Mayan indigenous communities in eastern Guatemala are waging an ongoing struggle for the defense of their lands and resources, in the face of encroachment by mining, power and oil corporations. These struggles have resulted in protests on behalf of the affected communities and against the Guatemalan government's repression of activists and indigenous inhabitants, and have now reached the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. CREDIT: Courtesy of Raúl Ico Pacham/FB

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Feb 21 2022 (IPS)

A struggle for the defense of their territories waged by indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in eastern Guatemala could set a historic precedent for Latin America’s native peoples because it would ensure not only their right to control their lands but also their natural resources, denied for centuries.

This could happen if the Inter-American Court of Human Rights based in San José, Costa Rica rules in favor of these communities involved in litigation for the defense of their ancestral territories and for control over their own future and development.

The struggle is against a nickel mine operated since 2011 by the Switzerland-based transnational Solway Investment Group on lands in Guatemala that these communities consider their own, in the municipality of El Estor near Lake Izabal, in the department of the same name in eastern Guatemala."We hope it will be a historic decision, that the Court can decide for the first time on the permanent sovereignty of indigenous peoples over their natural resources.” -- Leonardo Crippa

The mine is a private venture over which the local indigenous communities had no say. Furthermore, they argue that there is evidence that it is contaminating the area’s natural resources, lawyers and activists told IPS.

The mine “pollutes the rivers, destroys the hills, without regard for the lives of the people in the municipality,” said activist Abelino Chub of the Maíz de Vida Association, in an interview with IPS from El Estor.

Chub, of the Mayan Q’eqchi indigenous people, lives in El Estor and has worked for years in defense of indigenous territories in Izabal, in the face of inroads made by international consortiums in the production of nickel, bananas, electricity and oil, he said.

Because of his involvement in that struggle he was arrested and imprisoned in February 2017, as part of a pattern of persecution that other people who have fought against the transnationals have also experienced firsthand.

Solway Investment has been operating the mine since 2011, after purchasing it from the Canadian corporation Hudbay Minerals, which obtained the exploration permit in 2004 and the mining permit in 2006.

However, work on the mine came to a halt when Guatemala’s Constitutional Court accepted an appeal for legal protection from a union of fishermen from Izabal, who alleged that fishing had been hurt by pollution from the mine.

In addition to Guatemala, Solway Investment operates in Ukraine, Russia, Macedonia and Indonesia, and in 2019 reported more than one billion dollars in total assets, according to its official website.

Abelino Chub, a Mayan Q’eqchi’ activist from the Maíz de Vida Association, who is part of the struggle in defense of the Mayan territories located in the area of El Estor and surrounding municipalities in the eastern Guatemalan department of Izabal, was arrested and imprisoned in February 2017 for opposing extractivist projects granted concessions by the Guatemalan government in the area. CREDIT: Courtesy of Abelino Chub/FB

In the hands of the Court

Since 1974, more than a dozen Q’eqchi’ Mayan communities have been trying to obtain a collective land title from the government’s National Land Fund (Fontierras).

But the government of that time and subsequent administrations denied them that right, despite the fact that since that year they have met all the legal requirements.

In 1985 they even obtained a provisional collective agrarian title, attorney Leonardo Crippa of the Washington-based Indian Law Resource Center (ILRC) told IPS.

In 2002 the communities met the last of the requirements: the payment to Fontierras of a quota on the value of the land, Crippa said from the U.S. capital.

But they were denied their right to collective title as a result of obscure legal maneuvering.

The General Property Registry claimed that documentation on the provisional title had been lost, and demanded that the communities themselves make the effort to replace it, despite the fact that by law it was the responsibility of the government agency.

“The Registry allowed a page from a document to be extracted that made the registry entry disappear and that prevented the land titling agency from granting the definitive title in due time and form,” Crippa said.

As a result, the communities were not only denied their right to collective ownership of their land. In addition, extractive industry projects were imposed on them in their territory, and in other indigenous communities in the country, without carrying out the consultations required by law, or without conducting them properly.

In the case of the nickel mine, “they never asked the communities, they only asked the workers to sign some forms in support of the supposed consultation,” said Chub, 39.

The mining activities are carried out on overlapping lands, i.e., the boundaries are unclear and intermingle with those of the indigenous villages, due to problems in the land registry, and to date the discrepancy is still in place.

Following the struggles of the Mayan communities to defend their territories, which included the seizure of land in eastern Guatemala, the Guatemalan government authorized evictions that turned violent. Now the Maya Q’eqchi’ communities await an Inter-American Court of Human Rights ruling. CREDIT: Courtesy of Raúl Ico Pacham/FB

These indigenous communities, where the majority of the population speaks only their ancestral Mayan language, Q’eqchi’, did not stand idly by.

In August 2018, following legal action in Guatemala, they brought the case before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), based in Washington.

The ILRC had been working with them since 2005 and three years later they had a clear strategy: to focus on one of the 16 communities, known as Agua Caliente, because it best represented the indigenous cause.

Agua Caliente is home to some 400 people, according to a 2014 census.

In a March 2020 report, the IACHR recognized the responsibility of the State of Guatemala for the violation of the indigenous community’s right to property, and violation of due process, among other rights protected by the American Convention on Human Rights.

Furthermore, the IACHR added that the State does not have a law that recognizes the right of indigenous peoples in Guatemala to collective ownership or dominion of their lands and the resources under their possession, as guaranteed by international agreements to which the country is a signatory.

The IACHR also said that the titling procedure to which Agua Caliente was subjected for more than 45 years had not been effective because it did not grant a definitive title within a reasonable period of time.

As the basis of the litigation still remains, regarding the overlapping of the Agua Caliente and mine lands, the case has been referred to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which together with the IACHR make up the inter-American human rights system created by the Organization of American States (OAS).

In a Feb. 9 hearing the parties were heard, and final arguments will be presented in writing on Mar. 11.

“We hope it will be a historic decision, that the Court can decide for the first time on the permanent sovereignty of indigenous peoples over their natural resources,” said Crippa. As an Inter-American Court verdict, this would have regional effects, especially since its rulings are not subject to appeal and set a legal precedent.

Raúl Ico Pacham, a Mayan Q’eqchi’ native of the Chab’ilch’och’ community in the municipality of Livingston, in the eastern Guatemalan department of Izabal, had to flee the country following the persecution of activists in defense of their ancestral territories. He is now living as an undocumented immigrant in New York and has applied for political asylum in the United States. CREDIT: Courtesy of Raúl Ico Pacham/FB

Government persecution of activists

In the midst of this struggle, in October 2021, the State of Guatemala, through the Public Prosecutor’s Office and police forces, persecuted people who led protests against the government for granting the concession, and against the mine.

The government also declared a one-month state of siege in the area.

“They did that to scare people,” said Chub, who had to flee because he feared for his life, mainly because of his involvement in the fight against banana companies in the area.

He added, however, that in this area there are several major companies that band together to persecute activists regardless of whether they are fighting against mining, oil or banana companies.

Chub’s home was raided on Oct. 26, during the state of siege. But he had already fled to another part of the country.

“They broke the lock with a sledgehammer and entered. The only thing they found there was water, corn and beans,” he said.

Raúl Ico Pacham, who also belongs to the Q’eqchi’ Mayan people, had to leave Guatemala, fleeing persecution by the State. He is a native of Livingston, one of the municipalities in the department of Izabal, and has been an activist with the Guatemalan Comité Campesino del Altiplano (CCDA).

“My struggle was, more than anything, for the recovery of our ancestral lands that had been taken from us long ago by landowners and the military,” Pacham, 35, told IPS in an interview from New York, where he arrived without documents in April 2021 and has requested political asylum.

In 2016 the activist participated with other members of the affected indigenous communities in a takeover of ancestral lands. But the government ordered their eviction, a process that turned violent in October 2017.

In August of that year they broke into his house and stole, he said, documents from investigations they were carrying out on the land that had been taken from the indigenous people.

“In 2021 I was almost killed, I was stabbed and I had to leave the country,” he said.

Residents of the municipality of San Rafael Las Flores maintain a permanent sit-down in front of the Constitutional Court, in the centre of Guatemala’s capital, to demand that the country's highest court rule on the demand for a suspension of the San Rafael mining company's permit to operate a mine in that municipality. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
GUATEMALA CITY, May 4 2018 (IPS)

Rosa Dávila is busy cooking ears of corn, to be eaten by the men and women who have set up a checkpoint on the side of the road to block the passage of supplies sent to a mining company that operates in the area.

The San Rafael mining company, a subsidiary of the Canadian company Tahoe Resources, is located on the outskirts of San Rafael Las Flores, a town 96 km southeast of Guatemala City, in the department of Santa Rosa.

The roadblock has been mounted by the inhabitants of Casillas, a neighbouring rural municipality, located a few kilometres down the road, and which cannot be avoided on the way to the mine. Other transit points have also been blocked by the “resistance”, as the anti-mining protesters refer to themselves.

“The first thing we want, for God’s sake, is for them to go back to their country,” said Dávila, a 48-year-old homemaker and mother of seven, as she stoked the fire.

The residents of this and other neighbouring municipalities are firmly opposed to the company’s mining operations, due to the social and environmental damage they say has been caused since they began in 2007.

Conflicts like this have broken out in other areas of Guatemala and in other Central American countries, not only with mining companies but also with hydroelectric power companies.

“It’s not fair, and the worst thing is that they never asked us if we wanted these companies to come here,” Dávila told IPS while moving about in the kitchen set up in an improvised camp, which IPS visited on Apr. 29.

The lack of prior consultations with the communities where such projects are installed is a recurrent problem in the countries of Central America, whose governments fail to comply with international regulations that call for prior consultation over whether or not the population approves of these investments.

In late April, environmental organisations held in the Guatemalan capital the Second Regional Meeting of the Central American Alliance against Mining, which concluded with the requirement that the governments of the region comply with international and regional obligations to guarantee the right to free, prior and informed consultation.

“We call upon Central American governments to reflect on the viability of what they call development, when we know that the extractive industry is a model of destruction and death for our countries,” explained Julio González, of the Guatemalan environmental organisation MadreSelva, at the end of the meeting, on Apr. 27.

That organisation and the other participants in the meeting have joined forces in the regional Alliance against mining, in order to constitute a block with more power in the face of the activities of the extractive industries in Central America.

In the municipality of Casillas, in the department of Santa Rosa, in Guatemala, local inhabitants erected a roadblock on the road that leads to the San Rafael Las Flores mine, blocking the passage of trucks carrying supplies to the site. In the picture, Rosa Dávila (centre) peels ears of corn in the activists’ improvised camp. Credit: Edgardo Ayala / IPS

One of the rules under which the organisation operates is ILO Convention 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples, in force since September 1991, which has been ratified by 22 countries, including all countries in Central America except El Salvador and Panama.

Article 6 of the Convention establishes that governments shall “consult the peoples concerned, through appropriate procedures (…) whenever consideration is being given to legislative or administrative measures which may affect them directly,” such as when a national or municipal state institution grants a concession to international consortiums.

But that is basically dead letter in the Central American countries that have ratified it, said activists consulted by IPS during the meeting.

The governments have not promoted consultations, because they believe that important development projects would be halted, so it is the affected communities that have carried out their own consultations, they added.

In Guatemala, where 63 percent of the population is indigenous, around 90 such consultations have been held, by show of hands.

“Before the hydroelectric companies were to arrive, we began to carry out consultations, and we asked whether these businesses have the right to take our rivers, and the vast majority said no,” 69-year-old Mayan Indian Cirilo Acabal Osorio told IPS.

So far they have managed to stop attempts by companies to install projects in the eight communities putting up resistance in that region, which are predominantly Mayan, said the native of Zona Reina, municipality of Uspatán, in the department of Quiche in northwestern Guatemala.

In Honduras more than 40 open town meetings have been held in which the population of different localities has rejected similar projects, said Pedro Landa, of the Reflection, Research and Communication Team (ERIC), attached to the Jesuits.

“But the State continues to ignore the will of the people,” he said.

Environmentalist activists said local governments in the area consider the consultation processes to be non-binding, and as a result do not take them into account.

Before the Salvadoran legislature approved, in March 2017, a historic law prohibiting metal mining in all its forms, civil society organisations carried out popular consultations in at least four municipalities, under the Municipal Code.

For now there is no need for further consultations, as the law banned mining company investments. But the spectre of mining is still present after the right-wing parties, its natural allies, obtained an overwhelming majority in the Legislative Assembly in the Mar. 4 elections, warned Rodolfo Calles, of the Association for the Development of El Salvador (CRIPDES).

Convention 169 refers only to indigenous peoples, although the experts said in the meeting that national laws that serve the same purpose can be applied: people affected by any industrial activity must be informed and consulted beforehand.

“In the case of countries that do not have indigenous communities, they will use other mechanisms that they undoubtedly have, such as referendums,” Sonia Gutiérrez, an expert with the Association of Mayan Lawyers and Notaries of Guatemala, told IPS.

The extractive industry has no economic weight in the region, despite its impacts on the environment and on production in the communities where it operates, Nicaraguan activist Olman Onel told IPS. He pointed out that in his country, for example, it only contributes one percent of GDP and 0.66 percent of employment.

On the other hand, the participants in the forum denounced the police and judicial persecution suffered by environmentalists in the whole region, as a mechanism to silence opposition to such projects.

Landa, of ERIC, said that in Honduras, where more than 800 extractive projects and 143 hydroelectric projects have been approved in recent years, at least 127 environmentalists have been killed, including Berta Cáceres.

She was riddled by bullets on Mar. 3, 2016, for her fierce opposition to the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam, located between the departments of Santa Bárbara and Intibucá, in the northwest of the country.

Meanwhile, in San Rafael Las Flores, local inhabitants have organised to defend their land and their livelihood, agriculture, although the damage caused by the extractive activity is already evident, they said.

Rudy Pivaral, a 62-year-old farmer, told IPS that the impacts on the flora and fauna are already being felt, and there is a decrease and drying up of water sources, which makes it impossible to continue producing two or three harvests a year, in addition to the health problems associated with water pollution.

Around 96 families in the village of La Cuchilla, on a hill next to the site, had to be evicted because of damage to the walls of the houses, due to the vibrations produced by the drilling in the ground.

A street in the village of the Truká indigenous people, whose territory was divided in two by the diversion of the São Francisco River, on Assunção island in Northeast Brazil. Large-scale infrastructure projects, and the oil and mining industries have directly affected indigenous people in Latin America. Credit: Gonzalo Gaudenzi / IPS

By Fabiana Frayssinet
ISLA DE ASSUNÇÃO, Brazil , Mar 17 2018 (IPS)

Indigenous communities in Latin America, who have suffered the plunder of their natural resources since colonial times, are reliving that phenomenon again as mega infrastructure are jeopardising their habitat and their very survival.

On the island of Assunção in Northeast Brazil, the village of the Truká indigenous people was split in two when the flow of the São Francisco River was diverted.

“The Truká people have always been from this region. We are an ancient people in this territory. We have always lived on the riverbank fishing, hunting, planting crops. We did not need a canal,” lamented Claudia Truká, leader of the village in the municipality of Cabrobó, in the state of Pernambuco."However, the peasant and indigenous communities of the region - continually subjected to persecution, dispossession and defamation - have historically resisted, and continue to resist, encroachment." -- Luciana Guerreiro

The transfer, officially called the São Francisco River Integration Project, seeks to capture the river’s water through 713 km of canals, aqueducts, reservoirs, tunnels and pumping systems.

According to the government, the largest national infrastructure work of this type will ensure the water security of 12 million people in 390 municipalities in the states of Pernambuco, Ceará, Paraíba and Rio Grande do Norte and will benefit rural and riverbank communities.

But the project, according to what Truká told IPS, will hinder the process of demarcation of indigenous territories and will not bring them any benefits.

“The transfer will have many negative effects. It affects the vegetation and our animals, and it draws water from the river, not to bring water to those who are thirsty but to favour agribusiness. There are other ways to solve the lack of water,” she said.

“We were already colonised by the Casa de la Torre (an estate transformed into a sort of barracks from which ranchers conducted raids of indigenous lands in the seventeenth century), which together with the Capuchin (Cacholic Franciscan order) favoured that process. Once again the Truká people are going through a process of colonisation,” she said.

In the department of Madre de Dios, in the Amazon jungle in southeastern Peru, the Harakbut indigenous people are suffering the impacts of another megaproject.

In 2006, the U.S.-based Hunt Oil company was granted a concession to a plot of land for the exploration and exploitation of natural gas, overlapping with the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve, in the ancestral territory of the Harakbut.

In 2017, the company handed over that land because it had obtained no conclusive results within the deadlines for the exploration. However, there are five other producers interested in resuming the megaproject, Andrea Cardoso, a professor at the Arturo Jauretche National University, told IPS from Argentina.

“The withdrawal of Hunt Oil from Harakbut territory does not mean that the problem has been solved, the impacts on the forest continue and have left their marks,” she said.

According to Cardoso “the presence of the oil company has generated divisions in the communities, even within families.”

“The company’s so-called public relations officers have convinced many indigenous people to work for them, or to accept goods or money. But other members of the communities continue to work on raising awareness about the oil industry’s irreversible impacts on the forests,” she said.

In addition, the camps of company workers “generate diseases and the breakdown of the social fabric,” Cardoso said.

An “oca”, a traditional and ceremonial construction of the Truká indigenous people, where they celebrate their rituals, has a wooden cross on the outside, a vestige of the Portuguese Catholic colonisation, in the Truká village on Assunção island in the northeastern state of Pernambuco, Brazil. Credit: Gonzalo Gaudenzi / IPS

The oil industry activity there is being carried out at the headwaters of several rivers, “which are the only sources of water for more than 10,000 people, including indigenous people and non-native colonists,” she added.

For that reason, she said, “the rivers get polluted, with solid and liquid waste dumped directly into the forests and rivers, contaminating the soil and water and therefore also fish, one of the main sources of food for these communities.”

The researcher pointed out that the indigenous people of the Amazon basin, shared by eight South American countries, “know their territory better than anyone else. They are adapted to their environment and have great knowledge of the soils, flora and fauna, as well as their own technologies to take advantage of their natural resources, playing a role as guardians of the environment.”

According to Cardoso, the case of the Harakbut people must be analysed in a broader Latin American context.

Since the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, she said, “indigenous movements in Latin America have been at the centre of the political and social scene, in the framework of neoliberal practices implemented by different governments of the region,” with the influx of transnational capital for exploration and exploitation of fossil fuels.

“It’s in this context that there has been a loss of control over the common goods of nature and of indigenous peoples’ territories, as a consequence of the territorial dispossession, in a cycle of transnational extractivism that threatens our Americas,” she concluded.

In Ecuador, René Unda, from the Salesian Polytechnic University, highlighted the case of the Mirador-San Carlos Panantza Project, in the Condor mountain range, on the Amazonian western border with Peru, which plans to mine for gold, silver and copper “compromising several watersheds, nature reserves and forests that play a protective role.”

Unda said from Quito that one of the most affected indigenous peoples in the initial exploration stage are the Shuar, on both the Ecuadorian and Peruvian sides.

In a fragile ecosystem, a mining project of this scope “involves a profound transformation of their ways of life and their modes of survival,” he told IPS.

They are guardians of the environment “with their struggle and resistance. Not only against the coalitions that represent the interests of the government and of the corporations, but also against sectors of their own peoples who support the mining projects,” said Unda.

Luciana Guerreiro, an expert in indigenous autonomy processes at the University of Buenos Aires Gino Germani Research Institute, said that in Argentina, “one of the main threats to indigenous populations is the expansion of large-scale mining.”

One emblematic case is in Andalgalá, in Argentina’s northwestern province of Catamarca, where the Minera Alumbrera mining company has operated the first open-pit mine in Argentina for more than 20 years, currently in the process of closure and clean-up, she told IPS.

Guerreiro explained that “these ventures not only plunder the mineral resources and wealth of the territories they exploit, but also the water, a fundamental element in areas where it is scarce, leaving local people and their main traditional productive activities devastated and impoverished” and affecting their spirituality and their relationship with nature.

Another case is that of the Diaguita community of Aguas Calientes, in the north of the same Argentine province, which is fighting to keep out mining companies such as Buena Vista Gold.

“In these cases the only thing the communities can do is resist, protest and stop by their own means those who try to steal their land,” said the expert.

“The defence of the territories carried out by the Diaguita communities becomes a socio-environmental defence, since their territories also include the Laguna Blanca Biosphere Reserve, a protected natural area of great planetary importance for its biodiversity,” she said.

The Diaguita communities, she stressed, “maintain a close link with nature, which means protecting and respecting it; a spiritual relationship, with what they consider mother earth or ‘Pachamama’.”

According to Guerreiro, the “pattern of development” in Latin America “responds to the logic of the global financial markets…and keeps alive colonial relations, denying the specificity of territories and populations with their own ways of life, and recreating relations of subordination and exploitation.”

“However, the peasant and indigenous communities of the region – permanently subjected to persecution, dispossession and defamation – have historically resisted, and continue to resist, encroachment,” she said.

César Augusto Jaco, a member of an environmental community network, takes part in one of the demonstrations in support of the new law that bans metal mining in El Salvador, on March 29, in front of parliament. The measure, the first of its kind in the world, responds to a lengthy struggle by environmentalists and local communities. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Apr 3 2017 (IPS)

El Salvador, Central America’s smallest country, has become the first country in the world to pass a law banning metal mining in all its forms, setting a precedent for other nations in the world to follow, according to activists and local residents.

“This is historic; we are sending a signal to the world that countries can take a different path and say ‘no’ to the mining industry,” Edgardo Mira, an environmental activist with the National Council Against Metal Mining, an umbrella group of local organisations, told IPS.

With 69 votes out of 84, the members of the single-chamber Legislative Assembly passed on March 29 the landmark law, whose 11 articles amount to a blanket ban on mining, whether underground or surface.

Dozens of jubilant activists gathered early that day outside parliament to demand the approval by the plenary session of the ban agreed the day before by the legislature’s Environment and Climate Change Committee.““This is historic; we are sending a signal to the world that countries can take a different path and say ‘no’ to the mining industry.” -- Edgardo Mira

“I have visited the old mines which were active last century, where you can clearly see the impacts, such as acid drainage in the rivers, which would happen in the rest of the country,” retiree César Augusto Jaco, from the populous neighborhood of Cuscatancingo in the capital, told IPS.

Holding a sign with a yellow background and an image of a skull in black, the 76-year-old member of the Network of Community Environmentalists of El Salvador, said outside parliament: “Mining is disastrous, there’s no way it’s not going to damage our water sources.”

The risk of damaging the country’s groundwater reserves has been one of the main reasons driving the struggle of activists against the extractive industry, which uses millions of litres of water to obtain gold.

El Salvador is one of the most environmentally vulnerable countries, according to international agencies.

The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, the Latin American Water Tribunal, the International Water Association and the Global Water Partnership (GWP) concur that the country is heading toward a situation of water stress, researcher, José Simeón Cañas Central American University (UCA) researcher Andrés McKinley told IPS.

The law also prohibits the use of cyanide, mercury and other elements used in mining But it offers a two-year grace period to small-scale miners, so they can find another source of income.

Mira, from the National Council, estimated the number of artisanal miners at about 300, mostly in the San Sebastián mine in Santa Rosa de Lima, in the eastern department of La Unión.

Because the law is retroactive, it blocks all pending exploration permits.

The 2015 report “The Threat of Metal Mining in a Thirsty World,” written by McKinley and published by the UCA, documents the cases of countries where the activity has been restricted, but not banned outright.

Costa Rica, the report notes, passed a law in 2012 that banned open pit metal mining, while still allowing underground mining.

In 2002, the government of the province of Oriental Mindoro, in the Philippines, passed a 35-year moratorium on mining projects, and in 2011, the province of Zamboanga did the same with open-pit mining.

In 2014, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) vetoed the Pebble mine in the state of Alaska, to protect the largest habitat in the world of red or sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka).

Earlier, in 1989, the then president of Venezuela, Carlos Andrés Pérez, imposed a 50-year moratorium on all mining activity in the southern state of Amazonas. But that did not stop the expansion of illegal mining in that jungle region, while the current government reverted the measure de facto, allowing mining activity in the area.

“El Salvador is the first country in the world to evaluate the costs and benefits of the mining industry for the country and to exercise its right to say no,” McKinley told IPS.

The approval of the law was a product of many factors that combined to convince lawmakers to finally respond to the longstanding call from activists and local communities for a ban.

Among them, the pressure from environmentalist organisations that have struggled to that end for over a decade, and from the Catholic Church, which endorsed the popular demand.

On March 9, San Salvador’s archbishop, Luis Escobar Alas, led a march against metal mining to parliament, where they handed over a bill drawn up by the UCA, which formed the basis of the law that was finally adopted.

“The Catholic Church has enormous power in El Salvador, and its support for the struggle by local communities did not start this year, but in 2007, when it took a stance, at the Episcopal Conference, with its document Let’s Take Care of Everyone’s Home,” said McKinley.

The law is the culmination of years of struggle by environmental organisations and community leaders against, above all, the El Dorado mine in the central department of Cabañas, operated by the Pacific Rim company, now OceanaGold since it was acquired in 2013 by the Australian-Canadian corporation.

The company sued El Salvador for 250 million dollars in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), after the rightwing Salvadoran government of the time cancelled its exploration permit in 2008.

The two successive governments of the leftist Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front have maintained this de facto moratorium since 2009.

In October 2016, ICSID ruled in favour of El Salvador, and ordered the company to pay eight million dollars in legal expenses, which it has failed to do.

And in a new setback, the body ruled on March 28 that the corporation must also pay interest on the debt, at a monthly rate between two and five per cent, on back payments dating to October.

These rulings also contributed to generating a climate conducive to approval of the ban.

“We are celebrating the triumph of our struggle, and our celebration continues out there in the communities where the people have been fighting,” Rina Navarrete, the coordinator of the Friends of San Isidro Cabañas Association, told IPS.i

She added that the accomplishment was a vindication of the work by “the fallen martyrs in this struggle against the mining corporation” – a reference to Ramiro Rivera, Marcelo Rivera (not related) and Dora Alicia Sorto, environmentalists killed by hitmen between June and December 2009, in the town of Cabañas.

Navarrete, a single mother of two who lives in the municipality of Llano de la Hacienda, in Cabañas, has taken up the work of the late Marcelo Rivera.

The activists were shot presumably because of their opposition to the activities of Pacific Rim in that area, although this has not been confirmed by the legal authorities.

José María Arévalo, Héctor Berríos and Juan Hernán Molina (left to right), on the bank of the Titihuapa river, are three inhabitants of the Salvadoran town of Llano de La Hacienda, who are fighting against the El Dorado mine. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN ISIDRO, El Salvador , May 29 2014 (IPS)

Mining is not viable in this country, say Salvador Sánchez Cerén – who will be sworn in as the new president of El Salvador on Jun. 1 – and his team of environmental advisers.

The struggle waged by many rural communities affected by mining lies behind the position taken by the left-wing president-elect.

One of the highest profile cases is the town of Llano de La Hacienda, in central El Salvador, whose 1,200 inhabitants mainly grow maize, beans and squash, and graze cattle – but who more recently have also been dedicated to fighting gold mining.

Local residents were the first line of resistance against Pacific Rim, the Canadian corporation that sued the Salvadoran state in 2009 for refusing to grant it a permit for the El Dorado gold mine.

The town is in the mountains of the municipality of San Isidro in the department or province of Cabañas, 65 km northwest of San Salvador. The mine is its unwanted neighbour.

The company was acquired in November 2013 by Australia’s OceanaGold, for 10.2 mllion dollars.

The lawsuit was initially for 77 million dollars, but the amount was increased last year to 301 million dollars, in a case being heard in the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), a member of the World Bank Group in Washington.

The decisive hearing is slated to be held in September.

For the people of Llano de la Hacienda, the refusal of a mining permit to Pacific Rim was seen as a major triumph for local communities after years of intense opposition and social conflict that led, according to residents, to the murder of three activists between June and December 2009.

“Our entire struggle began over this river, to keep it from being polluted with cyanide,” local peasant farmer Juan Hernán Molina told IPS while resting on the banks of the Titihuapa river, which winds through the area’s hills and plains. Cyanide is a lethal ingredient used in gold extraction.

The Titihuapa river runs into the Lempa river, the largest in the country, which supplies water to the capital, San Salvador.

Another battle won by the environmental movement in El Salvador was an August 2013 ruling by ICSID which rejected a request by the Commerce Group, a U.S. mining company, to extend a 100 million dollar lawsuit against the Salvadoran state.

El Salvador had refused to renew the permit for the San Sebastián mine in the eastern department of La Unión, which the Commerce Group operated from 1987 to 2009.

In the case of Pacific Rim “a battle has been won, but not the war,” said José María Arévalo, another peasant farmer from Llano de la Hacienda.

“What we want is for it to be definitively banned,” he told IPS, walking along a path outside the town. “In all of these fields there are holes drilled by Pacific Rim, when it was searching for gold,” he adds, pointing them out.

Although the exploration work was brought to a halt, a small group of employees is still working in equipment maintenance and cleaning in the El Dorado mine, local residents told IPS.

Two years ago, environmental organisations grouped in the Mesa Nacional contra la Minería – a national umbrella group against mining – presented a proposed bill in Congress to prohibit mining because of the negative effects on health and the environment.

If it is approved, El Salvador would be following the lead of Costa Rica, which passed a law banning open pit mining in 2010. Panama approved a similar ban two years later, but only on indigenous lands in the western provinces of Bocas del Toro, Chiriquí and Veraguas.

Social organisations believe another bill, presented in 2012 by El Salvador’s Environment Ministry, falls short because it would merely suspend mining activity.

“We don’t support the idea of a moratorium, because it leaves the issue hanging, and gives companies time to prepare, whereas we want to just bring it to a halt once and for all,” said Héctor Berríos, a leader of the Movimiento Unificado Francisco Sánchez 1932 (MUFRAS 32) movement.

For years, the San Salvador-based organisation has been supporting communities in the province of Cabañas in their fight against the mining industry.

But neither the bill for a suspension of mining activity nor the one for a total ban have found support in the 84-member single-chamber legislature, where the right-wing parties, which have a majority, are opposed to both initiatives.

Sánchez Cerén’s left-wing former rebel Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has only 31 lawmakers, and is unlikely to drum up enough support to reach the 43 votes needed to move forward with the bill that would declare a moratorium on mining.

“The legislators should put themselves in our shoes, and look out for the health and well-being of the people and the quality of the water,” Roxana Ramírez, a young woman in San Isidro, told IPS while making pickles with three other women.

They are taking part in a project aimed at showing that the municipalities around the El Dorado mine can develop and generate employment without the need for jobs and incomes from the mining industry.

Patricia Pineda (front) and Roxana Ramírez, making pickles in the Salvadoran town of
San Isidro. Projects like this one are aimed at creating economic alternatives to mining in the area. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

“This is an alternative that can be taken up again in other communities,” added Ramírez, as she placed pieces of carrot and cauliflower in small bags with vinegar.

Sánchez Cerén, vice-president in the outgoing government, is a 69-year-old former schoolteacher and guerrilla who won the presidential elections in March, and who will have to prove that he will stand by his commitment to curb mining, which he repeated several times on the campaign trail.

The people he named to the Environment Ministry indicate that he at least plans to try. As deputy minister he appointed Ángel Ibarra, an activist who played a leading role in the struggle against Pacific Rim and against mining in general, in the organisation Unidad Ecológica Salvadoreña (Salvadoran Ecological Unit).

“The new president has reached the decision that mining is not viable in El Salvador,” Ibarra told IPS with conviction.

And the future environment minister is the current deputy minister Lina Pohl, one of the driving forces behind the effort to suspend mining, who recently stated once again that “there can be no mining activity” although she added “under the current conditions.”

But without the necessary number of votes in the legislature to push through a law to suspend or ban mining, it will remain a threat looming over rural communities.

In the shade of a tree next to the Titihuapa river, Arévalo said “We won’t rest until the politicians pass an anti-mining law, that is the only option.”

Rosa Tanguila, a Quechua indigenous woman, cleaning up the pollution caused by Texaco in a stream in her community, Rumipamba, in Ecuador’s Amazon jungle region. Credit: Gonzalo Ortiz/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada , May 18 2014 (IPS)

Conflicts with local communities over mining, oil and gas development are costing companies billions of dollars a year. One corporation alone reported a six billion dollar cost over a two-year period according to the first-ever peer-reviewed study on the cost of conflicts in the extractive sector.

The Pascua Lama gold mining project in Chile has cost Canada’s Barrick Gold 5.4 billion dollars following 10 years of protests and irregularities. No gold has ever been mined and the project has been suspended on court order.

And in Peru, the two billion dollar Conga copper mining project was suspended in 2011 after protests broke out over the projected destruction of four high mountain lakes. The U.S.-based Newmont Mining Co, which also operates the nearby Yanacocha mine, has now built four reservoirs which, according to its plan, are to be used instead of the lakes.

“Communities are not powerless. Our study shows they can organise and mobilise, which results in substantial costs to companies,” said co-author Daniel Franks of Australia’s University of Queensland, who is also deputy director of the Centre for Social Responsibility in Mining.

“Unfortunately conflicts can also result in bloodshed and loss of life,” Franks told Tierramérica.

The study is based on 45 in-depth, confidential interviews with high-level officials in the extractive (energy and mining) industries with operations around the world.

“Conflict translates environmental and social risk into business costs” was published May 12 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). A special report “Costs of Company-Community Conflict in the Extractive Sector” based on the study is also available.

“We wanted to document the costs of bad relationships with communities. Companies aren’t fully aware and only some investors know the extent of the risk,” Franks said.

“If companies are interested in securing their profits then they need to have high environmental and social standards and collaborate with communities,” Franks said in an interview.

Investing in building relationships with communities is far less costly than conflict. Local people are not generally opposed to development. What they oppose is having little say or control over how development proceeds, he added.

“We want development that benefits indigenous people and doesn’t just benefit someone’s brother-in-law,” said Alberto Pizango, president of the  Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP), an indigenous rights organisation in Peru representing 1,350 Amazon jungle communities.

Peruvian indigenous leader Alberto Pizango, who is on trial in connection with the 2009 massacre in Bagua, has at the same time been asked by the Environment Ministry to help plan the next climate summit. Credit: Coimbra Sirica/BurnessGlobal

“Indigenous people have something to say about harmonious development with nature. We don’t want development that destroys our beloved Amazon,” Pizango told Tierrámerica from Lima.

Pizango has been actively resisting the government of Peru’s selling of petroleum concessions to foreign companies on lands legally titled to indigenous people.

The struggle turned violent outside the northern jungle town of Bagua on Jun. 5, 2009, when armed riot police moved to evict peaceful protesters blocking a road. In the clash 24 police officers and 10 civilians were killed.

Pizango and 52 other indigenous leaders were charged with inciting violence and 18 other crimes. They went on trial May 14 in Bagua.

The indigenous people were protesting 10 legislative decrees they considered unconstitutional, which were put in place by the government to foment private investment in native territories.

“We had no choice and thought our protests were fair and that we were right. But it was too high a price. We don’t want to see that again. We want to move from the ‘big protest’ to the ‘big proposal,” said Pizango, who faces a life sentence if he is found guilty.

The study published in PNAS shows that the violence in Bagua could have been avoided if companies and the government acknowledged indigenous rights and worked with local communities.

“It is with great sadness I say this has yet to happen in Peru,” said Pizango, who was not even in Bagua when the violent clash occurred.

Meanwhile, Peru’s Environment Ministry has asked Pizango and AIDESEP to assist in the planning of the big U.N. climate conference to be held in Lima at the end of the year. The indigenous leader hopes the event will show the world that native people can protect the forest and the climate.

Repairing relationships between communities and companies and governments is difficult, said Rachel Davis, a Fellow at the Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative at Harvard University.

“It is much harder for a company to repair its relationship with a local community after it has broken down; relationships cannot be ‘retro-fitted’,” said Davis, a co-author of the study.

Franks compares this to a divorce, pointing out that only rarely do partners remarry.

Leading mining corporations have apparently begun to understand this, and are implementing the U.N. Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and adopting the International Council on Mining and Metals Sustainable Development Framework, Davis said in a statement.

But this is not the case in the oil and gas sector. “Their culture is very different. They’re not used to dealing with communities,” said Franks.

The study shows that environmental and water issues are the biggest triggers of conflicts. Activities like hydraulic fracking for unconventional gas and oil are on the rise and are affecting water. Big conflicts are coming, he predicts.

“It’s a good report but doesn’t address the broader economic and political pressure to push projects through quickly,” said Jamie Kneen of MiningWatch Canada.

Shareholders want big returns on their investments and governments want their royalties sooner rather than later. All of this makes corporations less willing to compromise or to take the time to find alternatives that might be acceptable to local people,” Kneen told Tierrámerica.

“Companies know there will be problems with local communities. Companies often gamble that any conflict will not get too high a profile and try to hide this risk from investors,” he added.

Not all conflicts are resolvable, Kneen said. “Some communities will never accept any risk of contamination to their water.”

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Police accost women protesting against the Kudankulam nuclear plant in India. Credit: K. S. Harikrishnan/IPS.

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, May 23 2013 (IPS)

For years India’s pro-liberalisation, Congress party-led coalition government chafed at civil society groups getting in the way of grand plans to boost growth through the setting up of mega nuclear power parks, opening up the vast mineral-rich tribal lands to foreign investment and selling off public assets.

Now, at the end of its tether, the Interior Ministry has cracked the whip on hundreds of non-governmental organisations engaged in activities that “prejudicially affect the public interest.”

"...The government is trying to promote globalisation while cracking down on the globalisation of dissent." -- Achin Vanaik
On Apr. 30 several NGOs were informed that the bank accounts through which they receive foreign funding had been frozen.

“It is shocking what the government has done – but not surprising given the increasingly authoritarian, undemocratic and repressive measures being directed…against anyone who is seen to challenge or disagree with their positions and decisions,” Lalita Ramdas, anti-nuclear campaigner and board chair of Greenpeace International, told IPS.

Ramdas said NGOs concerned with nuclear power, human rights, environment and ecology – areas where corporate and industrial interests were likely to be questioned – appeared to be particular targets of the government order.

Among the worst affected is the Indian Social Action Forum (INSAF), a network of more than 700 NGOs that is currently challenging, in the Supreme Court, the government’s restrictions on foreign funding reaching groups that engage in activities that can be described as “political” in nature.

In its court petition INSAF described itself as an organisation that believes that “the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution of India need to be safeguarded against blatant and rampant violations by the State and private corporations.”

INSAF said it has “actively campaigned against land grabs by corporations, ecological disaster by mining companies, water privatisation, genetically modified foods, hazardous nuclear power (and) anti-people policies of international financial institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank.”

INSAF declared in court that it “firmly believes in a secular and peaceful social order and opposes communalism and the targeted attacks on the lives and rights of people including religious minorities, and regularly organises campaigns, workshops, conventions, fact-findings, people’s tribunals, solidarity actions for people’s movements and educational publications.”

“With that kind of a profile we were expecting this crackdown,” Anil Chaudhary, coordinator of INSAF, told IPS. “Still, the government could have waited for the Supreme Court verdict.”

“At this rate,” he said, “organisations working against discrimination of women and (advocating) for their empowerment through participation in local bodies could be termed “political”, as (well as) organisations working for farmers’ rights.

“The same arbitrariness can be applied to green NGOs trying to protect the environment against mindless industrialisation.”

Chaudhary thinks it unfair that NGOs critical of government policies are being singled out. “Instead of selectively freezing the funding of groups under INSAF, the government should order a blanket ban on all foreign funding.”

Among INSAF’s many campaigns is an intiative to bring international financial institutions like the World Bank under legislative scrutiny for their activities in India.

It cannot have escaped the government’s attention that INSAF’s campaigns have run parallel to powerful movements for transparency and clean governance led by social activist-turned-politician Arvind Kejriwal, founder of the Aam Admi Party (Common Man’s Party) that plans to contest general elections due in 2014.

Kejriwal, whose social activity led to the passage of the 2005 Right to Information Act, has also been closely associated with transparency campaigns led by Anna Hazare, who mounted a Gandhian-style fast against corruption in April 2011 that rallied over 100,000 ordinary people.

Street protests demanding good governance have since been a thorn in the side of the government.  When they peaked in December 2012, following the gang rape of a young woman in a bus in the national capital, police took to beating protestors.

The government, starting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, has also been frustrated by NGOs’ efforts to stall work on a string of mega nuclear parks along peninsular India’s long coastline, especially at Jaitapur in Maharashtra, Mithi Virdi in Gujarat and Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu.

In February, the government froze the accounts of two leading Tamil Nadu-based NGOs allegedly associated with the protests at the site of the Kudankulam plant, signalling a new and tough stance against civil society groups fighting the displacement of farmers and fishermen by mega development projects.

The two NGOs, the Tuticorin Diocesan Association and the Tamil Nadu Social Service Society, received four million and eight million dollars respectively over a five-year period that ended in 2011, according to declarations they made to the government.

With strong backing from the Church, the groups continue to operate despite the freeze on their assets.

During the same five-year period a total of about 22,000 NGOs across India received roughly two billion dollars in foreign contributions, going by government records.

Unexpected protests have surfaced from among the Congress party’s partners in the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA). Devi Prasad Tripathi, general secretary of the Nationalist Congress Party and member of parliament, reminded Interior Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde that the UPA is “committed to protecting and promoting secular, democratic and progressive forces in the country.”

“Effectively, the government is trying to promote globalisation while cracking down on the globalisation of dissent,” commented Achin Vanaik, professor of political science at the Delhi University.

The government’s move stands in stark contrast to promises made not two years ago at the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid and Development Effectiveness in Busan, South Korea, where 159 governments and member organisations honoured the vital role played by the non-profit sector by pledging to foster an “empowering” climate for civil society.

In his most recent report to the United Nations General Assembly, Maina Kiai, special rapporteur on the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, noted with grave concern that India has repressed “peaceful protestors advocating economic, social and cultural rights, such as…local residents denouncing the health impact of nuclear power plants.”