"Whenever a Pasta de Conchos memorial comes up, people seek me out to speak to me and I tell them again why I collect rubbish... As if I did it for fun.  My son lived with me and was the one who sustained me... Because of the authorities, I have been working in a rubbish tip since my son died.  I leave at six in the morning after drinking a cup of coffee with biscuits.  I take a tin of tuna, tortillas or whatever I can eat in the rubbish tip... I get home in the afternoon...

PBI interviewed ProDESC to learn more about consultation processes. Alejandra Ancheita is a lawyer, founder and Executive Director of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Project (ProDESC), an organization that defends human rights, specifically the right to land, territory and natural resources of agrarian communities, indigenous peoples, and labor rights.

The shifting nature of international power relations has meant that transnational companies often exercise greater power than governments across the world.

Within the framework of the 12 years since the tragedy of the Pasta de Conchos mine in the coal region of Coahuila in Mexico, on 18th February 2018 representatives of the Family Organisation Pasta de Conchos presented the report "Red coal in Coahuila: here ends the silence", in Mexico City.  This publication, supported by the Heinrich Böll Foundation, tells "the story of the human and environmental cost that the extraction of coal has brought and left" in this northern region of the country; it also documents the struggle that the family members of the 65 miners who lost their lives 12 years ago in the mine have undertaken.