The Dominion - El Salvador

Hemispheric Resistance to Canadian Mining

Sandra — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:56:30 +0000

Day of Action organizers speak out about repression, connections, solidarity

VANCOUVER—From Canada to Argentina, preparations are well underway for the Continental Day of Action Against Canadian Mega Resource Extraction on August 1.

Dozens of organizations have signed a call for the day of protest in solidarity with communities impacted by Canadian extractive industries. The event is meant to highlight the dominance of the Canadian mining industry worldwide. Their demands range from divestment to putting people before profit.

But some activists in North America argue that the serious repression accompanying Canadian mining around the world requires going further than those initial demands. They say that acknowledgment, a sense of urgency and a deeper strategic analysis for concrete local action are also needed. Communities and organizers resisting extractive industry projects in Latin America continue to face displacement, harassment, threats, and death, often dismissed as part of unrelated violence and conflicts.

Decentralized actions will be taking place throughout the western hemisphere on Wednesday, including a national day of mobilization in regions of mining conflict in Colombia, a memorial in Vancouver to remember those who have lost their lives opposing mining projects and a rally outside the Canadian Embassy in San Salvador.

The National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining (Mesa Nacional Frente a la Mineria Metalica) in El Salvador, comprised of community-based groups affected by mining as well as environmental and other organizations across the country, will be actively participating in the day of action. Vidalina Morales spoke with The Dominion from her home in the department of Cabanas, El Salvador, where Vancouver-based Pacific Rim's plans to develop a gold mine have been fraught with controversy.

"We're going to rally in front of the Canadian Embassy here in El Salvador," said Morales, adding that there will also be a press conference on-site. Over the course of the Roundtable's actions and campaigns, many affiliated organizations have faced ongoing human rights violations, particularly in Cabanas.

The community-based resistance to the Pacific Rim mining project in Cabanas has suffered extreme repression, including murders of several active community organizers and activists from communities in the vicinity. Earlier this month, 19-year-old engineering student David Alexander Urias was murdered in the community of Palo Bonito, says Morales, only a few kilometres from Pacific Rim's operations. His murder has been reported as being gang-related, but Morales says local community organizers suspect otherwise.

"Because we continue directly in the region where we're in conflict and where the company has shown so much recent interest in mineral exploration, we've seen some things that seem surprising to us—when families that have been longtime supporters of our efforts are attacked. Here in this department where we live, a youth [David] who was only 19 years old was recently murdered—a young student who is the son of a woman who has been very involved in this struggle," she said.

"Here, anything that happens, they always blame it on the gangs, because it's the easiest way to deny links to other things," said Morales.

In Colombia, murders, threats and other repression against individuals and communities facing large-scale mining activities around the country take place amid an ongoing armed conflict. Mario Valencia, a member of the Colombian Network Against Large-Scale Transnational Mining—RECLAME—spoke with The Dominion via telephone from Bogota, where preparations for the August 1 day of action are in full swing.

"In the middle of this conflict, the issue of mining can't be seen as unconnected because many of these conflicts take place in zones that are rich in natural resources...It's a struggle for territory. It has to do with taking possession of these areas—for example, displacing small-scale miners from territories where they have been mining for years, or even for centuries, and the conflict becomes a tool for that to happen," said Valencia. "The National Confederation of Miners of Colombia, which unites small and medium-scale miners, is currently threatened and being persecuted by the government, to make way for transnational companies."

In Colombia, a national day of mobilization "to stop the mining-energy locomotive" is being organized, coordinated by an alliance of unions, communities, and organizations, including the National Confederation of Miners and RECLAME. Rallies, marches, carnival-style parades and cultural festivals will be held in over a dozen different departments, all regions with mining conflicts. In Caldas, for example, actions will denounce the displacement of communities to make way for Canadian company Gran Colombia Gold's Marmato mining project, says Valencia.

"Mining is one of the principal activities in the Colombian economy. The government's idea is that Colombia should be a mining country, so the most important issue is territorial defense. We have proposed to take this on as the defense of life, the defense of water, the defense of territory, so that these transnational companies can't find the conflict, the pretext to enter these regions," he told The Dominion.

Valencia says that organizations in Colombia realized that they would not be able to confront the mining policy alone—a mining policy imposed on the country from outside but fiercely adopted by the Colombian government. Some of the sectors that have joined forces against transnational mining in Colombia may not seem like natural allies to some people, he says, given that they include communities resisting mining, mining and energy sector workers, small-scale miners and environmental organizations.

"Obviously not everything is all rosy and there are conflicts, but we are fundamentally united in RECLAME for one reason," Valencia explained, adding that the unity is a product of years of discussion. "We came to the understanding that the main aspect of the contradiction on the issue of mining isn't between workers and communities or between environmentalists and small-scale miners, but that the principal contradiction is with transnational large-scale mining companies."

Root Force, a campaign based out of Tucson, Arizona, also connects environmental, social and other justice issues through a strategic anti-infrastructure approach to solidarity with communities in Latin America resisting extractive industry projects. Root Force has signed onto the call for the Continental Day of Action, although concrete actions are left to the discretion of the various autonomous collectives and affiliate groups scattered throughout the southwestern US, the Pacific Northwest and beyond.

"The sort of broader goal of Root Force is to help bring down this global economic system that is at the root of the various injustices that so many of the environmental and social justice groups are organizing against," Ben Pachano, an organizer with Root Force, told The Dominion in a telephone interview. "The method that we've identified for doing that is by preventing the expansion of this resource extraction and transportation infrastructure that underlies the system.

"The actions that Root Force promotes and that, you know, our affiliate and allied groups take are aiming toward that ultimate goal, which is itself an act of solidarity, because the idea is that oppression of an Indigenous community resisting a mine, say in Guatemala, is coming in large part because of the demand for that metal in the first world," said Pachano.

The organization provides resources to facilitate connections between like-minded groups, to raise awareness about struggles against extractive and infrastructure projects in Latin America and their connections to the US, and to promote effective strategic action at the local level.

"Because of that sort of interconnected nature of basically a globalized capitalist economy, that means that you don’t necessarily need to be in the place where the resources are being extracted to take actions affecting that extraction," he said.

In Canada, which is home to companies that together own more than 3,000 mining projects around the world, actions are planned across the country. In Toronto, where many corporate headquarters and the Toronto Stock Exchange are located, people will mobilize at Queen's Park. In Vancouver, another city with a huge number of mining company offices, the local Mining Justice Alliance is hosting a memorial action outside of Goldcorp's head office.

Latin American communities spearheaded the Continental Day of Action, but the Vancouver action is also in solidarity with communities in Asia-Pacific, in Africa, locally and around the world, Mining Justice Alliance member Beth Dollaga told The Dominion. She is also a founding member of Canada-Philippines Solidarity for Human Rights and sees the same patterns of extraction and repression that occur in the Philippines happening elsewhere as well. Paramilitaries around the world are often trained not just to protect corporate infrastructure, she says, but also to harass communities resisting mining and people who speak out in support of community resistance.

"We know that the aggressive extraction—mining—it’s not just the environment plundered or killed, but also mostly Indigenous people, because this happens in the remotest areas of places, like in Latin America or anywhere in Asia-Pacific. So most of these places are actually the Indigenous ancestral domain. And people are killed," she said.

"Part of this event is also to remember them. And to continue. It's not just remembering those people, those martyred activists, but also to carry on and pick up from [where they left off], in solidarity, from wherever we are," said Dollaga.

Dollaga is not the only one to recognize that solidarity organizing with resistance to Canadian extractive projects is often a matter of life or death for people from affected communities. Pachano also emphasizes that for many, it is a fight for survival.

"When you look at a lot of communities that are opposing mega-extraction projects, often the root of their opposition is that they believe that these projects will destroy their way of life and that at the end of the day it's a battle for survival," said Pachano. "Solidarity requires that we take that—that we sort of take to heart the urgency of the battles we’re in solidarity with."

"Ultimately, true solidarity requires looking at the systems that are producing these types of exploitations and actively trying to take them down."

Sandra Cuffe is a Vancouver-based freelance journalist.

Day of Action

Into the Fire

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:18:32 +0000

Deportation ends Salvadoran family's long wait for asylum in Canada

MONTREAL—Ever since Canada deported her family to El Salvador in December 2010, Jessica Vides says she fears for her life—and the lives of her young children.

“I am afraid to leave the house. The children can't go to school,” said the mother of three, two of whom are Canadian citizens, in a telephone interview from San Salvador, El Salvador's capital.

She and her husband, Eduardo Vides, fled their native country of El Salvador five years ago, she said, due to death threats from one of the country's notorious street gangs. Now that the family is back in San Salvador, she says the death threats have returned with a vengeance.

Two weeks after they were deported, Jessica Vides said the family received a menacing visit from men they suspect are gang members, who threatened to kill them if they failed to pay thousands of dollars.

“We all hid in a room at the back of the house,” she told The Dominion.

Such threats are exactly why she says the family left their home in San Salvador in the first place, and sought refuge in Canada.

But the peaceful refuge they’d dreamed of turned into a nightmare five years after they settled in Montreal. The family’s plight in the hands of Canadian immigration authorities raises serious concerns about Canada’s refugee policy. The Vides family accuses authorities of injuring their child while she clung to her dad as he was being carted off to an immigrant detention centre.

Eduardo Vides’s difficulties began when, as a passerby, he randomly witnessed the assassination of a woman on the street in San Salvador five years ago. Men he suspected were gang members soon started following him, he said in an interview with The Dominion.

Then the death threats started. He was warned that if he did not pay thousands of dollars, his whole family would be killed.

“I didn’t have the money,” he said. And so the family fled, escaping to Guatemala, and from there, to several US cities. In Buffalo, New York, with the help of a nonprofit group called Vive el Casa, they came to Canada as refugee claimants, according to Jessica Vides.

When they arrived in Canada, their first-born child, Eduarda, was just one year old. While awaiting a final decision on their asylum claim and subsequent judicial review of the decision, years passed. While they waited, Jessica and her husband established a home on Crevier Street in Montreal's Ville St. Laurent neighbourhood, where they had two more children: Andrea, now aged five, and Gustavo, now aged two. Originally trained as a pilot, Eduardo Vides found industrial maintenance work through an agency.

But their asylum claim was eventually rejected. Canada has in the past accepted Salvadoran refugees fleeing gang violence. However, given that asylum claims are heard before a single member of the Immigration and Refugee Board, it is, to some extent, the “luck of the draw,” according to Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR).

The Vides family went to Federal Court for a judicial review, but after a long wait, they learned that the verdict on that too was negative.

At a November 23, 2010, meeting at Citizenship and Immigration Canada's offices in downtown Montreal, Eduardo Vides was informed that the family was slated to be deported three weeks later. Vides said he pleaded at the meeting for the government to allow the family to stay until his daughter had completed her school year. Eduarda Vides, who is now seven years old, was enrolled as a first-grade student at Ville St. Laurent's Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school, and her dad had been working for more than a year at job repairing boilers, when the government ordered the family's deportation.

According to Vides, they responded by arresting him on the spot.

Three weeks later, in an interview with The Dominion, it was still difficult for Eduardo Vides to speak about the events of that fateful day. The slim man with gentle mannerisms spoke with a shaky voice about how his seven-year-old daughter, who was present at the meeting and witnessed the emotional exchange between her father and the Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) agents, had thrown her arms around him. He recalled with a pained expression, “She hugged me, [and] I hugged her back.”

According to Vides, two male immigration agents grabbed him—from either side, an officer clamped onto his arms.

A third, female, officer grabbed the frightened first-grader. The girl “held on hard with her arms,” her father recounted.

Vides claims that the female officer injured his daughter as she wrestled the seven-year-old girl off of him. She had “wounds all over her back, stomach, and also scars on her leg,” he said. “She couldn't walk.”

Meanwhile, Canadian immigration agents hauled Eduardo Vides off to the CBSA's Laval detention center.

Reached by telephone for comment, Dominique McNealy, a CBSA agent at the centre, clarified that immigrants are detained primarily because authorities are not sure of the immigrant's identity, or in cases in which the immigrant poses a “flight risk” or a menace to Canada. However, he would not comment on why the authorities decided to incarcerate Vides, who had declared his identity to the authorities, and, as an employed worker concerned with the continuation of his daughter's schooling, seemed to pose little risk of either flight or danger to the public.

Immigration attorney Jared Will observed in a telephone interview that, “Immigration officers have a great amount of power over people's lives. Yet there’s no accountability process that is comparable to even something police officers have.”

While Will noted that it is possible to file complaints against immigration officers, “In terms of holding them accountable, there’s no process that has any teeth.”

Locked up in the immigrant prison in Laval, Eduardo Vides took matters into his own hands. He began a hunger strike in protest of his family’s treatment.

CBSA put him in his own private “room” (like the term “prisoner,” the word “cell” is avoided in the parlance of the immigrant detention system), isolating him from the general population.

Meanwhile, Jessica Vides was desperately seeking medical treatment for her eldest daughter, who she said had still not recovered from the injuries suffered in the hands of the immigration officer three weeks prior. Upon the advice of a local nonprofit, she brought Eduarda to Montreal’s principal francophone children’s hospital, St. Justine. However, staff there refused to examine the girl upon hearing that her injuries had stemmed from a confrontation with immigration authorities, according to Eduarda’s parents.

The St. Justine ombudsperson failed to respond to a request for comment for this article.

In a telephone interview on December 13, Jessica Vides said that the pain in the seven-year-old's stomach had not improved, and she also had a fever.

When The Dominion called Jessica Vides two days later, the mother-of-three’s number had been disconnected.

On December 15, the day the government had ordered that the family be deported, the Vides’s first grader still had a fever and pain in her stomach, according to her mother. Local solidarity activists had urged her to bring the child to a sympathetic Montreal doctor. But the family’s lawyer, Stephane Dulude, told Jessica Vides to go instead to the airport, as ordered by CBSA. Upon this advice, Jessica arrived at the airport with her three children, and presented herself to the immigration authorities. She appealed on her daughter's behalf for medical attention.

Reached by telephone, CBSA spokesperson Stephane Malepart said that, “we make sure that everybody's in good health to travel. If that person has to go to the hospital before travelling, we'll then we take them to the hospital and that's it.”

However, Jessica Vides told The Dominion that the immigration agent she appealed to responded by asking whether the girl was a Canadian citizen. Vides says she was told, “If not, it doesn’t matter. She has to leave.” The seven-year-old was thus refused treatment again. And then she, her little brother and sister (both Canadian citizens), and their mom, were all immediately deported.

The Vides family’s deportation was executed on day 22 of Eduardo's hunger strike.

Two days later, The Dominion, accompanied by Sarita Ahooja, an organizer with No One Is Illegal and Solidarity Across Borders, visited Eduardo in the Laval detention centre.

An activist with long experience working with immigrants in detention, Ahooja expressed surprise when the CBSA guards led us to a private office-style room equipped with office chairs, a desk, and a computer to wait for Eduardo Vides. (She pointed out the usual meeting room as we exited: a sparse common room with plastic chairs.)

Ahooja commented that she had never seen such measures taken in the Laval detention centre. Eduardo was being kept in isolation “to avoid the possibility that his resolve would spread and inspire others to defy an unjust and repressive system,” she later explained in an email to The Dominion, adding that this was not just her analysis but also Eduardo Vides’s.

When asked about CBSA’s response to the hunger strike, Malepart said the agency takes such actions very “seriously.” In fact, they had even put off Vides’s deportation, originally scheduled for December 15.

But upon hearing about his wife and kids’ deportation, the Salvadoran man broke his hunger strike. He wished to be with his family, even despite the threats on his life in El Salvador, he explained.

Late on the afternoon of the following Friday, CBSA informed him that he would be deported very late that Sunday night—a timing Vides found “suspicious,” given that it left very little time for legal recourse.

In the 2008–2009 fiscal year, the last year for which figures are available on the CBSA’s website, 13,249 people were deported from Canada—an increase of well over 50 per cent since 1999. Of those deported, 9,672 were, like the Vides family, asylum seekers whose claims had been turned down by the Canadian government. And, since last summer’s passage of a new refugee reform bill, this trend seems to be on the rise, as the government shifts ever greater resources into what CBSA euphemistically refers to as “removals.”

Bill C-11, which will go into effect over the next year, is, amongst other things, supposed to eliminate the excessively long delays that families like the Videses have faced in waiting for a final decision on their asylum claims. “It was a fact that many people had been waiting for years” for final decisions on their refugee claims, according to Dench. This problem has been made worse in recent years by the federal Conservatives’ failure to fill dozens of vacancies on the Immigration and Refugee Board.

Moreover, the lack of a refugee appeals process in the current system means that asylum seekers whose claims are rejected are forced to go through a lengthy judicial review by the Federal Court. These delays have serious consequences for asylum seekers, making it very likely that families like the Videses will settle in Canada over the course of the excessive waits they are forced to undergo, and then face undue hardships if their refugee claims are turned down and they are forced to leave the country.

Bill C-11 is supposed to address these problems by shortening the timelines for asylum decisions, and creating a new refugee appeals process that will expedite the processing of asylum seekers whose claims are rejected. According to the Canadian government’s backgrounder on the bill, the new system also entails “hiring more officers to expedite removals.”

Groups like the CCR assess the new legislation as a positive development overall, although they express concerns that the new timelines may not allow sufficient time for all asylum seekers to prepare claims, and they are critical of the way the new system creates a discriminatory two-tier system based on asylum seekers’ country of origin. As well, given that many families like the Videses have already built lives for themselves in Canada due to the excessive delays of the old system, the new emphasis on “removals” raises serious concerns.

Already, there seem to be changes in how immigration authorities are dealing with outstanding deportation orders, according to Will. “There are situations where before they would have waited, and now they’re just plowing ahead as quickly as possible,” the Montreal-based immigration lawyer observed. “There’s definitely been a very obvious hardening in carrying out deportations in situations in which there may have been more leeway in the recent past,” he added.

As the country lurches from the old dysfunctional system in which thousands of asylum seekers spent years waiting for a decision, to a renewed emphasis on deportations, one can only guess how many families will suffer the consequences.

Back in San Salvador, Jessica Vides is worried about how her family will survive. If they pay the money to the gangs, “how will we feed the kids?” she asked, adding that with the threats to their lives, “Eduardo can’t go to work.” The family cannot possibly stay in El Salvador, she said.

More than a month after his family’s deportation, the young father who had defied CBSA with his hunger strike sounded tired, and sad.

“I don’t know what we’re going to do here right now. We’re in a very hard situation,” he said.

The family yearns to return home—to Canada.

Brought to Canada when she was just one year old, it is the only country Eduarda Vida has ever known. “She tells me that she misses her country,” Jessica Vides told The Dominion. The seven-year-old girl’s mom says she corrects her daughter’s “mistake.” For as CBSA has made painfully clear to both of Eduarda’s parents, Canada is not their country.

But for the girl who was abruptly yanked out of her first grade year at Montreal’s Bois Franc-Aquarelle elementary school in December, this is no easy lesson.

“I miss my friends,” the seven-year old told The Dominion mournfully, in a telephone from San Salvador more than a month after her family’s deportation. She also misses the snow, and her school, she said.

“I don’t have school here,” she added, explaining, “we can’t leave the house.”

Isabel Macdonald is a Montreal-based journalist and media scholar who has written for The Nation, The Guardian and The Toronto Star, amongst other publications.

Canada cuts refugees loose

Goldcorp Drilled by Shareholders

Moira Peters — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 09:28:38 +0000

Mining company challenged at AGM to respect host communities

TORONTO—Shareholders of Canadian mining giant Goldcorp Inc. got a glimpse—albeit brief—into the lives of Central Americans whose land is being exploited by the company for gold. Some even paid attention.

Representatives from communities hosting Goldcorp mines in Central America made their way from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador to address the company’s annual general meeting (AGM) in Toronto on May 19, 2010.

Shareholders learned about the devastating effects Goldcorp’s operations have had on communities in Central America. The presenters told of an increase in health problems, cracked houses, widespread social conflict and the criminalization of protest in their towns and villages.

Carlos Amador, a teacher from Honduras, challenged the company's reclamation process at the closed San Martin mine in central Honduras, which in 1999 displaced 14 families and contaminated water to the point beyond which even the World Bank recommended.

"Who will control the acid drainage? Who is going to clean up the water contaminated with heavy metals?" he asked.

The AGM was not an easy venue for the visitors to tell their stories. Goldcorp attempted to cut Javier de Leon of Guatemala short during question period when de Leon tried to explain the environmental, health and social devastation brought by a Goldcorp mine to his town of San Miguel Ixtahuacan. He had previously been given less than a minute to address the meeting. When a supporter of the visiting group refused to be silent—protesting that de Leon deserved to be heard after traversing a continent to address the meeting—President and CEO Chuck Jeannes relented and gave de Leon the platform.

All the presenters spoke of the need not only for effective and fair consultation with potentially impacted communities before mining operations begin, but also the consent of those communities.

To that aim, a shareholder resolution was brought forward by Kathryn Anderson of the Maritimes-Guatemala Breaking the Silence (BTS) Network, which called on Goldcorp to adopt a corporate policy on free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) by September 1, 2010.

FPIC is a central theme of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) and is the basis of Article 169 of the International Labour Organization, which states that before a mega-project—such as a mine or a hydroelectric dam—can begin on Indigenous lands, residents need to be consulted about the proposed project and to give their informed consent.

The Goldcorp operations influenced by Anderson’s proposed policy would impact not only Indigenous communities, but all communities dependent for survival on natural resources.

Specifically, the resolution calls on Goldcorp to respect UNDRIP as best practice with regards to FPIC rights; to note the legal difference between consultation and consent; to implement the proposed policy retroactively to ensure that all Goldcorp’s mining licenses were obtained in adherence to this policy; to cease all operations, expansions, and exploration where consent of the affected population has not been obtained by the state; and to apply this policy to any license with partial or full Goldcorp ownership.

“The shareholder resolution was brought forward because in cases like San Miguel Ixtahuacan [in Guatemala], we have seen the results of not having FPIC. Communities have not had the full disclosure of costs, benefits, and risks of open-pit gold mining,” said Anderson. “When a full discussion is not there, it creates an enormous amount of conflict.”

In its pre-AGM letter to shareholders, Goldcorp urged its investors to vote against Anderson’s resolution, saying the company would be launching its own human rights platform at the AGM.

In fact, just days before its AGM, Goldcorp released a Human Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) of the Marlin Mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacan—the result of a petition by shareholders. Initial assessments of the HRIA by various NGOs, including Amnesty International, express concerns that affected communities were not invited to discuss whether or not the study would have been appropriate or beneficial. Although both a Goldcorp representative and an investor sat on the steering committee for the HRIA, no resident was given such a privilege. Meanwhile, both the communities and NGOs argued that the study would only increase social tensions in the already-fractured communities; the assessor, On Common Grounds, itself concluded that the study resulted in escalated social tensions and polarization between and among communities.

Shareholders representing 90 per cent of Goldcorp’s shares voted against Anderson's proposed resolution. She was surprised by the 10 per cent of shares in its favour, given that shareholders rarely vote against the company line. “We do not have an explanation for that yet,” she said. “Did someone advise a large block of shareholders to vote against Goldcorp in this instance? Or is it because people specifically read and heard our concerns?”

Although Goldcorp claims it participates in consultations with populations affected by its mines, company representatives refuse to articulate a detailed consultation process or put one into company policy. Furthermore, nowhere does Goldcorp claim to respect the rights of communities to say no to mining, which is a keystone of Anderson’s resolution.

When it ignored the results of community-organized consultations in 2005 in Sipakapa, a region bordering the Marlin Mine—where 11 out of 13 communities unanimously opposed the mine’s presence—the local government was pressured to address the issue. The municipality of San Miguel has since organized its own upcoming consultation. Goldcorp General Counsel VP David Deisley said the company is not legally required to respect the results of such a consultation.

Goldcorp in general, and Jeannes in particular, consistently deny FPIC is directly applicable to the company, arguing the laws for consultation and consent apply to governments, not corporations.

Nelly Rivera de Silva of El Salvador explained that despite a moratorium on all mining exploitation in her country, she will be directly impacted by Goldcorp’s proposed Cerro Blanco mine to be built in Guatemala several kilometers upstream of Lake Guija—a binational lake. The lake is the tributary of the Lempa River, the most important watershed in El Salvador. Another 13 mining projects line El Salvador’s border with Guatemala, and 42 line its border with Honduras.

Rivera explained that she came to Canada to address Goldcorp on home soil and to inform people of the local repercussions of gold mining.

Goldcorp’s eight-page glossy handout on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) states: “Sustainable operations are dependent upon good working relationships with the communities in which we operate...We believe our transparent approach to doing business is the only way to fully engage our stakeholders in a meaningful, mutually beneficial relationship.”

But Rivera thinks this company line is an insult to shareholder intelligence.

“Why wouldn’t you think something is not quite right when members of the affected communities are coming all the way to Canada just to have their voices heard?” she asked.

As he was leaving the meeting, a shareholder addressed one of the 50 protesters demonstrating outside the AGM, asking why they were “anti-employment.” His sentiments reflect a feeling by many Canadians that mining companies are effectively bringing development and prosperity to people who would be starving if it weren’t for opportunities from the North.

De Leon had a different story. He maintained that Goldcorp is making millions in profit at the expense of the social fabric in Guatemala, where community tensions and social conflict are direct results of the affected communities having no say about the open-pit gold mine.

De Leon has felt this tension point-blank. After receiving numerous death threats, he was shot at four times on April 19, 2010, a few days before his departure for Canada. He said the majority of such threats come from mine workers or people with personal connections to the mine. Feeling tense, vulnerable, and worried for his family’s safety, de Leon said that a majority of investors do not know or care about this reality.

“No shareholder wants to hear what we have to say. They only want to see the renewal of their investment,” he said. “No-one claims ownership of the damages done to the environment, to society, or to the politics of Guatemala.”

Referenda have been organized across Guatemala to address the lack of informed consent, but neither the national government nor the company recognizes these consultations as legitimate, even though in some cases 100 per cent of an affected population has voted against mining.

Although it wouldn’t legally uphold FPIC, Bill C-300, a private member’s bill tabled by Liberal MP John McKay, could create some legal options for communities impacted by Canadian mines.

The Canadian government provides political and economic support to Canadian mining companies like Goldcorp operating abroad, through embassy relations, tax incentives and investment support with public funds like the Canada Pension Plan. Bill C-300 would make this political support and public money contingent on Canadian companies meeting certain human rights standards—standards these companies have already agreed to in various voluntary principles on corporate social responsibility, many of which are found in the CSR standards for Export Development Canada.

The bill would establish a legal complaints mechanism allowing people who wish to report human rights violations to do so with the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT). If DFAIT concludes that a company's actions violate established guidelines for responsible behaviour, the company’s political and economic support from Canada would be withdrawn.

Bill C-300 is a watered-down version of recommendations made at the 2007 National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility, which was approved by the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada. Nevertheless, the mining industry has launched strong opposition to the bill.

Rare for a private member’s bill, C-300 has passed through two votes in the House of Commons, and is currently at the end of its committee stage. MPs have reported receiving more letters in support of C-300 than any other bill in recent memory. If it succeeds in the committee, the bill will return to the House for a third and final vote; and if passed, it will go to the Senate. Since the Conservative Party opposes the bill on the basis that it would hurt the image of Canadian mining companies and their global competitiveness, the bill will likely die in the Senate because of a Conservative majority.

All four Central American activists who flew to Canada to speak to Goldcorp’s shareholders were adamant that voluntary standards for Canadian companies do not protect against human rights abuses. Although they were all in support of Bill C-300, they continue to push for free, prior and informed consent to be a focal point of Canadian legislation.

Valerie Croft worked in Guatemala as an International Accompanier in 2008 and is active in issues relating to corporate accountability.

Cleaning up Goldcorp's toxic mess

Feliciano Orellana and Carlos Amador

El Salvador's gold fight goes international

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 17:44:33 +0000

Five representatives of five organizations in El Salvador that form part of the National Coalition Against Mining, known as La Mesa, were in Washington, DC last month to accept the Letelier-Moffitt International Human Rights Award. The recognition comes at an interesting time as the group's successes in blocking mining exploitation in their small country, have brought about a unique legal situation. Namely, a Canadian mining company is suing the government of El Salvador for $100 million, through a US subsidiary under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). The Real News followed the group of activists around Washington, DC, and interviewed the CEO and president of the company behind the suit, Pacific Rim. Produced by Jesse Freeston.

Murders in Mining Country

hillarybain — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 06:24:46 +0000

Canadian mining companies at the scene of the crimes

San Cristobal de Las Casas, MEXICO—The mood was celebratory the weekend of August 29, 2009.

Activist and community leader Mariano Abarca Roblero had just been released after eight days in jail for alleged anti-mining activity.

In the town of Chicomuselo, near the Guatemalan border, people gathered for a weekend conference organized by the Mexican Network of People Affected by Mining (REMA) to discuss the effects of mining and how best to oppose local projects. Besides helping organize the event, Mariano—who had been fighting against a barite mine near his home operated by Canadian company Blackfire Exploration Ltd.—was treated like the guest of honour.

As the weekend came to a close, Mariano’s four adult children and his wife gathered around him as people attending the conference asked to have their photos taken with him. He was a hero for having survived several days in jail for his anti-mining stance. On top of everything, he said he was as determined as ever to keep fighting.

But less than three months later, Mariano was dead, shot in the neck and chest outside his home in Chicomuselo.

Three people arrested in connection with the murder all have ties to Blackfire as current or former employees. Blackfire has said they had nothing to do with the killing and they have no control over their employees outside of work hours.

Mariano’s death came after he had reported death threats by Blackfire employees to the police.

“A few weeks after my father made a report against [two Blackfire employees] one of them came to the house and said he was going kill my father,” Mariano’s son Jose Luis said.

“They completed their objective. At 8 p.m. that same day I got the news that my father was dead.”

Sadly, Mariano’s death is but one in a spate of recent killings in Mexico and Central America that have targeted locals who were known for their opposition to mining projects in their communities.

As Bill C-300—proposed legislation that would hold Canadian mining companies more accountable for their activities in developing countries—is debated back home, the practices of Canadian mining companies are yet again being questioned.

“The image that the [Mexican] population has of Canadian mines is that they’re murderers, and that’s throughout the region,” said Gustavo Castro, a close friend and colleague of Mariano’s who works for Chiapas NGO Otros Mundos.

“People have seen lives lost, dead livestock, waterways contaminated—that’s what they’ve seen of Canadian mining… And there’s a resistance movement that’s getting stronger all the time.”

It’s not that Canadian mines are necessarily worse than the mines of other countries—it’s that there are so many more of them.

“The Americans and the Brits and the Chinese and the Australians are no better, and if anything some are worse,” said Jamie Kneen, Communications Coordinator for MiningWatch Canada. “But because Canada is so dominant in the industry the odds are that if there’s a problem it’s going to be a Canadian one.”

There’s no doubt Canada is a global leader when it comes to the mining industry. According to an article written by Michel Bourassa, coordinator of the Global Mining Group at law firm Fasken Martineau, “As of 2008, over three quarters of the world’s exploration and mining companies called Canada home.” Extractive industries account for five per cent of Canada’s GDP.

A recent report released by the Latin American Observatory for Environmental Conflicts stated there are currently 118 mining conflicts in 15 countries in Latin America. By my own count, a total of 33, or 28 per cent, involve Canadian mining companies.

Kneen believes the increased violence is partly due to the mining industry's push into "more remote and sensitive areas."

“The more they have to go off into new places the more they are running into conflict, and the conflict turns deadly sometimes.”

El Salvador has seen the worst death toll with three activists killed. Each was opposed to Pacific Rim’s proposed El Dorado mine.

In an October interview, Pacific Rim CEO Tom Shrake denied the company had anything to do with anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera’s murder in June. In a follow-up email interview in January, he said the same with regards to anti-mining activists Ramiro Rivera and Dora Sorto’s murders, accusing the media of pointing to the mining issue with no factual basis.

“These most recent murders are in the area of our now inactive Santa Rita Project, not El Dorado,” Shrake said. “They have been reported by the police to be related to a family feud. We have no presence in the area and have not since 2008. There are no mining or exploration activities in the area. Hooded armed gunmen who—according to the locals in the area—came from another town ran us off the site. Certain outlets continue to point to the mining issue as the motivation for the murders, without factual basis. We would hope they are not purposely using this feud as a tool to generate opposition and worse yet, violence.”

However activists on the ground say the violence is being generated by Pacific Rim’s presence.

“We think there’s a link between the company and the violence in our country associated with this struggle [against mining]” Roberto Calles of the Mesa Nacional frente a la Mineria Metálica said.

“The company had pitted communities and people against one another,” Calles said, noting deep divisions exist between family members who are for and against the mine. Calles said local politicians have received benefits from mining companies in exchange for their support and have been known to turn against their anti-mining constituents, generating more conflict.

“Even if the company is not directly killing people, the result is related to them and their actions,” he said.

In Guatemala, a country that has a long history of struggle against Canadian mines, two lives were lost in mining related violence in September 2009. Kneen said he’s heard of travellers in Guatemala being warned not to identify themselves as Canadian for fear of being attacked.

According to Uriel Abarca Roblero, brother of murdered Mexican anti-mining activist Mariano Abarca Roblero, Canadians are getting a tarnished reputation in Chiapas as well.

“The people of Chicomuselo [near where the mine is], the newspapers, the family… all say Canadians—not the company—are the murderers because they came from another country and killed us,” he said. “That’s what everyone thinks. I know it’s not true but people really feel that way.”

Blackfire admitted they paid off the mayor to control opposition in Chicomuselo. These recent admissions of corruption have done nothing to quell people’s anger.

The government authorities in Chiapas shut down the Blackfire mine near Chicomuselo in early December, citing environmental concerns. Mariano’s son Jose Luis wants the company gone altogether.

“We don’t want that company in our town, in Chiapas, or in our country. They have divided us, threatened us, damaged the environment and brought nothing but tragedy to our community.”

* Anti-Mining Activists Murdered

The following is a list of people who have died in mining related conflict in Mexico, Guatemala and El Salvador since June 2009.

· Marcelo Rivera—El Salvador—opposed the El Dorado mining project headed by Canadian firm Pacific Rim. Tortured and killed. Disappeared June 18, 2009, body was found 12 days later.

· Adolfo Ich—Guatemala—opposed HudBay nickel mining project. Allegedly shot by security guards hired by the mine on September 27, 2009.

· Martin Choc—Guatemala—shot and killed when men opened fire on a minivan he was traveling in September 28, 2009.

· Mariano Abarca Roblero—Mexico—opposed mine operated by Canadian firm Blackfire. Shot outside his home on November 27, 2009.

· Ramiro Rivera Gomez—El Salvador—opposed the El Dorado mining project. Despite 24 hour police protection shot and killed when the car he was driving in was ambushed, December 20, 2009.

· Dora Alicia Sorto Recinos—El Salvador—opposed El Dorado and was the wife of a man who had lost two fingers due to opposition to the mine. Murdered while eight months pregnant, December 26, 2009.

** Bill C-300, the Conservatives and Corporate Responsibility

Liberal MP John McKay introduced Bill C-300, also known as An Act Respecting Corporate Accountability for Mining, Oil and Gas Corporations in Developing Countries, to the House of Commons in February 2009.

The Bill seeks to “promote responsible environmental practices and international human rights standards on the part of Canadian mining, oil and gas corporations in developing countries.” It proposes to do this by withholding taxpayer and political support and creating a complaints mechanism with the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Companies that have received investment from government pension funds could see that funding withdrawn if it is proven they are violating international standards for corporate accountability.

Bill C-300 would not affect all mining companies. Blackfire Mining Exploration—the firm implicated in the murder of Mariano Abarca Roblero—would likely not be affected because it is private. But public companies like Goldcorp, which has stakes in Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras “would have a lot to lose politically and financially,” according to MiningWatch’s Jamie Kneen.

While Bill C-300 has received widespread support from Canadian NGOs, the mining industry has predictably denounced the Bill. The Conservative government is also against the Bill, with Minister Peter Kent calling it a “poorly written piece of legislation which addresses some issues that are already part and parcel of our government’s policies abroad.”

Bill C-300 has been on shaky ground since it was first introduced and getting it through the Conservative-heavy Senate will be extremely difficult. The Bill barely made it to 2nd reading in April 2009, squeaking through with a vote of 137 to 133. It had most recently been debated in Committee hearings, with various interest groups presenting briefs before the Christmas break.

Surprisingly, according to John McKay, Stephen Harper’s decision to prorogue Parliament may actually prove to be an advantage for the Bill.

“With proroguing we have an extra 60 days to study the Bill,” he said, adding that he’s not “overly fussed” about having the extra time.

A Facebook group for supporters of Bill C-300 has been created and McKay suggests those who support the Bill contact local Conservative MPs to express their support.

“Just make the lives of Conservative MPs as hard as possible. That seems to be about the only thing that works,” he said.

Dominique Jarry-Shore is a freelance journalist based in Chiapas, Mexico. This work was carried out with the aid of a grant from the International Development Research Center in Ottawa.

Gustavo Castro

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Who Killed Marcelo Rivera?

hillarybain — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 23:31:13 +0000

Prominent anti-mining activist murdered in El Salvador

SAN ISIDRO, EL SALVADOR—Death and violence are an unfortunate part of everyday life in El Salvador. Local and national newspapers, with their graphic photos of bloodied corpses, track the daily tally of homicide and crime in a country that has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But even by those standards Marcelo Rivera’s torture and death were shocking.

During the evening of June 18, 2009, the community leader and anti-mining activist disappeared when he was lured away from a routine trip a few kilometers from his home in San Isidro. Twelve days later, his body was removed from an empty well 27 metres deep. His body had no hair or fingernails, his trachea had been broken and the thumb of his right hand was stuck in his mouth like a baby’s, tied in place with a piece of rope around his naked body. He had been beaten and his face was unrecognizable.

Rivera was a respected member of the community. He founded a cultural centre popular with youth in San Isidro, and had been in charge of the finances of the local chapter of the FMLN, the country’s leftist and currently ruling political party. He had also campaigned vigorously against the El Dorado mining project in Cabanas, owned by Canadian company Pacific Rim Mining Corp.

Vancouver-based Pacific Rim is a publicly traded company that has subsidiaries in El Salvador and the US. The company is a junior exploration company that specializes in gold exploration. Pacific Rim has invested $80 million into the El Dorado project in about seven years. They claim to have invested several million dollars in social programs in Cabanas.

But the project has generated conflict in a region characterized by poverty and a dependence on remittances from family members in the US. Money provided by Pacific Rim for health and education is seen as a way of buying support from the people and tension is high between those for and against the mine.

The environmental effects of the mine, such as the contamination of soil and water sources like aquifers and wells, are a big worry among residents in Cabanas. Some community members have also complained about the displacement of communities to make room for the mine. On a social level, the arrival of Pacific Rim has generated conflict and violence in the area.

Apart from Rivera’s death, there have been two assassination attempts that seem to be related to anti-mining activism: In July, a priest who hosts a local radio show used as a platform for his anti-mining stance was run off the road. A few weeks later, the leader of a local community development association that is against the mine was shot eight times. Both men now have 24-hour police protection.

Rivera’s brother Miguel Rivera said his brother’s murder has caused fear among those opposed to the project. “People we work with who are against the mining project are afraid because someone has died,” he said. “They say, ‘I could be the second one. I could be next.’”

According to lawyer and activist Hector Berrios, Marcelo Rivera had already been the victim of death threats and at least one assassination attempt near his home in January 2009. “The question is,” Berrios said, “who benefited from Marcelo’s death?”

For his part, Pacific Rim CEO Tom Shrake said the company condemns violence and has spoken to employees to see if they know anything about the murder.

“They have assured us that they had absolutely nothing to do with it,” Shrake said in a telephone interview from his hotel in San Salvador.

“As far as they know—and I’ve heard this from the local police as well—his death had nothing to do with his mining activism. Now whether that’s true or not we’ll see. But we have no knowledge of it.”

That police theory—that Rivera’s death was related to a gang dispute after a night of drinking and not his anti-mining activity—didn’t make sense to Rivera’s family when they heard it. Rivera was not someone who associated with gang members and he didn’t drink alcohol.

“The police invented a scenario to be able to tell people something, because a lot of people were asking about Marcelo,” Miguel Rivera said. “The police theory was that he was killed the same day he disappeared, or early the next day.” But the doctors who examined Marcelo’s body told Miguel that his brother died about eight days after he disappeared.

That was just one of several inconsistencies in the case. Following a complaint they received from Marcelo’s family, El Salvador’s Public Attorney’s Office for the Defense of Human Rights found there had been negligence on the part of the police.

“We found some failures in terms of the lateness in mobilizing to do inspections in places where the body could be,” Gerardo Alegria, a lawyer for the Public Attorney for the Defense of Human Rights, said. “That includes where they found the body. The police had known for a few days already that the body was there.”

Alegria also said the police failed to gather information at the scene that would have helped solve the crime. His office is now keeping an eye on the investigation and Alegria said things have improved. Five adults and one minor have been arrested so far and are awaiting a hearing. But in this part of the world, there is a lot to be said about intellectual versus physical perpetrators of a crime, and questions remain about who was really behind the killing.

Meanwhile El Dorado has been at a standstill. The company stopped investing serious money into the mine about two years ago, when Tony Saca, president of El Salvador at the time, made public statements indicating Pacific Rim’s permits would not be honoured.

Pacific Rim has since filed for arbitration under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), although Shrake said he is confident a settlement will be reached.

As for local opposition to the project, Shrake said that is something that was expected all along. “There’s just a huge international industry that opposes any extractive industry anywhere in the world at this point. So if you don’t expect opposition to any extractive project, you’re living in a closet,” he said.

“You will have people who are emotional about it and are in your face about it but you have to act like Mahatma Ghandi. You cannot react in any way, shape or form.”

Gold mining, a practice that relies on cyanide or mercury for extraction, has long come under fire from environmentalists because of its potential for contamination. Pacific Rim markets itself as an environmentally responsible company that has “raised the bar for environmental protection.” According to Shrake, the El Dorado design will use two impermeable liners to prevent tailings from coming in contact with the ground. They’ll also use a process called INCO to destroy the cyanide used and they’ll build their own water reservoir instead of using groundwater, purifying the water before it goes back into the water system.

Environmentalist Luis Gonzalez works with the Salvadoran Ecological Unit (UNES) in San Salvador. “It’s a concept, but on an industrial level, green mining doesn’t exist,” he said. “By definition what you’re doing is extracting a non-renewable resource.”

Gonzalez said the INCO process recycles only part of the cyanide and the rest goes into the ground. “Exploration is like exploitation on a smaller scale,” he said, noting people in Cabanas reported their wells and watering holes dried up after exploration activity by Pacific Rim.

Shrake said that was one incident involving some shoddy work on the part of a contractor and that it won’t happen again.

“Once we realized what had happened, within a day we set up a series of tanks so that they’d have water while we corrected the problem… We went back to the drill holes and cemented them from bottom to top and plugged up this disruption to the fracture system and the water’s flowing again, and has been flowing since we made the correction.”

While the future of El Dorado remains unclear, Miguel Rivera has gone ahead and set up the Marcelo Rivera Justice and Freedom Committee. He is holding out hope that his brother’s murderer will be brought to justice.

“He was my brother. Ever since we were little we spent a lot of time together and shared ideas. When we started finding out more about the impacts of mining we started spreading information to people. Marcelo was the person who had a relationship with the community.”

Dominique Jarry-Shore is a freelance journalist based in Chiapas, Mexico. She travelled to El Salvador with the help of a grant from the International Development Research Center in Ottawa. Click here to see a video memorial made for Marcelo Rivera.

Marcelo's Eyes

Pacific Rim's El Salvador Headquarters

In El Salvador, Kent visits TSE before FMLN victory

dawn — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 21:09:59 +0000

Picture 3.png

Finishing off his first overseas trip as a Canadian official, Peter Kent visited El Salvador, Central America's most densely populated country, and home to the delectable pupusa.

There, he fulfilled a foreign policy agenda that seeks to ensure stability for Canadian investors in El Salvador, while guaranteeing a consistent stream of temporary migrant workers from El Salvador to Canada.

Kent met with representatives from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the body which oversees elections, and underlined the importance of transparent and free elections.

Days after his visit, Salvadorans voted in legislative and municipal elections, with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) taking the majority of legislative seats in what experts consider "an auspicious prelude to the presidential vote," which is to take place in March.

There is little doubt that the rise of the FMLN in some way mirrors that of the Sandinista National Liberation Front, who now govern Nicaragua.

La mineria nos deja sin agua!

Van Ferrier — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:23:28 +0000

SHARE project documents the story of the people of Cabañas province who are losing their well water due to mining exploration by Vancouver-based Pacific Rim. (Spanish)

Shredding Social Fabric

dawn — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 09:14:57 +0000

Company promoters "contaminate" communities in El Salvador

SAN ISIDRO, EL SALVADOR–In El Salvador, the residents of one community are feeling the impact of mining long before any ground has been broken. Locals are talking about contamination – but not the kind caused by environmental pollutants – it is "social contamination" that is tearing apart the village of Trinidad, and a Canadian mining company that is being blamed.

Vancouver-based Pacific Rim operates the most advanced exploration project in El Salvador. Although the project is still in the exploratory stage, they have already spent US$77 million in the small Central American country. Some of this money has been used to hire mine "promoters."

Promoters are local people hired by a company to promote the best interests of the mine. Thus, the company voice comes from the face of a trusted neighbour or community representative, often without the community being aware of the promoter’s status as a paid employee of the mine.

A promoter serves a variety of purposes in a community, including encouraging locals to sell their land to the mining company, denying and denigrating legitimate concerns about mining, spreading the company’s story about development and "green mining," and sometimes even intimidating those who pose a threat to the company's plans.

This scenario has played out in countless mining-affected communities around the world. The resulting divisions and conflicts are what people in the village of Trinidad – a village in the gold-rich region of Cabañas – are calling "social contamination."

****

Trinidad resident Fermán Menjívar found out that his community was of interest for mining when, “They entered people's lands without the permission of the owners ... they went around breaking fences and cutting barbed wire. We didn't even know who they were.” "They" were a team of Pacific Rim geologists, who were hacking up surface rocks for clues to the region's geology.

Trinidad is located two hours by truck from the nearest paved road. When the company first arrived, people in the village knew little about what gold mining would mean for their community.

Distrusting information from Pacific Rim employees, and lacking knowledge of their own, the Environmental Committee of Cabañas organized a tour of the San Martín gold mine in the Siria Valley, in neighbouring Honduras.

A group from Trinidad was on that tour. What they saw and heard in Honduras left them with serious reservations about having a gold mine in their community.

The group returned to Trinidad with stories of rashes and skin disorders that resulted from people bathing or washing clothes in the Honduran river polluted by the mine. Studies, including one by the Honduran government, have indicated dangerously high levels of arsenic and other chemicals in the blood of people living in the Siria Valley.

Of all mining's potential consequences, it is the fact that 10 rivers have dried up in the Siria Valley that scares people in Trinidad the most.

Trinidad gets almost all of its water from wells that already often run dry due to a crippling water shortage that is affecting the entire country. In fact, according to the Consumer Defense Center, Salvadorans have the worst access to potable water in all of Latin America.

Through the delegation to Honduras, and the screening of documentary videos about mining by the Environmental Committee of Cabañas, many community members have educated themselves about the potential impacts of mining.

The community is now divided between "those in the know and those with the dough,"– those who believe that mining will destroy their community and those who are benefiting financially from Pacific Rim.

****

“Before the company arrived, life in Trinidad was great,” Menjívar remembers. “Our whole family used to get together often, along with friends from all over the region. But now my father and I do not speak and my grandparents won't talk to me. All because my father's side of the family is supporting the company. They tell us that we are stupid for fighting.”

When asked why his father supports Pacific Rim, Menjívar imitates his father’s raving about the money and free rides into town he has received from company representatives.

By contrast, Menjívar's other grandfather was one of the community members who visited the San Martín mine in Honduras, and returned urging the village to stop the exploration immediately.

Armed with his grandfather's testimony, Menjívar joined with many of Trinidad's inhabitants to oppose the incursion of the Canadian mining company. When Pacific Rim ignored their opposition and brought in heavy drills to carry out exploratory drilling, the residents unified with those opposed to the mine in neighbouring communities to physically stop the machines from entering the region. They occupied the highway on three separate occasions between November, 2006, and March, 2007, in order to stop the exploration.

In response to these direct actions, Pacific Rim put more resources into hiring grassroots promoters to convince the community from within.

Menjívar lives with his grandmother, Luciana Vela, who was unavailable for an interview due to lingering effects of a stroke she suffered after her first encounter with Pacific Rim, two years ago.

Vela's daughter, Edelmira Menjívar, recounts the story in her mother’s absence. "Employees arrived asking for permission to enter our land, and my mother refused. Some days later another man returned to explain that 'whether she liked it or not they were going to enter her land.' After that discussion my mother suffered a stroke and lost her ability to speak.”

In response, the company offered money. “They wanted to pay us for what happened to my mother, but we didn't accept any money, we asked them to leave instead.”

Pacific Rim did not leave. With the price of gold hovering around $1000 per ounce, Luciana Velas’s family was becoming an obstacle because they wouldn't leave their land. That is when, in January, 2008, a member of the community's Board of Directors brought a series of allegations forward against Edelmira Menjívar, including the attempted murder of a board member’s husband.

Edelmira's charges came only months after Fermán had 15 accusations leveled against him by a paid Pacific Rim promoter. Despite the promoter's claims at an earlier date that he had no connection to the company, Pacific Rim representatives accompanied him to court.

Although Fermán and Edelmira could not afford legal counsel – something the company was likely banking on – the Environmental Committee of Cabañas stepped in to provide a lawyer.

Every one of Edelmira and Fermán's charges was dismissed in court due to "lack of evidence." The board member who charged Edelmira resigned from the board after the trial and now, like Fermán’s accuser, works openly as a promoter for Pacific Rim in the community.

****

A short walk from Fermán and Edelmira’s house stands the home of José Santos Rodriguez, a corn and bean farmer. Santos lives here with his wife Dora and their six children.

"We were good friends; we used to go fishing together in the Lempa river,” says Santos. He is talking about his relationship with Oscar Menjívar. Oscar is Santos' neighbour, Fermán and Edelmira's cousin, and a paid promoter for Pacific Rim. “The problem started when the miners arrived,” he says.

Three weeks prior to the June, 2008, interview with Santos, Oscar attacked his lifelong friend Santos with a corvo (small machete), cutting off two of his fingers and making it nearly impossible for Santos to provide for his family.

When the memory becomes too difficult for Santos to continue, Dora takes over. “[Santos] came home and told me that Oscar had attacked him... there was blood everywhere.”

Ramiro Rivera, President of Trinidad's Community Board, explains the reason for the attack. “Santos went to Honduras and told us all about the situation there.

"For that, his life was threatened, and for that, they almost killed him.”

Ramiro claims to have received death threats as well. “We all do,” he says. “You have people coming up to you saying that ‘I heard something bad is going to happen to you if you continue, but you will be fine if you support the mining.’ And you know they are for real because of what they did to Santos.”

Santos tells me that when Oscar approached him, weapon in hand, Santos said: “We have the right to defend our environment. This country is so small and it deserves our respect.” According to Santos, it was then that Oscar attacked.

With her husband bleeding profusely and without access to a vehicle, Dora called the police to bring Santos to the hospital.

Santos believes that what happened next was evidence of the pervasiveness of the mining company’s influence.

“They brought me there as a victim,” Santos recounts. “But once we arrived they handcuffed my arm to the bed, as if I was the bad guy.” The police never formally put Santos under arrest nor informed him of his rights, illegally detaining him under Salvadoran law.

In contrast, Oscar was released after three days and had his assault case thrown out for "lack of proof." Santos was never approached to testify.

Although Santos does not excuse Oscar's actions, he repeatedly says "It is Pacific Rim who is responsible for this, because Oscar and I were great friends before they arrived. They are the source of all of this.”

After recounting a series of harrowing tales from his visit to Honduras, Santos points to Cerro Pelón, a hill less than one kilometre away and one of the potential mine locations being considered by Pacific Rim.

“These people [promoters] go around dividing families, siblings, mothers and fathers. They don't care how much we lose, they get their cheque at the end of the month and with this they are happy for now, because they have no idea that they will contaminate this country.”

To some, it appears that they already have.

****

Just one week after these interviews were conducted 18-year-old José Dolores Velasco committed suicide after his family threw him out of the home. He wasn't thrown out for coming home too late or using drugs, but for joining the Environmental Committee of Cabañas in their campaign against Pacific Rim.

Jesse Freeston is a freelance journalist whose upcoming documentary project, ¡Fuera!, deals with the ongoing confrontation between Canadian mining companies and communities in El Salvador.

Mural In El Salvador

Santos and Dora

Canada's Quiet Free Trade Agreement

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 17:43:34 +0000

Few people have heard of CA4TA

Guatemala City graffiti: We don't want free trade agreement, we want revolution, education, media. photo: Detritus

In June, Canada's international trade minister, David L. Emerson, gave a speech in Ottawa to Canada's business, government, and academic elite to celebrate International Trade Day. "I have no reservations about saying that we have not been aggressive enough and focused enough on ensuring that Canada keeps up with the rapid, almost competitive, expansion of bilateral free trade agreements," said Emerson. "Canada is the only major trading nation that has not negotiated a single free trade agreement in the past five years." One of the agreements the Canadian government is trying to finalize is the Central America Four Free Trade Agreement (CA4TA) with Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador and Nicaragua. Talks were suspended in February 2004 over a failure to resolve a few issues of contention, though one Canadian Trade official said the talks were "very well advanced." Canada is now informally talking with these Central American countries to resolve a few remaining issues, he said, one of them concerning market access for exports. "My assumption is that it is an opportunity for governments to work out differences so that in official meetings they can just rubber stamp the deal and send it through," said Nadja Drost, co-ordinator of the Americas Policy Group.

A point of contention with Drost and about 150 civil society groups throughout the hemisphere is the refusal to release a draft of the agreement.

The Canadian Trade official, who wished to withhold his name, said that the Canadian government wanted to release the draft but that it would be inappropriate to do so unilaterally since consensus on the issue couldn't be released. Drost countered by pointing out that it was the Canadian government who convinced the countries of the hemisphere to release a draft of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in 2001.

"Now they are saying that they can't get four small Central American countries to do it," she added.

As it stands, the text won't be released until the deal is signed and submitted to parliament for ratification. Although the economic impacts of the deal may not be profound, there are concerns about sovereignty, human rights and democracy based on experiences from past deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

"I think transparency is a major, major issue," said Drost. "I think the public would feel a lot more assured if they knew their concerns about democracy and human rights were being addressed."

Because of the secrecy behind the details of the deal, critics are using NAFTA and the United States' narrowly passed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) as references for their concerns. Both trade agreements were attacked for failing to promote and enforce human rights, as well as for undermining democracy with unbalanced investor rights provisions.

The investor rights provisions of free trade were first introduced in Chapter 11 of NAFTA. It essentially allows corporations to sue local, state or federal governments for labour, environmental or other public interest laws which they deem unfairly impeding their ability to maximize profits.

For example, the Canadian government was fined for entering an international agreement that prompted it to close its borders to toxic substances. Under Chapter 11, Canada was ordered to pay US company S.D. Meyers $4.8 million for "lost business opportunities." Thus far, tens of millions of dollars have been awarded to corporations, while billions of dollars worth of claims are still pending.

The Canadian government, in 2004, responded to some of civil society's concerns about NAFTA's Ch. 11 by revising its negotiation template for Foreign Investment Protection Agreements (FIPA). Although some issues are addressed, according to a policy review commissioned by the Canadian Council for International Co-operation and written by the editor of Investment Treaty News, the reforms fall short.

For example, the template restricts host countries from requiring foreign companies to purchase some supplies locally. These requirements would bolster local economic development, but might ultimately inhibit companies from maximizing profits.

Free trade critics are also concerned with the lack of provisions to address and redress weak labour and human rights laws in the Central American countries.

The Canadian Association of Labour Lawyers (CALL), an association of over 350 progressive lawyers that has worked to promote legally enforceable rights for workers in the Americas, has "serious reservations that the proposed CA4FTA will benefit workers in Central America or Canada." It uses past trade agreements, such as NAFTA and CAFTA, to point out historical deficiencies in the area of workers' rights when it comes to international trade.

Under CAFTA, Central American countries are only obligated to enforce domestic labour laws. This is problematic, considering various reports by the US State Department, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), and other human rights organizations point out not only inadequacies with current laws but also institutional failures in enforcing these laws. In the Central American countries included in CA4TA, child labour is pervasive, worker blacklists are made, foreign companies have closed their doors after being informed that workers wanted to form a union, and worker wages are a fraction of what Canadian workers make. According to the ICFTU, in Honduras, Francisco Cruz Galeano, the regional co-ordinator of the General Confederation of Workers (CGT), was shot over 20 times and killed.

As of now, Canadian citizens will not learn how CA4TA affects human rights issues until the deal is finalized and submitted to Parliament for approval. The text will then be available for public, media and government scrutiny. But any amendments proposed to address potential shortcomings would have to be reviewed by the Central American partner governments.

Pressure will undoubtedly be put on members of Parliament to pass the agreement as is so that Canada doesn't fall further behind in the race to secure new free trade agreements—something Canada's trade minister has already said needs to be remedied. The same approach was used in the United States to push through CAFTA, which was ratified by a mere two votes, despite widespread opposition by civil society in the United States, as well as Central America.

Cyril Mychalejko is assistant editor of UpsideDownWorld, an online magazine uncovering politics and activism in Latin America.

Cyril Mychalejko investigates the CA4TA, a free trade agreement few Canadians have heard of.

El Salvadorans Ask: do we CAFTA?

Wed, 25 Aug 2004 21:35:13 +0000

Delegates from signing countries gather in San Salvador to protest CAFTA. photo: Chiapas Indymedia

SAN SALVADOR — In the shiny offices of the Organization of American States (OAS) headquarters in Washington, DC, far from the streets full of protesters outside and in other capital cities, representatives from five Central American nations and the United States signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) on Friday, May 28th. After a year and a half of negotiations and amid criticisms from unions and politicians alike, CAFTA (or TLC by its Spanish initials) is one step closer to official implementation. . In the months since then, the campaigns for and against the agreement are digging in for the next battle: ratification in the Congress and Legislatures. In practice, however, the ideology and some of the key steps embodied in the agreement are already well-entrenched in the signatory countries. As the consequences of these policies unfold, though, the opposition groups are allying themselves across borders to prevent the ratification and promote an alternative vision.

El Salvador is perhaps the most dramatic regional example of the "opening" to foreign investment and market forces that CAFTA promotes. The privatization of several public services and the conversion to the US dollar as the official currency are among the crowning achievements of outgoing former President Francisco Flores, who consolidated 15 years of structural adjustment programs in the country. His government promoted CAFTA as the country´s "best hope for success" and the US Embassy has declared that "the stage is set for growth." As a farewell gesture, recorded telephone calls from exiting President Flores inform households across the country of the advantages of the accord. Incoming President Tony Saca, who owns a major Salvadoran media corporation, has promoted even more loudly that El Salvador must "advance with the times." These optimistic projections ring hollow to the many consumers and workers who wonder where competition and economic gain are to be found among the ever-increasing rates on utilities bills and food, while the minimum wage fails to keep pace. According to the Centre for the Defense of the Consumer, minimum wage income in urban areas covers only one fifth of basic living expenses, and many people subsist on the volatile income of the informal economy.

The promised benefits of competitive markets proved elusive when foreign companies bought out the national electricity service of El Salvador and established what some refer to as a "monopoly in private hands". Two US companies have divided up control of the sector between them, and rates have shot up by as much as 85% in the last ten years. Massive and unregulated foreign investment is the basis for expanding the textile industry, which runs out of maquilas in "free trade zones" on the outskirts of cities. The maquila industry is already strongly established in El Salvador, and the demands of competition have already created infamously low labour standards in the factories. Factory owners regularly oblige overtime hours, pregnancy tests, dismiss and blacklist workers suspected of union organizing. They can also resort to "cut and run" tactics– shutting down a factory without paying severance pay and reopening under a different name. Lawsuits fighting this practice remain unresolved. There is only one unionized clothing producer in the country, and it faces another sort of blacklist – international clothing brands unwilling to honour or make orders with this factory.

Former Economy Minister Lacayo declared that CAFTA would actually strengthen labour rights through enforcement of existing laws, and current Economy Minister Yolanda de Gavidia has said that CAFTA will "contribute to the recognition of Central America as a region committeed to Labour Rights" (23/07/04).. Unions in El Salvador and the US reject the fundamental principles of CAFTA on labour issues, pointing to the dismal labour rights record in Mexico after ten years of the rules established by NAFTA. Following NAFTA's precedent, CAFTA promotes investor rights (including expanding the definition of investor to include past and potential investors) over ensuring adequate and independent regulation of labour, environmental, and indigenous culture issues. Instead, CAFTA raises the stakes in the race for the cheapest labour, pitting neighbouring nations against each other and overseas giants: the trail of maquilas that once moved from Texas to Mexico now leads to Central America, and the next destination appears to be China. The fact that owners have unlimited mobility and workers have almost none is not lost on maquila workers who have lost their jobs to overseas factories.

An unlikely partner to the maquila industry in the pro-CAFTA headlines is the pupusa, the national food of El Salvador. The export of frozen pupusas to the millions of Salvadorans living in the US is held up as El Salvador´s starring role in globalization, where culture is commodified, in this case as a plastic-wrapped "ethnic product." The suggestion that this product might be an economic salvation for the damage caused by the global coffee crisis is indicative of the truth-stretching that posits El Salvador and the United States as equal partners in trade and negotiation. While the US continues to heavily subsidize its agricultural industry, many small-scale farmers in El Salvador rely on remittances from family members living in the US; these remittances are the largest source of income in El Salvador, dwarfing the coffee and textiles and certainly the frozen pupusa industry.

The main stage for implementing CAFTA will be its ratification process in the US Congress. Opposition to the agreement in the US is divided among those who are nervous of more job losses to overseas markets, those concerned that CAFTA needs stronger labour and environmental regulations (a sentiment which Democrat candidate John Kerry has taken up), and those who see CAFTA as another link in the chains that multinational corporations hold over social and ecological well-being. The coming months will tell whether these streams of dissent will form an effective block to ratification. The risk of a No vote in Congress prior to the November elections is high enough that the Bush Administration is unlikely to even table the bill without secure numbers. The Canadian government is watching these proceedings carefully, as negotiations for a Canada-Central America free trade Agreement are underway.

Meanwhile, Central Americans are left to gather in protest around empty government buildings as their trade representatives meet behind closed doors in Washington. The People´s Declaration Against CAFTA points out the "lack of opportunity the countries of Central America have had to exercise their right to self-determination and the construction of a different Central America." These opportunities are now further restricted in El Salvador since the recent application of so-called "anti-disturbance" measures, which take up the language of the PATRIOT act , particularly threatening leaders of unions and other social organizations. As the war on terror globalizes the crackdown on civil society´s voices, and the spectre of further social and environmental deterioration is bringing together diverse sectors. The Fifth Mesoamerican Peoples' Forum, a gathering of 1,500 regional activists in San Salvador in July, declared that the policies of CAFTA and related initiatives (especially the Free Trade Area of the Americas and Plan Puebla Panama) "have generated devastating impacts on the people and natural resources of the region, submitting our lives to the logic of profit and the interests of transnational companies." A regional day of protest is planned for October 12th. In the meantime, the actual statutes of CAFTA bear signatures but are stalled in the limbo of the US election campaigns, while the machinery of corporate pressure bears down on popular resistance.

"Best hope for success" or imperial power grab? Jen Peirce reports on the Central American Free Trade Agreement from El Salvador.

US Accused of Interfering in El Salvadoran Elections

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 01:22:35 +0000

When Tony Saca, a former sports commentator, faced the marxist ex-guerilla commander Schafik Handal in El Salvador's recent presidential election, the US took sides. White House special assistant Otto Reich held a press conference at the headquarter's of Saca's ARENA, a right-wing nationalist party, warning local reporters of the potential consequences if Handal won. Reich suggested that Salvadoran immigrants with temporary status could be deported in the event of a Handal victory. In an earlier visit to El Salvador, Assistant Secretary of State Roger Noriega asked Salvadorans to "consider what kind of a relationship they want a new administration to have with [the US]." Noriega met with all presidential candidates except Handal.

(In a strange twist, both Saca and Handal were born to Palestinian parents who came to El Salvador from Bethlehem.)

ARENA's principle campaign issue was the status of remittance payments from Salvadorans living in the US; campaign ads claimed that these could be compromised if the popular Marxist party was elected. More than a quarter of El Salvador's 6.5 million citizens live and work in the US, and remittance payments account for more than 16 per cent of the nations's economy.

"The elections were basically clean," said Jen Pierce, who worked as observer during the elections, "the main concerns are about all the manipulations and interventions that occurred in the campaign, related to media control, US intervention, fear mongering, vote buying, and partisanship."

Sande Ewart, who lived in El Salvador during much of the presidential campaign, said that Handal's political style was as much to blame for the loss as the US intervention. "Schafik would have news conferences and if he didn't like the quesions the media was asking he would just kick the reporters out of his office, essentially reinforcing the dictator image they were trying to paint him with."

Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America attributes the US intervention to the momentum of cold war policy in Latin America. "A lot of the [US] State Department's high-level people concerned with Latin America came out of the cold-war era, and they continue to see Latin America through that lens."

Otto Reich fits Thale's description. He was involved with the Contras, a Nicaraguan terrorist group that the US provided with arms, funding and training in the 1980s. By recent estimates, the Contras murdered over 10,000 Nicaraguan civilians during the country's bloody civil war.

Reich and Noriega's interventions were condemned by 24 members of Congress. Presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich also condemned the statements, saying that US policy is "not about promoting healthy democracies, but instead focused on making Latin American nations bend to U.S. commercial interests."

Writing in the Washington Post, Marcela Sanchez suggests that US interference would not work the same way in other leftward-leaning Latin American countries like Panama, Uruguay and the Dominican Republic. This is, she argues, because those countries are simultaneously less dependent on the US than El Salvador is, and equipped with more candidates more palatable to the mainstream.

"U.S. warnings about the outcome of elections in these other nations would probably be futile, if not also counterproductive. In Bolivia two years ago, the U.S. ambassador's admonitions against supporting the leftist candidate for president fueled anti-American sentiment that almost carried the coca leader Evo Morales to power."

» Christian Science Monitor: El Salvador vote recalls cold-war power play

» Dominion Weblog: Intervention in El Salvador

» National Security Archive: Public Diplomacy and Covert Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Otto Juan Reich

» Dennis Kucinich: Kucinich to Bush Administration: Let Salvadorans Vote

» Washington Post: Interference in El Salvador Won't Work Elsewhere

» Seven Oaks: Fear and voting in Latin America: A report from El Salvador and Venezuela, with Henry Nava