One of the voting centers of the popular consultation held on Sunday, Sept. 18 in Asunción Mita, a town of 50,000 people in eastern Guatemala. The majority of the people who voted said no to the Cerro Blanco mine, due to its environmental impacts. CREDIt: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
ASUNCIÓN MITA, Guatemala , Sep 21 2022 (IPS)

The majority of the Guatemalan population continues to oppose mining and other extractive projects, in the midst of a scenario of socio-environmental conflict that pits communities defending their natural resources against the interests of multinational corporations.

The most recent rejection of mining projects in this Central American country took place on Sunday Sept. 18 in the town of Asunción Mita, 350 kilometers southeast of the capital of Guatemala, in the department of Jutiapa.

The “No” vote wins

Here, through a citizen consultation, 88 percent of the more than 8,503 people who voted said “no” to the operations of the Cerro Blanco gold mine, owned by Elevar Resources, a subsidiary of Canada’s Bluestone Resources.

“In my view we can’t allow this to go ahead, we are getting older, but we don’t want the children and young people to suffer from the environmental impact of the mine,” said Petronila Hernández, 55, after voting at a school on the outskirts of Asunción Mita.

Hernández added to IPS that “we don’t agree with the mine, it affects our water sources, we carry the water from the water source, and the mine contaminates it.”

Hernández was accompanied by her daughter, Marilexis Ramos, 21.

“Hopefully our ‘No’ vote will win,” said Ramos during the voting. At the end of the afternoon the counting of votes began, and by Monday Sept. 19 the results began to be clear.

Mother and daughter live in the Cerro Liso hamlet, on the outskirts of Asunción Mita, very close to the mine.

Marilexis Ramos (r), 21, voted on the continuity of the Cerro Blanco mining project, located near Asunción Mita, 350 kilometers southeast of the Guatemalan capital, in the department of Jutiapa. A full 88 percent of the more than 8,503 people who voted said “no” to the gold and silver mine. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

The Cerro Blanco underground mine was licensed to operate in 2007 for a period of 25 years, but since then it has not been able to extract gold and silver, due to unforeseen issues.

The project encountered thermal water veins in the subsoil that released heat that made it impossible to work for long enough inside the two tunnels built in the mine, activist Juan Carlos Estrada, of the Water and Sanitation Network of Guatemala, told IPS.

“The mine has been stranded for almost 15 years without extracting a single ounce of ore,” Estrada said.

However, the community struggle continues because, despite the setback it suffered in Sunday’s vote, the company still intends to operate the mine and to do so it aims to modify the original plan and turn it into an open pit mine.

People vs. transnational corporations

Guatemala, a nation of 17.4 million inhabitants, has experienced socio-environmental conflicts in recent decades as a result of the communities’ defense of their territories against the advance of mining and hydroelectric projects and other extractivist activities.

Many of the conflicts have taken place in the territories of indigenous peoples, who make up 60 percent of the total population. Members of affected communities have put up resistance and have faced crackdowns by police and soldiers.

This has earned them persecution and criminalization by the authorities.

Dalia González, of the Salvadoran movement Green Rebellion, on the banks of the Ostúa River in eastern Guatemala, talks about the impact that pollution from the Cerro Blanco mine will have on the river, which in turn will end up polluting the Lempa River in El Salvador. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

In February, IPS reported on the struggle of indigenous Maya Q’eqchi’ communities in the municipality of El Estor, on the outskirts of Lake Izabal, in the department of the same name in eastern Guatemala.

The only active mine in Guatemala operates there, as similar projects have been blocked by the communities through citizen consultations or by court rulings, after the communities requested injunctions complaining about the lack of such votes, which are required.

The nickel mine in El Estor has been operated since 2011 by the transnational Solway Investment Group, headquartered in Switzerland, after purchasing it from Canada’s HudBay Minerals.

“Almost 100 consultations have been held, in 100 municipalities around the country, and in all of them mining and hydroelectric projects, mainly, have been rejected,” said José Cruz, of the environmental collective Madreselva.

The high number of consultations expresses the level of struggle of the population and the companies’ interest in the country’s natural resources.

“The only mining project currently operating is El Estor,” Cruz told IPS. And it is still active thanks to a “mock” consultation, manipulated by the company, which apparently endorsed the mine.

The Oxec I and Oxec II hydroelectric projects have also been a source of socio-environmental conflict.

The first plant began operations in 2015 and the second has been under construction since two years later. Both are owned by the Energy Resources Capital Corporation, registered in Panama.

In 2015, local Q’eqchi indigenous communities launched a struggle against the two hydroelectric power plants on the Cahabón River, located in the municipality of Santa María de Cahabón, in the department of Alta Verapaz in northern Guatemala.

After suffering persecution for his active participation in defense of his people’s territories, Q’eqchi leader Bernardo Caal was imprisoned in January 2018 and sentenced the following November to seven years in prison by a court “without any evidence,” as denounced at the time by Amnesty International, which considered him a prisoner of conscience.

However, he was released in March 2022 for good behavior and because there was essentially no evidence against him.

An anti-mining banner hangs on the façade of the church in Asunción Mita, in eastern Guatemala. The company operating the Cerro Blanco mine called the consultation process held in the town on Sept. 18 illegal. CREDIT: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

Projects that pollute across borders

Although the victory of the “no” vote in Asunción Mita represents an achievement for local residents, the project still presents a pollution risk, not only for this town of 50,000 people, but also for neighboring El Salvador.

Asunción Mita is located near the border with El Salvador.

Environmental organizations in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador have warned that heavy metal pollution from the mine would end up impacting the Ostúa River on the Guatemalan side.

The waters of that river, in turn, would reach Lake Guija, on the Salvadoran side. And a segment of that lake is reached by the Lempa River, which provides water to more than one million people in San Salvador and neighboring municipalities.

The Lempa River is 422 kilometers long and its basin covers three countries: It originates in Guatemala, crosses a small portion of Honduras and then zigzags through El Salvador until flowing into the Pacific Ocean.

El Salvador passed a law in March 2017 prohibiting mining, underground or open pit, but the proximity to the Cerro Blanco mine makes it vulnerable to pollution.

“We are concerned, our main source of water is under threat,” Salvadoran activist Dalia González, of the Green Rebellion movement, told IPS.

González added that the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador have an important role to play in protecting natural resources and the health of the local population.

“Because the effects of the mines cross borders,” said the young activist on the banks of the Ostúa River, where she had arrived along with Salvadoran environmentalists and journalists after witnessing the consultation process.

González called on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele to engage in a dialogue with his Guatemalan counterpart Alejandro Giammattei to find a solution to the problem of pollution that would also affect El Salvador.

“The situation is serious and requires urgent action,” said the Salvadoran activist.

After learning the results of the citizen consultation in Asunción Mita, the company behind the Cerro Blanco mine, Elevar Resources, called the process illegal, according to a press release made public on Monday Sept. 19.

The company’s managing director, Bob Gil, said, “this consultation process is clearly illegal and full of irregularities,” according to the statement.

In the company’s view, the process was flawed by what it called “anti-mining groups”.

“We are disappointed with the actions of these groups who use biased referendums to create doubt and uncertainty regarding responsible mining projects such as Cerro Blanco,” he added.

The consortium said the aim is to continue developing the project and to produce 2.6 million ounces of gold during the life of the mine.

Due to the problems it has had with the tunnels and the heat that prevents it from working and extracting the minerals, in November 2021 the company submitted a request to the authorities to transform the current underground mine into an open-pit mine.

The company “spoke of updating the Environmental Impact Study, but what was needed was a new study, because it was a completely different project,” said Madreselva’s Cruz.

Juana Martínez takes part in an October 2021 protest in Lima organized by the platform of people affected by heavy metals in front of Congress, holding a sign that reads: "Cajamarca. Mercury Never Again". She was 29 years old when the mercury spill occurred in her town, Choropampa, in Peru’s northern Andes highlands. Several of her relatives have since died from the effects of the heavy metal and one of her sisters became sterile. CREDIT: Courtesy of Milagros Pérez

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Jun 3 2022 (IPS)

“We are not asking for money, but for our health, for a dignified life,” is the cry of the people of Choropampa, which lawyer Milagros Pérez continually hears 22 years after the environmental disaster that occurred in this town in the department of Cajamarca, in Peru´s northern Andes highlands, on the afternoon of Jun. 2, 2000.

On that day, a Yanacocha Mining company truck spilled 150 kilograms of mercury on its way to Lima, the capital, leaving a glowing trail for about 40 kilometers on the road that crosses Choropampa, a town of 2,700 people located at an altitude of almost 3,000 meters.

The company, 95 percent of which is owned by a U.S. corporation, set up shop there in 1993, 48 kilometers north of the city of Cajamarca, where it operates between 3,400 and 4,200 meters above sea level. Yanacocha (black lagoon in the Quechua indigenous language) is considered the largest gold mine in South America and the second largest in the world, although its production is declining.

Children and most of the population started collecting the shiny droplets scattered on the ground and in the following days, responding to a call from the mining company that announced that it would purchase the material, they picked it up with their own hands, unaware of its high toxicity and that this exposure would affect them for life.

Before the disaster, the town was known for its varied agricultural production which, together with trade and livestock, allowed the impoverished inhabitants of Choropampa to get by as subsistence farmers.

But their poverty grew after the mercury spill, in the face of the indifference of the authorities and the mining company, which never acknowledged the magnitude of the damage caused.

The Choropampa road, now paved, where a truck of a large gold mining company spilled mercury on Jun. 2, 2000, affecting this small town in the department of Cajamarca, in Peru’s northern Andes highlands. The only change since then has been the paving of the road. CREDIT: Grufides

Violated rights

A report, also from the year 2000, by the Ombudsperson’s Office concluded that of the total mercury spilled, 49.1 kilos were recovered, while 17.4 remained in the soil, 21.2 evaporated, and the whereabouts of 63.3 were not identified.

The autonomous government agency also questioned the actions of the authorities and the mining company, referring for example to the extrajudicial agreements they reached with some of the affected local residents, which included clauses prohibiting them from filing any complaint or lawsuit against the company, and which “violate the rights to due process and effective judicial protection of those affected.”

Twenty-two years after the incident, Choropampa’s demands for reparations and access to justice are still being ignored. Pérez, a lawyer with the non-governmental Information and Intervention Group for Sustainable Development (Grufides), based in Cajamarca, said in an interview with IPS that the effects on the local territory and people’s health are evident.

She explained that despite the attempt to hush up the incident, it received enough attention that then president Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) was forced to promise “an investigation, punishment and reparations” – although these did not happen.

Against a backdrop of poverty and lack of opportunities, the mining company took advantage of the local residents’ goodwill and reached compensation agreements with some of them in exchange for their silence. There were also collective reparation agreements such as the construction of a town square, but nothing that actually contributed to remedying and addressing the damage caused to the people, say experts and activists.

For instance, the mining company committed to a private health plan for the people who were affected by the disaster, but it ended up being “a sham,” she said.

“They give them pills for the pain and nothing more, to people affected by mercury, while every day it becomes more difficult for them to support their families as they suffer terrible loss of vision, decalcification, bone malformations, and permanent skin irritations, which make it impossible for them to work their land and lead the lives they had before,” said Pérez.

Lawyer Milagros Pérez, who is dedicated to fighting for the reparations demanded by the population of Choropampa after a mercury spill in 2000 by the Yanacocha Mining Company in this town in the northern Andean department of Cajamarca, Peru, which caused irreversible damage to their health and lives. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Women, affected in very specific ways

The Grufides attorney stated that there is also an additional impact that has remained in the dark until now.

“Although the population in general has suffered damage to the corneas, nervous system, digestive system, skin, and bone malformations, we have noticed specific problems in women related to their reproductive capacity, such as premature births, miscarriages, sterility and births of infants with malformations, which have not been investigated,” she said.

Pérez criticized the fact that to date the affected population continues without specialized attention, with access only to a health post with a general practitioner and three nurses, who lack the capacity to deal with the specific ailments caused by contamination with heavy metals such as mercury.

“What the women are experiencing is part of this overall situation, effects that began in the year 2000 after the spill, according to the testimonies we have been collecting. But they need a specialized health diagnosis, something as basic as that, in order to begin to remedy the damage,” she said from Cajamarca, the capital of the department.

Pérez also mentioned the effects on women’s mental health and their role as caregivers, as a collateral aspect of this tragedy that has not yet been documented.

She cited the example of Juana Martínez, who is known for her defense of the rights of the local population and who for this reason has been threatened and slandered by unidentified persons.

“I tell her, Juanita, you don’t die because everyone needs you, that keeps you alive; because as a result of the contamination, her sister, her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law all died. There is a chain of contamination, the problem is much bigger and it affects different generations, but they don’t want to study it,” she said.

IPS tried to contact Martínez, but was unable to do so because she lives in a remote area far from the town, where there is no cell phone signal.

Denisse Chávez is an ecofeminist activist and member of the team promoting the Third International Tribunal for Justice and Defense of the Rights of Pan-Amazonian-Andean Women, to be held Jul. 30 in the city of Belem do Pará, Brazil, where the case of the women of Choropampa, whose health was affected by mercury contamination in 2000, will be presented. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

Getting their voices heard in an international ethical tribunal

Denisse Chávez, an ecofeminist activist, told IPS that the case of the women of Choropampa affected by the mercury spill will be among those presented at the Third International Tribunal for Justice and Defense of the Rights of Pan-Amazonian-Andean Women, to be held Jul. 30, 2022, in the city of Belem do Pará in Brazil’s Amazon region.

The tribunal is one of the emblematic activities to take place within the framework of the 10th Pan-Amazonian Social Forum, which under the slogan “weaving hope in the Amazon” will bring together for four days some 5,000 people from different countries of the Amazon basin interested in coordinating actions in defense of nature and the Amazon rainforest.

Chávez, a member of the group organizing the tribunal, which also includes feminist and human rights activists from Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia and Uruguay, denounced that the Peruvian State has failed to make the company compensate the damage caused to the local population or to make visible the specific impacts on women, in the past 22 years.

“Choropampa is an area far from the city and with a highly vulnerable population, with high rates of poverty and illiteracy. In more than two decades no government has been interested in solving the problems while the mining company continues to offer solutions on an individual basis, which is violent since money is offered so that people do not talk,” she added.

She said the tribunal will bring the case international visibility, like others from Brazil, Colombia and Ecuador, which “have in common the impact caused by extractive economic activities on the lives of our peoples and especially on the bodies of women, which is still not taken into account or discussed.”

The ethical, symbolic tribunal will issue a judgment specifying the violations of women’s human rights and the obligations incumbent upon States and corporate actors.

Chávez said the document would be sent to the Peruvian authorities, both in Cajamarca and at the national level. “We cannot allow impunity in the Choropampa case; we will continue to keep the memory of what happened alive,” she said.

Intervention plan

In December last year, the Peruvian government approved the creation of a “Special Multisectoral Plan for the integral intervention in favor of the population exposed to heavy metals, metalloids and other toxic chemical substances”, which will include the different regions whose populations have been harmed by polluting activities.

Pérez pointed out that the government’s decision was the result of pressure from civil society and groups affected by heavy metals. But Choropampa has not been included in this first stage, despite the lasting impact on its population and soils.

“It is supposed to expand gradually but we will be closely watching the decisions that are taken because a protocol of attention and budgets for diagnostics must be elaborated,” she said.

Children and adolescents in a Yanomami community in Parima, on the southern border with Brazil, the area where four indigenous people were shot dead and others injured when they confronted military troops last March. CREDIT: Wataniba

By Humberto Márquez
CARACAS, May 12 2022 (IPS)

The voracious search for gold in southern Venezuela, practiced by thousands of illegal miners under the protection of various armed groups, represents the greatest threat today to the lives of indigenous peoples, their habitat and their cultures, according to their organizations and human rights defenders.

In this part of the Amazon jungle, “mining, violence, habitat destruction, death from disease and forced migration make up a context that indigenous people are calling a silent genocide,” researcher Aimé Tillet, who has worked in the area for many years, told IPS.

At the other end of the country, along the northwest border with Colombia, indigenous people are fighting for the delimitation of their territories, which has led to clashes and deaths in their attempts to recover ancestral lands, while they are often reduced to destitution.

There are common features of life in border regions that are home to indigenous peoples, such as neglect by the government, which fails to fulfill its duties in health, education, security, provision of food, fuel and transportation, supplies, communications and consultations with native peoples regarding the use of their land and resources.

The government foments mining activity and in 2016 decreed the “Orinoco Mining Arc” on the right bank of the Orinoco river – an area of 111,844 square kilometers, larger than Bulgaria, Cuba or Portugal.

In parallel, it established an armed forces company, Camimpeg, to spearhead the mining of gold, diamonds, coltan and other conventional and rare minerals, in which the country is rich.

Opacity is a stain on the management of military companies by the authorities, according to non-governmental organizations such as Citizen Control for Security and Defense.

The local press has reported on the involvement of military and police units in the region in incidents related to mining activity that have sparked protests by indigenous people and human rights activists, ranging from deaths of native people in altercations to massacres in which “unknown groups” have killed dozens of people.

Artisanal and illegal mining, in hundreds of deforested areas and along rivers contaminated with mercury used to extract gold from ore, are often controlled by criminal gangs that call themselves “syndicates” and that traffic in gold and supplies, as well as in people who work in the mines, who are often subjected to forced labor.

According to human rights groups, for some years now another danger has been Colombian guerrillas, particularly the National Liberation Army (ELN), which is involved in mining and other illegal activities in the southern state of Amazonas, as well as dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), which laid down its arms under a 2016 peace deal.

In the Sierra de Perijá mountains, home to three native peoples and part of the northern border between Colombia and Venezuela, the ELN has made inroads into indigenous communities, setting up camps, collecting “vacunas” – taxes or protection payment – from cattle ranchers, overseeing cattle smuggling and recruiting young people as guerrilla fighters.

A map showing the areas that are home to the main indigenous peoples of Venezuela, according to the governmental Simón Bolívar Geographic Institute. The most numerous groups are in the extreme northwest, south and east of the country. CREDIT: IGVSB

Shots in the jungle

On Mar. 20, four Yanomami Indians were shot and killed in the Sierra de Parima mountains that mark the border with Brazil in the extreme south, by Venezuelan Air Force troops after an altercation over the internet signal and a router shared by the military and members of a native community.

The Yanomami, who have lived in the jungles of southern Venezuela and northern Brazil for thousands of years – considered a living testimony to the Neolithic era who only came into contact with the rest of the world a few decades ago – have found mobile telephones a useful means of communication in their widely dispersed communities.

What happened in Parima “cannot be taken as an isolated reaction, but must be seen as the result of an accumulation of tensions and abuses, of a lack of a differentiated treatment based on the right to positive discrimination,” declared Wataniba, an organization supporting the indigenous peoples of Venezuela’s Amazon region, at the time.

“All these tensions that are experienced daily on the borders are a consequence of extractivism, coupled with abuses of power by the military, transculturation and the lack of concrete actions by the State to meet the basic needs of indigenous peoples,” the organization added.

Hundreds of informal and illegal gold mines deforest land, damage the soil, pollute the water with mercury and exploit indigenous and other workers under forms of modern slavery in Venezuela’s Amazon rainforest. CREDIT: RAISG

Undeterrable garimpeiros

In 1989, a decree law by then President Carlos Andrés Pérez (1922-2010, who governed the country from 1974-1979 and 1989-1993) banned for 50 years all mining activity in the state of Amazonas in the extreme south of the country, an area of 178,000 square kilometers of jungle with fragile soils, home to 200,000 inhabitants, more than half of them members of 20 indigenous peoples.

For decades, however, thousands of garimpeiros – the Brazilian name for informal gold prospectors, who originally came from Brazil – have made incursions into Amazonas, and in recent years on a larger scale, using airstrips and a large number of motor pumps, and imposing relations, sometimes involving trade but above all exploitation, with indigenous communities and individuals.

On Jul. 28, 2021, the Kuyujani and Kuduno indigenous organizations, as well as the Tuduma Saka court of justice of the Sanemá ethnic group (Yanomami branch) and their Ye’kuana (Carib) neighbors, denounced the presence of garimpeiros in four communities, in documents delivered to the governmental Ombudsman’s Office.

More than 400 armed garimpeiros, according to the complaint, were working with 30 machines extracting precious minerals in the Upper Orinoco area, forcing men and boys to work in mining, and enslaving and forcing women into prostitution.

The report added that the destruction of the forests has also affected the vegetable gardens of local indigenous communities, which have become dependent on food supplies from the garimpeiros.

Tillet said the incursion of guerrillas and illegal miners in the south also creates hotbeds of inter-ethnic conflict, because some indigenous people and communities desperate to find a means of survival accept the miners, while others (such as the Uwottija or Piaroas of the middle Orinoco) strongly oppose such incursions.

A view of the damage caused by uncontrolled mining in an area of southern Venezuela. CREDIT: SOS Orinoco/RAISG

Modern-day slavery

In the “currutelas” or mining villages, young men and boys work extracting gold-rich sands, while women are employed to cook, sweep, wash and clean the camps, and are exploited sexually.

This situation, seen in the hundreds of mining camps in Amazonas and the southeastern state of Bolívar, which covers some 238,000 square kilometers, is aggravated in the case of indigenous peoples, lawyer Eduardo Trujillo, director of the Andrés Bello Catholic University’s Human Rights Center, which is conducting several studies in the area, told IPS.

“Under the control of armed groups, dynamics of violence are generated, with confrontations and deaths, and conditions of modern-day slavery, where omission translates into acquiescence on the part of the Venezuelan State,” Trujillo added.

In particular, indigenous women recruited to work in the camps “are caught up in a dynamic of violence: their work is not voluntary, sometimes they are not paid, and they are subjected to risks to their health and lives,” he said.

Mining in Venezuela contributes to the figures of the International Labor Organization (ILO), according to which more than 40 million people around the world are victims of modern-day slavery, 152 million are victims of child labor and 25 million are forced laborers.

Autana hill, seen from the banks of the Cuao River, a tributary of the middle Orinoco. The Uwottija people consider it sacred and reject the presence in the area of guerrilla groups from Colombia, associated with illegal mining. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Adios habitat, culture and life

According to the 2011 census, at least 720,000 of Venezuela’s 28 million inhabitants are indigenous, belonging to some 40 native peoples, and close to half a million live in rural indigenous areas, mainly in border regions.

Although the largest indigenous group (60 percent) is the Wayúu, an Arawak-speaking people who live on the Colombian-Venezuelan Guajira peninsula in the north, most of the native peoples are in the south of the country. Some groups have thousands of members but others only a few hundred, and their languages and ancestral knowledge are at risk of dying out.

The environmental organization Provita reports that 380,000 hectares have been deforested south of the Orinoco in the last 20 years, while the area dedicated to mining increased from 18,500 to 55,000 hectares between 2000 and 2020.

Riverbanks and headwaters have been especially affected, many in areas theoretically protected as national parks. Tillet stressed that, in addition to the environmental damage they suffer, these are areas of limited resources for subsistence, for which indigenous communities and miners are now competing.

“Because they depend on mining for an income, indigenous people are forced to abandon their traditional activities of planting, fishing and hunting, their diet deteriorates, malnutrition and diseases such as malaria increase, and they are forced to say goodbye to their land, to move and migrate,” said Tillet.

The researcher said that health services, which are the responsibility of the State, have practically disappeared, and even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic, while education has collapsed as teachers move away and migrate, with the result that “children who should be in school now work in exploitative conditions in the mines.”

In the document they presented to the Ombudsman’s Office, the Yanomami and Ye’kuana organizations said they were victims of selective killings, contamination of water with mercury, contagion from diseases and, in short, “a silent cultural genocide.”

Children from a Uwottija (Piaroa) community in the middle Orinoco region, where organizations of this native people reject the presence of guerrilla groups from neighboring Colombia, associated with illegal mining. CREDIT: Humberto Márquez / IPS

Territory, an elusive right

The current constitution, adopted in 1999, recognized the right of indigenous peoples to conserve their cultures and possess their ancestral territories, and provided for the expeditious demarcation of these areas – which has only happened for a small part of their territories.

In the case of the state of Amazonas, which is almost entirely the habitat of indigenous people, the demarcation process has been ignored, preventing indigenous peoples from laying claim to their rights, demanding the required consultation processes and consent for the exploitation of their territory, and eventually obtaining benefits from their land.

Tillet said that “demarcation is still a pending issue, for which there is no political will, but the avalanche of mining has relativized its importance, because if protected areas such as national parks or natural monuments are violated by mining, you can imagine that the same thing is true for indigenous territories.”

Examples are the 30,000-square-kilometer Canaima National Park in the southeast, rich in tepuis – steep, flat-topped mountains – and large waterfalls, and the 3,200-square-kilometer Yapacana, in the middle of Amazonas state, where mining is practiced while the authorities turn a blind eye.

On the other hand, in the northwest, the struggle for land of the Yukpa people in the center of the Sierra de Perijá continues, with episodes of violence. Like their neighbors, the Barí of Chibcha origin, and the Wayúu, they are a bi-national people, although with more members of the community on the Venezuelan side than in Colombia.

The crux of the conflict is that throughout the 20th century the indigenous people were pushed into the most inhospitable lands in the mountains, while the plains, on the western shore of Lake Maracaibo, were occupied by cattle ranchers.

Some communities have accepted plots of land – the least fertile areas – granted by the government. But a resistant group of Yukpa, led by chief Sabino Romero until he was murdered in 2013, lays claim to land occupied by cattle ranches, while combating incursions by smugglers and guerrillas in the mountains.

Sabino Romero, a Yukpa chief from the Sierra de Perijá mountains bordering Colombia, was killed in 2013 in the context of his people’s struggle to recover lands occupied by cattle ranchers throughout the 20th century. CREDIT: Homo et Natura Society

“Other members of Sabino’s family and followers of his have been killed over the years and have endured attacks by hired killers and employees of cattle ranchers, and even by the National Guard (militarized police) or the ELN,” Lusbi Portillo, leader of the environmental Homo et Natura Society, told IPS.

Ana María Fernández, a Yukpa activist in the area, said that “we are not only fighting against large landowners, police forces and the National Guard, and the State, which does not allow the demarcation of our lands. We are also attacked by Colombian guerrillas and hired killers contracted by ranchers.”

On the other hand, some Yukpa indigenous people sometimes seize cattle as a way to collect on the damages inflicted on them. Others, less combative, “charge a right of way on what used to be their lands, to earn some money to eat and survive,” said Portillo.

The activist said that one alternative is for the State to fulfill its commitments to compensate cattle ranchers whose farms must be returned to the indigenous people, and to make good on its duty to provide transportation routes for the communities’ agricultural production and health care in the face of the increase in diseases.

Ana María Fernández is an activist from a Yukpa community that is demanding the demarcation of their ancestral territories in the western Sierra de Perijá, where the best lands were occupied by cattle ranches throughout the 20th century. CREDIT: OEPV

Time to migrate

The crisis of the second decade of this century in Venezuela has forced thousands of indigenous people to migrate, as part of the diaspora of six million Venezuelans who have left the country since 2014, overwhelmingly heading to neighboring Latin American and Caribbean countries, the United States and Spain.

The largest group is the Warao, a people living in the northeastern Orinoco delta, whose southern zone is affected by mining and logging activities, and who have gone mostly to Brazil, but also to Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.

The Warao “number less than 50,000, and the migration of at least 6,000, more than 10 percent of them, is a decrease in numbers that speaks volumes about the human rights situation of this population. In northern Brazil there are some 5,000, and Brazil already considers them to be a distinct, nomadic indigenous people in its territory,” Tillet commented.

Pablo Tapo, a member of the Baré people and coordinator of the Amazon Indigenous Human Rights Movement, compiled a report according to which more than 4,500 indigenous people from nine ethnic groups in his region crossed the border into Colombia in three years.

In both cities and rural areas, “communities are left on their own because there is no attention or services, in outpatient hospitals there are no doctors, medicines or supplies, and there is no food security,” said Tapo.

In the southwestern plains state of Apure, the armed confrontation that months ago involved Colombian guerrillas and Venezuelan military forced the flight to Colombia of indigenous groups living on the Venezuelan side of the Meta River.

In the extreme southeast, next to Brazil, the Pemón people have suffered from the drop in tourism due to the insecurity associated with mining and the pandemic, which has created an incentive to migrate. And in the northwest, for peoples such as the Wayúu, continuously crossing the border is an ageold practice that has never changed.

At the center of the indigenous people’s plight is mining, particularly the insatiable craving for gold, of which, according to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), this country can produce some 75 tons per year, although actual extraction, both legal and clandestine, is possibly half that.

Artisanal gold mining in Latin America uses mercury, a practice that should be modified in countries that have ratified the international Minamata Convention for the control of this toxic metal. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Sep 26 2017 (IPS)

For environmentalist Patricia Ruiz the only word that comes to mind is “devastating,” when describing the situation of mercury mining in her home state of Querétaro in central Mexico.

“There are a large number of pits (from which the mercury is extracted), and there are the tailing ponds containing mining waste, all of which drains into the rivers. These are people who don’t have other options, they risk their health, their family genetics. There are many people involved, who have no alternative employment,” said Ruiz, the founder of the Sierra Gorda Ecological Group.

Her non-governmental organisation is dedicated to protecting the 383,567-hectare Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve, which is home to a rich ecosystem as well as100,000 people, distributed in five municipalities and 638 communities.

Querétaro and the northern state of Zacatecas have become major producers of mercury, the extraction of which is mainly in private hands and practiced without a license. The mercury is mostly exported to countries such as Bolivia and Colombia, where it is used mainly in the artisanal mining of gold.

The rise in production in Mexico was a consequence of export bans in the United States and the European Union since 2011, which prompted Mexico to step in to fill the gap.

Replacing mercury in artisanal mining is a challenge that Mexico is now facing in order to comply with the Minamata Convention, which entered into force on Aug. 16, and which will celebrate its first meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Geneva from Sept. 24-29.

The treaty prohibits new mercury mines and stipulates the phasing out of existing mines, the reduction of mercury use in a number of products and processes, the promotion of measures to curb emissions into the atmosphere and seepage into the soil and water, the regulation of artisanal and small-scale gold mining and proper management of contaminated sites.

The “Mexican Mercury Market Report”, produced in 2011 by the Commission for Environmental Cooperation, estimated that there are nearly 27 million tonnes of mercury waste accumulated in mines and the chlor-alkali industry.

Primary mercury mines account for 43 percent of these deposits – some 11.75 million tons – while the secondary production of old deposits of mine waste or tailings in Zacatecas contribute another 14.9 million, and the chlor-alkali industry accounts for 240,000 tonnes in two plants.

A report by the governmental National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change (INECC), obtained by IPS, shows that eight of Mexico’s 31 states have mercury mines that feed the national trade in dental fillings, lamps and raw materials for artisanal gold mining, as well as the increasing exports.

Some 300 artisanal mercury mines operate in Querétaro, while extraction from tailings ponds is attractive due the value of amalgamated silver. Mercury mining in Querétaro is concentrated in three municipalities.

In that state, two regions, with a total of nine mining districts, contain mercury. Between 1995 and 2016, the state government supported three projects with potential mercury deposits.

In Zacatecas, four of 17 mining regions have mercury and six of 116 mining projects involve mercury exploration and exploitation.

Artisanal gold mining is active in 10 states, and more than 3,000 people work in this activity.

Mercury is obtained from cinnabar ore, which is crushed and fed into a furnace or kiln to be heated, generating toxic mercury vapor with toxic properties.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), the main effect of exposure to fish and seafood contaminated by mercury in fetuses and infants is impaired neurological development. Mercury, which has
neurotoxic characteristics, accumulates in the body.

In Latin America, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Uruguay have already ratified the Convention. But only Brazil has submitted its report to the secretariat of the mercury control treaty, as only nine other countries around the world and the European Union have done.

Measures to curb the production of mercury in other countries have turned Mexico into the second largest supplier in the world, after Indonesia. In July this country exported 75 tons to Bolivia and 9.55 to Chile, while sporadic sales were reported to Argentina, Colombia, Cuba, Nicaragua, Panama and Paraguay.

In 2016, Bolivia was also the top destination, with 193 tons, while Colombia imported 41.5, even though it had banned the use of mercury in artisanal mining in 2013.

The coordinator of the non-governmental Center for Analysis and Action on Toxics and their Alternatives (CAATA), Fernando Bejarano, said that Mexico saw the upturn in mercury mining coming and did not take action.

“This is a social problem linked to poverty and we must treat it according to that perspective, and not only as an environmental issue. But there is no clear multisectoral approach. In the coming years production may grow even further,” the expert told IPS.

In his view, “Mexico lacks a clear policy on the handling of hazardous substances and people continue to be exposed to them.”

A report by the Federal Attorney General’s Office of Environmental Protection (Profepa), to which IPS had access, states that mining is carried out with no environmental damage mitigation or prevention of health effects.

Mines, the report adds, lack the infrastructure to prevent polluting emissions from the furnaces, and there is inadequate management of mining waste, which pollute water and soil.

Their “2015 studies on air quality and its impact in the central region of Mexico”, obtained by IPS, which assessed emissions from 83 mines, concluded that there is a risk of toxicity for workers in the mining area of Querétaro and the surrounding population, where it found high concentrations of the mineral.

INECC this year detected high concentrations of mercury in the basement of a shopping center in Zacatecas, where products for sale are stored.

For activist Patricia Ruiz, winner of at least five prizes in ecology, Mexico should work on a plan based on people´s needs.

“The semi-desert (of the region) offers possibilities. It can provide employment for many years and the mines would be shut down. It requires financial resources to be able to pay temporary employment and cover the pits,” she said.

Mexico, which anticipates designing a plan of action to modify artisanal gold mining, will have to adapt its legal framework to the Minamata Convention. It has already identified four sites and 15 communities contaminated with mercury.

“The state and municipal actors must be informed about the risks. There must be an orderly plan of transition. It is a national responsibility, we should not just wait for international resources to come,” Bejarano said.

In Geneva, CAATA and other NGOs will determine the presence of mercury in body creams from places such as Quéretaro.

Mexico is waiting for approval by the Global Environment Facility to finance a seven million dollar environmental risk reduction initiative in mining in Querétaro. At the end of the year, the government will complete an assessment of the country’s situation in this regard.

The main street of Ressaca, a town of garimpeiros or artisanal gold miners, on the right bank of the Xingu River, along the stretch called the Volta Grande or Big Bend, where a large-scale mining project, promoted by the Canadian company Belo Sun, is causing concern among the local people in this part of Brazil’s Amazon region. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

By Mario Osava
RESSACA, Brazil, Apr 7 2017 (IPS)

The decline of this town is seen in the rundown houses and shuttered stores, and the few people along the streets on a Sunday when the scorching sun alternates with frequent rains at this time of year in Brazil’s Amazon region.

“There is still a lot of gold here,” said Valdomiro Pereira Lima, pointing to the ground on a muddy street in the town of Ressaca, to emphasize that the riches underground extend along the right bank of the Xingu River at the 100-km stretch known as Volta Grande or Big Bend, which could restore the local economy.

This drew Belo Sun, a transnational Canadian mining corporation that intends to extract 60 tons of gold in 12 years through plants that separate gold from rock, in what is to be the largest open-pit gold mine in the country.

But the mine has given rise to a new wave of concern among the locals of Ressaca and other communities downstream, where the local population has already been affected by the impacts of the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, operational since late 2015 and set to be completed in 2019.

Valdomiro Pereira Lima, a garimpeiro or informal miner, says there is gold beneath the streets of the town of Ressaca, as in many other areas along the Volta Grande of the Xingu River. But the residents of this rundown town in Brazil’s Amazon region are opposed to a large-scale gold mining project. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The 64-year-old Pereira Lima has been mining for gold since 1980, when at the age of 27 he left farming in Maranhão, his home state in northeastern Brazil, to become a “garimpeiro” or informal artisanal miner in Brazil’s Amazon region.

He worked in Sierra Pelada, in the northern state of Pará, and in Volta Grande, which lured near 100,000 miners in the 1980s, as well as in the state of Roraima, along the border with Venezuela, before settling in Ressaca.

But the gold that gave rise to this village and brought it prosperity, as well as to other towns and settlements that emerged around nearby mines, started to become less accessible, while the garimpeiro way of life deteriorated, IPS noted, talking with all the interested parties during a one-week tour of the Volta Grande.

“There were over 8,000 garimpeiros when I arrived here in 1992, today there are just 400 to 500 left,” said 53-year-old José Pereira Cunha, vice president of the Mixed Cooperative of Garimpeiros from Ressaca, Itatá, Galo, Ouro Verde and Ilha da Fazenda.

“We used to find up to two kg of gold per week, now it’s only one per year,” said the garimpeiro leader, known by the nickname of Pirulito, because he is a small man. He has been a miner since the age of 17, and also got his start in Sierra Pelada.

But everything collapsed after 2012, when the police and environmental inspectors began to crack down on the garimpeiros, driving out many of them, he said. Moreover, the mining authorities did not renew the operating permits for the cooperative, outlawing the miners, who are still active in some mines.

Dozens of them have filed lawsuits in faraway cities.

“We have turned to the justice system to secure our rights,” said Cunha, who blames the campaign on Belo Sun and the municipal and state governments, interested in collecting more taxes, since the persecution began two years after the company began investigating potential gold deposits along the Volta Grande.

The village of Ilha da Fazenda depends economically on the town of Ressaca, where many families have left due to the decline of small-scale gold mining, added to the impact of the nearby Belo Monte hydroelectric plant. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The company obtained an advance license in 2004, which recognises the environmental viability of the project. And on Feb. 2 the Environment and Sustainability department of the state of Pará granted it a permit to build the necessary plants.

But just two weeks later, the justice system suspended the permit for 180 days, demanding measures to relocate the affected population and clarification about the land acquired for the mine, presumably illegally.

Belo Sun claims that it has met all the requirements and conditions. The company keeps a register of the local population in the directly affected area, which it continually updates, because “the garimpeiros come and go,” according to Mauro Barros, the director of the company in Brazil.

João Lisboa Sobrinho, 85, a baker from Ilha da Fazenda who “only” has ten children. Until recently, he used 50 kg of flour a day to make bread, but now uses just three – a reflection of the decline and depopulation of this island village along the Xingu River, in the northern Brazilian state of Pará. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

“It is not necessary to remove the population, we can even operate with everybody staying in their homes, if that’s what they want. All over the world there are active mines next to cities,” said Barros, a lawyer with previous experience in other mining companies.

But he said, in an interview at the company’s headquarters in the nearby city of Altamira, that those who are relocated will be provided with all the services, access to the river and support to earn an income. “We want to develop the region,” he said, adding that at least 80 per cent of the company’s employees will be locals.

The company will generate 2,100 direct jobs at the peak of the installation phase, and 526 once the mine is operational, he said. The promise is to train the garimpeiros to work in mechanized mining.

According to estimates from Belo Sun, there are probable reserves of 108.7 tons of gold.

It takes a ton of rocks to obtain a gram of gold.

Barros ruled out the risk, which has raised concern among the local population and environmentalists, that the mine will pollute the waters of the Xingu River, which has already been contaminated and has a reduced water level due to the Belo Monte mine. He guaranteed that Belo Sun would only use rainwater, and would hold its waste products safely.

But the conflict with the miners’ cooperative, community leaders and indigenous people who live along the Volta Grande has already begun.

“Either Belo Sun throws us out of here or we throw them out,” said Cunha, vice president of the cooperative.

The town has not received the promised compensation from Norte Energía, the company that holds the concession to run Belo Monte, nor services from the municipality, because “it would be pointless, since we are supposed to be resettled,” said Francisco Pereira, head of the Association of Ressaca Residents.

A map from Belo Sun showing the area where the Canadian mining company intends to extract 60 tons of gold. In blue, the Volta Grande or Big Bend in the Xingu River, where the Belo Monte hydroelectric plant has been built, in Brazil’s Amazon region. Credit: Mario Osava/IPS

The town of about 200 families still has no basic sewage. “The wastewater runs into the river, we have no drinking water or sports field, and at the school the heat is unbearable,” and nothing will be done because of the uncertainty created by Belo Sun, said Pereira, a 58-year-old garimpeiro who is now working as a farm labourer.

The uncertainty and decline are also affecting the roughly 50 families that live in Ilha da Fazenda, a village dependent on Ressaca and separated from it by a two-kilometre stretch of a tributary of the Xingu River. Children from the fifth grade and up and sick people can only go to school or receive healthcare in the town of Ressaca, which they reach in small boats.

“In the good old days of the ‘garimpo’ (informal mining), there were dozens of bars in Ilha da Fazenda. They extracted gold in Ressaca and came here to spend their money,” said 85-year-old baker João Lisboa Sobrinho, who has “only ten children” and is a living history of the island village.

“I used to use 50 kg of flour a day to make bread, now I use three at the most,” he said, standing next to the brick oven made by his father in 1952.

“Ninety-five per cent of the people on the island want to move away,” because if Ressaca disappears, it will be impossible to live in Ilha da Fazenda,” said Sebastião Almeida da Silva, who owns the only general store on the island.

More than 20 families have already left the village.

But “I will only leave if I am the only one left,” said Adelir Sampaio dos Santos, a nurse from José Porfirio, the municipality where the mining area is located. “We will only be left isolated if we don’t take action,” she said, urging her fellow villagers to struggle for the school, medical post, water and electricity that are needed in the village.

“With the garimpo in better conditions, supported by the government, with state banks buying our gold, we could bring life back to local cities and towns, we could pay taxes, we could all stay and prosper,” said Divino Gomes, a surveyor who worked with environmentalist organisations before becoming a garimpeiro.

“I have seen mining companies elsewhere, they take all the wealth and leave craters. We have to think about it ten times over before accepting their projects,” he concluded.

Gold from eastern Congo. The war in Congo is fueled by a thriving gold trade today, with armed groups controlling mines and earning an estimated 50 million dollars last year from selling gold and minerals. This gold is from a day's work at Kaniola mine. Credit: ENOUGH Project/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Nov 25 2014 (IPS)

Major U.S. jewellery companies and retailers have started to take substantive steps to eliminate the presence of “conflict gold” from their supply chains, according to the results of a year-long investigation published Monday.

Rights advocates, backed by the United Nations, have been warning for years that mining revenues are funding warlords and militia groups operating in the Great Lakes region of Africa, particularly in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). In 2010, such concerns resulted in landmark legislation here in the United States aimed at halting this trade, and those laws have since spurred similar legislative proposals in the European Union and Canada.“Just a few years ago, jewellery companies were pretty resistant to making progress on this, but today there is clearly interest in supporting peace and finding out more about the role they can play in this issue." -- Holly Dranginis of Enough Project

Three of the most problematic of these “conflict minerals” – tin, tantalum and tungsten, collectively known as 3T – are used primarily by the electronics industry. In recent years, that sector has made notable progress in certifying and otherwise regulating its use of these materials.

Yet forward movement has been slower on the fourth conflict mineral from the Great Lakes region – gold.

“Over two-thirds of the eastern Congo’s 3T mines are conflict-free today,” a new report from the Enough Project, a Washington-based watchdog group, states.

“Gold, however, remains a major financial lifeline for armed actors. Ninety-eight percent of artisanally mined gold … is smuggled out of the country annually, and much of that gold benefits armed commanders.”

Last year, the report estimates, some eight to ten tons of gold were smuggled out of eastern DRC. That would have been worth more than 400 million dollars.

Much of this smuggling is thought to take place through Congo’s neighbours, particularly Uganda and Burundi, and onwards to Dubai. From there, most of this gold is able to anonymously enter the global marketplace.

The jewellery industry, meanwhile, is the largest user of global gold supplies, constituting slightly less than half of worldwide demand. “Conflict gold thus taints the industry as whole,” the report warns.

Pledging to stay

According to the Enough Project’s new rankings, however, the industry is starting to respond to these concerns. Researchers looked at both past and pledged actions by 14 of the largest jewellery companies and retailers in the United States – part of an industry worth some five billion dollars a year – and found a spectrum of initiatives already underway.

On the one hand, some companies appear to have undertaken no conflict minerals-related initiatives whatsoever, at least as far as the new report’s metrics were concerned. Three companies scored zero points, while others – including major retailers such as Walmart, Sears and Costco – scored very low.

On the other hand, the researchers found a few key companies that have undertaken particularly notable responses. They say there is reason to believe that these leaders could now influence the rest of the industry.

“We really wanted to focus on the leading jewellery retailers in the U.S. because of their leverage over the industry – we wanted to take lessons from our experience with the electronics industry, that leading companies can move an entire industry,” Holly Dranginis, a policy analyst with the Enough Project and the lead author on the new report, told IPS.

“Just a few years ago, jewellery companies were pretty resistant to making progress on this, but today there is clearly interest in supporting peace and finding out more about the role they can play in this issue. We found two very clear leaders among the 14.”

Those are two of the most recognizable jewellery brands and retailers in the world, Signet Jewelers and Tiffany & Co. Three others highlighted for recognition in the rankings are the commercial retailers J.C. Penney Company, Target Corp. and Cartier.

The Enough Project researchers sent a broad questionnaire to these companies, and Signet and Tiffany received the highest overall rankings. Yet Dranginis notes that what differentiates these companies is merely the fact that they have put in place policies around the sourcing of gold from the Great Lakes region.

Perhaps more importantly, these companies have also started engaging on the ground in countries such as the DRC. Over the past three years, for instance, Signet has pledged to continue sourcing certified gold from the country, rather than simply moving on to another country entirely. The company is also making its sourcing strategies open to others in the industry.

“We see our involvement in industry guidance and standards in the gold sector and the development and implementation of the Signet Responsible Sourcing Protocols as part of a broader initiative of ensuring responsible business practices through the entire jewellery supply chain, for gold and for all other materials,” David A. Bouffard, a vice president for Signet Jewelers, told IPS in a statement.

“It is important to us that our SRSPs are open public protocols which can be used by anyone in our industry, and which Signet’s suppliers can use to their benefit in their relationships with other customers.”

Tiffany, meanwhile, is making a concerted effort to assist local communities, particularly small-scale miners and their families. Both companies reportedly have individual executives that have taken a particular interest in the issue.

“One of the concerns has been that compliance with [U.S. conflict minerals laws] has pushed some companies to think they should leave the region and source elsewhere,” the Enough Project’s Dranginis says.

“Supporting community initiatives in the region is critical, because a lot of communities are affected by major market changes. We also need to ensure that gold miners and their families are supported in a comprehensive way, looking into sustainable projects, alternative livelihoods, financial inclusion and related issues.”

Certification capacity

Action by major brands is, of course, a key component in driving the global response to the impacts of conflict gold. Yet an important collection of multistakeholder and trade mechanisms has also sprung up in recent years, directly facilitating these initiatives.

Central to any attempt at tracking and regulating raw commodities, for instance, is a system of certification. And just as the electronics industry has been able to use metals smelters as an important lynchpin in this process, so too has the gold industry been able to start certifying gold refiners.

According to the new report, in 2012 just six gold refiners had been certified as “conflict free” by one such initiative, the Conflict Free Smelter Program. Two years later, that number has risen to 52 – though “there are still many refiners outside the system,” the study notes.

Advocates are also calling for stepped-up and coordinated action by governments. While the United States, European Union and Canada could all soon have legislation on the use of conflict minerals, some are increasingly pushing for action from the government of the United Arab Emirates aiming to constrict the flow of conflict gold through Dubai.

Likewise, India, Pakistan and China are among the most prominent consumers of gold worldwide, and thus constitute key sources of demand.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

A multilateral arbitration panel here began final hearings Monday in a contentious and long-running dispute between an international mining company and the government of El Salvador.

An Australian mining company, OceanaGold, is suing the Salvadoran government for refusing to grant it a gold-mining permit that has been pending for much of the past decade. El Salvador, meanwhile, cites national laws and policies aimed at safeguarding human and environmental health, and says the project would threaten the country’s water supply.“This mining process would use some really poisonous substances – cyanide, arsenic – that would destroy the environment. Ultimately, the people suffer the consequences." -- Father Eric Lopez

The country also claims that OceanaGold has failed to comply with basic requirements for any gold-mining permitting. Further, in 2012, El Salvador announced that it would continue a moratorium on all mining projects in the country.

Yet using a controversial provision in a free trade agreement, OceanaGold has been able to sue El Salvador for profits – more than 300 million dollars – that the company says it would have made at the goldmine. The case is being heard before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an obscure tribunal housed in the Washington offices of the World Bank Group.

“The case threatens the sovereignty and self-determination” of El Salvador’s people, Hector Berrios, coordinator of MUFRAS-32, a member of the Salvadoran National Roundtable against Metallic Mining, said Monday in a statement. “The majority of the population has spoken out against this project and [has given its] priority to water.”

The OceanaGold project would involve a leaching process to recover small amounts of gold, using cyanide and, critics say, tremendous amounts of water. Those plans have made local communities anxious: the United Nations has already found that some 90 percent of El Salvador’s surface water is contaminated.

On Monday, a hundred demonstrators rallied in front of the World Bank building, both to show solidarity with El Salvador against OceanaGold and to express their scepticism of the ICSID process more generally. The events coincided with El Salvador’s Independence Day.

“We’re celebrating independence but what we’re really celebrating is dignity and the ability of every person to enjoy a good life, not only a few,” Father Eric Lopez, a Franciscan friar at a Washington-area church that caters to a sizable Salvadoran community, told IPS at the demonstration.

“This mining process would use some really poisonous substances – cyanide, arsenic – that would destroy the environment. Ultimately, the people suffer the consequences: they remain poor, they are sick, women’s pregnancies suffer.”

Provoking unrest?

The case’s jurisdictions are complicated and, for some, underscore the tenuousness of the ICSID’s arbitration process around the Salvador project.

It was another mining company, the Canada-based Pacific Rim, that originally discovered a potentially lucrative minerals deposit along the Lempa River in 2002. The business-friendly Salvadoran government at the time (since voted out of power) reportedly encouraged the company to apply for a permit, though public concern bogged down that process.

Frustrated by this turn of events, Pacific Rim filed a lawsuit against El Salvador under a provision of the Dominican Republic-Central American Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) that allowed companies to sue governments for impinging on their profits. While Canada, Pacific Rim’s home country, is not a member of DR-CAFTA, in 2009 the company created a subsidiary in the United States, which is.

In 2012, ICSID ruled that the lawsuit could continue, pointing to a provision in El Salvador’s investment law. The country’s laws have since been altered to prevent companies from circumventing the national judicial system in favour of extra-national arbiters like ICSID.

Last year, OceanaGold purchased Pacific Rim, despite the latter’s primary asset being the El Salvador gold-mining project, which has never been allowed to go forward. Although OceanaGold did not respond to a request for comment for this story, last year the company noted that it would continue with the arbitration case while also seeking “a negotiated resolution to the … permitting impasse”.

For its part, the Salvadoran government says it has halted the permitting process not only over environmental and health concerns but also over procedural matters. While these include Pacific Rim’s failure to abide by certain reporting requirements, the company also appears not to have gained important local approvals.

Under Salvadoran law, an extractive company needs to gain titles, or local permission, for any lands it wants to develop. Yet Pacific Rim had such access to just 13 percent of the lands covered by its proposal, according to Oxfam America, a humanitarian and advocacy group.

Given this lack of community support in a country with recent history of civil unrest, some warn that an ICSID decision in OceanaGold’s favour could result in violence.

“This mining project was re-opening a lot of the wounds that existed during the civil war, and telling a country that they have to provoke a civil conflict in order to satisfy investors is very troublesome,” Luke Danielson, a researcher and academic who studies social conflict around natural resource development, told IPS.

“The tribunal system exists to allow two interests to express themselves – the national government and the investor. But neither of these speak for communities, and that’s a fundamental problem.”

Wary of litigation

Bilateral and regional investment treaties such as DR-CAFTA have seen massive expansion in recent years. And increasingly, many of these include so-called “investor-state” resolution clauses of the type being used in the El Salvador case.

Currently some 2,700 agreements internationally have such clauses, ICSID reports. Meanwhile, although the tribunal has existed since the 1960s, its relevance has increased dramatically in recent years, mirroring the rise in investor-state clauses.

ISCID itself doesn’t decide on how to resolve such disputes. Rather, it offers a framework under which cases are heard by three external arbiters – one appointed by the investor, one by the state and one by both parties.

Yet outside of the World Bank headquarters on Monday, protesters expressed deep scepticism about the highly opaque ISCID process. Several said that past experience has suggested the tribunal is deeply skewed in favour of investors.

“This is a completely closed-door process, and this has meant that the tribunal can basically do whatever it wants,” Carla Garcia Zendejas director of the People, Land & Resources program at the Center for International Environmental Law, a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“Thus far, we have no examples of cases in which this body responded in favour of communities or reacted to basic human rights violations or basic environmental and social impact.”

Zendejas says the rise in investor-state lawsuits in recent years has resulted in many governments, particularly in developing countries, choosing to acquiesce in the face of corporate demand. Litigation is not only cumbersome but extremely expensive.

“Governments are increasingly wary of being sued, and therefore are more willing to accept and change polices or to ignore their own policies, even if there’s community opposition,” she says.

“Certain projects have seen resistance, but political pressure often depends on who’s in power. Unfortunately, the incorrect view that the only way for development to take place is through foreign investment is still very engrained in many of the powers that be.”

While there is no public timeframe for ISCID resolution on the El Salvador case, a decision is expected by the end of the year.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The writer can be reached at cbiron@ips.org

An aerial view of the Luwowo coltan mine, near Rubaya in the northeastern province of North Kivu, DRC. Credit: MONUSCO Photos/ CC-BY-SA-2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Jun 3 2014 (IPS)

For the first time, nearly 1,300 U.S. companies have filed reports on whether the products they manufacture or sell are made with minerals that have bankrolled conflict in the Great Lakes region of central Africa.

Monday was the deadline for the filings, the first concrete results of a provision passed in 2010 by the U.S. Congress aimed at helping to end the long-running civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Yet the law’s regulatory details have since been the target of sustained legal attacks from companies and lobby groups that have warned that fulfilling the reporting requirements would be onerous and even unconstitutional.

“In general we’re very disappointed with how vague many of the reports are, lacking much description on processes.” -- Carly Oboth, policy advisor at Global Witness
By Tuesday, however, it appeared that most companies expected to file a report on the so-called conflict minerals in their supply chains had done so. Those reports are now publicly available through the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the federal regulator tasked with implementing the rule, formally known as Section 1502.

“This is a historic day. Five years ago this issue wasn’t on anyone’s radar, and now consumers can look under the hood of what’s in a product,” Sasha Lezhnev, a senior policy analyst at the Enough Project, a Washington-based watchdog group, told IPS.

“I think many people knew what companies like Apple, Intel or HP had been doing, as they have been pretty proactive on this issue. But no one has known what companies like Walmart or GM [General Motors] have been doing.”

In 2009, the U.N. Security Council formally recognised that revenues from minerals extraction were strengthening multiple armed groups operating in eastern DRC. The electronics industry has been one of the most significant users of these minerals, which include tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold.

Since then, Lezhnev reports, 95 mines in the DRC have been validated as “conflict free”, while two-thirds of the tin, tantalum and tungsten mines in the country’s east have been demilitarised. Gold remains a significant problem, however, and the Enough Project and others are calling for more concerted action in tightening sourcing decisions, particularly from the jewellery industry.

Box-checking?

Under the SEC guidelines, companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges must now file annual reports describing their efforts to discern whether their products use conflict minerals and, if so, their plans for stopping this practice. Several thousand U.S. companies have been identified as potentially – and likely unwittingly – selling products containing conflict minerals.

The consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton has stated that it has been involved in the manufacture of circuit boards, electrical assemblies and surveillance recorders containing conflict minerals. Many of these products, the company noted, were manufactured for the U.S. government.

Yet most companies have reported incomplete results. Microsoft, for instance, states that it “cannot exclude the possibility” that its products contain conflict minerals, but also that it hasn’t yet been able to obtain full sourcing information from its “extensive and complex” supply chain.

Advocacy groups are also concerned that most companies aren’t providing information on what follow-up actions they took after surveying their suppliers, if any.

“In general we’re very disappointed with how vague many of the reports are, lacking much description on processes,” Carly Oboth, a policy advisor at Global Witness, a watchdog group that has supported the conflict minerals regulations, told IPS.

“We’re concerned with how companies have come to their conflict minerals status decision, as many are claiming that they’re ‘conflict indeterminable’ or ‘conflict free’ but not showing how they arrived at that conclusion. This isn’t supposed to be a box-checking exercise, but rather about showing that you’re not sourcing from a conflict zone.”

Global Witness says the majority of the reports that have been filed thus far have been “inadequate”.

Conflict-free competition

For many companies faced with auditing their supply chains, a key chokepoint has been the metal smelters that turn raw resources into workable products. An industry-led initiative, the Conflict-Free Smelter Programme, has been particularly prominent, having so far certified around 40 percent of the world’s smelters, according to the Enough Project’s Lezhnev.

Yet Global Witness’s Oboth says many companies have simply ascertained whether their suppliers have this certification, and then gone no farther.

“Instead, what we want them to do – and what the [SEC] rule requires – is to follow up with the smelters,” she says. “Intel, for instance, has made site visits to smelters to check on their conflict minerals policy, to see how they’re actually identifying risk.”

Indeed, Intel, the microprocessor manufacturer, has in many regards been the most proactive company on the issue. In January, it unveiled the world’s first “conflict-free” product, and ahead of the recent filing deadline was the only company to offer a fully audited report on its supply chains.

Following an April court ruling that altered the original SEC rule, companies are no longer required to state whether or not a product is “conflict free” (though the court may rehear this case in coming months). Yet Intel, echoing advocacy groups and regulators, says such designations are important.

“One of our takeaways is around transparency. Although not required to disclose the status of our products, we believe this transparency shows our commitment on this issue to our customers and stakeholders,” Intel told IPS in a statement.

“We encourage other companies to also share their product conclusions as we all work towards validating our products as DRC conflict free. Product conclusions provide a useful and transparent method to communicate the progress of our due diligence efforts.”

Already the presence of a single conflict-free product on the market has spurred competition, and a similar dynamic is expected to result from Monday’s public filings.

“We’re already seeing other companies racing to make the next conflict-free product, and we’re encouraging consumers to urge the largest aerospace and automotive companies to take part,” Lezhnev stated.

“Intel’s step is a good one, but there are companies out there that are far bigger. For instance, when is Boeing or GE going to make the next conflict-free product?”

(END)

Fifty Greenpeace activists were arrested on Dec. 9 during a symbolic action of "digging for gold" in front of the Romanian parliament. Credit: Courtesy of Greenpeace Romania

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Dec 10 2013 (IPS)

Authorities in Romania have been attempting to bulldoze through public opposition to push through controversial extractive projects such as gold mining at Rosia Montana and shale gas drilling at Pungesti.

However, amendments to the national mining law, which would have given Rosia Montana Gold Corporation extraordinary powers to implement its project to build Europe’s biggest gold mine in the Apuseni mountains, failed to be passed by the Romanian parliament Dec. 10 mainly because of a lack of quorum.

Tuesday’s vote was part of a long-term strategy by the Romanian government to give the project a green light despite public opposition and legal objections.

While the parliament voted, hundreds of protesters occupied the headquarters of the ombudsman in Bucharest and camped outside the offices of political parties in the western city of Cluj.

If the law had been adopted, projects involving the extraction and processing of mineral resources could have been declared “of exceptional public interest” allowing project promoters to receive extraordinary powers, such as the right to conduct expropriations, skip permitting procedures for working on archaeological sites, and be reissued permits within 60 days if they were cancelled by courts.

The new law represented a means for the authorities to push the Rosia Montana project – and potentially others like it – in a less than transparent manner after a previous attempt to give special powers to Gold Corporation had been dropped due to public pressure.

In August, the Romanian government led by Social Democratic Prime Minister Victor Ponta proposed a draft law that declared the Rosia Montana gold project one “of national interest” and gave Gold Corporation extraordinary powers – expropriations, automatic reissuing of permits, etc.

The draft law sparked massive protests in Romania starting Sept. 1, with tens of thousands taking to the streets for weeks in a row across the country.

Faced with such discontent, the special parliamentary commission analysing the Rosia Montana law rejected the text in November, arguing that the project would be illegal on multiple counts.

In appearance, the decision by the special commission meant the project had been rejected.

Yet as the commission announced its conclusions, the Romanian parliament – dominated by Ponta’s party – was preparing amendments to the mining law which meant potentially giving all mining companies the same controversial extraordinary powers intended to be granted to Gold Corporation.

The political bet was that the amended mining law would be passed under the radar, as the text did not single out Rosia Montana and some of the public thought the project dead with the rejection of the first law.

It was only on Monday Dec. 9 that the public learned that the mining law would be voted on by parliament the next day. The full text of the new law was not available to the public at the time of the Tuesday Dec. 10 vote.

On Monday, the mining law was debated by parliamentary commissions. According to Stefania Simion, a lawyer who has been working for years on the Rosia Montana case and who observed the proceedings, most of the parliamentarians did not have a chance to study the amendments and there was virtually no debate.

In the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities are using secrecy and legal artifice to try to push through a project facing significant public opposition.

In the case of drilling for shale gas at Pungesti, in the eastern county of Vaslui, they are relying instead on policing.

During the months of battle over Rosia Montana, at the other end of the country a new campaign was born: in October, as U.S. energy giant Chevron was preparing to start exploratory works for shale gas in Pungesti, locals mobilised to stop the company’s operations. They set up a camp next to the land where Chevron was preparing to install exploratory drills and tried to block access by machinery to the site.

The villagers, mostly farmers, were worried about the impacts that fracking – hydraulic fracturing, the technique used to extract natural gas from shale – on a perimeter inside their village could have on their lands and water. Some told the Romanian media they had seen movies about the negative effects of fracking in U.S. communities.

Opposition to shale gas exploration – albeit not massive – has grown gradually in Romania over the past two years as successive governments gave exploration permits to several companies; rejecting fracking was one of the themes brought up by protesters during the January 2012 anti-austerity protests and this year’s Rosia Montana demonstrations.

When locals in Pungesti started protesting against Chevron in October, anti-Rosia Montana activists were already mobilised in major cities and ready to offer some support.

The villagers’ attempts to block Chevron operations and the police response were broadcast live on the internet from the early days. The national media also reported on Pungesti, after being criticised for failing to properly cover the anti-Rosia Montana mobilisation.

In their turn having learned from the Rosia Montana case, Romanian authorities responded decisively from the start to prevent the opposition from escalating. For weeks now, the hundreds of villagers protesting at Pungesti are outnumbered by military police deployed on the ground. Tens of people have been arrested. Protesters complain of police brutality and systematic harassment.

“As I camped at Pungesti last Friday, I saw the police attacking people, I witnessed at least four people who had to be saved by the crowds from police abuse,” retired engineer Gherghina Vladescu told IPS.

Responding to the accusations of police brutality in Pungesti, Romania’s minister of interior, Radu Stroe, told the national media Dec. 8: “Others were violent too, they broke down fences…Everyone is free to protest in this country as long as they do it peacefully.”

The minister was referring to the protesters’ tearing down Dec. 7 of a wire fence protecting the area for which Chevron was granted the exploration permit.

In November, villagers from Pungesti submitted an official complaint to the National Anti-Corruption Agency in which they accuse the mayor of Pungesti, who leased land to Chevron, of obtaining property rights over it through an illegal land exchange.

Since protests began at Pungesti, Chevron has suspended operations repeatedly saying that it “is committed to having constructive and positive relations with communities where it conducts operations”. Each time, it resumed works; this month, it filed criminal complaints against villagers for destruction of property.

On Dec. 8., Romanian authorities declared Pungesti “a special public safety zone”. This was needed to justify the ongoing police practices of checking all cars coming into Pungesti, keeping guard outside homes, ID-ing people at will and removing protesters from the site.

Claudiu Craciun, one of the prominent figures in the Rosia Montana and shale gas protest movements, said the situation in Pungesti brought to mind a dystopian future: “Imagine for a second a country where hundreds of industrial perimeters are permanently guarded by tens of thousands of police and private contractors.”

Resistance will continue, he said, adding, “The more the government tries to appear in charge of things, the weaker it is. Legitimacy and the use of force are in an inverse proportionality relation to one another.”

A generation after independence from the Soviet Union, most villages in Kyrgyzstan are ramshackle, broken places, scenes of hopelessness and despair. Able young people leave – for Bishkek, the capital, or for menial jobs in Russia. But thanks to a secret gold mine, one little mountain hamlet is different.

Soviet geologists found the gold vein in remote Naryn Province in the 1940s, villagers say. But the gold was never tapped until economic collapse in the 1990s forced the village’s “wild geologists,” as they call themselves, to explore.

“Without it, our village would vanish in crime and theft,” says one miner, an agronomist by training. “It used to be a very criminal place before people started working at the mine. One wouldn’t even leave a broom in the backyard.”

Though it’s illegal, villagers say about 60 percent of local men work regularly at the mine, and it supports the entire community of approximately 3,000. With other work opportunities scant – and with gold mining increasingly contentious and politicised in Kyrgyzstan – villagers are cautious. They would only speak with EurasiaNet.org on condition of strict anonymity, insisting even the name of the village not appear in print.

Another miner, who has been working at the open-pit mine for more than 10 years, says the gold helped him and his wife, a schoolteacher, raise three children and build a modest home. Now his son is studying geology in Bishkek, intending to continue his father’s work. With deeply wrinkled hands he points at the mountain: “Everything I have today is because of this mine.”

The miner, who asked to be called Bakyt, makes the three-hour trek up to the pit about once every other month with four or five colleagues in a jeep packed with warm clothes, tents, and food they can cook on a portable gas stove – meat, rice, and vegetables. “It needs to be high-calorie food, because it’s very hard labour,” he says.

On trips lasting up to a month, the miners look for quartz and pyrite – two indications of gold. “Once we see small pieces of gold glittering, we start digging with pickaxes and hoes,” Bakyt says.

The miners sort promising rocks into 50-kilo burlap sacks and return home to a jerry-built refinery. One machine crushes the stones into powder; several electric sieves wash away the dust, leaving the heavier gold on the bottom. Even hidden in a garage, the machines make so much noise they can be heard outside. But it seems everyone in the village has an economic stake in the process, and thus an incentive to keep the secret.

The gold dust contains gold, silver, iron, and pyrite. The pyrite is burned away with highly corrosive nitric acid in a process that might frighten health inspectors: Outside, in an open field, with no goggles or other protection, the miners mix the acid and powder in a stainless-steel dish and step back as they burn.

“We … put the dish against the wind, in order not to inhale the smoke,” says Bakyt, describing it first as “black, then yellow. At the end, it turns white and stops. That’s how we know it’s done.”

Nitric acid is available, illegally, in Bishkek for about five dollars per litre. The amateur chemists remove iron with the help of magnets. Eventually, they say, the gold dust is about 83-85 percent gold and about 15 percent silver. This compound is sold to one of several middlemen in the village at an agreed four to five-dollar discount off world market price, per gramme, because of the silver.

Villagers keep a close eye on market price fluctuations with the help of mobile Internet connections.

Those not directly involved in the mining also benefit, explains a member of the elected local council. Shops in the village are well stocked and several men hire themselves out as drivers to ferry miners to the site. Unlike many Kyrgyz villages, where most young men have migrated away to search for work, few are eager to leave. Some who left in the 1990s have even returned.

The mine “benefits these people and the whole village. Everyone is doing what they can to get by,” the official says. “Plus, gold miners contribute money to social events. There’s both an economic and social impact.”

The economic benefits may trickle down illicitly to local officials, too – a phenomenon widespread in Kyrgyzstan and throughout the former Soviet Union. One villager said police sometimes stop vehicles on a road from the mine, demanding a “toll” of 300 som (about six dollars) per bag of stones. (Each vehicle returning from the mine carries up to 10 bags.)

Asked if the miners have the technical expertise to handle and store chemicals like nitric acid, the council member says locals are more careful than foreign investors because “they live here.” Foreign companies are often faulted in the local press for environmental breaches – in some cases justly, in others not.

He says villagers have tried to get permission to operate the mine legally, but never heard back from Bishkek. Now, with parliament considering nationalising the country’s only significant gold mine, Canadian-owned Kumtor, the villagers are afraid to ask again. “I don’t believe the government will listen to us, they will just ban mining,” the council member says.

The off-the-radar mine was contested in the not-too-distant past. In 2011, Kyrgyzaltyn, the state-run gold company, tried to sell it to a Chinese firm, according to Radio Azattyk. The decision seems to have been put on hold after villagers protested in the provincial capital, Naryn.

“This is theft. It cannot be allowed and should be prosecuted by the local government,” said Kadyrbek Kaketaev, recently retired as deputy director of the State Geology Agency.

But villagers have no intention of stopping.

“We don’t care whether it’s winter or summer, we are there the whole year,” says one miner. The mine doesn’t make him rich, but gives him something rare in rural Kyrgyzstan – a comfortable life. It’s also risky, he explains: Some missions return home empty-handed and rack up debt. But a successful trip can gross around 2,000 dollars.

“We have gold fever and will never be healed. We will do this all our lives,” says Bakyt.

Editor’s note:  Asel Kalybekova is a freelance reporter based in Kyrgyzstan. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Artisanal miner panning for gold in Choluteca, Honduras. Small-scale gold mining is a leading cause of mercury pollution. Credit: Thelma Mejía/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Oct 7 2013 (IPS)

A new international convention opening for signatures this week will for the first time offer an agreed-upon roadmap by which to significantly decrease the global use of mercury while offering stronger safeguards for both human health and the environment.

Environment and public health groups are hailing the treaty, a legally binding agreement known as the Minamata Convention on Mercury, the text of which was agreed to in January by 147 countries following four years of negotiations. Proponents are now calling on governments to move quickly to ratify the accord after it opens for signatures, on Wednesday during a four-day summit in Japan.“This is something we’ve worked on for over a decade, so it’s quite an amazing moment." -- Michael Bender of the Zero Mercury Working Group

The convention will come into effect following ratification by 50 countries, though several key parts of the agreement will only be enforced at the end of this decade or even later.

“Overall, this is a really positive step – while we would have liked to have seen a stronger section on health, just having health language in what was considered an environmental treaty is an achievement,” Jane Cohen, a researcher in the Health and Human Rights Division at Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“We see mercury exposure in this setting as a critical threat to children’s and women’s health, as well as a major issue around access to information. It’s a prime example of environmental degradation impacting directly on human lives.”

The Minamata Convention (named for the Japanese city that is the site of the worst modern mercury poisoning) will now lead ratifying countries to phase out – and, by 2020, to ban – the use of mercury in a range of consumer items, including certain batteries, light bulbs, medical devices, dental fillings and vaccines. It will also tackle mercury pollution at its two most common sources, small-scale gold mining and coal-fired power plants.

Indeed, it is due to these latter two sectors that the new convention’s effects will likely be particularly pronounced in developing countries. While most industrialised countries have reduced their use of mercury in recent decades, developing economies have seen a steep rise in the toxic metal’s use.

“This is the first time we’ve seen these kinds of protections in a convention, so in addition to requiring real, implementable steps, it also brings much-needed attention to this issue for governments,” Cohen notes.

“Any country that has small-scale gold mining must now have a national action plan to look at alternatives or ensure worker and environmental safety – countries won’t be able to just ignore this convention. In addition, some of the worst forms of this sector’s use of mercury – such as burning it – will be banned outright.”

According to estimates released earlier this year by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), since 2005 mercury emissions have doubled in small-scale mining operations in Africa, Asia and South America. Today, Southeast and East Asia alone account for around half of global mercury emissions, put down to the regions’ rapid economic growth in recent years and rising gold prices.

No alternative to cooperation

International talks on the dangers posed by mercury began in earnest early last decade, and by 2003 countries had struck an initial agreement that the substance deserved to be considered a global pollutant warranting immediate international action. But it took another half-dozen years for serious negotiations, a process that was given new momentum by President Barack Obama’s election in 2008.

As a senator, Obama had urged the U.S. government to enter into negotiations towards a binding international mercury standard. After his election to the presidency, Obama was able to oversee an about-face in U.S. policy on the issue, a change that proved to be a catalyst for other countries, including China and India.

Simultaneously, many industrialised countries were already ratcheting down their own use of mercury, both for consumer and industrial purposes. In late 2011, the U.S. government unveiled strict new standards for mercury emissions from power plants, seen as one of the most important environmental victories of Obama’s first term.

“This is one of the compelling reasons why countries like the United States and other developed countries have moved to adopt the treaty, because they’ve already taken significant steps to phase out their use of mercury,” Michael Bender, a founder and international coordinator for the Zero Mercury Working Group (ZMWG), a network of groups in 50 countries, told IPS from the sidelines of the Japan summit.

“This is something we’ve worked on for over a decade, so it’s quite an amazing moment. No single country can solve the global mercury crisis – while there are alternatives to most products and processes and there are controls for most major sources, there is no alternative to global cooperation.”

Mercury, which can remain in natural environments for years, attacks the nervous system and has been proven to be particularly debilitating for unborn babies and children. According to new research released last week by the ZMWG, mercury levels in many human communities could be far higher than anticipated.

Looking at hair samples of women of childbearing age from nine countries, researchers found that nearly a quarter exceeded a widely accepted safety limit for a certain type of mercury set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Further, higher findings appear to correlate with higher consumption of fish and seafood, with 71 percent of women in Japan, for instance, exceeding this limit, followed by 64 percent of women in Spain.

While Bender expresses satisfaction with the Minamata Convention’s imminent passage, he and others have expressed concern over the agreement’s timeframe.

A new article he co-authored for the Journal of Public Health Policy warns that the convention “is slow to address major sources and uses of mercury. Coal-fired power plants constructed after the Convention enters into force are not required to install controls until 5 years later, with existing facilities given 10 years … Moreover, missing from the Convention are steps to eventually end mercury use in” small-scale gold mining.

Still, Bender and the ZMWG are now turning their attention to encouraging the convention’s timely ratification. They’re hoping to get the required 50 ratifications by 2015, and Bender says he’s optimistic that goal will be met.

“One good indication is the great number of environment ministers showing up here [in Japan], a dozen and a half from Africa alone,” he says.

“We also understand that a significant percentage of countries in the European Union are coming. Between the interest being demonstrated in Africa and the E.U. alone, we feel quite confident that the momentum for this international agreement will continue to build.”

Eugen David, former miner turned farmer and inhabitant of Rosia Montana, speaking to protesters in Piata Universitatii in Bucharest. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS.

By Claudia Ciobanu
BUCHAREST, Sep 17 2013 (IPS)

Street protests are snowballing in Romania against a Canadian-led gold mining project in the Rosia Montana area in the Apuseni Mountains. More than 20,000 people joined a protest march in Bucharest on Sunday, and thousands in other Romanian cities took to the streets.

The Sunday marches represent the third major countrywide weekend mobilisation to oppose the project since Sep. 1. They drew the biggest numbers of participants so far. Smaller numbers of people have been protesting daily in Bucharest, in the western city of Cluj, and in others cities.

The protests erupted after the Romanian government proposed a draft law Aug. 27 that gives extraordinary powers to the project promoter, Rosia Montana Gold Corporation (in which Canadian group Gabriel Resources is the majority stakeholder). “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations." -- Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests

According to the text, the company can relocate people whose homes are on the perimeter of the mine. Additionally, the law asks state authorities to grant the company all necessary permits within set deadlines regardless of national legislation, court rulings or public participation requirements.

Gold Corporation plans to build Europe’s largest gold mine at Rosia Montana to extract 300 tonnes of gold and 1,600 tonnes of silver over 17 years. The operation would involve the destruction of three villages and four mountains.

In all, 12,000 tonnes of cyanide would be used yearly and 13 million tons of mining waste produced each year, according to a project presentation submitted by the company to the Ministry of Environment.

The proposed law is meant to give the project a definitive green light after over 14 years in which Gold Corporation has not been able to secure all necessary permits.

In 2004, the Romanian Academy of Science – the most authoritative scientific body in the country – called for the project to be scrapped because environmental and social costs far outweigh benefits. Apart from environmental risks and displacements, the large-scale mining proposed by Gold Corporation would threaten the cultural heritage in Rosia Montana, a mining area since Roman times.

Hundreds of people in the 3,000-strong village have been opposing the project for years, setting up the NGO Alburnus Maior and successfully battling the corporation and state authorities in courts.

Contributing to the growth in public sympathy for the movement has been the seemingly close alliance between Gold Corporation, politicians across the political spectrum and mainstream media.

Political arch-rivals, such as centre-right President Traian Basescu and Socialist Prime Minister Victor Ponta, have at various points declared themselves in favour of the project.

Most major media outlets in the country have run Gold Corporation advertisements while failing to cover arguments against the exploitation. In a country where corruption is a big feature of public life, this consensus in favour of gold mining at Rosia reeked of backroom deals.

The predominant discourse about Rosia Montana in the public sphere has been that gold mining would create employment and enrich state coffers. According to the most recent agreement between the Romanian government and the company (annexed to the Aug. 27 draft law), Gold Corporation would employ 2,300 people during the two-year construction phase and 900 during the 17 years of exploitation. Over the duration of the operation, the Romanian budget is set to win 2.3 billion dollars while other benefits for the Romanian economy are estimated at 2.9 billion dollars.

The popular mobilisation now targets the Parliament, whose vote will effectively decide the fate of Rosia Montana. If the law is approved, even if it is challenged as unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court (the premises for such a procedure exist since a judicial committee in the Senate issued a negative opinion on the draft law), construction could begin immediately, pending the supreme court ruling.

“We cannot tell what will happen with this project, but all that we can say is that we keep fighting, that united we will save Rosia Montana,” Eugen David, leader of Alburnus Maior told IPS. “We are under siege right now in Rosia Montana, but in the end we will manage to lift it.”

The protests that began on Sep. 1 are remarkably strong for Romania. Since their start, misinformation in the public space has been abundant: the main television channels originally failed to cover the protests despite their size; on Sep. 10, media wrongly announced that the draft law had been rejected by the Senate; and Ponta declared that the project could not go ahead against popular will, only to later express again support for the project.

In spite of this, protesters – who function according to a non-hierarchical structure and have no official leaders – have skillfully kept the public informed and engaged via Facebook. The weekly hours-long marches go through neighbourhoods with the goal of spreading the word about opposition to the project and showing that protesters are not hooligans as depicted on TV.

Their strategy seems to have worked since numbers this Sunday were bigger than ever. The first days of mobilisation brought mostly youth to the streets, but older participants and youth-parent couples are increasingly visible. After two weeks of well-mannered street actions, police presence on Sunday can be considered symbolic.

“It is very interesting that such a revolt began with a case of protecting the environment, but this is not only about the environment,” Claudiu Craciun, an active participant in the protests, told IPS. “It is also about the right of people to keep their properties, about our duty to safeguard a patrimony that belongs not only to us, but also to the world and to future generations.

“The Rosia Montana case – in which you see legislation custom made to serve the interests of a corporation – highlights some failures of both democratic institutions and of the economic system, capitalism in a broader sense,” Craciun added.

“Rosia Montana is the battle of the present and of the next decades,” the activist said. “It illustrates the end of post-1989 cleavages [communist vs anti-communist, European vs. non-European] and the emergence of new ones. People today confront a corrupted political class backed up by a corporation and a sold out media; and they ask for an improved democratic process, for adding a participatory democracy dimension to traditional democratic mechanisms.”

Ochir Damchaa chuckles as he drives his second-hand Toyota sedan through the alleyways of Nalaikh, a ramshackle town 35 kilometres east of Ulaanbaatar: “There’re just two kinds of jobs here: drive a taxi, or dig coal.”

Nalaikh was once a major Soviet-era industrial hub, and the site of Mongolia’s first mine. Today, though, the town is littered with ruins of former factories, such as Mongolia’s only glassworks. Residents continue to work as freelance miners on the grounds of the former state-owned coalmine. But jobs are scarce in Nalaikh, as in every other small town across Mongolia.

Despite rapid, mining-driven economic growth, Mongolia is experiencing persistent unemployment, a widening income gap, and a 30 percent poverty rate. The country’s leaders are now promising to diversify the economy, aiming to create jobs that push more people above the poverty line.

Mongolia’s massive Oyu Tolgoi gold and copper mine started shipping copper concentrate to China in early July. By 2020, the joint-venture between Canada’s Rio Tinto, Anglo-Australian firm Turquoise Hill and the Mongolian government is projected to account for about 35 percent to GDP, according to Oyu Tolgoi’s website.

Mongolia at present appears to be at high risk of suffering from so-called Dutch Disease, an economic condition in which a nation’s economy becomes overly dependent on the export of natural resources. Mining currently contributes about a third of GDP and accounts for 89.2 percent of the country’s total exports, according to data compiled by Oxford Business Group.

But the sector employs only about four percent of the entire workforce. Inversely, the traditional agricultural sector – livestock for meat and wool – employs about 40 percent of the workforce and contributes less than 15 percent of GDP, according to the same data.

The transition from a largely agricultural economy to one dominated by mining has contributed to disproportionate growth and exacerbated a problem in Mongolia, dubbed the “missing middle”, says Saurabh Sinha, senior economist at the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Ulaanbaatar.

“On the one hand you have the mining sector which is running away and driving the entire economy and on the other hand you have the agriculture, the livestock and nomadic lifestyle. And between these two, the urban manufacturing sector is really scant and limited,” Sinha says.

This wasn’t always so. Mongolia’s manufacturing sector comprised about a third of the economy in 1988, just before the collapse of communism. In 2011, the figure was seven percent, according to Oxford Business Group.

The decline, Sinha points out, is partly due to the collapse of many state-owned factories following the transition to a market-oriented system. He believes options for reviving manufacturing in the country are limited given the small population and poor infrastructure.

President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, re-elected for a second term in early July, has promised to promote economic diversification policies, but years of talk about the development of non-mining sectors have produced little, says Sukhgerel Dugersuren of OT Watch, a non-profit that monitors the impact of Oyu Tolgoi.

“Ten years ago Mongolia started talking about economic diversification: improving its competiveness, developing the IT sector, developing eco-tourism,” she said. But she believes the attention on mining has adversely affected growth in other sectors over that period.

“Economic diversification simply means not putting all your eggs in one flimsy basket,” Dugersuren says, referring to the Oyu Tolgoi mine. “A nation that is dependent on one corporation for 35 percent of its GDP is not in a safe place.”

In April, Ulaanbaatar demonstrated its support for agricultural development with 86.2 million dollars in soft loans for cashmere companies, garment industries and dairy producers. But limited private investment and scant infrastructure continue to check the agriculture sector’s growth potential, according to French entrepreneur and dairy expert Didier le Goff, who started a cheese factory on the outskirts of Ulaanbaatar in 2010.

“Mining is fast money for a short time, agriculture is slow money forever,” says le Goff.

He believes Mongolia has a unique potential to become an exporter of “organic bio-products” given the country’s nomadic heritage. But he admits sourcing local milk year round is difficult and enormous challenges still exist to rebuild and streamline supply chains in the vast country.

A 2009 report from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) noted that 70 percent of milk consumed in urban Mongolia was reconstituted from imported milk powder, despite a livestock population of over 30 million animals – or about 10 animals per every Mongolian citizen.

Jim Dwyer, director of the Business Council of Mongolia, a private business lobby, agrees that developing the agricultural sector is Mongolia’s best bet to diversifying its economy. He argues the government must reinvest mining wealth in infrastructure and social services to generate broad employment.

There are some signs authorities are listening. Earlier this year, Ulaanbaatar raised 1.5 billion dollars in its first-ever bond offering. Though authorities announced plans to spend a large share of the money, about 850 million dollars, on improving infrastructure across the country and to support the mining sector with construction of a new power plant and a new railroad, about 145 million dollars was earmarked for improving cashmere production technology, dairy production and wool industries.

“Agriculture is one thing we do have here. When the Russians left in 1990, the country was self-sufficient, even exporting various food products. There’s tremendous opportunity here with the [mining] money to bring that back to life,” says Dwyer.

Editor’s note:  Pearly Jacob is a freelance journalist based in Ulaanbaatar. This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

Haitians concerned about the impacts of unchecked mining meet at a sweltering tin-roofed church near Grand Bois on Jul. 5, 2013. Source: HGW/Lafontaine Orvild

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Aug 1 2013 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

As the government works on preparing “an attractive law that will entice investors”, Haitian popular organisations are mobilising and forming networks to resist mining in their country.

Already one-third of the north of Haiti is under research, exploration, or exploitation license to foreign companies."We in Baie de Henne are against any eventual mining because we will not profit one bit. It will have harmful impacts that destroy our fertile lands and our fruit trees and dry up our aquifers.” -- Vernicia Phillus, a member of the Tèt Kole women’s group

Some 2,400 square kilometres have been parceled out to Haitian firms fronting for U.S. and Canadian concerns. Some estimate that Haiti’s mineral wealth – mostly gold, copper, and silver – could be worth as much as 20 billion dollars. The awarding of permits behind closed doors, with no independent or community oversight, has angered many in Haiti, who fear that the government is opening the country up to systematic pillage.

But the head of the government mining agency told Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) his concern is to assure that Haiti is made more “attractive” to potential investors.

“We need an attractive mining law,” said Ludner Remarais, head of the Mining and Energy Agency. “A mining law that will entice investors.”

The current law is obsolete, according to Remarais.

Haiti’s “gold rush” has been going on for the past five years or so, since the price of gold and other minerals rose. Until last year, the government and the companies cut their deals behind closed doors. After an investigation revealed that 15 percent of the county was under contract, on Feb. 20, 2013 the Haitian Senate adopted a resolution demanding all activities cease in order to allow for a national debate and for analysis of all contracts.

“We are scrupulously respecting the decision,” Remarais said, but he added that the resolution does not annul the rights already acquired.

Local resistance in the gold-rich regions

Peasant, human rights, food sovereignty and environmental organisations are worried about the disastrous effects the mining industry could have on water quality, farmland, and on the affected regions in general and have formed the national Collective Against Mining to assist local associations with information and consciousness-raising sessions.

On Jul. 5, over 200 farmers from the area around the Grand Bois deposit – about 11 kilometres south of Limbé, in the North department – got together to discuss the mining operation and their futures. They spoke of their worries for three hours in sweltering tin-roofed church.

“When someone talks about mining, our history makes us think of slavery, of the takeover of our farmlands,” said Willy Pierre, a social sciences teacher from a nearby school. “We could lose our fertile fields. We will be forced off our land. Where will we live?”

The Grand Bois deposit is rich in gold and copper, according to tests carried out by the Canadian mining company Eurasian Minerals. Eurasian owns the license given by the BME to its Haitian subsidiary, Société Minière Citadelle S.A.

During the meeting, many people said they were nervous.

“This mining business should be a lesson for all of us,” warned Jean Vilmé, a farmer from the Bogé region of Grand Bois. “Not only will those of us who live around the mineral deposit perish, the entire country will be swallowed up!”

Two weeks earlier about 50 members of local and national organisations met in Jean Rabel, an impoverished town in the Northwest department with poor roads and no water system or health facilities. Participants watched and debated a video on mining in Haiti and discussed their next steps.

Earlier that month, some 60 representatives of the associations in the collective organised a day-long meeting at Montrouis, northeast of the capital. Of particular concern are the protection of ground water, food sovereignty, agricultural land, biodiversity, health, and land ownership.

Clébért Duval, a member of the peasant association Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan Ayisyen (“Small Haitian Peasants Working Together”) from Port-de-Paix, noted that a state that is working in favour of its people could use mineral resources to “change the conditions of the popular masses, peasants, vulnerable people, and could give this country a new face”.

However, he said, “If the state is a predator that is working for the multinationals, for the capitalist system which, since it is in crisis, is taking over the riches of poor countries to fight the crisis, then that state will always encourage mining. All the money that should go to the people will go to the foreign firms, except for a few crumbs for the local guys who are serving as go-betweens. The mining companies will get all the riches, just as they have in the past.”

Many rejected the officials’ arguments that mining is important for the country’s development and economy.

“In 2012, some companies did prospecting,” said Vernicia Phillus, a member of the Tèt Kole women’s coordination in Baie de Henne. “They took away soil and rock samples. Each person who worked for them got between 200 and 250 gourdes (4.65 to 5.81 dollars) a day.

“We in Baie de Henne are against any eventual mining because we will not profit one bit. It will have harmful impacts that destroy our fertile lands and our fruit trees and dry up our aquifers.”

Government and World Bank also organising

In early June, the Haitian mining agency and the World Bank organised a “Mining Forum” aimed at developing “the mining sector in a way that makes it a motor for the country’s economic takeoff.” Most of the speakers were from foreign institutions and from mining companies.

Parliamentarians, local elected officials, independent geologists and researchers, representatives of the people from the regions concerned, and grassroots organisations did not address the room.

One of the meeting’s principle objectives was allegedly to sketch out the general contours of a new mining law for the country, even though World Bank officials said they had kicked off that process earlier this year, according to media reports.

During the Jun. 3-4 forum, Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe said that his government was working with “competent experts who have [Haiti’s] national interests at heart”, according to the Associated Press.

But World Bank involvement with the law appears to be a conflict of interest. In 2010, the International Finance Commission (IFC), a branch of the bank, invested about five million in Eurasian Mineral’s Haiti operations, receiving Eurasian shares in exchange.

The World Bank is often criticised by organisations like Mining Watch Canada, Earthworks, and others for being lax where the protection of poor countries is concerned, and for its role in the “continuation of colonialism” in Africa, Asia, and Latin America through its important loans to mining companies.

In March, the U.S. government representative to the World Bank abstained in a vote to approve a bank loan for 12 billion dollars to a mining operation in the Gobi Desert, citing concerns over potential negative environmental impacts. The bank loans were approved anyway, according to Inter Press Service.

Asked about an eventual new law that would be “attractive” and capable of “enticing investors”, the director of DOP, a member of the Collective Against Mining, said he was concerned.

“Mining legislation that is ‘attractive’ will open the country up for ‘business,’” wrote attorney Patrice Florvilus on Jul. 14, 2013, making reference to the government’s slogan “Haiti – Open for business.”

“Business, without considering the deleterious effects on community life and on the environment, which is already deteriorating at a worrying pace,” he added.

In a Jul. 22 note, the Collective wrote the following: “We want a truly national law and international conventions that protect life, water, land, and the environment, and that outlaw mining which brings with it pollution, destruction, contamination, and more hunger.”

Please also see other Haiti Grassroots Watch stories on the issue: Dossier #18 and Dossier #27

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

AngloGold Ashanti Colombia billboard on the road from Ibagué, capital of Tolima, to Cajamarca: “Together we build the future: La Colosa means progress for Colombia in harmony with the environment and hand in hand with communities.” Credit: Constanza Vieira/IPS

By Constanza Vieira
CAJAMARCA, Colombia , Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

People in a farming town in central Colombia voted overwhelmingly against global corporation AngloGold Ashanti’s La Colosa gold mine.

In a popular vote on Sunday, whose results are binding, 99 percent of the 2,995 people in the municipality of Piedras who cast ballots – out of a total of 5,105 local people eligible to vote – said “no” to the South Africa-based gold mining company’s operations in the area.

Piedras, in the central province of Tolima, is 96 km west of La Colosa, the largest open pit gold mining project in the northern Andes, located in the district of Cajamarca, known as “Colombia’s breadbasket.”

Early last decade, AngloGold Ashanti (AGA) arrived in these hills of cloud forest and peasant fields.

La Colosa, which is still in the feasibility study stage, is the third-largest mining project of AGA, which is the world’s third-largest gold producer, with 21 mining operations in 10 countries.

According to the report “Mining in Colombia – Foundations for going beyond the extractivist model”, published this year by the office of the comptroller-general, La Colosa will produce a total of 759 tonnes of gold over 20 years. The estimate is based on 2008 figures from AGA.

AGA Colombia’s director of communications, Sandra Ocampo, told IPS that the material removed would yield one gram of gold per tonne.

AGA estimates the mine’s useful life at 20 years, although Ocampo said it could be longer, since the firm’s technicians “are still making discoveries that increase its size, in the project’s direct area of activities and in surrounding areas.”

The company thus does not rule out the possibility of mining gold in La Colosa for up to half a century.

But that depends on whether “the preliminary exploration can move forward so AGA manages to assess what there is in the area,” Ocampo said.

In the battle over La Colosa, AGA filed a lawsuit in January against Piedras Mayor Arquímedes Ávila, because a roadblock by local residents was blocking the circulation of the company’s employees, vehicles and machines.

But the attempt to sue the local government, which according to the company had failed to take action to prevent the roadblock, did not go anywhere.

The Tolima environmental authority brought AGA’s activities in the area to a halt on three occasions, most recently in March, when it announced penalties for repeated irregularities.

AGA decided to install the processing plant for La Colosa in Doima, a rice-growing village in the municipality of Piedras, whose residents began to mobilise as soon as they found out about the plans, in January.

Activities to block the gold mining project have continued since then. Ávila called on the 5,105 eligible voters in Piedras to come to the polls on Sunday to respond “yes” or “no” to one question: do you support AGA’s mining activities in the area?

The 12-line question asked local residents whether they accepted the “exploration, exploitation, treatment, transformation, transportation and washing of materials” from the company’s large-scale gold mine.

It also asked if they accepted the “storage…and use of materials harmful to health and the environment,” like cyanide and other toxic substances, and “the use of surface and underground water” for gold mining, which threatens the water supply for human consumption and agricultural use.

But AGA argued that “the description included in the question does not reflect the way we operate.” The firm complained that it had not been listened to, and that Sunday’s vote was not “an informed and coherent decision” but one that was “induced by prejudice”.

Under Colombia’s law on plebiscites, the result of the vote is binding if at least one third of voters participate – in other words, a minimum of 1,700 voters in the case of Piedras.

However, different interpretations of the law’s jurisdiction mean a legal battle is looming.

The ministry of mines and energy claims municipalities cannot decide on gold-mining projects within their jurisdictions, and that authorisation by the ministry or by the national environmental permitting authority takes precedence over popular votes or plebiscites.

According to Colombia’s statistics office, 33.5 percent of the people in Piedras and 28.3 percent in Cajamarca were poor – defined as “unsatisfied basic needs” – as of June 2012.

Cajamarca divided

In a communiqué, AGA said mining would generate 1,500 direct jobs and 60,000 indirect jobs, as well as 477 million dollars in taxes and royalties over the next 20 years.

“La Colosa is a golden opportunity for Tolima…that will bring progress and well-being,” it stated.

But many people in Cajamarca who spoke to IPS were sceptical.

“The mining company is buying up farms, and those who don’t want to sell find themselves hemmed in and without a future,” said one mulberry grower who preferred not to give his name.

“Without permission, AngloGold uses private roads to drive in with a hellish number of trucks,” said a local woman who was also fearful of having her name published.

Although her restaurant has benefited from the influx of company personnel, she said she preferred to leave a healthy environment to the young people in her family.

AGA created the civil organisation Sí a la Mina (Yes to the Mine), which divided the community. And the local leaders who have not been won over feel isolated.

The majority of the population in Cajamarca supports mining and believes that everyone will benefit, and that in 30 years, everything will be back to normal, because AGA told them it would cover the mine with greenery after it is finished.

At least, that is what rural children say the mining company has told them.

Local people who spoke to IPS said the children live in remote rural areas of Cajamarca, where they never even see cars, and where they walk several kilometres to school each day.

On Saturdays, AGA sends vehicles to pick them up at their homes to take them to parties it has organised. The company has also distributed laptop computers to local students. When they come home from these events, the children argue with their parents about why they are opposed to the mine.

The mayor of Cajamarca, Evelio Gómez, has accepted the mine. If a school needs painting and reforms, AngloGold pays. It also makes gifts, like ambulances.

“And the mayor doesn’t do anything,” a local resident of Anaima, in Cajamarca, told IPS. Most of the people in that village are united against La Colosa – as are the people of Piedras.

As officials in Kyrgyzstan prepare to negotiate with their country’s largest investor in Bishkek this week, new details are emerging about how the Kyrgyz government wants to restructure the agreement covering operations at the country’s flagship gold mine.

Bishkek and Toronto-listed Centerra Gold are engaged in a protracted legal dispute over Kumtor, the largest gold mine operated by a Western company in Central Asia.

Earlier this year, a Kyrgyz state commission claimed Centerra owes approximately 467 million dollars for environmental damages. Then, in February, parliament gave Kyrgyz officials three months to negotiate a new operating agreement, which would be the third in 10 years.

Kyrgyz officials say the current agreement, negotiated under former president Kurmanbek Bakiyev in 2009, shortly before he was ousted amid violent street riots, was unfair. The company, which also operates a mine in Mongolia, argues that it negotiated in good faith with what was at the time the legitimate government, and has threatened to seek international arbitration.

It calls the 467-million-dollar claim — which other miners in Bishkek say is a negotiating tactic — “exaggerated or without merit.” Centerra officials also point out that the agreement gave the company confidence to invest almost one billion dollars in the mine since 2009.

Kumtor is critical to Kyrgyzstan’s economy. Last year the mine, which sits above 4,000 metres in the Tien Shan mountains, contributed approximately 5.5 percent of the country’s GDP. In 2011, a good year, the mine accounted for 12 percent of GDP and over 50 percent of industrial output. Earlier this month, Centerra announced its first quarter revenue rose 44 percent.

Negotiations are likely to focus on current operating agreement’s structure, a source close to the Kyrgyz side told EurasiaNet.org. Under the existing agreement, Kyrgyzstan owns close to one-third of the Toronto-listed company. That arrangement places Bishkek in a bind: if the government fines the company, it hurts its own potential dividends.

Bishkek is ready to divest itself of Centerra ownership, the source said, in return for “both a higher income stream and more direct control over operations at the mine.”

The current agreement “doesn’t allow the nation to properly exercise its function as a sovereign. It actually creates an internal conflict. The more they levy tax, the more they assess environmental penalties, the less revenue is available to them in dividends,” the source said, speaking on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the negotiations.

“This structure may be very useful to Centerra, but it is very difficult to understand why, in 2009, the Bakiyev regime pressed for this structure. That reinforces the suspicions of corruption.”

Centerra has repeatedly denied allegations of corruption, and Kyrgyz authorities have not presented convincing evidence the company engaged in corrupt practices. But some believe the venal Bakiyev administration was eager to obtain stock options so it could one day sell them and embezzle the proceeds.

Kyrgyzstan’s shares are held by the state-run gold company, Kyrgyzaltyn. Kyrgyzstan “has every interest in seeing shareholder value maximised and Centerra run as a profitable and successful business,” Kylychbek Shakirov, Kyrgyzaltyn deputy chairman for economics and finance, said in a May 10 speech to shareholders.

Shakirov stressed that Kyrgyzstan is not seeking to nationalise the mine, but said his delegation was acting as a “responsible shareholder” by pushing for Centerra to use a new auditor (it has employed KPMG for a decade) and sideline a senior member of the board while he faces insider-trading allegations in Canada.

Shakirov also expressed “strong reservations” about proposals to offer senior Centerra managers pay raises, noting that in the past few years, compensation packages have risen “sharply as the company’s performance overall was falling.”

Centerra’s top five principals each earned, on average, over 1.6 million Canadian dollars in 2012, 56.7 percent more than they earned in 2010, according to the management information circular distributed at the shareholders’ meeting. Yet, over the past two years – while production has fallen and the company has faced repeated calls for nationalisation by some Kyrgyz politicians – the company’s value has fallen roughly 80 percent.

John Pearson, Centerra’s vice president for investor relations, told EurasiaNet.org that the two sides “are making progress” as they approach negotiations, which parliament has said must be completed by Jun. 1.

“The discussions with the government are ongoing. Most recently in our discussion with the government we recommended that they retain external independent advisors on both the financial and legal fronts and they have done so,” he said.

Bishkek is said to have hired DLA Piper, the law firm, and Price Waterhouse Coopers as advisors.

In recent weeks, increased waste rock movement at Kumtor has highlighted long-standing environmental concerns, some of the thorniest issues in the negotiations. Centerra points to studies – including several commissioned by Bishkek – that absolve it of wrongdoing.

But questions remain about whether an accelerated pace of melting ice at the high-altitude mine is being encouraged by extraction activities there.

As part of its approach, Bishkek is expected to push for a review of environmental compliance standards, while it considers ways of tightening its own legislation related to mining’s environmental impact in general.

*Editor’s note: David Trilling is EurasiaNet’s Central Asia editor.

This story originally appeared on EurasiaNet.org.

An armed policeman stands guard in the village of Ierissos, where residents have been protesting a mining project. Credit: antigoldgreece.wordpress.com

By Apostolis Fotiadis
HALKIDIKI, Greece, Apr 27 2013 (IPS)

Any sense of tranquility that hangs around the mountain of Skouries in northern Greece, 80 km east of Greece’s second largest city Thessaloniki, is a façade. Home to some of the oldest forests in Greece, the pristine region is now a battleground, as the local population takes on the Canadian mining giant Eldorado Gold Corporation and its local subsidiary, Hellas Gold.

At the intersection between the road that leads to the village of Ierissos and another going up to the only operational mine in the region, on the mountain of Mavri Petra, one is stopped by a security guard, with the questions: “Who are you and what do you want?”

The guards have good reason to worry. A huge majority of this community of 40,000 opposes the extractive project, which aims to mine approximately 12 billion dollars worth of copper, gold, silver, zinc and lead that have been slumbering untouched under this mountain.

This past February, hooded men wielding Molotov cocktails set fire to bulldozers, containers and other equipment to mark their resistance to so-called “cheap extraction” plans, approved by the Greek government in 2011.

The corporation has pledged to invest 1.2 billion dollars into the creation of a huge open pit mine, as well as a network of smaller mines below the surface of the mountain. It says the project will generate over 1,000 jobs for locals and pump new life into Greece’s sputtering economy.

A close analysis of the contract shows Greece will not pocket even a significant portion of the mines’ projected revenue.

Christo Pahtas, mayor of the municipality that houses the natural deposits, signed away extraction rights to a 317,000-square-kilometre area without specifying royalties for the state.

Currently, Greece is only eligible to earn social security contributions for workers employed in the project, and taxes from the company’s profits — which could reduce dramatically if Eldorado opts to process minerals in another country.

Arguments over the extent of possible environmental impacts have already split the scientific community here. The state-run Institute of Geology and Mineral Exploration has formally thrown its support behind the investment, even while academics cry foul on the company’s claims that “new” extraction methods will spare the local ecosystem.

“The company speaks ‘half-truths’,” Georgios K. Triantafyllidis, a lecturer on mining and metallurgical engineering from the University of Thessaloniki, told IPS. The company has promised to refrain from using chemicals like cyanide or from emitting arsenic into the surrounding forests – but their “novel” practices are based on “scientific theories not yet proven in production”.

Past mining activity has set a negative precedent among locals, who do not trust claims of environmental sustainability. On Apr. 3, the results of a chemical analysis of samples from an old mining site the company plans to reintegrate into its production network showed arsenic contamination that was 42,000 times higher than the allowed levels.

On Apr. 17 the Constitutional Court of Greece declined the motion filed by residents against the validity of the Ministry of Environment approval of the environmental study submitted by Hellas Gold.

Locals are also concerned that mining will destroy the tourism industry here, currently the region’s biggest employer and income generator.

But the mineworkers and their families are determined for the project to succeed.

Having spent 26 years working in mines Aggelos Deligiobas, president of the Miners Union, told IPS he and others employed in the sector “will do everything in order to save [our] jobs”, insisting that if there was a real threat of environmental damage, they too would intervene to prevent it.

Disagreements have run deep into the local community, causing rifts between friends, neighbours and even families.

This instability could impact attempts by the Hellenic Republic Assets Development Fund to catch the eye of foreign investors in a 50-billion-dollar sale of most of the country’s wealth, a privatisation spree that many have termed a “total carve up” of the Greek economy.

Media coverage of the state’s heavy-handed repression of protests against this wave of privatisation could dissuade investors and spur support for local activists.

Last September, for example, the police cracked down brutally on a group of protestors marching peacefully toward the open pit construction site. The ensuing images of elderly villagers running to escape heavily armed riot police shocked the country.

In a press conference on Mar. 20, Eldorado Gold threatened to reconsider its investment if the government failed to “stabilise” the situation.

The company also launched what experts here called a “charm offensive”, inviting journalists of major publications and TV channels to tour Eldorado Gold’s sites in Greece and Turkey between Apr. 7 and 10, a move the Green Ecologist Party here has denounced as a ploy to deflect criticism.

On Apr. 9, a Facebook page dedicated to the company received more than 10,000 “likes”, many of them originating in Moscow, eliciting accusations from social media aficionados that the company has resorted to “buying” a good reputation.

According to statistics from the research company Media Services SA, Hellas Gold has given itself a virtual makeover. Between January and March 2013, the company paid over 630,000 euros for adverts, more than the company spent for all of 2012, shelling out roughly 370,000 euros in March alone.

One of the most popular advertisements uses images of the “workers” along with their names, implying that these are legitimate defenders of a plan resisted by hooded vandals.

Against a 24 percent dip in the advertising market in Greece, it is clear the company is going against the trend of the business community to stabilise its position in Greece.

Several requests for comments from Hellas Gold and Eldorado Gold went unanswered.

Environmental groups and indigenous Diaguita communities of the Huasco Valley in northern Chile celebrated a court decision Wednesday that will bring to a complete halt work on the Pascua Lama gold, silver and copper mine belonging to Canada’s Barrick gold.

“The mine was approved on the condition that the glaciers would not be touched. But the General Water Department (DGA) has repeatedly confirmed that Pascua Lama is destroying glaciers,” said Lucio Cuenca, director of the Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts (OLCA).

He told IPS that “illegal work on the mine has caused episodes of severe pollution in rivers in the area, and the environmental institutions have responded in a biased manner. So we believe it is a very good thing that the courts are putting things in order, even if this is a temporary measure.”

Located at 4,000 metres altitude in the Andes mountains on the border between Chile and Argentina, Pascua Lama, a binational open-pit mine, is the world’s highest-altitude open-pit gold, silver and copper mine.

On the Chilean side, it is at the headwaters of the El Estrecho river, in the province of Huasco, Atacama region, some 700 km north of Santiago.

Barrick had originally planned to actually move three glaciers to get at the minerals beneath.

The unanimous verdict handed down by the appeals court in the city of Copiapó, the capital of Atacama region, was in response to legal action brought by Lorenzo Soto, the lawyer representing the local Diaguita communities of Huasco who are opposed to the mine because they say it will threaten their water supply and pollute the glaciers.

In the lawsuit, Soto cited environmental infractions that triggered sanctions from government bodies like the National Geology and Mining Service (SERNAGEOMIN), the National Evaluation System and the Superintendency of the Environment.

Soto said the irregularities committed by the Canadian company included “the destruction of glaciers Toro 1, Toro 2 and Esperanza, located in the environs of the mine, and the pollution of water resources” with heavy concentrations of arsenic, aluminium, copper and sulphate that threaten the El Estrecho river.

The company had already brought construction of the mine to a halt in November 2012 on orders from SERNAGEOMIN, which fined it for failing to comply with safety standards.

But Wednesday’s ruling completely suspended work on the mine.

However, a spokesperson for the company clarified that on the Argentine side of the border, work would continue.

“What this court measure does is confirm that the oversight and fines by the country’s institutions have been absolutely insufficient and biased, and have failed to take into account the gravity of the denunciations made by the community with respect to the infractions committed by Barrick in the operation of Pascua Lama,” Cuenca said.

Oriel Campillay, president of the Chiguinto Diaguita Indigenous Community, told IPS that the communities opposed to the mine were pleased with the shutdown of the project.

“We live in a beautiful valley where we grow avocados, grapes, lemons, apricots, peaches and pears, and the El Estrecho river is essential for us,” he said.

Speaking “in a personal capacity,” Campillay said he would not be opposed to the mine “if things were done properly.”

“We are asking for our communities to take part in the oversight of the project, but the company refused,” he said.

Barrick has not yet stated whether it will appeal to the Supreme Court or address the environmental irregularities it is accused of.

Barrick Gold’s vice president of corporate affairs for South America, Rodrigo Jiménez, said the company had not yet been officially notified of the decision by the court, and was thus unable to comment on its content or implications.

The government of right-wing President Sebastián Piñera surprised activists by applauding the court ruling.

Interior Minister Andrés Chadwick said the verdict “comes as no surprise to us, and we believe it is a good thing that it was possible to bring work on the mine to a halt, through a judicial organism, while Pascua Lama effectively lives up to the measures that had already been ordered by the Superintendency of the Environment.”

Meanwhile, Environment Minister María Ignacia Benítez said “this ruling is in line with what the government has been doing…As an environmental institution, we are not willing to accept projects that do not live up to environmental resolutions and commitments.”

Cuenca said the government’s statements were “brazen” because “what the court is doing is precisely rebuking the government and the state services for not fulfilling their role.”

“I think it is amazingly cheeky for a minister to come out and say that she thinks it’s a good thing, after they have failed to do their work and to exercise proper oversight. What’s more, what should really happen is for Pascua Lama’s environmental permit to be revoked,” the activist said.

He also stressed the role of the local communities in the struggle against projects that threaten their sustainability.

“The role of citizens, organisations, and in the case of Pascua Lama, the community of Huasco Valley has to be strengthened,” Cuenca said.

“This conflict has dragged on for at least 10 years, and what is happening is the result of the protests and mobilisation by the community,” he added.

In addition, he said that there are now “more sensitive courts that are better-informed about the country’s environmental institutions and regulations and their consequences. Today there is a much more progressive interpretation of the legislation compared to what we had two years ago, and that has been demonstrated in a string of rulings.”

Cuenca said that was due to “a combination of new conditions in the country, but for us, the essential thing is the role that the community has played.”

Campillay, meanwhile, said the Diaguita communities were organising to demand the implementation of International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169, which requires that indigenous and tribal peoples are consulted on issues that affect them.

A favourable verdict was already obtained in the El Morro gold and silver mine in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. And now, he said, native communities would continue to challenge Pascua Lama and any projects that they feel threaten their integrity.

“We are surrounded by mining companies, and we want to be given the opportunity to decide what is done on our land, rather than having it be decided between four walls,” he said.

The mining project has been the focus of longstanding complaints from local herder communities. Credit: Zingaro/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 7 2013 (IPS)

The United States has refused to vote for involvement by the World Bank Group in a massive but controversial mining project in Mongolia.

In abstaining, the U.S. representative cited concerns over the potential environmental consequences and an inadequate impact study of the mine plan.

The Oyu Tolgoi mine, a 12-billion-dollar project, is looking to massively expand copper-and-gold extraction in the South Gobi Desert. Its parent company, the London-based Rio Tinto, is currently fielding funding proposals from multiple international investors, including the World Bank Group.

If the four-billion-dollar expansion goes forward, income from the mine could make up a third of the gross domestic product in Mongolia, which has significantly expanded its mining sector in recent years. On Wednesday, Rio Tinto stated that it was on track to begin operations by June.

Criticism of the plan has been widespread, however, with local communities and international civil society warning that concerns are being pushed aside and that the World Bank’s own safeguard guidelines are not being followed. It now appears that the U.S. backs some of this apprehension.

“[T]he United States’ review of the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) for the project has raised concerns in a number of areas,” a position paper, dated late February but publicly released this week, states.

“First, the United States believes the ESIA has gaps in critically important information, particularly related to the operations phase of the project and mine closure … Second, the ESIA does not provide a sufficiently detailed analysis of associated facilities and cumulative impacts.”

In particular, the policy statement notes that the impact assessment, which currently focuses almost exclusively on the project’s construction rather than its potential operation, covers this planned expansion “only lightly”. (The U.S. Treasury declined request for additional comment.)

The document also draws attention to longstanding complaints from local herder communities, currently pending before a World Bank Group auditor. The U.S. says it is “keenly interested in the outcome” of this review.

Missing management plan

The U.S. position will not halt the funding proposal, which was greenlighted last week by the board of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the World Bank’s private sector arm. The institution will now work with Rio Tinto to decide on a funding package.

The IFC, which is reportedly offering up to 900 million dollars in loans for the project, is joined in its interest by numerous other multinational donors and investors. These include the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD, which also approved a 1.4 billion dollar loan last week), the U.S. Export-Import Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and several others.

Yet the U.S. explanation for its abstention may now strengthen civil society recommendations on how to improve the Oyu Tolgoi project.

“Without valourising the U.S. government, what they have said on this project is important – they have made some very reasonable recommendations, many of which overlap with our own,” Jelson Garcia, manager of the Asia programme at the Bank Information Center (BIC), a Washington-based watchdog, told IPS.

“The challenge is how these recommendations will be reflected in the loan agreement and in the updated management plan. Otherwise, it will be hard to hold the company accountable.” (BIC has an extensive resource on the project here.)

As noted in the U.S. policy statement, one of the major complaints by critics is that the IFC only entered the Oyu Tolgoi project very late. By the time the IFC’s required ESIA was filed, more than 90 percent of construction had been finished, and the assessment only covered the construction phase.

Nonetheless, when the project came up for a vote last week, as the United States noted, “the Boards of the IFC and EBRD [were] being asked to make a decision on this project without seeing the agreed commitments contained in the forthcoming Operations Phase Environmental Management Plans”.

Extensive civil society analyses of the probable impacts of the full-scale operation are available, however. These detail the mine’s intensive use of water in a desert area, as well as its plan to divert the Undai River, the major waterway in the area, which flows through the mine’s planned open pit.

In addition, environmentalists are disturbed over a reported plan to build a 750-megawatt coal-fired power plant at the site, with which to power operations. According to a November brief prepared for the Sierra Club, a U.S. conservation group, this would contravene both IFC and World Bank Group guidelines.

Additionality

Last month, the IFC released an extensive public response to many of these concerns. It notes that the Oyu Tolgoi management has not made a final decision on long-term power sources, that the mine would be allowed to use only 20 percent of the water in a major local aquifer, and that the ESIA does include content on the mine’s operation.

The response also points out that the nomadic herders are not formally considered indigenous peoples, and hence are not covered under more stringent safeguards.

The project “is compliant with our sustainability policy and environmental and social standards,” the IFC said in a statement e-mailed to IPS. “The financing will not be concluded before certain key environmental management plans have been agreed to and publically disclosed. During the span of our proposed financing, IFC will actively monitor the project to ensure continued compliance with our standards.”

Alongside, the Compliance Advisor/Ombudsman (CAO), an independent body charged with response to complaints from communities affected by IFC projects, has accepted two cases (here and here) stemming from the Oyu Tolgoi project, including one last week.

These relate particularly to the project’s use of land and water, including the plan to divert the UndaiRiver. “The complainants contend they have not been compensated or relocated appropriately, and question the project’s due diligence, particularly around the issue of sustainable use of water in an arid area,” CAO notes.

Both assessments are ongoing.

According to BIC’s Garcia, such concerns raise questions about IFC’s involvement in the project in the first place.

“Given that IFC is not a major source of financing for this project, the main argument from the institution is over the ‘additionality’ it brings, specifically its performance standards and requirements for environmental and social issues,” he says.

“But we and many others have identified multiple flaws in exactly those assessments, even though the project has now been accepted. So the additionality here is highly questionable.”

Map showing location of Morne Bossa property (VCS / Société Miniere Delta). Credit: VCS website

By Jane Regan
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Feb 24 2013 (IPS)

Outraged that they have not been consulted, this week Haitian senators called for a moratorium on all activities connected with recently granted gold and copper mining permits.

In a resolution approved by 15 of 16 senators present, the lawmakers also demanded the establishment of a commission to review all of the current mining contracts and “a national debate on the country’s mineral resources”.For a country with a weak state, the royalty is the safest place to get your money. Anything under five percent is just really ludicrous.

The resolution – voted Wednesday in reaction to three new gold and copper mining permits issued late last year by the government – decried “the genocide that accompanied the pillage of our mineral resources in the 15th century”, “the waste of resources… since the January 12, 2010 earthquake”, the foreign mining experiences of the 20th century which caused “trauma”, and “the incapacity of our country to calmly undertake negotations related to its mineral resources in a context of political disequilibrium”.

News of the permits first caused an uproar in January. Journalists, experts and politicians speculated on what Haiti had lost or would gain, and accused the state mining agency (the Bureau des Mines et d’Energie – BME) of granting “illegal” contracts.

Parliamentary protest

The senators say that the three new permits violate the Haitian Constitution because they are based on 1997 conventions that were never approved by the parliament.

The Constitution says that the parliament must “approve or reject international treaties and conventions” (Art. 98-3). According to attorney Mario Joseph, director of the Office of International Lawyers, “The conventions are illegal, because the parliament did not ratify them.”

At a special hearing on Jan. 22, senators accused BME director Ludner Remarais of subverting the law.

“In 20 years the parliament has never ratified any mining conventions,” Senator Steven Benoit (West) thundered, while Senator Andris Riché (Grande Anse) shouted: “We must not accept wacky contracts that seek to bury the people.”*

“I am sorry the Senate was never contacted,” Remarais responded, tears in his eyes.

However, the conventions are not “international” because they concern the government and companies that – at least on paper – are Haitian. The BME’s former director, Dieuseul Anglade, maintains that the conventions are not “illegal” because the government decided to sign and publish them as decrees, i.e., without ratification.

“Decrees have the same authority as laws. If someone wants to be a demagogue or make political hay, he can call the conventions ‘illegal,’ but they are legal,” Anglade told IPS in a telephone interview on Feb. 6, 2013.

New permits not really “new”

The three “new” permits – for mining deposits in Morne Bossa, Douvray and “Faille B” in Haiti’s North and Northeast departments – are not new. They are the conversion of permits for “exploration” into permits for “exploitation”.

They were originally granted in 1997 by the René Préval government via two mining conventions with two Haitian companies – St. Genevieve S.A. and Sociète Minière Citadelle S.A. Because they were sold or they changed their names, today the conventions are held by two small firms, also ostensibly Haitian: Société Minière Delta and Société Minière du Nord-Est SA (SOMINE S.A.).

But in both cases, the power rests overseas, in the hands of foreign companies and shareholders.

The Société Minière Delta is the property of VCS Mining, a small U.S. private company registered in the state of Delaware, infamous for its laws which permit firms to hide their profits, keep their operations secret and pay minimal taxes.

SOMINE S.A. is a subsidiary of the Canadian mining company Majescor which says it specialises in “emerging” regions. Last month, Majescor offered for sale over two million dollars worth of shares for “the SOMINE project.” Majescor says it controls SOMINE because it controls a company called SIMACT Alliance Copper-Gold Inc., which in turn controls the majority of SOMINE shares.

The three mining permits are the most advanced of the dozens of permits for one-third of Haiti’s north (about 2,500 square kilometers) handed out in recent years and will convert into concessions once the companies start mining.

VCS Mining, the company working in Morne Bossa, maintains that it has followed Haitian law from the beginning. Last year, VCS submitted the required “feasibility study” for the site, which maps out the steps they will take in order to prepare for mining, and it was finally accepted by the BME in November, a representative told IPS in a telephone interview.

The spokesman – who asked not to be identified by name because his company has decided to keep a low profile until the resolution of the BME-Senate conflict – insisted, “We have done the work as required by law. The permits are legal.”

The VCS representative also said that his company has invested over four million dollars in the Morne Bossa site so far, and that since gold was first discovered by U.N. geologists in the late 1970s, “over 38 million (dollars) has been spent.”

Now what?

Seeking verification and clarification, IPS requested an interview with BME director Ludner Remarais. The interview was three times promised, and then denied. IPS wanted to confirm what VCS said, to ask for a copy of the feasibility studies and also to ask about the illegality of the original conventions.

IPS also wanted to ask Remarais about the very low royalties in the two mining conventions. Both award the Haitian state only 2.5 percent of the value of the minerals extracted – a number that is “really low,” according to mining royalties expert Claire Kumar.

“Anything under five percent is just really ludicrous for a country like Haiti. You shouldn’t even consider it. For a country with a weak state, the royalty is the safest place to get your money,” Kumar told IPS in 2012.

According to Haitian mining law, the financial agreements in a convention can be “revised”, but so far, no government official has mentioned the possibility.

The other major concerns are lack of transparency, and the lack of participation from and benefits to local communities. See Sidebar: Morne Bossa Neighbours Nervous

The Feb. 20 Senate resolution cannot legally block mining activities, but it will undoubtedly cause the BME and the government to pause, according to Eddy Laguerre, a lawyer and also a member of the editorial staff at the Haitian weekly Le Matin.

“When the Senate votes a resolution, the executive needs to be careful,” Laguerre told IPS in a telephone interview. “If the resolution is not respected, the Senate can find ways to punish the executive, and can even punish it politically by calling for a change in government.”

*This story was produced in collaboration with Haiti Grassroots Watch. For more information, see Haiti Grassroots Watch series “Gold Rush in Haiti!”

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

A small-scale gold miner shows off his earnings for the day. Credit: chuck624/cc by 2.0

By Bert Wilkinson
GEORGETOWN, Guyana, Nov 26 2012 (IPS)

As regional delegates meet to discuss a legally binding ban on the use of mercury this week, Guyanese officials are arguing that an exception should be made for the South American country’s lucrative gold mining sector until an acceptable alternative is found.

Since world gold prices began to surge in the last five-plus years, gold has become Guyana’s leading export industry, easily surpassing sugar, bauxite and rice as the main economic pillar.

The runaway prices have also attracted hundreds of millions of dollars in investments by Canadian, U.S., Australian, Russian, Chinese and Brazilian firms, all eager to open huge mines in the country that colonial-era British explorer Sir Walter Raleigh once believed was home to the legendary “El Dorado”.

The plan to lobby for a grace period to comply with anticipated treaty restrictions on the use of mercury to recover gold is to be pitched at the Nov. 26-29 U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) review conference in Bogota, Colombia, where government officials, industry players and activists will gather to debate the issue in-depth.

Small-scale miners add mercury to pans of gold-rich ore, where the element clings to the gold and sinks to the bottom. Studies show that up to 15 million miners around the world are exposed to dangerous levels of mercury in this way, along with others in the industry like jungle shopkeepers and jewelers.

It is also a major environmental hazard, travelling thousands of miles in the atmosphere and poisoning local water sources.

This year, recorded sales of gold will bring in more than 600 million dollars to the Guyanese economy, about six times more than sugar. Officials say about half of the estimated national annual production of about 650,000 troy ounces is smuggled to countries like neighbouring Suriname and Brazil where royalties and taxes are cheaper.

Natural Resources Minister Roper Persaud has included active miners and mercury suppliers in his delegation. He says he plans “to vigorously tell the meeting that up to 100,000 people depend on the sector for a living and so the status quo must remain until an equally efficient way of trapping gold from mud, sand or alluvial rock is arrived at.”

“We import large quantities of mercury in Guyana but mercury is not abused here,” Miners Association spokesman Tony Shields told IPS. “We use far less than, for example, the Brazilians and miners in other countries, but the industry will die unless we get the grace period and until a satisfactory alternative is found to the use of mercury.”

Shields argues that if uncertainty about restrictions or an outright ban is not dealt with quickly, miners will simply hoard mercury supplies. Most remain convinced that mercury is the best method despite its known negative effects on human health and the environment.

A recent study by the Guianas office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) found elevated levels of mercury not only in miners who use it almost daily while panning for gold, but in jewelers who inhale the dust when working with raw gold and in jungle shopkeepers who often barter for gold, a revelation that caught most in the industry and environmental community off-guard.

Critics note that the Guyanese government has been hard-pressed to control the industry’s spectacular growth, which has brought increased lawlessness – including a spike in the annual murder rate from about 10 to 50 a year – and more importantly, pollution of waterways and general damage to the environment.

As an indication of how serious the situation is, the umbrella Amerindian People’s Association (APA), which monitors the situation of nine native tribes in the jungle, says it is overwhelmed by daily complaints from members about rivers being so polluted that animals no longer water at them.

Residents say they now have to trek to faraway creeks that are hopefully less polluted to get potable water, fish and wait for animals to trap, as dirty and dying waterways are chasing them away.

“The situation is a serious one but nothing much is being done to alleviate it,” APA spokeswoman Jean LaRose told IPS.

The mines commission and the WWF have collaborated in recent months to demonstrate alternative equipment like the shaking tables and a retort system that hardly uses mercury, but miners’ representatives like Shields, as well as government officials, argue that mercury is still the most efficient method.

Meanwhile, several large Canadian companies are at an advanced stage of exploration and will soon be going into full production on large-scale mines in the malaria-infested interior of the Amazon. They will likely use cyanide, whose effects are also known to be harmful to the environment.

When nationalist MP Kamchybek Tashiev led his supporters over a fence surrounding parliament in early October, both foreign and local executives working in Kyrgyzstan’s mining industry braced for the worst.

Throughout the year, the sector has been cloaked in uncertainty, with foreign investors confronting regulatory hassles and nationalisation threats.

Tashiev, the leader of the opposition Ata-Jurt faction in parliament, succeeded in scaling the wrought-iron barrier – but, amid calls to nationalise Kumtor, a part-Canadian-owned gold mine – his alleged attempt to seize control of the government failed. With Tashiev and two confederates now behind bars, representatives of the extractive industry are breathing a little easier. But the sector will never enjoy peace, they say, as long as mines are entangled in political power plays.

The events of Oct. 3 may turn out to be the climax in what had been an escalating confrontation between miners and mobs. Just days prior to the episode, the new prime minister had announced “with authority” that Kumtor, whose operations accounted for roughly 12 percent of Kyrgyzstan’s GDP in 2011, would not be nationalised, and that mineral extraction would be a core economic priority for his newly formed government.

Mining firms were quick to applaud the premier’s vow to fill the State Agency for Geology and Mineral Resources (responsible for overseeing licenses) with sector specialists, rather than patronage appointees, as had been the tendency under previous governments.

Prime Minister Jantoro Satybaldiyev’s statements were meant to end a challenge to Kumtor’s legal status, initiated on ostensibly environmental grounds by a Tashiev ally, Sadyr Japarov, earlier this summer. In June, a commission led by Japarov failed to convince the legislature that the gold giant’s alleged ecological transgressions warranted expropriation.

With corruption cases looming against both Tashiev and Japarov, the duo subsequently decided to take the debate into the streets.

Orozbek Duisheyev, president of the Association of Miners and Geologists, a non-profit that liaises between mining companies and the government, criticised the pair’s ecological arguments. “(Tashiev and Japarov) are members of the legislative branch – lawmakers – and they create this kind of chaos? These people aren’t environmentalists, they are agents provocateurs. This behaviour must be severely punished,” Duisheyev told EurasiaNet.org.

If Japarov and Tashiev were playing a mining card to defend their personal interests, they were doing so because it is one of the most effective in Kyrgyzstan’s political deck. Since President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was ousted in April 2010, conflicts between mining companies and rural communities have been a regular feature of Kyrgyzstan’s political life. While supposed environmental violations are often cited during rallies, miners suspect the protesters are pawns in conflicts between marginalised elites and the central government in Bishkek.

“Mining companies certainly have a responsibility to abide by domestic and international environmental standards,” said a manager of a gold and copper mining firm, an expatriate with many years’ experience in Kyrgyzstan, who discussed the topic on condition of anonymity. “But to plan for, and anticipate shifts in clan politics – that shouldn’t really be part of our job.”

Centerra Gold, Kumtor’s parent company, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Kumtor is not alone in facing operational threats; there is scarcely a mine in Kyrgyzstan untouched by scandal.

In August, locals threatened to burn down the mine of Asia Gold Enterprises – a Chinese-owned firm working in the southern region of Chon-Alai – over concerns about river pollution. The company responded by offering villagers one percent of its operational profits. Villagers agreed and backed off. Earlier this year, the company was also accused of illegally exporting ore.

And in the western province of Talas, after parliament voted in June to suspend the license of Australia’s Kentor Gold on environmental grounds, the firm submitted itself to a rigorous environmental audit that has found little reason for concern.

The long-term prospects for these and other operations may depend less on environmental concerns and more on the government’s ability to enforce order in the countryside – especially in regions where hostile rivals wield influence.

Compared with Kumtor, these mines are small. Kentor Gold believes their Andash field will yield only 10-15 percent of the gold coming out of Kumtor. But the smaller mines are far more vulnerable to protesters. Attempts to nationalise Kumtor in 2003 and 2007 failed, while licenses for smaller outfits have been repeatedly revoked in the past.

Miners are not the only ones concerned by the nationalist opposition’s behaviour. According to Emil Shukurov, head of the ecological non-profit Aleyne and the editor of Kyrgyzstan’s Red Book of endangered species, Kyrgyzstan has “more serious environmental problems” than Kumtor.

Though he believes the mine commits “minor” environmental violations, “this goes with the territory (of mining),” Shukurov said. He complains that opposition rabble-rousing distracts from other important ecological debates, such as protecting biodiversity. Politicians pick and choose their environmental hang-ups, Shukurov added: “Ecology should not be a subject for political speculation.”

*Editor’s note: Chris Rickleton is a Bishkek-based journalist.

This story originally appeared on Eurasianet.org.

Pedro Melville, 62, a father of nine from Guyana’s northwestern gold and manganese mining district of Matthew’s Ridge, sees the impacts of unchecked prospecting on the local environment every day.

One major problem is contamination of water sources. Melville says some residents who previously depended on river water to drink now dig their own pits or trenches, allow the water to settle, and let the rain replenish it.

“The miners don’t care anything about the communities. All they want is what they could get,” he told IPS. “Hygiene is also a problem, and by that I mean the disposal of human and other waste. That is why we have diseases like malaria and typhoid. The situation is getting out of hand, to tell you the truth.”

Authorities regulating Guyana’s booming gold industry recently ordered a halt to new applications to mine for gold and diamonds in the country’s rivers and other waterways, setting off a sectoral firestorm and threats of protests from enraged industry players who accuse government of abusing its powers.

Melville, a member of the Carib tribe and himself a former miner who worked land dredges, believes the restrictions make sense. He says the nearby Barima River is so polluted it can no longer be safely used for domestic purposes, and blames corrupt officials in the city and urban centres for not properly regulating the brigade of local and Brazilian miners working in the jungle.

Besides pollution, officials say some river courses have been changed dramatically because of gravel islands left uncaringly in their centre by heavy mechanical dredges.

Paulina Williams, a mother of three from the western Upper Mazaruni Village of Kako, admits that her village has allowed a small number of locals and Brazilians to work claims in the Kako and Mazaruni rivers, but adds that the miners are presenting problems to villagers of the Akawaio Tribe, one of nine in the country.

“They give nothing to the community and litter the rivers and instead of paying us local taxes, they give it to the police who demand bribes from them. I agree that work on the rivers should be restricted,” she said.

Williams claimed the police are also shaking down Brazilians who don’t have work permits and allowing them to work without the permission of the village council.

Citing persistent complaints from native Indians and other interior residents, worried river boat captains and other stakeholders, Natural Resources Minister Robert Persaud banned miners from applying for operating permits at the beginning of June, blaming widespread pollution and a plethora of other problems for the move.

But last week, the fairly militant Gold and Diamond Miners Association stepped in to organise an emergency meeting of members, passed a motion of no confidence in Persaud, and raised more than 50,000 dollars to bring court challenges to the move. It also threatened street protests if no compromise was reached.

Veteran miners said it was time the industry, by far the number one foreign exchange earner and among the largest single employers, flexed its muscles.

In the end, the ministry said the ban would only last for a month, to allow for a thorough review of the situation as pollution and turbidity levels had reached alarming proportions in some rivers, tributaries and creeks.

The miners’ association does not deny these problems, but argues that individual miners who transgress should be suspended or have their licenses revoked rather than penalising the entire industry for the behaviour of a few.

“That is our argument as the mining act is clear on how an errant miner should be punished. We see no reason for all applications to be turned away. Just deal with those who create problems,” said association administrator Colin Sparman.

The ministry had also criticised some dredge owners for allowing operators to work too near to river courses, uprooting 100-year-old trees which in turn fall across small rivers and block navigation. But that is only the tip of the iceberg.

Like the umbrella Amerindian People’s Association (APA) which has railed against the effects of indiscriminate mining, the ministry says that the future of subsistence farming and fishing are seriously threatened by mining activities, wildlife is disappearing because of the noise, and some species of fish are dying off from the pollution.

The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) describes the ongoing dispute as “a battle for control of Guyana’s rivers”, noting that the Guiana Continental Shield that includes Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana “is currently one of the world’s largest reservoirs of fresh water; even on limited cost/benefit economic calculations the uncontrolled destruction of our rivers is short-sighted.”

“This is the real context in which the battle for Guyana’s rivers is being contested,” it says.

“Within a matter of a few decades, fresh water will be as valuable as oil,” the group says, noting ongoing water disputes in the Middle East and China-Tibet region, as well as Southeast Asia involving India, Nepal and Bangladesh.

Runaway world prices for gold in the past five years have brought more than a billion dollars in direct investment to Guyana and its eastern neighbour, Suriname, as dozens of Canadian, U.S. and Brazilian companies have set up shop, creating a mining boom that appears to have grown too large to regulate with current structures.

For example, only now is the mines commission moving to establish gold-buying centres in the western mineral-rich regions to make it easier for miners to sell their wares without traversing lonely jungle roads where they risk being robbed by heavily armed gangs. Local police investigate at least one murder a week linked to greed and general lawlessness.

The U.S. is also coming down hard on Guyana over the trafficking of underage girls to jungle camps where they are forced to work as prostitutes. Police have rescued several in recent months and remain vigilant for ongoing cases.

Added to all this is the problem of smuggling. Official natural resources ministry estimates indicate that up to half the national annual production of 600,000 troy ounces of gold are smuggled to Venezuela, Brazil and especially Suriname because royalty and tax rates are three times cheaper in Suriname than across the border river with Guyana.

Talks between the two governments are likely to soon yield an increase in rate levels in Suriname to help minimise smuggling, but the pressure to cope with a dramatic increase in investment remains heavy.

In under two days, five demonstrators were gunned down by security forces in the northern Peruvian highlands region of Cajamarca, where a state of emergency has been declared.

Marco Arana is arrested by police in Cajamarca. Credit: Red Verde Cajamarca Blog

That makes a total of 15 dead and 430 injured in social protest-related incidents in less than a year since President Ollanta Humala took office.

Health authorities of the department (province) of Cajamarca told IPS that 27 members of local communities and four policemen were wounded in clashes on Tuesday in the district of Celendín, and another 13 civilians were injured on Wednesday in Bambamarca.

For the second time in six months, the government called a state of emergency in the area, where local and peasant communities are mobilising to protest against the Conga gold mining project headed by the multinational corporation Yanacocha-Newmont.

These demands are not new. Protests staged in December 2011 led to a change of ministry authorities and prompted an international environmental impact assessment in Conga, which did not satisfy project opponents.

“Almost all the civilians hurt in these clashes had bullet wounds, while the policemen had only concussions and minor injuries,” Cajamarca regional health director Reinaldo Núñez Campos told IPS, after confirming the death of the fifth victim, 29-year-old José Antonio Sánchez, at 6:45 a.m. Thursday.

Sánchez had been wounded while he participated in a demonstration broken up by police and army officers. The demonstration had been called to protest the Conga project and express discontent with the administration of Mauro Arteaga, the mayor of Celendín, a district some three hours away by car from the provincial capital of Cajamarca.

At the time this story was published, President Humala had not yet commented on these incidents. Only Prime Minister Óscar Valdés mentioned the matter briefly in a press conference at government headquarters, on Wednesday, while justice minister Juan Jiménez urged regional social leaders to “keep calm”.

Roque Benavides, CEO of the mining company Buenaventura, a Yanacocha shareholder, said that despite protests they would go ahead with the construction of the water reservoirs required by the government.

Police violence and international reports

More than 20 people had been arrested as of Wednesday, according to the ombudsperson’s office, including environmental leader Marco Arana, who was beaten and dragged by police to the Cajamarca city police station.

A video broadcast on local TV by Channel 45 shows Arana being picked up by police in the city’s Plaza de Armas square, while sitting on a park bench. A few minutes later, Arana posted on his Twitter account that he had been beaten. His attorney, Mirtha Vásquez, described what happened to IPS.

“They took him to a room in the police station where some three policemen came down on him with their sticks, hitting him for 20 minutes, and yelling, ‘This is what you get for terruco (terrorist).’ He was then taken to another office. I know this because he told me, but also because I saw the bruises on his face,” Vásquez said.

Arana, a former Catholic priest who founded the Land and Freedom Movement, was released early on Thursday, along with eight young people who had also been arrested for protesting.

“Violence will only end when police brutality stops and Conga mining works are suspended, along with any other citizen practices that can generate further violence,” the environmental activist said in a press conference, after spending 12 hours behind bars.

“The government is mistaken if it thinks it is going to quash the just demands of Cajamarca with bullets, torture or beatings. We want Yanacocha out,” he added.

Arana’s lawyer will file a complaint against the policemen and a report with the Organisation of American States’ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). In 2007 the IACHR had granted precautionary measures in favour of Arana and Vásquez, in response to a report of intimidation and threats made against them, and asked the Peruvian state to adopt the necessary measures to protect them.

Rage in Celendín

While the population of Cajamarca is increasingly divided and opposition leaders seek ways to get around the state of emergency, the nearby community of Celendín is terrified, fearing further repression, and the media is viewed with growing distrust.

“I try not to give any statements because the media in Lima keeps twisting the facts. I can’t have the people against me,” Elí Guerrero, president of the Federation of Celendín Journalists, told IPS.

IPS also spoke with several residents who oppose the mining project in this district, and all of them asked to remain anonymous.

According to media accounts demonstrators had caused damages and even burnt down part of the facilities of the Celendín municipality, accusing mayor Arteaga of being a “traitor.”

The violent incident apparently erupted as a result of claims made by Arteaga against opponents of the project.

“They’re a handful of extremists who think they can use force to make the government and civil society agree with them… I don’t think it’s right to force your ideas on anyone at gunpoint,” Arteaga had said on Jun. 28 on the TV programme La Hora N.

By Tuesday, opponents were calling to step up protests, and demonstrators marched into the municipality, causing material damages. “There were few policemen at the scene and as things got out of hand the army, who had been standing by, stepped in,” a resident said.

“Shots were heard, then two helicopters arrived and more shots were heard,” a woman said. The confrontation went on for hours.

Arteaga refused to comment on this incident. “We don’t want to add fuel to the fire.” “Just look at the reaction a minor interview on TV gets,” Celendín municipality PR chief Richard Díaz, who was in the building during the incidents, told IPS.

Map of Eurasian Minerals licenses, as of late 2011. Credit: Eurasian Minerals website

By Correspondents
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Jun 27 2012 (Haiti Grassroots Watch)

Twenty billion dollars worth of gold, copper and silver hidden in the hills of the hemisphere’s poorest country. Investors in North America so convinced of the buried treasure, they have already spent 30 million dollars collecting samples, digging, building mining roads and doing aerial surveys.

The fairy tale is true, but it might not have a “happily ever after” ending.

A 10-month investigation into Haiti’s budding “gold rush” by the watchdog consortium Haiti Grassroots Watch (HGW) discovered backroom deals, players with widely diverging objectives, legally questionable “memorandums”, and a playing field that is far from level.

Although Haitian law states that all subsoil resources belong to “the Haitian nation”, so far the nation has been kept in the dark about the digging and testing going on in the country’s north.

Dieuseul Anglade, a well-respected geologist who headed the state mining agency for most of the past 20 years, was recently fired by Haiti’s newly installed prime minister. Was it because he has consistently championed tougher laws and better deals for the state, and for the Haitian people?

“Minerals are part of the public domain of the state,” the 62-year-old Anglade told HGW a month before he was removed from his post.

The geologist said that if tougher laws and better contracts with the mining companies aren’t written, it would be better to “leave the minerals underground and let future generations exploit them”. The geologist lost his job shortly after that interview.

Another major player in the gold game – Eurasian Minerals – has a different opinion of who should exploit Haiti’s riches.

The Canadian company and its Haitian subsidiaries are poised to mine on the very same ground where Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards once forced Haiti’s indigenous peoples to dig for gold.

Within 40 years of the famed 1492 landing, hard labour in the mines, murder and European diseases reduced the population from perhaps 300,000 to about 600.

Eurasian recently returned to the same hills where so many died, and has been quietly buying up licenses and conventions: 53 of them so far. The company controls exploration or exploitation rights to over one-third of Haiti’s north.

“Eurasian Minerals likes to acquire large tracts of real estate, add value by doing good geology, and then execute astute deals with good partners to advance our assets,” Eurasian’s David Cole said in a recent interview, and in another, he bragged that his company “control(s) over 1,100 square miles (1,770 square kilometres) of real estate” in Haiti.

Eurasian – which has tested over 44,000 samples so far – is partnered with the world’s number two gold producer, U.S.-based mining giant Newmont.

Another Canadian company, Majescor, and a small U.S. company, VCS Mining, and their subsidiaries have licenses or conventions for tracts totaling over 750 square kilometres. Altogether, about 15 percent of Haiti’s territory is under license to North American mining firms and its partners.

As Majescor’s Haitian subsidiary said in a recent corporate presentation: Haiti is “the sleeping giant of the Caribbean!”

The “sleeping giant” awakens

The giant was “asleep” because Haiti’s minerals have previously been too expensive to extract thanks to the tumult of the past three decades, characterised by brutal coups d’état, and due to local resistance to the mining companies.

But the price of gold has held steady above 1,500 dollars an ounce for the past year, Haiti hosts a U.N. peacekeeping force of 10,000 that will assure a modicum of security for the companies, and just next door in the Dominican Republic, foreign gold giants say they’ve found the largest gold reserve in the Americas: 25 million ounces.

Haiti’s newly installed prime minister is also optimistic. Laurent Lamothe, whose slogan is “Haiti is open for business,” has pledged to make mining one of the country’s new growth industries and to change laws in order to make them more business-friendly.

Speaking before the Senate last month, Lamothe said: “Our subsoil is rich in minerals. Now is the time to dig them up.”

In a nation where unemployment reaches 70 percent, where over half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, and where most of the government’s budget is covered by foreign aid, the buried treasure sounds like El Dorado.

But not all Haitians are as enthusiastic as Lamothe or the foreign mining companies. Pit mining can potentially poison water supplies and damage the environment. In the Dominican Republic, some regions are still suffering from mistakes made a few decades ago.

Nor is it clear that the eventual revenues that might be generated would benefit Haiti and its people.

“Invisible gold” with visible dangers

The mining companies estimate Haiti’s hills hold over 20 billion dollars in gold – much of it “invisible” because it exists in tiny particles in the rock and dirt. Extraction will only be possible with environmentally hazardous pit mines.

But Newmont Mining, Eurasian’s partner, knows its pits. The gold giant opened the world’s first pit mine in Nevada in 1962 and later dug in Ghana, New Zealand, Indonesia, and other countries. In Peru, Newmont runs one of the world’s largest open pit gold mines: the 251-square-kilometre Yanacocha mine.

But even with its years of experience, the company’s track record is far from error-free.

In Peru, farmers’ organisations claim their water supply has been slowly polluted with cyanide and in 2000, Newmont’s Peruvian trucking company spilled 330 pounds of mercury, causing dozens of people to become sickened with deadly diseases.

In Ghana, Newmont operates a mine located in a farming region known as Ghana’s “breadbasket”. So far, Ahafo South operations have displaced about 9,500 people, 95 percent of whom were subsistence farmers, according to Environmental News Service.

Newmont has poisoned local water supplies there at least once, by its own admission. In 2010, the company agreed to pay five million dollars in compensation for a 2009 cyanide spill.

In a May 25 email to HGW, Diane Reberger of Newmont wrote, “We can assure you that Newmont is committed to strong environment, social and ethical practices.”

While welcoming the possible benefits that well-built and -supervised mines might bring to Haiti, former state mining agency chief Anglade and other Haitian experts are worried that a pit mine could be dangerous to Haiti’s already fragile environment. Haiti has only about 1.5 percent tree cover, down from about 90 percent in 1492.

“Mines can cause big problems for the environment,” Haiti’s former environment minister told HGW.

Yves-André Wainright, an agronomist by training, noted that in addition to his heavy metal worries, some of the areas under license are “humid mountains”, meaning they play “an important biodiversity role and need to be protected, starting in the prospection phase.” They are also home to tens of thousands of farming families.

Nobody from the environment ministry has been seen at any mine sites, according to community radio journalists.

“When I really think about the possibility of mining, I am not so sure it’s a good thing,” farmer and peasant organiser Elsie Florestan told HGW.

She and her family have some land near Grand Bois, where they grow corn, manioc and sweet potatoes and where Eurasian and Newmont just finished test drilling.

“They say the company will need to use the river water for 20 years, and that all the water will be polluted,” continued the 41-year-old member of Haiti’s Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan (“Small Peasants Working Together”) peasant movement. “They say we won’t be able to stay here.

“If we don’t organise and make some noise, nothing good will happen as far as we are concerned,” she concluded. “We need to ask the president – what will happen to us peasants?”

Who is protecting Haiti’s interests?

Florestan’s fears may be justified.

Haiti has not signed the international Safety and Health in Mines convention or the voluntary Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, both of which – if followed – offer some protections. In addition, Haiti is ranked as one of the most corrupt countries in the world – coming in at 175 out of 200 countries.

So far, permits have been issued behind closed doors, deals have been sealed secretly, and the test drilling has been carried out with no public scrutiny and little government oversight, by the state mining agency’s own admission.

“The government doesn’t give us the means we need to be able to supervise the companies,” Anglade confirmed in an interview while still head of the agency.

An audit of the agency’s motor pool shared with HGW in January showed that only five of 17 vehicles were in working condition. And with a budget of about one million dollars, the BME is also strapped for human resources.

Only one-quarter of the 100 employees have university degrees. Another 13 percent are “technicians”. The rest are secretarial and “support” staff.

In addition, Haiti has one of the lowest royalty rates in the hemisphere, collecting only 2.5 percent of the value of each ounce of gold extracted.

“A 2.5 percent royalty share is really low,” according to mining expert Claire Kumar of Christian Aid. “Anything under five percent is just really ludicrous for a country like Haiti. You shouldn’t even consider it. For a country with a weak state, the royalty is the safest place to get your money. There is room for manipulation by the company, but it’s not as big as you would think.”

Former minister Wainwright shares Kumar’s concerns. Will Haiti’s “weak state” be able to keep an eye on the mining companies’ work and on the potential environmental damage?

“We have competent staff at the Mining Bureau, but they don’t have the means to carry out their jobs,” Wainwright said.

The mining companies also have friends in high places.

Former Minister of Finance Ronald Baudin – who sat across from Newmont at negotiating tables in 2010 and 2011 – went through the “revolving door” and now works directly for the company. Asked in an interview with HGW about the apparent conflict of interest, the ex-minister said “I have to eat, right?”

In March, Baudin helped facilitate a “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) he says allows Newmont to do test drilling. The ex-minister told HGW said the MOU was “a waiver” to current law, which states that no drilling can take place without a signed mining convention.

Lawyers consulted by HGW confirmed that the only way to get around the requirements of a law is with a newer law that would remove the requirements of the old one.

Anglade, then head of the state mining agency, knows the law. He told HGW that he refused to sign the “waiver”.

“I told them it was illegal and that it was not in Haiti’s interest,” Anglade said. Two months later he was out of a job.

Despite Anglade’s refusal to agree, the MOU was signed by the then-ministers of Finance and of Public Works in late March, and Eurasian reported to its shareholders on Apr. 23 that “(t)he joint venture is allowed to drill on certain selected projects under the MOU, and drilling is currently underway.”

As drilling progresses and more ore is tested, the farmers in Haiti’s northeastern mountains say they feel like nobody is looking out for their interests.

Residents of the dirt-poor hillside hamlet of Lakwèv have panned for gold since the 1960s in order to supplement their farming income. Over the past few years, they have seen mining company crews come and go, but they rarely see anyone from the state mining agency or any other government offices.

“It’s always a couple of big white guys with some Haitians. They don’t even ask you who owns what land. They come, they take big chunks and put them in their knapsacks and they leave,” peasant organiser Arnolt Jean explained. “We need a government that controls what is going on, because we don’t have the capacity to do that.”

Lakwèv is destitute. No clinic, no state schools, no running water, and a rutted path as a “road”.

“Our country is poor, but what is underground could make us not poor any more,” Jean mused. “But since our wealth remains underground, it’s the rich who come with their fancy equipment to dig it out. The people who live on top of the ground stay poor, while the rich get even richer.”

Read the entire series at Haiti Grassroots Watch

Haiti Grassroots Watch is a partnership of AlterPresse, the Society of the Animation of Social Communication (SAKS), the Network of Women Community Radio Broadcasters (REFRAKA), community radio stations from the Association of Haitian Community Media and students from the Journalism Laboratory at the State University of Haiti.

Made possible in part by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. The Haitian weekly Haïti Liberté partnered with Haiti Grassroots Watch on this report.