Amid the global race for minerals for the energy transition, digitalization, and the defense and aerospace industries, the European Union (EU) has adopted an industrial policy to secure its access to "critical" raw materials, including lithium. According to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, 25 of the 34 raw materials the EU considers essential are found in Latin America's indigenous territories and strategic ecosystems. Civil society warns that the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) and other recent policies aimed at deregulation and promoting the defense sector (Omnibus I and II) could deepen historical inequalities between Europe and Latin America.

In this webinar, we addressed the threats to Latin America by the European Union's new policies and what the region's states and civil society can do to address them. To this end, we focused on the significance of the "strategic partnerships" that the EU has signed with Chile and Argentina, and explained what the so-called "strategic projects" that the EU intends to consolidate at the global level to maintain the flow of minerals from South to North consist of. Indigenous leaders denounced how excessive water use in lithium mining has already degraded Andean wetlands and caused the loss of biodiversity and culture.

In this session, we debated the justice of the "European green transition," which, in the name of decarbonization, threatens to open up new sacrifice zones in the Global South, while erasing ancient knowledge and causing irreversible damage to carbon sinks that are essential for tackling the climate crisis.

Panel

• Alejandro González, Senior Researcher and Advocate in SOMO's Climate Justice team and member of the EU Raw Materials Coalition.
  Pía Marchegiani, Deputy Executive Director and Director of the Environmental Policy area of the Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN).
  Joám Evans Pim, Coordinator of the Confederal Mining Area at Ecologistas en Acción and Director of the Montescola Foundation.
  Ramón Balcázar, Director of the Tantí Foundation.
  Román Elías Guitián, Community Atacameños del Altiplano, Argentina.

Moderator: Yeny Rodríguez, Senior Attorney and Area Coordinator, Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA).

Recording (in Spanish)