Glencore, one of the world’s largest mining companies and a leading trader of fossil-fuel commodities, embodies the brutal realities of neocolonial exploitation. Glencore accounts for a significant portion of global coal production, operating mines in countries like Colombia, South Africa, and Australia, while systematically ravaging environments and trampling human rights.

Its operations in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) are a stark example, where investigations revealed years of waste acid discharge from its Luilu copper refinery, causing severe pollution and ongoing spills. Glencore’s denial of responsibility for child labour at its sites, instead blaming impoverished locals, is a cynical attempt to deflect from its own complicity. Further exposing its predatory practices, the Paradise Papers leak unveiled Glencore’s ties to controversial figures who facilitated the acquisition of undervalued mining rights, robbing the DRC of a tenth of its annual budget.

Glencore’s corruption extends across Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire, and Cameroon, with its former head of oil trading and four executives facing UK bribery charges, including allegations of flying cash bribes on private jets. In South America, its copper mining has poisoned indigenous lands and rivers in Peru, devastating the health and livelihoods of the Quechua and K’ana peoples while denying compensation. The company’s dark history also includes funding state security forces and paramilitary groups in Colombia and the Philippines to intimidate and murder communities resisting its exploitation.