US Mining MoU with Colombia Must Safeguard Community Rights and Sustainability

In September, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio visited Barranquilla, Colombia, to meet with President Abelardo de la Espriella and to sign memorandums of understanding on critical minerals and nuclear cooperation. The visit was part of the Secretary of State's South American tour and marked the highest-level official US visit to Colombia in years, following a period in which bilateral relations had stalled amid repeated tensions between former Colombian President Gustavo Petro and US President Donald Trump.

One of the memorandums covers cooperation between Colombia and the US on four critical minerals: rare earth elements, lithium, copper and tungsten. It includes exploration, processing and trade, as well as cooperation on geological surveys and the incorporation of environmental, social and governance standards. The memorandum is non-binding, and according to Colombia’s Foreign Ministry, it creates no legal obligations, grants no mining rights over specific deposits and explicitly recognizes Colombia's sovereignty over its natural resources. Any projects that eventually emerge from the agreement will remain subject to the procedures and approvals required under Colombian law.

According to the State Department, the memorandum states that within six months of its signature, the two countries will begin identifying potential projects and exploring financing mechanisms. These could include guarantees, loans, equity investments and government purchase agreements. Its figures on the concentration of global supply chains are particularly striking. Based on data from the US Geological Survey and the International Energy Agency compiled by SunSirs Commodity Group, China produced 67,000 of the world's 85,000 tonnes of tungsten in 2025, nearly 80 percent of global production. It also accounts for approximately 60 percent of global rare earth extraction and nearly 90 percent of separation and refining. Chinese smelting and processing of rare earths represents 94 percent of the global total, while its share of global copper smelting stands at 47 percent.

A history of Colombia US cooperation and its benefits

The memorandum could be good news for Colombia. Rather than viewing bilateral cooperation through a simplistic model in which the Global North benefits while the Global South merely bears the costs, it is important to recognize that cooperation with the United States has historically contributed to Colombia's economic and institutional development.

International cooperation has played an important role in Colombia's modernization. As Luis Guillermo Vélez Cabrera recently noted in La Silla Vacía when discussing the opportunities that opened for the coffee and railway sectors, international engagement has been central to Colombia's development. From the modernization efforts associated with the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s to the institutional and security cooperation strengthened through Plan Colombia at the beginning of this century, the relationship with Washington has been an important pillar of Colombia’s national development.

The challenge now is to ensure that this new phase of cooperation creates more than an export economy based on critical minerals. The success of this new bilateral cooperation will depend on whether Colombia can avoid repeating the environmental and social costs associated with past extractive models. The country's experience with large-scale coal mining in La Guajira and Cesar offers a difficult precedent. Intensive extraction has affected local communities, altered watersheds and generated serious environmental and public health concerns without always translating into structural development or equitable distribution of benefits.

The hidden material costs of the AI economy

To understand the significance of the memorandum, we need to look beyond AI software, algorithms and generative models, and toward the physical infrastructure that makes them possible. AI is not immaterial. It depends on massive data centers, large amounts of energy and global supply chains for critical minerals such as rare earth elements, copper and lithium.

At the same time, Colombia should take advantage of the opportunities created by the emerging technological economy. The objective should be to establish environmental and social safeguards from the beginning, rather than treating them as obstacles to development.

A regional example illustrates why this matters. When Google launched its first Latin American data center in Quilicura, Chile, the facility brought over $150 million in investment, improved regional connectivity, and catalyzed solar energy projects. However, when Google proposed a second data center in Cerrillos, its planned groundwater consumption sparked strong community opposition. Although Google proposed shifting to an air-cooled system, a landmark February 2024 ruling by Santiago's Second Environmental Court partially annulled the project’s permit, requiring a full reassessment of aquifer impacts. Google subsequently withdrew the original proposal to submit a fully air-cooled design. More recently, community groups objected to the project’s relaunch, demanding that it be subject to a full environmental review. This Chilean experience shows that technological infrastructure can adapt to local ecological limits, setting a vital regional precedent for Colombia as it seeks to attract tech development while enforcing safeguards from the outset.

The lessons from Chile suggest that Colombia's cooperation with the US should not be limited to extracting and exporting critical minerals. It should also generate knowledge transfer, domestic value chains and higher value added production, while respecting the rights of local communities. If Colombia is to become part of the technological economy built around these resources, it should seek to capture more of the value that its minerals make possible.

An opportunity for science and industry in Colombia

Colombia should approach this new phase of cooperation with the US from a position of confidence, not suspicion. American cooperation has been invaluable to the country’s institutional, economic and security development, and this memorandum could open a new chapter in that relationship. But Colombia also has decades of experience with extractive industries whose environmental and social costs offer lessons that should not be repeated as the technological economy expands.

Projects developed under this framework will have to comply with Colombian environmental law and respect the rights of affected communities. In Indigenous and Afro-descendant territories, that includes the constitutional protections surrounding prior consultation. These safeguards should not be treated as obstacles to investment, but as part of the institutional framework needed to make development legitimate and sustainable.

The larger challenge, however, is economic. Colombia has too often participated in global commodity chains primarily as a supplier of raw materials, capturing only a fraction of the value generated further downstream. This memorandum offers an opportunity to change that pattern. Cooperation with the US should bring not only investment and access to markets, but also scientific knowledge, technology transfer, industrial capabilities and opportunities to develop higher-value activities within Colombia.

If critical minerals are among the foundations of the AI economy, Colombia should aspire to contribute more than the resources beneath its soil. It should seek the knowledge and capabilities needed to participate in the industries those resources make possible. Chile has demonstrated how a country with abundant mineral resources can become a major player in global supply chains, and Colombia has no reason to assume that it must remain behind. Its potential, including significant deposits of copper, nickel, rare earth elements and other strategic minerals, combined with its geographic position and industrial base, gives it the opportunity to develop a meaningful role in the emerging technological economy.

The real opportunity is for Colombia to use these resources to build knowledge, industry and technology at home. If it gets this right, the country can become part of the industries that are shaping the AI economy, rather than simply supplying the materials they depend on.