Divide and Rule in the Land of Gold

[polly7]

By Frauke Decoodt

Source: Fraukedecoodt.org

Friday, July 27, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/divide-and-rule-in-the-land-of-gold-by-frauke-decoodt

Doña Deodora tells her story in broken Spanish interwoven with her native Mam language. She is 58 years old, and appears humble and poor. Deodora survives by running her livestock on the lands of her community in the municipality of San Miguel Ixtahaucán, which is in the San Marcos department of Guatemala, near the Mexican border. San Miguel has always been an isolated mountainous region where the indigenous inhabitants mainly live from subsistence agriculture and migrate for temporary work to the coffee plantations on the coast. Things began to change in 1996, when the Canadian mining company Goldcorp started to eye up the land. Coincidentally, it was that very year when the civil war ended and the Peace Agreements were signed. 1 By 2005 Goldcorp, through its national subsidiary, started to dig up gold and silver in what it called the “Marlin Mine”.

“Attacks from our own brothers”
A few metres from Doña Deodora’s house one can see an enormous hole in the mountain. Deodora is the only one in her hamlet who has not sold her land and who does not work in the mine. Pleas and threats to make her sell her land come almost daily. She cries “They want to kill me and my family. We lived here in peace. Now there is so much fear, loneliness, pain and sadness.” A local activist clarifies, “These attacks come from our own community, from our brothers. Brothers who do not own the company but defend her.”
The strategy to divide a population, to break its resistance, is common in Guatemala. It is also not a new strategy. On the other side of Guatemala, on the border with Honduras, where communities also confront the intrusion of mining companies, an indigenous Chort’í exhorts his companions to remember the Spanish conquest. “They co-opted leaders, and the ones killing native people were the same natives. The mines are buying our leaders, to divide us and break our struggle.”

“The company is not here to do social work and lift people out of their poverty” says Javier De León from the organisation ADISMI 2, a driving force behind the resistance against the mine. “It is here to make a profit”. In 2011, according to the reports of Goldcorp to its investors, the Marlin Mine generated 607 million dollars of profit. It gave 1% – less than 9 million dollars – in royalties to Guatemala. The amount of taxes it paid is not on public record. A young peasant, Noe Navarro, also from ADISMI, adds, “there are about 35,000 people in San Miguel, about 700 work for the mine. The company is offering development to some. Goldcorp says that there is no longer extreme poverty here but we experience and see another reality. We remain poor. There is no general benefit.”

There are, however, general damages, highlighted by both locals and studies from national and international organisations. 3 The walls of adobe and earth houses are cracked, there are also fissures running in the ground for kilometres. Water is becoming scarcer and in some places it is contaminated with arsenic. Skin diseases and hair loss have been reported. Enough complaints for the CIDH 4 to order a temporal suspension of activities in the Marlin Mine in 2010. The inhabitants also face various indirect damages. The cost of housing and basic food staples rose, the price of land tripled. More money for some also meant more bars, weapons, violence, robbery, and crime.

[Judi Lynn]

1. Painful reading, infurating, horrendous. So glad to see more information on Goldcorp.

I have to come back later in the day to finish this. It requires complete attention, and I need to get the whole story.

Thanks for posting it here.

The word needs to get out. There ARE so many people who DO care. They've just been kept in the dark a long time.

[polly7]

2. It sure is.

Here's a little more ... have I mentioned how much I hate NAFTA? It makes me sick to see what they're doing.

Mexican Farmers Up Against Canadian Mining Goliaths

By David Bacon

Source: America’s Program

Thursday, August 02, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/mexican-farmers-up-against-canadian-mining-goliaths-by-david-bacon

At Caballo Blanco, each ton of ore would produce half an ounce of gold, so mountains of cyanide-treated tailings would quickly rise around the pit and the wastewater ponds. According to the Diario de Xalapa, another local newspaper, leaching out the gold would require 1.12 million cubic meters of water per year, depleting the aquifer on which rural farming communities depend.

An even greater danger might come from Mexico’s only nuclear power plant, Laguna Verde, less than ten miles away. The ore would be broken loose from the earth by virtually continuous explosions, using up to five tons of explosives a day. This section of Veracruz is geologically part of a volcanic region that includes some of Mexico’s most famous dormant volcanoes, including Orizaba, less than a hundred miles away, and the Cofre de Perote, which is even closer.

People from the towns closest to the mine, Actopan and Alto Lucero, said they’d been threatened to get them to sell their land to Goldcorp. Beatriz Torrez Beristain, an activist with the Veracruz Assembly and Initiative in Defense of the Environment (LA VIDA, in its Spanish acronym) reported to La Jornada Veracruz that in a public hearing on the project “they told us they were afraid, that they’d been intimidated and felt forced to sell their land. There is definitely intimidation here, and they’re criminalizing social and environmental protest.”

Goldcorp promised jobs, and said the environment would be restored after the gold and metals had been extracted. “But we know that this can’t be,” Torres Beristian told reporter Fernando Carmona. “It’s impossible to restore an ecosystem that has been so damaged. You can cut down a tree and plant another, but you’ll never restore the complex ecological chain, with its many trees, birds and water.”