudly cites a report that recognises the aga Greenfields team as the world’s most successful, with ‘a proven track record that includes the discovery of world-class ore bodies in Colombia at La Colosa, Gramalote and Nuevo Chaquiro’ (aga, n.d.), showing the great relevance of the Colombian discoveries to the business at the global level.
Large greenfields discoveries lend themselves well to mythologising. Geologists who have been involved in important discoveries typically develop a ‘discovery history’, which they disseminate in geological publications (for La Colosa, see, e.g., Lodder et al., 2010), and at exploration-focused industry conferences. Some of these events even specifically focus on storytelling, by gathering geologists who have been involved in recent discoveries to tell the exploration community about their discovery process. An example is the Australian ‘NewGenGold’ conference, which promotes itself as ‘consistently featur[ing] the case histories of most of the world’s more important gold discoveries’ (NewGenGold, n.d.). The importance of these discovery histories shows how corporate mythologising is not only integral to attracting investment at the stage when a discovery is no more than a promise, but is a key part of the business of mining exploration in a broader sense. Stories of successful discovery contribute to sustaining the quest for new frontiers by making exploration success tangible.
Santiago has an exceptional instinct. He is un terco [someone stubborn] but knows when something is worth going after. In Cajamarca, he could tell from the first rocks they analysed that they were after something gigantic. Did you know that they say that he was the one who gave the creek where they were prospecting the name of La Colosa? They were using an old map of the region, on which the name of the creek was not legible. All they could make out was ‘La Col’. Santi felt that they were after something colossal, so he took a pen, and changed the name of the creek on the map by scribbling ‘La Col.-osa’. Since then, everyone has called the creek La Colosa.
The story is a true tale of conquest, in which the gifted exploration geologist not only discovers the deposit, but, in an ultimate act of appropriation, even renames the creek where he made the discovery. According to an article by the geologists involved in the La Colosa discovery, the creek was originally named ‘La Cólogan’, ‘later renamed by AngloGold Ashanti La Colosa Creek’ (Lodder et al., 2010, 26).
We had been exploring for several years but did not find anything significant. The process was coming to a close and we knew that eventually, we all would lose our jobs. The envelopes with our termination letters were ready, so to say. One afternoon, the Australian lead geologist came into the office, and said, ‘Everyone, stop what you are doing, I have a big announcement to make’. We all thought, there it is, we are all getting sacked. But he said, ‘Let’s go out, we’re going to celebrate. We have made an important discovery!’
The company had been on the brink of shutting down the project for a while, but Santi had insisted that there was something there. He managed to convince the company to start one last round of drilling to a deeper level than had previously been performed in Colombia: over one kilometre deep. It turned out that all this time, we simply had not gone deep enough. The deposit had been there all along, but it was covered under a thick layer of rock without mineralization, and we had to drill deeper to get to the mineral.
As the heroic stories about Santi show, among the Greenfields personnel, exploration geologists who were considered responsible for key discoveries were elevated to the rank of almost mythical figures. Another revered geologist was aga Colombia’s first president, who had played a leading role in the La Colosa discovery. The geologist who led the exploration team in Colombia at the time of my fieldwork, for instance, looked up to him as a ‘very inventive geologist’, who had ‘convinced Anglo to go to Colombia’. Interestingly, whereas modern mining exploration involves complex scientific procedures and the use of advanced technologies, the mythology around individual ‘hero’ geologists centres on their instinctive ability to sense opportunity and their audacity in pursuing these intuitions. These epic stories maintain the age-old image of greenfields exploration as a magical process of gold seeking, in which intuition and boldness are eventually rewarded.
The stories told and retold among Greenfields personnel are central to shaping a distinct ‘greenfields identity’. Amid engineers, managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats, they allowed exploration geologists to think of themselves as the bold pioneers who venture into remote mountain areas to look for gold. A senior Greenfields manager described exploration geologists to me as ‘the adventurous types […] who dare to get on a plane and go to a country they don’t know, even if there is a war’. The performance of this greenfields identity extended beyond stories to the way Greenfields personnel presented themselves. In the Bogotá office, for instance, they walked around in sturdy mountain boots, in sharp contrast to the smart business attire worn by most of their colleagues from other departments. The Greenfields desks were also easily recognisable in the open plan office space, as Greenfields employees typically decorated their desks with mineralised rocks and fragments of drilling samples—greenfields symbols in an otherwise corporate space. Thus, narrative and performance were key to shaping greenfields identity.
Notably, these greenfields stories are also deeply gendered. They involve a celebration of particularly ‘male’ qualities, such as being bold and unabashed,
The gendered identity of the exploration geologist was also reflected in the gender distribution of the Greenfields department, which employed very few women, most of whom worked in social roles, for instance as community liaisons, rather than in geology. At the time of my fieldwork, the department did have one female geologist, whom I will call Adriana. When she was not on field trips, she worked in the Bogotá office, where I got to know her. Whereas most women in the office dressed in a more stereotypically feminine way, Adriana had bright pink hair and a tomboyish style. When I asked her what it was like to work as the only woman on the team, she told me, ‘I already don’t notice it anymore. In my team, there is not much machismo. When you work together, it doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman, I don’t feel it’. It seemed to me that Adriana’s way of dealing with the male dominance of the Greenfields department was by conforming to the greenfields identity of being cool, bold and adventurous, downplaying her femininity in the way she presented herself, in the way she talked, and seemingly even in the way she thought about this. This involved a constant tension between her ignoring or even ‘undoing’ gender difference, and acting and speaking in particularly gendered ways (see also Smith, 2014, Chapter 5).
Greenfields identity was not only shaped from the inside, but also by other actors in the company, outside the Greenfields department. While they shared the reverence for geologists who had made important discoveries, other employees tended to highlight the cowboy reputation of these geologists. A former manager of government relations, for instance, described Lodder to me as ‘brilliant’ but ‘un bruto’ (a rogue) because ‘he went to very dangerous parts of the country without any form of protocol’ (see Welker (2014, 47) for a similar narrative on greenfields geologists by Newmont’s csr personnel). The executive talked to me at length about how he saw ‘the greenfields geologist’, whom he found difficult to manage and spoke of as if he were discussing an exotic species: ‘a greenfields geologist is, by nature, independent, and does not want to be restricted by too many limits. To be successful, he needs to be as flexible and quick as possible’. Another manager described greenfields geologists as ‘very keen on maintaining their independence’, and had found that they tended to resist managers who attempted to impose rules and protocols. Greenfields geologists themselves saw such characterisations as a
7 Suspended Capitalisation and Alternative Stories
In this chapter, I have argued that the study of extractive frontier expansion requires attention to narrative, imagination and performance, as this allows us to see how seemingly abstract market dynamics are embedded in, and enabled by, deeply social practices. aga’s exploration campaign in Colombia illustrates how storytelling and imagination were key to making mining exploration possible. This chapter has illustrated how Colombia was actively conjured as the ‘last Andean frontier’ for gold exploration in the corporate, shareholder, and investor imaginations through narrative and performative practices, by both state and industry. To aga specifically, this imagination of Colombia’s subsurface potential and the generation of hype around it were key to attracting the investment required for its extensive exploration campaign, which yielded important mineral discoveries.
Yet the case of aga in Colombia also crucially illustrates the other side of this argument: storytelling is crucial for advancing mining exploration and exploitation, but alternative stories to extractive frontier expansion are also possible. The spectacular narratives I have discussed in this chapter did not go uncontested, but competed with other imaginations for the country’s future. aga’s performance of greenfields bravado on the one hand earned the company a competitive advantage as ‘first mover’ and admiration from industry peers, but the hype it generated around its exploration campaign also exposed the company to intense public scrutiny from an early stage. This turned La Colosa into a flagship project not only for aga and the Uribe Administration, but also for a growing anti-mining movement of concerned peasants, national and local politicians, and environmental activists in alliance with international ngos.
The opposition to La Colosa continues to be one of the most prominent cases of mining resistance in the country. In March 2017, a coalition of anti-mining groups successfully organised a municipal referendum to ban mining in Cajamarca, the town where the project is located (bbc Mundo, 2017). A month
Narrative, imaginative and performative practices are integral to the making of resources and extractive frontiers. While these practices are interconnected with a mining project’s viability, they do not necessarily or straightforwardly enable the actual realisation of a mining operation. Whether or not extractive frontier expansion materialises is the result of an uneven and speculative process involving (temporary) deferrals and disruptions, competing anticipations of financial gain and environmental damage, and a complex interaction of geological substances with the imaginations of geologists and financiers, assessments of financial, environmental and political risk, legal arrangements and volatile commodity prices. As Gisa Weszkalnys characterises it, the process through which resources and frontiers are made is ‘simultaneously ethically charged, materially grounded, and temporally extended into an uncertain future’ (2015, 633). In Colombia, stories and imaginations alternative to an extractive future are central to a polarised public debate on whether and in what way there is a place for large-scale mining in the country’s future, reinvigorated by the growing demand for transition minerals, on the one hand (anm, 2021), and the election of an outspoken opponent of the extractive industries as president, on the other. Whether or not Colombia will indeed turn out to be the last Andean frontier for industrial gold mining is a story still being written.
The chapter is based on fieldwork funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (esrc award no. es/j500112/1).
aga in its current form was formed in 2004, when AngloGold, a subsidiary of the South African transnational corporation Anglo American, merged with Ashanti Goldfields Corporation, a company partially owned and largely controlled by the Ghanaian government. For clarity, I use the name aga throughout this chapter, but events I describe prior to the 2004 merger concern AngloGold, which was the part of aga that first became active in Colombia.
Acknowledgements
For valuable feedback on earlier drafts, I am grateful to Filipe Calvão, Matthew Archer, Asanda Benya, Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt, Paul Gilbert, and two anonymous reviewers.
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