The city of Jericó, perched in the Andes mountains in the Antioquia department of Colombia, has been the site of intense protest over a copper mining project with potentially drastic environmental consequences. Owned by the South African company AngloGold Ashanti, the Quebradona site, located less than an hour away from Jericó, was at one point slated to become the largest copper mine in Colombia.
But by 2025, it appeared as if the extended local struggle against the mine had triumphed, with tangible policy support from the national environmental regulator and the administration of former president Gustavo Petro. AngloGold Ashanti, however, was not content with letting the project dissolve and has resorted to a powerful and coercive international court known as the Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), which allows multinational corporations to directly sue governments.
In 2025, Petro, following the lead of other left-wing administrations in Latin America, denounced ISDS as an infringement on national sovereignty, and announced his intention to withdraw Colombia from its arbitration. However, following the election of far-right President Abelardo de la Espriella earlier this year, Petro’s initial move appears dead in the water, and the environmental commitments that have stifled mining companies are vulnerable to dissolution.
The conflict around the Quebradona mine, and AngloGold Ashanti’s use of ISDS highlights a critical nexus for Colombia and Latin America as a whole. Amidst a regional right-wing surge that looks to strip back progressive environmental and economic policy and promote foreign investment, the ISDS system persists as an essential mechanism in empowering foreign capital over the needs of communities and governments. Meanwhile, a global surge in demand for critical minerals highlights the urgent need for environmentally-focused national sovereignty.
Jericó’s struggle
AngloGold Ashanti has a long and controversial history in Colombia, marked by major mineral discoveries coupled with conflict with local communities, ties to human rights violations, environmental controversies, and legal battles. Persistent campaigns by local farmers and activists have successfully challenged the company, as was recently the case in the municipality of Cajamarca, Tolima, where AngloGold Ashanti was forced to suspend a gold mine project, eventually selling it to another firm.
The battle in Jericó is proceeding along similar tracks.
Despite AngloGold Ashanti’s campaign to promote the mine as a boon to the local economy and downplay its environmental impact, local resistance in Jericó intensified in late 2023. Rural communities and environmental groups organized fierce resistance to the project, arguing it would contaminate and restrict water supplies, undermine local agriculture, and further rupture the surrounding ecosystem.
The potential of mining activity to contaminate land and agricultural output is a direct threat to the safety and livelihoods of Antioquians.
The potential of mining activity to contaminate land and agricultural output is a direct threat to the safety and livelihoods of Antioquians. Additionally, the region of southwestern Antioquia is home to extraordinary biodiversity ranging from tropical dry valleys to Andean cloud forests—the latter housing an unparalleled array of plant and animal life. Yet, in response to allegations of environmental and human rights violations at Quebradona, AngloGold Ashanti insists that the project has followed all obligations and was “positively received by the majority of the community.”
Many remain hostile to the mine and the company’s presence. AngloGold Ashanti even took legal action against protestors in Jericó through Colombian courts—accusing them of theft and kidnapping for their attempt to halt an unauthorized excavation in 2023.
In 2021, a pivotal decision by the National Environmental Licensing Authority (ANLA) shelved the environmental permit for the mine. While not an outright ban on mining activity, the institution put the project on hold, citing both environmental risks and technical gaps identified from company reports, third party experts, and field visits. In order to further protect the land, in 2025, the Petro administration created an environmental protected area over several municipalities in southwestern Antioquia—including Jericó—which prevented mining companies from applying for future projects. But, the context of the struggle has changed immensely with the election of de la Espriella; local communities no longer have an ally in power, leading to fears that these decisions could be overturned, and the path to future extraction cleared of previous regulatory hurdles.
In addition to having a more favorable administration in Bogotá, AngloGold Ashanti is looking to leverage the pro-corporate ISDS system to impose its will on the Antioquian hills.
In June, the company filed a case in the International Court for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a tribunal system operating in Washington D.C. under the World Bank. The ICSID court is the central mechanism of the ISDS system, which empowers foreign investors—often large transnational companies—to sue governments for actions that they allege threaten their expected profits, including policies like raising the minimum wage, or certain public health or environmental policies. Colombia, along with most of the Global South, is exposed to this court through various trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties that contain ICSID arbitration provisions.
The ISDS system, which was formally instituted by the World Bank in the 1960s, is the product of entrenched corporate power. Jen Moore, a researcher and human rights activist with the Institute for Policy Studies, frames ISDS as “a tool that was envisioned and later put in place from a neocolonial and extractivist mindset. There’s been some excellent work done to show the role of fossil fuel companies in particular, and also big banks and some mining companies, in lobbying for the ISDS system that we have today. It very much comes from a certain initiative after World War II that sought to ensure corporate control from the North over the natural commons in the Global South.”
The mechanisms of ISDS did not tangibly take effect until the late 1990s and early 2000s, when they were inconspicuously added to the free-trade deals and international investment treaties proliferating at the time. The economist Joseph Stiglitz, who worked in the Clinton administration, recalls how ISDS provisions were not even discussed during the adoption of NAFTA. He now criticizes the system as a form of “legal terrorism,” carried out by transnational corporations against the economically dependent and debt-saddled countries in which they invest.
The justification of ISDS made by the World Bank, corporations, and global investors is that it facilitates the growth and prosperity of developing economies by reassuring foreign investors that may be wary of entering markets riddled with political and economic uncertainty. However, decades of ISDS have shown no evidence of this. Academics and critics across civil society have criticized and denounced the system as a burden on the global south and a barrier to sovereign economic policy.
Rather than promote development, ISDS has had huge financial ramifications for Latin American states. As of October 2025, the 419 claims against countries in the region have resulted in close to $40 billion in awards paid to corporations from government coffers—a number that could be much higher given the confidentiality of some cases. The most significant of Colombia’s 29 ICSID cases since 2016 was a 2024 ruling in favor of Spanish company Telefónica, which has cost the Colombian state upwards of $500 million.
Lawfare and its Resistance
AngloGold Ashanti’s adoption of this form of lawfare should not come as a surprise, given its legal antagonism towards community protest in domestic Colombian courts. Euan Wallace, a journalist who has covered critical mineral mining across Latin America, notes how the use of international arbitration as a weapon of deterrence has its parallel at the local level. He recalls how, in Jericó, the protesters’ legal defense argued that the goal of the company was to discourage future protests. “This is definitely a pattern that repeats itself across all of Latin America,” Wallace said. “In terms of other transition mining projects, this isn’t the first time that this has been used as a strategy to potentially deter the state from fulfilling its responsibilities to the environment.”
Colombia is only one of several Latin American countries to speak out or take action against the ISDS architecture. Since 2007, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Honduras have all denounced and withdrawn from the ICSID Convention.
Colombia is only one of several Latin American countries to speak out or take action against the ISDS architecture.
However, there are numerous challenges that complicate withdrawal from the court’s arbitration. Investment treaties or free trade agreements can still bind countries to the system, as was the case for Bolivia after becoming the first country to withdraw from the ICSID Convention in 2007. Furthermore, right-wing administrations can easily reverse any progress— as Guillermo Lasso did in Ecuador, and Nasry Asfura recently did in Honduras. While Petro denounced ICSID and expressed an intention to withdraw Colombia from it, he did not take any politically binding action for de la Espriella to reverse.
The Quebradona case illustrates another key structure of the ISDS system: the geography of legal exposure created by investment treaties and trade agreements. Since there is no bilateral investment treaty (BIT) between Colombia and South Africa, where AngloGold Ashanti is based, the company filed the case through a subsidiary in the UK. This means that, technically, the Quebradona ICSID case is a dispute under the United Kingdom-Colombia BIT, allowing AngloGold Ashanti to take advantage of the favorable features of that treaty. Rather than only focusing on the ICSID system itself, Petro recognized the necessity of combatting these agreements that subjugate Colombia within the global architecture of trade and investment.
Arresting Environmentalism
By turning to ISDS, AngloGold Ashanti is resorting to a system that has a proven track record of insulating foreign capital from the assertion of economic sovereignty. This system’s history is particularly pronounced in the realm of environmentally damaging industries like mining and fossil fuels.
A 2023 report by the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, David Boyd, harshly criticized ISDS and its repression of environmental policy. The report calculated that fossil fuel and mining industries have won over $100 billion in international arbitration against governments seeking to legislate environmental protection.
This mechanism takes on added importance in the context of a renewed wave of extractive mining.
This mechanism takes on added importance in the context of a renewed wave of extractive mining. Copper prices have surged in recent years, in large part due to increasing long term demand for the metal for both AI and green energy infrastructure, alongside various supply shocks. As a result, land struggles across Latin America have intensified—the Quebradona mine being just one flashpoint of these confrontations.
Speaking on the potential reform of ISDS, Moore emphasized the need for more urgent action. “I think there’s growing consensus, and particularly in the context of the climate crisis, of the need for an exit and a collective exit [from the ISDS system],” she said. “ISDS [is] a tremendous obstacle to enacting strong climate policy and particularly to taking substantive climate action—it’s urgent for ISDS to be abolished.”
Quebradona clearly illustrates this urgency. What seemed like a local triumph to protect the water and soil in the hills of Jericó—materialized in national environmental policy—is being challenged by a system shown to be alarmingly effective at securing corporate access to vital resources over and above the objections of local opposition and national sovereignty.
Nolan Young is a freelance journalist covering political-economy, foreign investment, and climate change in Latin America.