La minería de carbón en Colombia y la situación económica de las mujeres rurales: la comunidad El Hatillo (Cesar, Colombia)

Coal is the second main commodity for export in Colombia. Since beginning the 20th Century, the governments have created conditions increasingly favorable for the foreign companies to start or increase their mining projects in our country. As a consequence, the extraction volume has increased ever since. While the Colombian Government stated in 2012 that the mining exploitation is one of the “locomotives for development” and the macro level data go on this direction, it is quite worrying that only a part of the Colombian population benefits from this development model. This article aims to answer the following question: To what extent the coal mining on a large scale is changing the financial situation of the rural women in our country? To answer it, this article emphasizes the experiences by these women and tells the reality from their perspective. This work analyzed previous studies and conducted some qualitative interviews to women from a community that should be relocated since 2012: El Hatillo, in Cesar Province, Colombia. As a result from this research, four hypotheses were set out as related to the challenges the coal mining pose to those women facing the destruction of the sources for making a living, the alteration of their traditional roles both in the community and the family, scarce possibilities to access to jobs in the mines and the resulting high level of gender inequalities in this business.