Covas do Barroso: Local Resistance to Europe’s Lithium Race

Lithium may be at the heart of the green transition, but mining the metallic element also causes damage to natural environments. In lithium-rich Portugal, modest rural communities join national outrage against governmental deals bypassing local economies and threatening livelihoods. A photo essay.

By Giacomo Sini, Dario Antonelli 

March 18, 2024

Source: Green European Journal

Covas do Barroso: Local Resistance to Europe’s Lithium Race | Photo ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

On first impression Covas do Barroso, nestled between green mountains in northern Portugal, is no more than a handful of stone houses gathered around the junction of two roads. The village, with around 150 inhabitants, has traditionally relied on livestock farming and agriculture for its local economy. But Covas do Barroso’s land is also valuable for another reason: it is rich in lithium reserves. And, since 2016, Savannah Resources, a British company with solely Barroso on its books, has been developing plans for an open pit mine in the area. The company estimates that the mine could be exploited for 12 years, would employ up to 250 workers, and supply enough lithium for 500,000 electric car batteries each year. 

An overview of Covas do Barroso. Photo by Giacomo Sini and Dario Antonelli. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

A controversial deal  

Portugal is known as the largest and, indeed, the only significant site of lithium production in the European Union. To date, the country’s lithium has only been mined in combination with feldspar to supply the ceramic industry. But the growth of global lithium production related to the manufacture of batteries, especially for electric vehicles, has prompted the development of a specific production chain in the EU. As part of its Critical Raw Materials Act, the EU Commission stipulated that by 2030 at least 10 per cent of Europe’s demand for critical raw materials such as lithium should be met from domestic supplies. In Portugal, mining companies have received approval for new projects in areas such as Barroso, Romano, Alvarrões, and Argemela. And requests for exploration are pending in many other areas of the country.  

The Portuguese Environment Agency gave its preliminary approval for the environmental impact assessment of the Barroso project at the end of May 2023, and construction is scheduled to start in 2024. But many residents think the Savannah Resources mine should not be built. From the outset locals opposed to the project founded Unidos em Defesa de Covas do Barroso (UDCB), an association organising demonstrations, assemblies, protest camps, and legal action.  

A small stone quarry in the area near Romainho, in the Covas do Barroso area. The area is
historically an excavation zone for the construction of stone houses. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

The mining plan is also highly controversial with the region’s wider population. And in Portugal, mining is more than just a local issue: exploration concessions in Barroso and Montalegre were at the centre of an investigation into corruption which saw raids on parliamentary offices in November 2023 and led to Prime Minister António Costa’s resignation. The banner welcoming visitors to Covas do Barroso that states “Não às Minas, Sim à Vida” (No to Mines, Yes to Life) poses inescapable questions to the global green transition model. 

Some banners in the center of Covas do Barroso against the opening of the mine. “No to the
mine yes to life” reads the main one. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

In defense of Barroso 

The audience contains students, professors, researchers, interested people. “It is a falsification to talk about a just green transition,” says Mariana Riquito, researcher at the University of Coimbra. “It cannot be just if it does not respect the autonomy of local populations. It cannot be a transition if, to implement it, you intensify the consumption of fossil fuels. It cannot be green if it only considers the problem of emissions and not the consequences of the mining and extraction industry.”  

A lecturer asks whether the mine project might still represent a development opportunity for the area. Nelson calmly replies that “Covas do Barroso has been a FAO World Heritage Site for agriculture since 2018. The mine is incompatible with the development of the area. They talk to us about compensation, minimisation, landscape restoration. But a relationship with nature is the only reason to live in such an isolated place. What development is possible for an area where no one would want to live?”   

On the left, Mariana Riquito, Portuguese university researcher and Nelson Gomes, president of
the association “Unidos em defensa de Covas do Barroso” during a conference organized by the
“UTAD – University of Tras os Mones e Alto Douro” in Villa Real, northern Portugal. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Vila Real, north-eastern Portugal, 24 October 2023. Classroom B.02 at the University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro is full. All attention is directed towards the first speaker of a public discussion organised by the Centre for Transdisciplinary Development Studies (CETRAD): “My name is Nelson Gomes and I live in Covas do Barroso.” As president of the UDCB, Nelson explains that the mines would completely disrupt the environment of the valley and the lives of its inhabitants. “They accuse us of being unwilling to sacrifice ourselves for the planet,” says Nelson, “but we already sacrifice ourselves with our way of life and farming.”  

We need to question the energy transition as a model centred on extractivism.

According to Nelson, the mining project has broad implications: “We need to question the energy transition as a model centred on extractivism. Alternatives, says Nelson, would include the development of public transport, including in rural areas, instead of simply replacing fossil-fuelled private cars with electric ones. “Bear in mind,” warns Nelson, “such an imposition could one day happen to you too, where you live.” 

Local impacts

A stream, swollen after the rains, washes over the road leading to the village of Alijò. “I come all the way here because I can use some of the pastures for grazing,” says Paolo, a farmer with 170 sheep. His business, like that of other shepherds and farmers from Covas do Barroso, is threatened by lithium mining. “Part of my land is in danger of being included in the mining area. Where will I graze the sheep then?” Paolo is worried that the valley’s sources of water will be compromised: “With the drilling, some farmers are already complaining about the lack of water in the wells. What will happen to the troughs and streams?” 

Paulo Pires, a shepherd from Covas do Barroso, grazing his flock of sheep near Alijò, a village
4 km from Covas do Barroso. Paulo is one of the local residents opposing the construction of the
Savannah Lithium mine. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

While recognising the need for an energy transition, Paolo feels it is important to broaden the vision: “Of course lithium is needed for batteries. But we should ask ourselves what we use this energy for. Will lithium make consumerism sustainable? And what green transition are we talking about if we destroy green spaces? Look,” he exclaims, laughing, “everything here is green!” 

“We opposed the lithium mine from the beginning,” says Mayor of Boticas Fernando Quieroga sitting at his desk in the municipal headquarters for Covas do Barroso, almost 20 km away from the village. “It is a different kind of mining activity from those that were already present in the area,” he explains. “It may affect the living conditions and health of the members of our community.” In line with Paolo, he considers that the area’s freshwater supply, specifically underground sources, are a key concern: “We are very alarmed because there is a risk that the mining will compromise the phreatic level.” 

Fernando Quieroga, president/mayor of the Câmara municipal of Boticas. The mayor is
outspoken against the construction of the Covas Lithium’s mine. In this photo is seen in the
mayor’s office in Boticas. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

“They say that such a sparsely populated area can only gain from such a project,” Quieroga says with a sarcastic grin, “but if we look at the lithium value chain in addition to the mining – battery production, electric car fabrication, and, finally, battery recycling – all these industrial activities will be handled elsewhere. Nothing will remain here.” On the region’s future prospects, he uses plain words: “As far as it is within our power, we will not provide authorisations. If the government decides to go ahead, it risks facing a popular uprising.” 

“When I opened, more than twenty years ago now, the village was lively,” says the elderly bartender from the only bar in Covas. “Now there are fewer and fewer inhabitants. Even the school closed down a long time ago.” In the face of inexorable depopulation, the bartender perhaps hopes that the mining project will bring development and new customers, and is less critical of it than most other locals. “My bar is for everyone, it doesn’t take sides on the lithium issue!” 

The only open bar in the small village of Covas do Barroso in northern Portugal. In this area,
designated by the FAO as world agricultural heritage, the British company Savannah wants to build
the largest lithium mine in Europe. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

But, standing near the door, a customer with a drink in hand expresses a different view: “Of course some have sold their land [to the mining project]. But how can you abandon everything? With that kind of money, it is not possible to move and change your life,” he says. 

Fighting back 

“Now it’s good!” Mariana, who has just finished cleaning the entrance to the former primary school in Covas do Barroso with her friend Paloma, looks pleased with their work. Closed for many years, the building has been reborn as A Sachola, thanks in part to the initiative of young people who, like them, moved here to support the struggle against mining. The banner at the entrance reads Encontro Solidario Anti-Extractivista (Anti-extractivist Solidarity Meeting). “We have to finish setting up the space,” Mariana explains, gesturing to the large room inside. “In a week’s time, we’re going to have a film screening. We want this space to be a place of aggregation and sociality for the inhabitants of the village but, at the same time, a meeting point between the local community and those from outside.”

Aida Fernandes, president of Covas do Barroso’s common land association, Baldios, is keen to protect the communal areas of land most threatened by mining projects. “Savannah has bought some land, but a lot of drilling is taking place on the commons, especially in the forests,” explains Aida. “We aim to stop the works, claiming the use of that land for the community.”  

Aida Fernandes, resident of Covas do Barroso and breeder. She is the president of the “Baldios
‘communal land – land for civic use”, and is against the construction of the lithium mine. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

In recent years, many people have come to Covas do Barroso to find out about the struggle of its inhabitants. Aida recounts how exchange situations are often reciprocal: “Last October we participated in an international meeting against mining in Spain, because it is important to be united in the face of such a powerful counterpart.”  

Winning the war 

Project developments for the massive exploitation of lithium reserves have provoked protests from the inhabitants of many rural areas of Portugal. As in Barroso, committees and movements have also been formed in Serra de Estrela, Argemela, and Penalva, to name but a few. A plurality of voices has united on many occasions: for unified demonstrations in Lisbon, for assemblies in Coimbra and elsewhere, in an anti-mining protest camp that was held last summer in Covas do Barroso. 

From the top of the Olhar do Guerreiro viewpoint, the entire valley can be seen. Drilling areas, partly covered by vegetation, can be seen all around. Aida points to a spot southeast of the village, an expanse of pine trees on a hillside. “Over there is the area that they are really focusing on. It seems to be the richest [in lithium],” she says. “Just think, that whole area is going to become an open pit. It will be dug down 150 meters with a diameter of 500 meters. 80 per cent of the material will be waste. The remaining 20 per cent will have to be washed, even chemically, to extract the lithium fitted there.” 

The area around Covas in Barroso, designated by the FAO as a World Agricultural Heritage
site. In the centre among the greenery the first excavation of Savannah, the British company that
has plans to build a Lithium mine in the area. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

Recently, the struggle against lithium extraction in Covas do Barroso has received broad support from diverse sectors of society. “This is not about slowing down the work and obtaining small results,” says Aida decisively. “It is not enough to win battles. You have to win the war!” 

The headquarters (information point) of Svannah in Covas do Barroso, in the north of Portugal. Savannah is the British company that wants to build the largest lithium mine in Europe within the Barroso area. ©Giacomo Sini & Dario Antonelli

As the sun goes down, a farmer crosses the central village square, leading his cows to the stable with a hoe slung across his shoulder. On one side is the sports field, where the protest camp against lithium mining was held, countless colourful banners are hanging on the fence. They call out against mining, for village life, for water, and for nature. Directly opposite, on the other side of the square, is the small Savannah office, hidden behind a dark door, guarded by cameras.

An Eyewitness Account From the Streets of Haiti

BY ANONYMOUS

 MARCH 22, 2024
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If you had called me yesterday I couldn’t have answered. I was so traumatized. A young friend of my daughter’s called to tell me to pack a bag and he’d pick me up in half an hour and take me elsewhere because they were making their way to our neighborhood. As BBQ had announced last week they were coming to get the bourgeois living in the hills.

I’m at a friend’s now in another neighborhood, but I don t know for how long and don t know if my home will still be habitable after they go through it.

One of my neighbors was home with the kids and her husband had gone to work when they came. She hid with her children and locked the bathroom door, but the attackers fortunately did not get upstairs because the man next door whose yard they had entered shot 2 of them and the others ran. We worry that they’ll come back because along with the gangs come the hoodlums of the nearby slums, armed individuals who follow after the gangs and take advantage of their cracking the homes open to rush in for whatever is left over like vultures or jackals after the lions have fed.

My friend offered me a room in her home in a different neighborhood and I had to bring my maid since I couldn’t leave her alone at their mercy. She’s been living with me for more than two years now since the gang warfare got so bad in her area she had to leave her house.

A friend of mine who lives down the road in the neighborhood they attacked before mine was home with her husband and kids when the guys came to their gate. It was iron and heavy so they were not successful in their attempts to break it.

They called him to the gate and told him it would not be good for him if he didn’t open it cause they knew his wife and kids were in there. He refused and they told him they saw that there were two cars out front and he should put their keys in a bag with his wife’s jewelry and all the money in the house and throw that over the gate and they would leave it at that.  He did what they said and they left. They were some good bandits. That’s why we think the real paramilitary army might be behind in successive waves but we hope and pray.

I don’t really think the Americans told their gangs to go and massacre the bourgeois in the hills, I think the attacks have as a goal to force the Montana Accord alliance and the internationals to accept gang leaders sitting with them at the negotiation table. Give them amnesty and let them take part in the political process to determine the next president.

Since the gangs have been the ones who pay the crowd to take to the streets for the purpose of those who profit from the disorder and in turn pay their gang leader to foment it, they’ll be able to sway whatever elections we’ll have especially since guy Philippe is in alliance with them. That’s my opinion since the Americans have already said they want to see the gang leaders be part of the negotiations. Can you believe it?

In 1995 Aristide asked the US to put an arms embargo on Haiti that is still in place today and that is why the police cannot have new weapons, that is why ordinary people now can’t defend themselves.

Everybody is saying that the Presidential Council nominated by CARICOM, with the stipulation that Haiti accept a foreign intervention, will cause a massive bloodbath because the federated gangs will not accept CARICOM’s choice as they insist on being part of it. The US and its international and Haitian allies have created a monster and now they’re acting as if they didn’t want to meddle.

All Haitian billionaires with foreign passports have flown from the coup on Dominican helicopters to the tune of $10,000 USD a pop.  I’m an American citizen and targeted as the elite but I have nowhere to go in America, all I have is here. Do you think I could pay for such a trip? I have had my business burned down 3 times in the last 15 years during these political upheavals, It got to the point where I can no longer rebuild. I once was part of the upper middle class, now I’m just middle class and trying to hang on.

Those who can afford to pay,  who have friends in high places in the US, those families who have always made and broken presidents, who can bring in weapons to distribute to gangs, who have been doing so since 1995, those who own ports and never pay customs taxes are the impenetrable elite who have not had any of their properties looted or touched, none of their children kidnapped, who are not running for their lives but just leaving the killing field. It’s us who get our kids kidnapped and lose all our savings on the ransom, us who never meddled in politics, who pay our taxes, who pay customs we are the only elite in the world, it has been said, who take showers with one bottle of water.

My kids are gone after losing their retail business which could not function in this atmosphere. My family split apart. And yet I hope and pray.

The gangs who now say they are representing the people first destroyed the peoples’ neighborhoods, their small shops, their street booths. Then they destroyed the lower middle-class neighborhoods, the artists, artisans teachers, nurses and now it’s the bourgeois’ turn.

Look at that hypocrisy. They say they want a man of the people to rule but ever since Papa Doc men of the people have ruled as the puppets of the same international powers who want the minimum wage to remain below 4 dollars, the same families who are paying for their guns today who are giving them money for putting the people out in the streets to demonstrate and get shot by police. The poor are their first victims, they have suffered most at their hands.

Have you noticed in the foreign news recently when the announcer spoke of the US airlifting embassy personnel out of Haiti they slipped in that private planes were coming in to get some American citizens and some Haitian orphans?  Why does no one find this strange?  Every time there is a catastrophe natural or political the missionaries take orphans out of Haiti.

Their fate remains unknown. They haunt us. There is never a follow-up story to tell us what happened to these orphans five or ten years later. The news announcer did not say who those private individuals were but we know who the usual suspects are. It’s  always the same. And now the missionaries Haitian converts have a seat in the CARICOM’s presidential council. No separation of church and state here.

Why doesn’t the foreign press ever ask the right questions, ever?

To the gang leaders they never ask: where did you go to school, where did you learn urban warfare, what is the network through which you get weapons, or the information you use to kidnap people?

Yet foreign journalists are always giving the gangs airtime, always telling us of orphans carried off with no paperwork to better lives. Haitian journalists are starting to ask the right questions and the answers are out there.

Meanwhile, I’m at a friend’s house where no talk of politics is allowed, no news, no comments, no complaints. I’m outside now, under a beautiful sky and it’s quiet. We hope and pray.

The writer lives in the Laboule section of Port Au Prince.

Defending Bodily Sovereignty and the Long Arc of Radical Feminist Care

BY DIANA BLOCK

 MARCH 22, 2024
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A Book Review and Reflection Forward

In this rapidly degenerating American climate where women (including trans and non-binary people) are in danger of losing control over their own frozen embryos and face criminalization for crossing state lines to get an abortion, Angela Hume’s new book is a very important read.  It reminds us of the long history of radical feminist action to achieve sovereignty over our own bodies – action that refuses to respect the constraints of legislative advocacy and legality.

Hume began writing Deep Care – The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions, Defied the Law and Fought to Keep Clinics Open (AK Press Oct 2023) when Dobbs was still only handwriting on the wall.   The Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in June 2022, which eliminated Federal legal protection for abortion, and the subsequent drastic restrictions on a range of abortion rights in more than seventeen states around the country, has crystallized the need for regenerating militant grassroots movement for reproductive justice.

The book is an in-depth examination of the largely untold history of West Coast reproductive activism from the 1970s to the beginning of the 21st century through dozens of interviews with activists who were part of this movement. It offers critical lessons for the building of a radical reproductive justice movement in the coming period.  Hume theorizes that “deep care” values and practices were at the root of the linked developments of feminist self-help, feminist health clinics and abortion clinic defense. For her, the self-help/self-care movement was a core component of building out this three-pronged strategy.  Self-help “teaches us about how to empower, defend, and care for each other”, she states. “And when we can do this, we can strengthen our community from the inside, and we don’t have to rely on the state.”

The history that she narrates elucidates the ways in which people-to-people care and education has always been an integral part of radical feminist movement starting with consciousness raising groups in the seventies.  At the same time, her perspective raises unresolved questions about how to embed “deep care” practices into movement strategies that go beyond self-reliance and self-defense to build a broad militant challenge to the foundations of the U.S. racial, imperialist state.

As part of her research for this book, Angela Hume interviewed me about my experience in Bay Area feminist self-help circles in the early 1970’s.  I had had a legal abortion in New York City in 1971, shortly after abortion was legalized in New York but before the landmark Supreme Court Roe decision of 1973.  Women from my consciousness-raising group picked me up at the hospital after the abortion and in the weeks that followed we all shared emotional stories of illegal abortions, deliberate misinformation about contraception and sex, and the critical need to take control of our bodies on all levels.  It was one of my first direct experiences of the kind of feminist care that the second-wave women’s movement insisted upon in the face of patriarchal attitudes and practices which devalued all forms of care even within the male-dominated left.

When I moved to California in 1972, the burgeoning women’s self-help health movement offered groups that could expand awareness and care of our bodies, including cervical self-exams and information about menstrual extraction – a way to manage our periods efficiently as well as a method of abortion.  My time in the self-help group was short-lived.  The particular group that I was in was very caring, but it was all white and mainly middle class. I questioned the applicability of this type of self-exploration to the health and well-being of women of color and working-class women.  And in a period when the U.S. war against Vietnam was still raging and horrifying stories about the systematic rapes and massacres of Vietnamese women by U.S. soldiers was circulating widely, I wasn’t clear how self-examination could help build forceful anti-imperialist feminism.

Deep Care gave me a new appreciation of the ways in which the feminist self-help movement in the Bay Area was simultaneously evolving a broader agenda beyond small groups. Taking inspiration from the Black Panther Party’s community-controlled free health care clinics, the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center (OFWHC)/ Women’s Choice clinic, was established in 1973, as a “broad spectrum sexual, reproductive and abortion health care provider” which primarily served women of color and working-class women, including many queer and trans people. Women’s Choice soon expanded into a network of Feminist Health Care centers that developed a “participatory” health care model, challenging the conventional hierarchical structure of patient-provider relationships.

Deep Care offers particular insight into the role that Black lesbian feminist poet Pat Parker played in the further evolution of the Women’s Choice clinic. Parker had been a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) at an early age but left due to the sexism she experienced in the organization.  She went on to express her commitment to the Black community and Black women through her groundbreaking poetry.  When she started working at Women’s Choice in 1977, she didn’t have a background in health care but she, along with other Black women at Women’s Choice, expanded the work that it did with Black and other women of color. As Hume puts it “These clinic workers took insights from Black radical and other Black health activist histories, inflected them with Black feminist perspectives from their own experience, and brought them to the clinic.”

In 1985, as a new women’s health clinic in Richmond, CA came under attack by right-wing anti-abortionists, Parker recognized that a different level of work was needed to protect the right to abortion.  She helped initiate the Clinic Defense Committee to build community support and protection for the Richmond clinic.  Women’s Choice was joined by several other groups, including Radical Women, Women Against Imperialism and the Revolutionary Workers League in their clinic defense efforts.  As  Operation Rescue targeted clinics across the U.S. with systematic efforts to physically block people from access to abortion and clinic bombings spread, the Clinic Defense Committee evolved into the Bay Area Coalition Against Operation Rescue (later Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights).  BACORR was a broad coalition providing clinic defense for a variety of clinics. For years the coalition developed an array of sophisticated and creative tactics that physically protected people’s right to choose abortion.

Hume also details the simultaneous commitment of feminist activists to maintaining a network of underground abortion self-help providers. These providers maintained practices that were not licensed, insisting that a form of direct autonomous care needed to be sustained outside of the state’s institutional purview.  Even though the legal system had granted women the legal “right to choose”, these underground networks ensured that the knowledge and skills necessary for people to exercise direct control over their reproductive function would continue despite increasing legislative restrictions beginning with the 1977 Hyde Amendment .

In an adjacent development not discussed in the book, the need to defend the health and bodily sovereignty of women in prison led to the founding of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP) in 1995. I have been involved in CCWP since then, and more recently Angela Hume has also become active in the organization. CCWP recognized that people in women’s prisons were consistently denied their rights to basic health care, including their reproductive rights, but were not being included in the work of the feminist movement at that time. Our slogan, Caring Collectively for Women Prisoners, was suggested by a formerly incarcerated woman who understood the absolute importance of collective care to ensure survival inside prison. By trying to put this principle into practice over decades, CCWP has carried the trajectory of the feminist self-help movement of the 1970s into the abolitionist movement of the twenty-first century.  And Angela Hume is now shaping their own practice of deep care through their direct work with people in women’s prisons at the same time as they are documenting the long history of that effort.

I was in Cuba with the May Day Brigade in May 2022 when the news of the impending Dobbs decision was leaked by Politico.  Many conversations immediately ensued between us and our Cuban hosts contrasting their uncontested right to abortion, which had been protected in Cuba since 1965, and the reactionary forces that were systematically bulldozing reproductive and other gender rights in the U.S.  For me, those conversations corroborated the exemplary character of Cuba’s model of participatory community health care where reproductive health is approached “as a multi-faceted part of every woman’s life” from the time she enters puberty. They also reconfirmed the need for care to be guaranteed by a state and a constitution that upholds health and reproductive care as an inalienable right.

Deep care should be a fundamental value that underlies human interaction in community. The fact that it has to be defined and asserted again and again as a political project in the U.S. context exposes the intrinsic inhumanity and violence of the patriarchal imperialist system that we live under.  Hume’s book demands that we find ways to fiercely assert principles of care and solidarity as core to our movements as we accelerate the struggle for sovereignty, self-determination and liberation around the world.

Free Palestine!

Diana Block works with the Bay Area Cuba Saving Lives Committee. She is a founding and active member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners , an abolitionist organization that celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2020. She is the author of a memoir, Arm the Spirit – A Woman’s Journey Underground and Back (AKPress 2009), and a novel, Clandestine Occupations – An Imaginary History (PM Press 2015). She writes for various online journals.