Rio Tinto is a global mining company that was founded in 1873 when the Spanish government privatized a 100 year old government mine on the Rio Tinto, in Huelva, Spain. The company opened the Corta Atalaya copper mine, which gained notoriety not only as the world’s largest in its heyday, but also for a massacre of some 150 miners who went on strike in 1888 against labor abuses and environmental pollution. Over the last 150 years, the company has become a flashpoint for similar protests around the world in dozens of countries. In the 1970s, activists against the company’s operations around the world joined hands to create Partizans (People Against Rio Tinto Zinc and Subsidiaries) to send delegates to the company annual meetings.

Conflict over environmental pollution at Rio Tinto’s Panguna copper mine, on the island of Bougainville, caused the local community to rise up and kick out the government of Papua New Guinea in an effort to secede. Recent controversies over Rio Tinto’s impact include a massive popular uprising in Serbia in 2022 over the company’s $2.4 billion plan to dig for lithium in the Jadar region; and the demolition of Juukan Gorge, a 46,000 year-old sacred Aboriginal site in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, in a quest for iron ore, despite the fact that company executives were aware of the site’s significance to local indigenous communities.

In the past Rio Tinto violated United Nations decrees on apartheid in Namibia by operating the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia where Black workers were housed in tents and forced to work under horrific conditions.