Where mining and violence meet
James Munson (bitly.com/MinerOpposition) traveled to Guatemala in July to explore the stories of mines caught up in a global debate over the responsibilities of Canadian-owned mining firms in developing countries. With Canada moving toward a new policy for the sector, Munson explores how the Fenix nickel mine in eastern Guatemala became the test case for bringing allegations of murder, rape and assault tied to the mine to an Ontario court room. Meanwhile, Goldcorp Inc.’s Marlin mine in the western part of the country has been the subject of protests and findings that its operations broke human rights standards. The stories of these mines, and the people who live beside them are the starting point for Miner Opposition — http://www.bitly.com/MinerOpposition (Produced with support of the Ford Foundation)
EL ESTOR, GUATEMALA— One night this past April, while poring over legal documents at around four in the morning, Manuel Xo Cu drifted to sleep and had the dream that would save his life.
The dream involved him grabbing onto the roots of two trees to keep from sliding into a dark hole. During a bus ride the next day, he was confronted by three armed men who asked him to move to the back of the bus. He refused, recognizing the back of the bus as the dark hole, and sat beside a woman who he would later use as an excuse to get off at an earlier stop, thinking the would-be assassins could identify him with more certainty if he were to get off at his regular destination.
“I thought, ah, the woman is the root of the trees,” said Cu, standing in the book-lined office of the Defensoria Q’echi’, the local indigenous rights organization where Cu works as co-ordinator of the legal department, on a humid afternoon in July.
Cu’s fear of being murdered is common in this part of eastern Guatemala. The site of a massacre during one of the violent phases in the three-decade-long armed conflict that scars this country still, the region surrounding Lake Izabal — which is governed as the Izabal Department in Guatemala’s unitary government — is frighteningly unsafe for those excluded from power, even as it enters into a new economic era with the grand reopening of a massive nickel mine and smelting complex on the lake’s north coast.
One community, Lote Nueve, lives in the crossfire of this clash between old and new. It went all the way to the Constitutional Court in Guatemala City after it discovered its title to the land was ripped out from a municipal registry. Its land disputes with the mine continue while a World Bank-sponsored surveying project, which could certify some of the indigenous village’s claim to land ownership, has gone silent despite initially promising to release new maps of the area in January.
Canadian mining firms have played a role in the Izabal Department’s long story of lawlessness and land disputes. It was the nickel giant INCO that first won approval from the military dictatorship to open a mine here in 1968, and it was a Canadian mining firm, Skye Resources Inc., that had first seriously attempted to reopen the Fenix project after it lay dormant for over twenty years.
During Skye’s brief ownership stint in 2007, the mine’s security staff are alleged to have carried out a brutal forced eviction of a town behind the mine, burning down the villagers’ straw homes and gang-raping 11 women. The period of terror continued after another Canadian firm, Hudbay Minerals Inc., took the reins. In 2009, security forces allegedly murdered an anti-mine opponent and paralyzed another with a gunshot wound.
The incidents in El Estor have steep significance in the global debate over how to prevent conflicts around extractive projects, a debate that is disproportionately focused on Canada because of the sophistication and reach of its mining industry.
The murder, assault and rapes in Izabal are part of three separate lawsuits in an Ontario court, litigation that seeks to pry open Canadian courts to the worst crimes. Meanwhile, Ottawa is orchestrating a wholesale revamp of Canada’s presence in developing countries, a historical reform that carries within it a plan to re-market mining and petroleum firms.
These conflicting approaches sit alongside a multitude of other trends — some pushed by lawyers and activists, others by industry — that are all vying to be part of the solution.
For the rest of this series, click here: http://www.ipolitics.ca/specials/guatemala/start.html