Two weeks ago, Salem State professor Avi Chomsky and a large delegation returned from a fact-finding and solidarity visit to one of the most troubled coal-producing regions of Colombia.

Chomsky, a history teacher and coordinator of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at the college, was accompanied by other academics, labor and justice activists, and a Witness for Peace contingent.

What Chomsky and the group saw in Colombia clearly illustrates how small our planet has become, how interconnected are nations' economies, and how the political and energy choices that we Americans make, can determine the living conditions of people a continent away.

The northern Colombian province of La Guajira, where the delegation observed environmental conditions and met with local inhabitants, is host to the infamous Cerrejon Norte mine. Three miles wide and 30 miles long, it is perhaps the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and produces 15 million tons of coal a year - half of Colombia's total output.

The mine is so enormous that it damages the land, air, and water of the region around it. Dust constantly blows off the excavation, rivers and streams are fouled, the water table has been lowered, and the surrounding vegetation and lands are drying out.

The health and livelihoods of hunters, farmers, and villagers in the area are severely and adversely affected. (The farmers do not want mining jobs, and none are offered to locals anyway.)

Additionally, the mine is slowly, but steadily, expanding, and doing so in a crude, undemocratic way. Aided by misguided (or worse) government officials and a questionable permitting process, the mine's corporate owners have repeatedly and autocratically expropriated adjacent lands.

In 2001, in a particularly brutal example of land-taking, in the small village of Tabaco, Colombian military police evicted the residents and held them at bay while mining company bulldozers razed their homes.

Now and in the coming years, dozens of small communities and farms - perhaps 5,000 people - are at similar risk.

Viewed from a distance here in the United States, it is tempting to try to make sense of the strife by seeing the misfortune of native Colombians as the regrettable, but inevitable, by-product and necessary growing pains of an industrializing nation and a nascent capitalist economy. After all, we had our own Industrial Revolution, with its dirty factories, mines, pollution, land degradation, labor exploitation, and other excesses.

But this is not 1850, or even 1950; and the abuses in Colombia today are totally gratuitous and are occurring in a tiny, media-lit world where even the remotest village understands the injustice being perpetrated against it. Furthermore, in increasingly dangerous ways, the continuing assaults on the villages of Colombia wear an American stamp of approval.

Because one-third of Cerrejon's coal is purchased by northeastern U.S. power plants, the eight or nine American energy companies that run our eastern coal plants could exert significant pressure on the owners of the mine to reduce pollution, cease labor abuses, and reimburse and relocate villagers who have been displaced. That American companies don't make bigger objections to human rights abuses in Colombia reflects very poorly on our nation's image.

It is just this sort of foreign-policy-by-default that helps to sow and feed the resentments against American hegemony that we have seen in the Mideastern oil states. And the fact that the social, political, environmental, and human costs of both oil and coal production are in service to gluttonous American consumption, further undermines the legitimacy of our attempts at leadership.

Ironically, private citizens - like Chomsky and her colleagues - are demonstrating the sort of diplomacy and engagement with affected Colombians that the U.S. government might profitably emulate. Chomsky's group met with mine officials, political leaders, union organizers, and villagers threatened by the mine.

The delegation, which hopes to return to the Guajira area again with health professionals in November, will continue to publicize the injustices occurring in the region and will continue to press U.S. power companies to insist on improvements in the operation of the Cerrejon mine.

Brian T. Watson of Swampscott is a regular Viewpoint columnist.