Children exposed to mining industry pollution in Peru. The debate on mining is raging throughout Latin America. Credit: Milagros Salazar/IPS

By Leila Lemghalef
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 30 2015 (IPS)

A recent case study on Canadian mining abuses in Latin America has woven one more thread of justice into the tapestry of international law.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) has found five Canadian mining companies and the Canadian government responsible for human rights violations in Latin America, including labour rights violations, environmental destruction, the denial of indigenous self-determination rights, criminalisation of dissent and targeted assassinations."The battle for international justice is absolutely the same as the battle for internal democracy." -- Judge Gianni Tognoni

Gianni Tognoni was one of eight judges in the decision, and has been secretary general of the PPT since its inception in 1979.

In an interview with IPS, he spoke about how the PPT’s claims have previously become part of the international debate.

“And in the experience of the Tribunal, that has been happening in different ways,” he said.

Out of many examples, he cited the case of child slave labour in the apparel industry, which was denounced by the tribunal, and which was “taken up in order to strengthen the controls and the monitoring by NGOs of the conditions that were there”.

The big panorama, he said, shows that “whatever could be done is being done… in order to integrate the tribunal with other forces… in order to formulate in juridically solid terms the claims”.

International processes are rarely rapid, he said, articulating that the judgement on the former Yugoslavia would “appear to be more a kind of judgement on the memory, the same is true for Rwanda”.

He contrasted that to the immediate effectiveness of economic treaties, and also brought up the well-known clash between human rights and transnational corporations, and the latter’s attitude of impunity.

“It’s not possible to have a global society which is progressively responding only to the economic criteria and the economic indicator,” he summed up.

Formally, Canada is expected to uphold the same rights abroad as at home, in accordance with the Maastricht Principle under which public powers are supposed to monitor non-state actors.

“But they simply fail to do that,” Tognoni said.

The 86-page ruling reports that 75 per cent of mining companies worldwide are based in Canada, and that Canadian companies with estimated investments of over 50 billion dollars in Latin America’s mining sector represent 50-70 per cent of mining activities in that region.

“And the verdict in Canada is clearly showing Canada outside is favouring the violation of fundamental human rights,” Tognoni said.

The PPT on the session on Canadian mining delivered the guilty verdict in Montreal on Dec. 10, 2014 – Human Rights Day – in an ongoing investigation until 2016.

So far, it has made recommendations to the Canadian government, the mining companies in question, as well as international agencies and bodies including 22 divisions of the U.N. Human Rights Council.

Access to justice is a long-term effort

The PPT’s efforts are long-term ones.

“It is clear that it is important to organize the movement of opposition in order to give a strong also juridical support to the political and social arguments so that it would be clear that the battle for international justice is absolutely the same as the battle for internal democracy. Because the two things are more and more linked.  There are no more countries which are independent from the international scene,” Tognoni said.

PPT sessions “serve to add to that body of work to demonstrate that there is a crying need for instruments that will provide access to justice”, co-organiser of the PPT session on Canadian Mining in Latin America, Daniel Cayley-Daoust, told IPS.

“The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal is not an enforcement kind of initiative, where it does not having legal standing in a concrete way,” he said, explaining that it serves to support for affected communities and to document abuses committed, “in the sense of broadening that debate… to increase the pressure and to add that as kind of further proof to what the abuses are, that are permitted.”

A priority of the PPT is to add “more voice and credibility to something that has been largely ignored by the people who kind of have the power to make the changes”, said Cayley-Daoust.

In 2011, the U.N. Human Rights Council established a Working Group on the issue of human rights and transnational corporations and other business enterprises.

Cayley-Daoust expressed concern that the U.N. has come under corporate influence over the last three to four decades, specifically because of its closer relations with corporations.

Rolando Gómez, spokesperson for the U.N. Human Rights Council, told IPS corporations are not immunised.

“There’s not one human rights issue within any setting – a corporation, a city, a country, a community – that would escape the attention of the council,” he said.

“We have seen positive trends of corporations, large and small, taking those issues to heart,” he said.

As for the challenge of political effects – “I think what we’ve been seeing is states are recognising more and more that we have to depoliticise the discussions,” he told IPS.

He emphasised that “the Human Rights Council is not merely about the resolutions adopted, but it’s about the follow-up, the action, it’s about the fact that there’s a setting here in Geneva where issues which often don’t get heard are heard.”

“The extent to which NGOs are active here is unique,” he told IPS, mentioning the participation of human rights victims and civil society, in delivering statements, sitting in on negotiations, and informing discussion going on in the formal setting.

As for whether talk translates into action… that depends on the issue as well as the willingness of states and decision-makers on the ground, said Gómez.

“Justice takes a long time,” he said.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Rosalinda Dionisio (middle) with other residents of San José del Progreso, giving their testimony at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
CUERNAVACA, Mexico , Jun 27 2013 (IPS)

“They brutally repressed us. The mining company buys off people’s consciences, it divides the community, but we’ll keep fighting it. Some people have had to flee the community,” Rosalinda Dionisio, a Zapoteca indigenous woman in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, told IPS, sobbing.

Her moving testimony illustrated the growing conflicts between local communities and mining companies in Mexico.

Dionisio, 30, still walks with a limp from the leg injuries she sustained when she and other activists from the Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Ocotlán anti-mining organisation survived an attempt on their lives in March 2012.

The Coordinadora is made up of local residents fighting the San José mining company run by the Compania Minera Cuzcatlan S.A., a subsidiary of Fortuna Silver Mines Inc of Canada, which mines for gold and silver on an area of 700 hectares.

The deposits are located near San José del Progreso, one of the three poorest towns in Oaxaca, which is Mexico’s second-most impoverished state. Most of the 6,200 people in the town are opposed to the mining company’s activities in the area because of the soil and water pollution they cause.

But Mayor Alberto Sánchez heads a group of local residents who back the company. The community is divided and confrontations have occurred – like in other mining towns in Mexico.

Stories like Dionisio’s abound in this Latin American country, which is experiencing a mining boom fomented by the government of conservative President Felipe Calderón (2006-2012).

Under the 1992 mining law, Mexico has granted around 31,000 concessions to some 300 companies for more than 800 mining projects on nearly 51 million hectares. Most of the companies involved are Canadian, according to the economy ministry’s most recent figures.

ProMéxico, the government office dedicated to drawing in foreign investment, and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) report that Mexico is the world’s top producer of silver, in third place for bismuth, fifth for molybdenum and lead, and ninth for gold.

In 2012, the mining industry generated 300,000 direct jobs in Mexico, accounted for seven billion dollars in investment, and represented two percent of GDP, according to official figures.

ProMéxico predicts that in 2014, the mining industry’s contribution to GDP will rise to four percent, and that in the next six years, the sector will bring in 35 billion dollars in investment, in a country where 70 percent of the territory has significant mineral deposits, according to official estimates.

But local communities have clashed with the mining companies because of the deforestation, water pollution and dumping of toxic liquid waste.

Since the 1970s, the people of La Mira, in the western state of Michoacán, have been fighting the Las Truchas iron mine, owned by Siderúrgica Lázaro Cárdenas-Las Truchas, a subsidiary of India’s ArcelorMittal steel and mining company.

“They polluted the water and the air, they damaged our houses, and they’re just taking everything,” complained Melitón Izazaga, a leader of the non-governmental Colonias Unidas de La Mira, which groups residents who have been affected by the nearby mine and steelworks that produce 100,000 tons a month of steel.

The mine and the factory dump waste into a reservoir that pollutes nearby rivers and streams, which are the source of water for the local communities. But so far legal action aimed at curbing the mine’s pollution has been unsuccessful.

San José and La Mira were among the cases presented Jun. 21-23 to the Mexican section of the Permanent People’s Tribunal, in a pre-hearing on the mining industry’s impact on the environment and the rights of local people, which was attended by IPS in Cuernavaca, the capital of the central state of Morelos.

The Tribunal began its work in Mexico in 2011 and will conclude its hearings in 2014 with non-binding rulings based on the evidence collected under seven categories: violence; impunity and lack of access to justice; migration; femicide and gender violence; attacks against maize and food sovereignty; environmental destruction; and peoples’ rights.

“The new mining activity is not seeking to develop anything, but merely wants to extract gold, silver, or whatever. It’s a model for exploitation, not for development of the communities. If we don’t fight them, we’re going to have to leave,” Fernanda Campa, a researcher at the Autonomous University of Mexico City, told IPS.

The government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto, who took office Dec. 1, has kept in place the guarantees offered investors in the mining industry. But academics and activists complain that there have been no guarantees for the rights of local communities, and of indigenous people in particular.

Mexico’s indigenous population is variously estimated to make up between 12 and 30 percent of the country’s 107 million people (the smaller, official, estimate is based on the number of people who speak an indigenous language).

From 2000 to 2012, mining concessions were granted for two million hectares of the 28 million hectares that make up officially recognised ancestral lands of native peoples in Mexico.

According to the Observatory on Mining Conflicts in Latin America, there are 175 socio-environmental conflicts or clashes over natural resource use ongoing in the region, involving 183 mining projects and 246 communities. Twenty-one of these conflicts are in Mexico.

“We don’t want more deaths, but we prefer to lose our lives than go down on our knees before the state. We haven’t managed to get the company to leave; we want justice,” said Dionisio, who spent two months in hospital after the attack that her organisation blames on armed militias hired by Cuzcatlán.

So far, four activists opposed to the mine in San José del Progreso have been killed.

Another criticism of extractive industry policies in Mexico is the low level of benefits that go to the state. Mining companies currently pay between 36 cents of a dollar and eight dollars a year per hectare of their concessions for extracting metals and minerals. The only additional tax they pay is income tax, the amount of which is kept secret.

A “study on the extractive industries in Mexico and the situation of indigenous peoples in the territories in which those industries are located” documented native peoples’ complaints that their rights have not been respected or protected.

They stressed that they have not been made participants in consultation and citizen input processes, and that their free, prior and informed consent has not been sought before concessions are granted to mining companies in their territories – as required by International Labour Organisation Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples.

The report on extractive industries and the situation of indigenous peoples, commissioned by the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, also cites the criminalisation of protests, the loss of natural resources, negative environmental impacts, health effects and a total lack of benefits for the local population from the mining industry’s activities.

“Federal authorities should fulfil their role as protectors of the rights of indigenous peoples; monitor the assumption of corporate social responsibility by companies; decriminalise the holding of protests by indigenous peoples against mining companies; and punish those responsible for crimes against indigenous leaders,” the report says.

“One day the hillside is going to slide down on us and bury the town,” as a result of the mining activity, Izazaga said.

“No More Forced Disappearances; They Took Them Alive, We Want Them Back Alive!” say victims’ families who presented their cases to the Permanent People's Tribunal in Mexico. Credit: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 31 2013 (IPS)

The last time Enrique Rangel heard his brother Héctor’s voice was on the night of Nov. 10, 2009, when he called and said “they’re coming, they already stopped me and asked for money, and I already paid, but they’re coming.”

“We never heard from him again,” Enrique Rangel said, in one of the 13 testimonies heard by a jury of nine in Mexico City during a May 28-29 pre-hearing on “Forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions in Mexico: a permanent state policy.”

The pre-hearing was part of the work of the Mexico chapter, launched in 2011, of the Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT), an international public opinion tribunal that has examined human rights violations and crimes against humanity since 1979 and hands down non-binding judgments.

The jury of each thematic pre-hearing will deliver its conclusions to a grand general hearing to be held in 2014, and a verdict will then be issued on the conduct of the Mexican state.

Héctor Rangel disappeared in the city of Monclova, in the northern state of Coahuila. “When we went there the police told us that some officers had arrested him, that he had paid a fine and that they had taken him off to be searched,” Enrique Rangel told IPS.

“But paying a fine at midnight? It seems very odd. Then they told us we’d better go away,” said Rangel, who lives in the central Mexican city of Querétaro.

Since 2007, as the military campaign against drug trafficking intensified in Mexico, the number of forced disappearances and extrajudicial executions has steadily climbed.

In this Latin American country, forced disappearances have traditionally been blamed on the public security forces and paramilitary groups.

But human rights activists say organised criminal groups are increasingly involved in the practice, sometimes acting in collusion with the police or military.

In December 2006, only days after he took office, conservative former president Felipe Calderón deployed the armed forces to combat the illegal drug trade, a strategy that has had fatal results.

During his six-year term, more than 100,000 homicides were committed, over 26,000 people disappeared and another 250,000 were displaced, according to official reports and NGOs.

The violence has continued since the arrival in office of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto. Between December and the end of April there were 8,000 violent deaths, according to journalists’ tallies.

Common threads in all of the accounts heard by the PPT were the problem of impunity and the desire for justice.

Domingo Pérez, a Chol Indian who testified before the PPT, is tireless in his search for his sister Minerva Pérez, who was a 19-year-old student when she disappeared on Jun. 20, 1996, in the municipality of Tila in the southern state of Chiapas.

“Witnesses say she disappeared at a checkpoint. We reported her disappearance and an investigation was ordered. But the authorities have not taken up the matter. This is a violation of our rights, we want to live in peace but the government thwarts our wishes,” Pérez told IPS.

The Fray Bartolomé de las Casas Human Rights Centre (FRAYBA) learned from witness statements that Minerva Pérez was held for three days by the Paz y Justicia paramilitary group. During that time she was beaten and raped, and afterward all trace of her was lost in the Chiapas jungle.

At the time the armed forces were fighting the leftwing Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) that took up arms on Jan. 1, 1994 in Chiapas, one of Mexico’s poorest states.

FRAYBA documented 37 forced disappearances and 85 killings committed between 1995 and 2000, most of them by three paramilitary groups which according to reports were supported by the army and the state government.

On Mar. 20, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) admitted eight cases – six extrajudicial executions and two forced disappearances, in Chiapas – presented by civil society organisations against the Mexican state.

“The cases are well grounded. The situation is muddied by the strategy of blaming the disappearances and executions on organised crime. Now it will be harder to prove the relationship between paramilitary groups and the state,” Clemencia Correa, an academic and one of the members of the PPT jury, told IPS.

The PPT deals with matters like collective violence, impunity, lack of access to justice, migration, femicide and other gender-based violence, threats to native maize and food sovereignty, as well as environmental destruction.

Victims’ relatives continue to fight for effective investigation of their cases.

“We ask for clarification of where (our loved ones) are, and if they committed a crime, that they be tried. We want an effective inquiry to catch those responsible and put them on trial,” Nadin Reyes, the daughter of Edmundo Reyes, who disappeared together with Gabriel Cruz on May 25, 2007, told IPS. They both belonged to the leftwing insurgent Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR).

Based on an investigation by the National Human Rights Commission, their relatives believe that they were both captured in a combined state and federal police and military operation at a hotel in the southern city of Oaxaca.

Like the titles of Swedish author Mari Jungstedt’s trilogy of novels, they are: Unspoken. Unseen. Unknown.

“It’s a politically motivated case, because of his involvement in the EPR. We made the same journey all the families have had to make, to several agencies to ask for solidarity and demand a response from the authorities,” said Reyes.

On Monday May 27 the Mexican government announced the creation of a Disappeared Persons Search Unit. But victims’ families complained that only 12 agents were assigned to it.

“We have the log books of the police officers who arrested my brother, and their names. We gave them to the authorities and they still haven’t been able to arrest them,” complained Rangel, whose brother sold clothing.

In 2010, victims’ relatives formed United Forces for Our Disappeared in Coahuila, which became United Forces for Our Disappeared in Mexico (FUNDEM) because of the magnitude of the human rights tragedy. FUNDEM has documented more than 300 disappearances.

Native varieties of maize, like these drying in San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern state of Chiapas, are key to preserving crop diversity. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, May 8 2013 (IPS)

In the 2011 action-thriller “Unknown”, scientists are persecuted by the biotech industry because they plan the open release of a drought- and pest-resistant strain of maize that could help eradicate world hunger.

There are certain parallels with the situation today in Mexico, the birthplace of maize, which is at the centre of the global fight to protect the crop’s diversity from the onslaught of genetically modified varieties.

“It’s the first time in history that one of the most important harvests in the world is threatened in its centre of diversity,” Pat Mooney, the head of the Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC Group), an international NGO, told IPS.

“If we let the companies win, there will be no chance to defend them in other parts. What is happening here is of key importance for the rest of the world.”

Civil society organisations are raising their guard against the possibility that the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) may approve commercial cultivation of transgenic maize, a move widely condemned by environmentalists and other activists, academics, and small and medium producers due to the risks it poses.

In September, the U.S. corporations Monsanto, Pioneer and Dow Agrosciences presented six applications for commercial plantations of transgenic maize on more than two million hectares in the northwestern state of Sinaloa and the northeastern state of Tamaulipas.

Moreover, in January these companies and Syngenta presented 11 applications for pilot and experimental plots to grow transgenic corn on 622 hectares in the northern states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Durango, Sinaloa and Baja California. And Monsanto has applied for an additional plantation in an unspecified area in the north of the country.

Since 2009, the Mexican government has issued 177 permits for experimental plots of transgenic maize covering an area of 2,664 hectares, according to the latest figures provided by the authorities.

But large-scale commercial release of GM maize has not yet been authorised.

“They are going to serve up transgenic maize on every table in spite of the fact that food sovereignty depends on growing native corn,” said Evangelina Robles, a member of Red en Defensa del Maíz (Maize Defence Network) which campaigns against GM corn. “As a result, we have to demand its prohibition by the state,” she told IPS.

Mexico produces 22 million tonnes of maize a year, and imports 10 million tonnes, according to the agriculture ministry. The country purchased about two million tonnes of GM maize from South Africa over the last two years, and is set to import another 150,000 tonnes.

Three million maize farmers cultivate about eight million hectares in Mexico, two million of which are devoted to family farming. White maize is the main crop for human consumption, while yellow maize, for animal feed, is largely imported.

The National Council for the Evaluation of Social Policy (CONEVAL) estimates the country’s annual consumption of maize at 123 kg per person, compared to a world average of 16.8 kg.

The historical link with pre-Columbian indigenous cultures gives maize a strong symbolic and cultural significance throughout Mesoamerica, the area comprising southern Mexico and Central America, where it was domesticated, producing 59 landraces or native strains and 209 varieties.

In the state of Mexico, adjacent to the capital city’s Federal District, small farmers have found their native maize to be contaminated with GM maize, according to tests carried out by students at the state Autonomous Metropolitan University.

“We swapped seeds and decided to do some tests. Now we are more careful when exchanging, and over who participates in the fair, although we still have to carry out confirmation tests,” activist Sara López, of the Red Origen Volcanes (Volcanoes Origins Network), an association of small farmers that has been organising producers’ fairs since 2010, told IPS.

Environmental, scientific and small farmers’ organisations have discovered GM contamination of native maize in Chihuahua, Hidalgo, Puebla and Oaxaca.

Contamination is “a carefully and perversely planned strategy,” according to Camila Montecinos, from the Chile office of GRAIN, an international NGO that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems.

Transnational food companies “chose maize, soy and canola because of their enormous potential for contamination (by wind-pollination),” said Montecinos, one of the experts participating in the preliminary hearing on transgenic contamination of native maize at the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal, an international opinion tribunal which opened its Mexican chapter in 2012 and will conclude with a non-binding ruling in 2014.

“When contamination spreads, the companies claim that the presence of transgenic crops must be recognised and legalised,” in order to pave the way for marketing the GM seeds, to which they own the patents, she said.

Mexico’s environment minister, Juan Guerra, has said that all available scientific information will be examined before a decision is made.

But that will not be easy. The National Confederation of Campesinos (Small Farmers), one of the main internal movements in the ruling PRI, has had an agreement with Monsanto since 2007 under which the company is to “conserve” native varieties.

Meanwhile, the Peña Nieto government still has not approved regulations for the format and contents of reports on the results of releasing GM organisms, and the possible threats to the environment, biodiversity, and the health of animals, plants and fish.

“For 18 years, corporations have been unsuccessful in convincing the people that their products are good. Maize is being used as a means of political and economic control. People need maize to be alive,” the ETC Group’s Mooney said.

The transgenic seeds on the market are herbicide-resistant Roundup Ready and Bt (for the Bacillus thuringiensis gene they carry for pest resistance) versions of cotton, maize, soy and canola. While they are legally grown in Canada, the United States, Argentina, Brazil and Spain, they are banned for example in China, Russia and the majority of the EU countries.

Recent studies published in the United States show that transgenic crops do not significantly increase yield per hectare, do not reduce herbicide use, and do not increase resistance to pests, in contrast to biotech industry claims.

“We are analysing what legal action to take against the new applications (to plant GM maize),” said Robles, of the Maize Defence Network.