The land Alcoa dammed A struggling country's past and future shaped by Alcoa and its aluminum
It electrified this South American country even as it drowned a jungle, so the 1.2-mile-long dam Alcoa built here to harness the Suriname River is more than stone and turbines. It’s a symbol, in this tropical land of 560,000, of progress, trauma and a global company’s ability to dominate a little country’s landscape and society.
Now the Alcoa Corp. is leaving Suriname, and the Afobaka Dam’s future rivets everyone from the capital’s dealmakers to the forest’s subsistence farmers.
In a country just north of the equator that would fit within a combined Pennsylvania and West Virginia — a country that’s already in a downturn locals call “the crisis” — Alcoa’s decision to permanently end mining and refining has delivered a resonating blow.
Alcoa, the aluminum company founded in Pittsburgh in 1888 that eventually spanned six continents, set up shop here in 1916 when it found bauxite beneath the jungle floor. Cutthroat conditions in the global aluminum market compelled a shutdown in November 2015.
Halfway through that century, Alcoa finished the dam, flooding a forest people’s heartland but also jolting a plantation-based economy into the industrial age. Alcoa created mammoth mining and refining sites and raucous river towns, building a middle class while toughing out a nation’s independence, civil war and an unstable government.
“You need to understand that after 100 years of [Alcoa] being in Suriname, this thing is so emotional for Surinamers,” said Ruben Halfhuid, managing director of Suralco, the Alcoa subsidiary in the country. “But there are also people who are thinking of these things ... in an adult way.”
Controversial negotiations between the company and the government — focused largely on the dam but also on environmental and humanitarian issues — are coming to a head, even as protests against the president’s economic policies clog the streets. Alcoa’s departure from a country with little global profile could test the company’s commitment to a sustainable approach to metals.
“We are not strong against a company like Alcoa,” said Jennifer Simons, chair of Suriname’s National Assembly. “This is a very large thing for a small country.”
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