Colombia’s energy unions view the transition as an opportunity for structural change. Their central objectives are reindustrialization aimed at achieving energy and food sovereignty and water justice. In line with this egalitarian, collective, and territorially grounded model of development, unions – especially those in the coal sector – are promoting worker cooperatives in renewable energy, technology, and agriculture. In his contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series, Dario Azzellini explores the intertwining of energy democratization and the development of an alternative economy.
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The victory of far-right candidate Abelardo de la Espriella in Colombia’s June 21 presidential run-off was a shock to popular movements and particularly unions in the energy sector. Espriella won 12.96 million votes (49.66%), up 2.6 million from the first round, narrowly defeating left-wing senator Iván Cepeda, who took 12.71 million votes (48.7%), a gain of 3.04 million. Cepeda drew 1.4 million more votes than incumbent President Gustavo Petro received in 2022 – more than any leftist candidate in the country’s history. Yet it wasn’t enough.
The causes still need analysis. But Colombia’s mass media is owned almost entirely by conglomerates tied to the country’s richest families and the right-wing parties, and it strongly opposed Petro. The Trump administration threatened military intervention, executed more than two dozen strikes on alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Pacific and Caribbean that killed 211 people, and intervened in Venezuela to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. The political landscape, meanwhile, remains highly fragmented, with entrenched territorial control by established political forces.
The two candidates could hardly be more politically opposed. Espriella, a wealthy businessman often compared to Bukele in El Salvador or Milei in Argentina, has a long record of publicly backing the right-wing paramilitaries responsible for slaughtering more than 240,000 people over several decades, and wants Colombia to withdraw from the UN and international courts. He favors expanding fracking and issuing new coal-mining licenses.
Cepeda in turn had pledged to deepen the policies of the Petro government (2022-2026) which launched an ambitious energy transition, ended new oil, gas and coal licenses and banned fracking. That was a major challenge in a country where oil and coal account for more than half of exports, the national bourgeoisie is closely tied to transnational extractive corporations, and the government never held a majority in the bicameral legislature.
The role of unions
Unions in the sectors central to the transition – coal, oil, energy and transport – formed alliances and mobilized for a just transition fair to workers, the environment, and local communities. They helped shape the Just Energy Transition Roadmap, founded a research institute (the Innovation and Research Center for the Just Development of the Colombian Mining and Energy Sector, Cipame), influenced government commissions, wrote just transition demands into collective bargaining, took cases to national and international courts, developed retraining programs with universities, built cooperatives, and ran their own renewable-energy training courses.
This proactive union role, and the deepening of climate policy against the prevailing global trend, made Colombia an exception among OECD countries. Unions had pushed for a fossil-fuel phase-out for more than two decades, viewing resource extraction as a central driver of the violence inflicted on peasants, Indigenous people and workers. They point to the environmental destruction wrought by coal mining and crude extraction, and to the exploitative economic model behind it.
“We cannot continue to consider nature as a commodity to be dominated and exploited, as if it were a basket of infinite resources or natural capital. We need to raise awareness, that we are affecting the planet, the sources, and an entire society. If an oil company is in a certain sector and social progress and growth in the communities were seen, one would say, ‘Okay, that’s great,’ but the truth is, it’s not visible. Capital takes all the profits. It takes absolutely everything. So, we prefer to finally materialize the energy transition project as soon as possible.” Elkin Zamir, oil workers union USO (Unión Sindical Obrera)
“That coal continues to be burned in the world is a responsibility that neither we nor the national government want to assume.” Juan Carlos Solano, president of the main coal miners’ union Sintracarbón (Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadores de la Industria del Carbon).
“The most advanced, most progressive union sectors, which fully understand the phenomenon of nature and its relationship with the capitalist mode of production, fully understand that this cannot continue.” Fabio Arias, union confederation Unitarian Central of Workers CUT (Central Unitaria de Trabajadores).
The end of the fossil era
Despite the right-wing propaganda Espriella repeated throughout the campaign, coal production is being drastically cut by mining companies on their own. In February 2021, Glencore/Prodeco closed the La Jagua and Calenturas mines and laid off 7,000 workers, while the Cerrejón mine in La Guajira – owned by Glencore, BHP and Anglo American – cut 450 jobs. Until the Petro government introduced new regulations, mine closures were only loosely governed. Companies have scaled back production in response to shrinking demand in Europe, which takes 19.4% of Colombia’s coal exports; average annual production fell from 88 million tons in 2012-19 to 59.6 million tons in 2021.
Glencore and Drummond have both cut mining investment, and in March 2025 Cerrejón announced it would extract just 5-10 million tons in 2025, down from a planned 21 million, as demand for coal from Colombia keeps falling. Days later, Drummond announced similar cuts at two open-pit mines. At current extraction rates, Colombia’s gas and oil reserves aren’t expected to last past 2030. Power generation will need to diversify regardless: more than 70% of it comes from large hydroelectric plants highly exposed to climate and weather shocks. The question, then, isn’t whether the energy transition will happen, but how – and who benefits.
As Felipe Diaz Chaves, a researcher at the union institute Cipame, says: “We do not buy the ILO’s idea that everyone will win here, and that no one will end up unemployed, no one will end up closing their business and going bankrupt, no one will end up in a consumer society without having what they want. We’re all going to lose here, but the idea is to minimize those losses and adapt better.”
Meanwhile Juan Carlos Solano, president of Sintracarbon, maintains: “The energy transition will be for multinationals and the northern countries. And what’s left for us? Problems: environmental, labor, health, liabilities … So, let’s not let those of us who made our share of sacrifice and brought wealth to the global North and beyond be affected in this process. (…) At some point, we’re going to have to migrate. If we don’t do it voluntarily, in a concerted, and organized manner, circumstances will force us to migrate, and that would be even more critical.”
Energy transition as structural change
Colombia’s energy unions see the transition as an opening for structural change. Central orientations are (re-)industrialization aimed at energy sovereignty, food sovereignty and water justice. One pillar of this vision is a government program letting communities install, maintain and manage their own renewable electricity systems – decentralizing production, expanding access, building local capacity and redistributing economic benefits. The unions are directly involved, offering training and helping install panels. As Elkin Zamir of the USO describes it, their vision of a just transition has to work “for workers, for women workers, for communities, for the environment, for companies in the sector – a transition seen through a lens of justice, equity, labor rights and well-being.”
In line with this more egalitarian, collective and territorially grounded model of development, unions – especially in the coal sector – are promoting worker cooperatives and investing in reskilling and vocational training. Former coal workers have founded cooperatives in renewable energy, technology, and agriculture. Beyond the workers directly affected, unions stress the need to address the largely female care economy that has grown up around coal mining.
Coal miners’ unions have developed shared positions on a just transition and presented mining companies with a sectoral collective-bargaining proposal. They insist that all decisions rest on social dialogue – freedom of association and genuine worker participation – and that social protections, including healthcare, childcare and food provision, be built into just-transition frameworks from the start. They frame retraining, economic diversification and cooperative production through a gender- and care-centered lens, demanding that employers and government “create and finance childcare centers, centers for the elderly, and centers for persons with disabilities,” with quality standards and flexible hours, and “guarantee the effective and equitable participation of women” through minimum quotas in decision-making bodies.
They also want government and mining companies to fund “a comprehensive and differentiated study on the impacts that mine closures will have on the LGBTIQ+ community,” to design mitigation measures suited to each group’s needs. Although the labor law reform under Petro allows for sectoral collective bargaining, mining companies have so far rejected the proposal.
The future is unwritten
The future of Colombia’s energy transition is uncertain. Under Petro, unions had access to government institutions and lawmakers – and a role in formal policymaking – like never before. Despite criticism, government and unions were clearly pursuing an energy transition with a shared horizon. Unions, communities and popular organizations will keep fighting for a just energy transition, though how much of Petro’s legislative and programmatic legacy survives under Espriella remains to be seen. The political situation is deeply polarized, and Espriella, like Petro before him, lacks a parliamentary majority, while the left is stronger than it has ever been.
Colombia’s population now has the experience of a different kind of government – one that was also, in part, a legacy of the April 2021 uprising, which social historian Renán Vega Cantor called “the most important social mobilization in all of Colombia’s history… in 200 years, a mobilization of such extraordinary dimensions has never before occurred.” The state met those protests with massive violence, killing at least 28 people. But the foundations for a shift in Colombia’s history had already been laid. Colombia will never be quite the same again.