Canadian sportswashing swamps the Amazon
Sports’ greenwashing has reached Putumayo in the Amazon in its most blatant, insensitive form Badvertising reports.
The Nasa Indigenous Guards posing for a picture with other participants at the ‘The Festival in Defense of the Mountain, Water and Life,’ organized in March 2022 to take action against the copper mining project. Behind them, a graffiti made during the event says: “The Mountain Lives in Me.” Photo: Antonio Cascio for Mongabay.
In a year that has seen the Colombian city of Cali host the COP16 Biodiversity Conference, two small towns in the Colombian Amazon have become the hosts of unexpected visits by Brazilian footballing superstars, linked to Canadian mining and oil companies.
In June 2024, FC Barcelona’s charitable branch, the Fundación Barça, inexplicably joined forces with the high polluting Canadian oil company Gran Tierra Energy to bring the 2002 World Cup winning midfielder Edmilson to the oil town of Puerto Asís. Active in the area since 2008, Gran Tierra Energy has been accused in multiple reports of oil spills which have polluted water courses and huge stretches of farmland and forest in the Colombian Amazon. Terrain that should smell of nature instead reeks of petroleum.
Mid-November, it was announced that an even greater football star, Ronaldinho, will attend the 2024 Energy of the Future Awards 16 km away in Mocoa, the capital of the department of Putumayo, in the Colombian south on Saturday 16 November.
It is the first time the awards, organised by a local cultural body, Putumayo Somos Todos, have been held. The sponsors include a variety of local cafes and restaurants, the domestic airline Satena, and the Canadian copper and rare earth minerals mining company Libero Cobre.
On the event poster, the Libero Cobre logo nestles among those of the other small time local sponsors, although it is glaringly obvious that only one of these sponsors is a concern likely to have the financial clout to secure the presence of a global sports star like Ronaldinho.
Mocoa residents recognise at a glance the subliminal messages in the poster design. Copper coloured leaf patterns and other elements betray the mining giant’s heft in the town and its surrounding area.
Libero Cobre’s influence is both highly explicit and more insidious. A cartoon circulating on community noticeboards shows the Scooby Doo character Fred unveiling a masked villain. Beneath the mask, the face is obscured by a sign saying Libero Cobre. The caption reads: “When someone finally finds out who’s behind Putumayo Somos Todos.”
The fact is that in part of the world where employment opportunities are limited, Gran Tierra Energy and Libero Cobre have divided local communities. Few are enthusiastic about the environmental damage they appear visibly to cause, but those able to secure a livelihood, directly or indirectly, through the company, are prepared to turn a blind eye.
It is to be hoped that the visiting footballers receive a full briefing from environmental NGOs and indigenous organisations about the full extent of the environmental and social damage caused by the two Canadian companies which dominate the area. In all reality, the chances are slim.
Nonetheless, for players like Edmilson and Ronaldinho who find themselves, even inadvertently, sportswashing polluters, their visit offers them a chance to follow in the footsteps of increasing numbers of other athletes, like the 100 plus professional players who recently criticised FIFA’s sponsorship deal with the giant oil company Saudi Aramco, to use their profile and voices to focus the attention of sports fans on the Colombian, Amazon, and its environmental crisis. If they did, it would show true solidarity with local communities, environmental and indigenous campaigners.