MEXICAN FARMERS UP AGAINST CANADIAN MINING GOLIATHS
By David Bacon
Truthout Report
http://truth-out.org/news/item/10501-canadian-mining-goliaths-devastate-mexican-indigenous-communities-and-environment
An assembly last fall in Oaxaca of the Binational
Front of Indigenous Organizations, calling for a
sustainable development policy that would support
farmers.
OAXACA, MEXICO (7/20/12) - For over two
decades in many parts of Mexico, large
corporations -- mostly foreign-owned but usually
with wealthy Mexican partners - have developed
huge projects in rural areas. Called
mega-projects, the mines and resource extraction
efforts take advantage of economic reforms and
trade treaties like the North American Free Trade
Agreement.
Emphasizing foreign investment, even at
the cost of environmental destruction and the
displacement of people, has been the development
policy of Mexican administrations since the
1970s. When the National Action Party defeated
the old governing Party of the Institutionalized
Revolution in 2000, this economic development
model did not change. In fact, the PAN simply
took over the administration of this development
policy, and even accelerated it, while in the
Mexican Chamber of Deputies the two parties
cooperated to advance its goals.
But while these projects enjoy official
patronage at the top, they almost invariably
incite local opposition over threatened or actual
environmental disaster. Environmental
destruction, along with accompanying economic
changes, cause the dispacement of people.
Families in communities affected by the impacts
are uprooted, and often begin to migrate.
Nevertheless, the projects enjoy official
support, and are defended against rising protests
from poor farmers and townspeople by the Federal
government.
This economic model could have changed in
Mexico's national elections at the beginning of
July, had a party won that was committed instead
to providing poor and indigenous communities with
jobs and social services, to raising rural
income, and to protecting labor and social
rights. This was the program put forward by
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the candidate of the
leftwing Democratic Revolutionary Party.
The PRD did not win, however. Instead,
the Mexican election campaign looked increasingly
like those in the U.S., in which the two
conservative parties, the PRI and PAN, were
fueled by enormous corporate contributions.
Heavy television coverage by two captive
corporate networks excluded the left entirely,
while "impartial polls" announced the
inevitability of the PRI's return. And in the
end, a wave of old-fashioned vote-buying backed
up the media circus.
The return of the PRI to power does not
change Mexico's social reality, especially not
its corporate-dominated development policy. The
cost of this policy has become most obvious, and
the conflicts over it the sharpest, in rural
communities faced with huge industrial mining
projects. Under a new PRI administration, these
conflicts will almost certainly spread,
particularly given the party's history of using
force against popular movements.
In Oaxaca and southern Mexico, growing
anti-mining movements give a preview of what's on
the horizon. Sharp conflicts have already broken
out over mines in Oaxaca, where in one community
indigenous leaders have been assassinated and the
town deeply divided since the mine began
operation. The companies and their defenders
promise jobs and economic development. But
affected communities charge that far more people
lose jobs and their livelihoods because of their
negative environmental and economic consequences.
In Oaxaca, Vancouver-based Fortuna
Silver, Inc. began drilling exploration holes in
a previously mined area of San Jose del Progreso.
San Jose is a small town in the municipality of
Ocotlan, an hour south of the state's capital.
Its 1200 residents speak Zapotec, an indigenous
language that was already centuries old when the
Europeans colonized Mexico.
Fortuna Silver began exploration in 2006,
and five years later its mine went into full
production. According to Flavio Sosa
Villavicencio, a state deputy from the Party of
Labor (PT), the company told him that in 2012
Fortuna expected to produce 1.7 million ounces of
silver and 15,000 ounces of gold. Sosa
Villavicencio said annual profits from the mine
would reach 468 million pesos, or $39 million.
San Jose del Progreso lies in a valley
filled with small indigenous towns, many of which
have already lost more than half their
inhabitants to migration. In an environment of
economic desperation, money from the mine has a
big impact.
Bernardo Vasquez, an opponent of the mine
and director of the Coalition of People United in
the Ocotlán Valley (COPOVU) explained to Canadian
journalist Dawn Paley that some residents enjoyed
the benefits, while the mine opponents organized
demonstrations to protest. The town became
divided, and Vasquez said the division extended
into the schools, the health center, and to the
municipal offices.
In 2009 300 people for blockaded the mine
over a month. Twice that number of police
eventually descended on the demonstrators with
dogs, guns, tear gas and a helicopter. People
were beaten, and two dozen arrested. In another
confrontation a year later the mayor was killed.
Then, in January 2012 a group of opponents
confronted a work crew laying water pipes,
accusing them of building a water system for the
mine. Police were called again, and this time
they shot and killed Bernardo Mendez, one of the
leaders of COPOVU. After that, the town's mayor
fled, and the municipal offices were closed.
COPOVU leader Bernardo Vasquez, an
agronomist, said he'd been threatened at least a
dozen times by members of an armed group in the
town, and the state Human Rights Commission
issued an order of protection for him. However,
while he was returning home on the evening of
March 15, 2012, gunmen stopped his pickup truck
and murdered him. His brother Andres and
Rosalinda Canseco were both wounded and
hospitalized.
COPOVU representatives Jorge Sanchez and
Eustasio Vasquez said the killing was the work of
"guardias blancas," or paramilitaries, supported
by the company. "We've seen them give money to
people in the community who are against us, and
create a group called 'Protecting Our Rights.'
These are people who now have new cars, when
before they had nothing. They are the guardias
blancas who kill and threaten." Fortuna denied
responsibility. The company's CEO Jorge Ganoza
told Canadian media, "We, as a company, and our
team in Oaxaca, are saddened by these senseless
and continued acts of violence in the town of San
José, related to a long-standing political
struggle for local power. It is in no way
related to our activities or involves company
personnel."
Community and social organizations
throughout Oaxaca condemned the assassination.
Servicios para una Educación Alternativa A.C.
(Services for an Alternative Education, EDUCA)
said the violence was a consequence of the
government's development policy. "Oaxaca has
been converted into an arena for experimentation
with the imposition of mega projects at any
cost," it stated. "The multimillion profits of
the big mining companies, and the human and
social costs, will be paid as always by those
'conflict-loving Indians,' as they insultingly
call those who defend their communities."
The murder of Bernardo Vasquez was also
condemned by the leaders of another Oaxacan town
resisting mining projects, Capulalpam de Mendez
in the Zapotec Sierra Juarez region. In March
2012, its municipal leaders demanded an end to
the mining activity in the area of the Natividad
mine, and the cancellation of all the concessions
given to its owners, another Canadian company
called Continuum Resources. Between 2004 and
2006 Continuum Resources was given mining
concessions for 50,000 hectares in the Sierra,
most covering communal lands.
The mine had a huge environmental impact.
The Natividad mine opened in 2002. Just four
years later, in 2006, water problems grew so bad
around the mine that the Federal Prosecutor for
Environmental Protection ordered all work at the
mine to stop. Community leaders accused the mine
of having damaged the aquifers on which they
depend, and that 13 springs disappeared. "A
community without water has no life on which
future generations can depend," a communal
statement declared.
Water in the local river runs yellow, and
has a terrible smell, according to Capulalpam
residents. The current Communal Welfare
secretary, Javier Garcia Juarez, says that in
2011 some of the dams holding back ponds of toxic
residue from earlier mine operations collapsed.
Tons of waste contaminated communal land
belonging to the town, and trees in the local
forest were stained grey with the chemicals that
had been used to separate gold and silver from
the ore extracted from the mine.
That impact was particularly devastating
for Capulalpam, which was declared "a magical
town" by the Federal government's Secretary of
Tourism. In the Sierra Juarez there are over 200
species of orchid, including some that are in
danger of extinction. People still sight
jaguars, while monkeys, parrots and toucans are
common, along with pumas, white-tailed deer and
the dwarf magpie.
Despite this biodiversity, in 2011
another mining company, Minera Teocuitla, arrived
in the community accompanied by agents of the
Agrarian Reform department. Minera Teocuitla is
a subsidiary of Sundance Minerals, whose business
model involves developing mines next to other
mining projects, even closed ones. The company
proposed an exploration project called Geranio,
directly north of the Natividad mine. Mine and
government representatives demanded a meeting
with community residents to authorize a new
exploration contract.
On April 10, 2011, however, the Zapotec
community's general assembly announced it would
not support the project. "The community of
Capulalpam, exercising our rights as an
indigenous and farming municipality, refuses
permission to the companies Natividad, Minera
Teocuitla, Continuum Resources, Arco Exploration
or companies using any other name to carry out
exploration or exploitation of minerals in our
land."
In Veracruz, a Canadian corporation,
Goldcorp Resources, initiated exploration in the
mid-2000s for two huge open pit excavations
halfway between the state capital Xalapa and the
Gulf coast. The company, with headquarters in
Vancouver, and its Mexican subsidiary, Minera
Cardel SA de CV, were virtually given a
concession of 20,000 hectares by the Federal
government.
Edgar González Gaudiano published an
analysis of the mine in the local newspaper La
Jornada Veracruz, in which he estimated that the
mine would produce 100,000 ounces of gold a year,
with a value of about $1660 an ounce at 2012
prices, or $166 million. Goldcorp would operate
two huge open pits. The ore would be treated
with cyanide, a strong poison, to leach out the
metal. Cyanide bonds with the gold, essentially
dissolving it. Later the gold is separated out,
leaving a large amount of cyanide-laced
wastewater. That runoff is held in huge open-air
ponds.
Gold mining with cyanide is a very
dangerous process, yet more than 90% of all gold
extracted worldwide relies on its use. In
Romania in January 2000 a dam on one such pond
broke, and about 100,000 cubic meters of toxic
wastewater and mud poured into the Danube River.
The plume of cyanide traveled downstream, through
Hungary and the former Yugoslavia, to the Black
Sea, killing everything it touched. It was
called the worst environmental catastrophe since
the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl.
At Caballo Blanco, each ton of ore would
produce half an ounce of gold, so mountains of
cyanide-treated tailings would quickly rise
around the pit and the wastewater ponds.
According to the Diario de Xalapa, another local
newspaper, leaching out the gold would require
1.12 million cubic meters of water per year,
depleting the aquifer on which rural farming
communities depend.
An even greater danger might come from
Mexico's only nuclear power plant, Laguna Verde,
less than ten miles away. The ore would be
broken loose from the earth by virtually
continuous explosions, using up to five tons of
explosives a day. This section of Veracruz is
geologically part of a volcanic region that
includes some of Mexico's most famous dormant
volcanoes, including Orizaba, less than a hundred
miles away, and the Cofre de Perote, which is
even closer.
People from the towns closest to the
mine, Actopan and Alto Lucero, said they'd been
threatened to get them to sell their land to
Goldcorp. Beatriz Torrez Beristan, an activist
with the Veracruz Assembly and Initiative in
Defense of the Environment (LA VIDA, in its
Spanish acronym) reported to La Jornada Veracruz
that in a public hearing on the project "they
told us they were afraid, that they'd been
intimidated and felt forced to sell their land.
There is definitely intimidation here, and
they're criminalizing social and environmental
protest."
Goldcorp promised jobs, and said the
environment would be restored after the gold and
metals had been extracted. "But we know that
this can't be," Torres told reporter Fernando
Carmona. "It's impossible to restore an
ecosystem that has been so damaged. You can cut
down a tree and plant another, but you'll never
restore the complex ecological chain, with its
many trees, birds and water."
In February 2012, a Pact for a Veracruz
Free of Toxic Mining was signed at a statewide
assembly of environmental activists, who
committed themselves to distributing accurate
information about the exploitation of natural
resources, alerting communities about potential
threats, initiating legal actions, and organizing
peaceful demonstrations. Other groups opposed to
the mine include REMA (Red Mexicana de Afectados
por la Minería/ Mexican Network of Communities
Affected by Mining) and RMALC (Red Mexicana de
Acción frente al Libre Comercio/ Mexican Action
Network on Free Trade) also organized opposition
to Caballo Blanco.
Environmental damage from the mine is
potentially so great that on February 28 Governor
Javier Duarte de Ocho announced he was opposed to
its operation. But municipalities and states
don't make the basic economic decisions in
Mexico. That power is in the hands of the
Federal government. And on March 13, 2012,
Goldcorp announced it had received its first
environmental impact report from the Federal
Secretariat of the Environment and Natural
Resources (Semarnat), a major step towards
operating the mine.
Federal acquiescence to Goldcorp reflects
the policy of Mexico's four past administrations
of virtually giving away the country's mineral
wealth. In 1992 Mexican President Carlos Salinas
de Gortari modified the country's mining law.
This was the same year that he also changed
Mexico's land reform law to allow the sale of
former communal (ejido) lands. Both were changes
intended to allow foreign corporations to invest
in huge projects in Mexico, and to protect those
investments. A year later, just before the North
American Free Trade Agreement took effect, the
ceiling on the amount of foreign investment that
could be allowed in "strategic" industries (like
mining) was eliminated.
Changes continued under Salinas'
successors, with both the PRI's Ernesto Zedillo
and the PAN's Vicente Fox increasing the number
of mining concessions given to foreign
corporations like Goldcorp, and to huge Mexican
mining cartels like Grupo Mexico. Taxes on
mining operations were eliminated. Companies
only had to make a symbolic payment for each
hectare of land granted in their concessions.
According to Carlos Fernandez-Vega, whose
business column "Mexico SA" ("Mexico, Inc.") runs
in the leftwing Mexico City daily La Jornada, the
amount of land given in concessions reached 25
million hectares at the end of Fox' presidency in
2006, and then more than doubled, to 51 million
in just the first four years of his successor
Felipe Calderon. "In the two PAN administrations
about 26 percent of the national territory was
given to mining consortiums for their sole
benefit," he charges. In 2010, Fernandez Vega
explains, Calderon granted 4 million hectares in
concessions, in exchange for which the Mexican
government received $20 million (U.S.). The
foreign and domestic corporations given the
concessions made $15 billion that year (a 50%
increase from the previous year). Those earnings
were 750 times what they paid for the
concessions.
Fernandez Vega based his column on a
study by Mexican academics Francisco López
Bárcenas and Mayra Montserrat Eslava Galicia of
the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) in
Xochimilco, called "Minerals or Life." The
Mexican Constitution, with its roots in the
Revolution of 1910-20 and the nationalist
government of Lazaro Cardenas of the late 1930s,
puts forward goals for mining and other economic
activity. They include, Barcenas Lopez and
Eslava Galicia state, "using natural resources
for social benefit, creating an equitable
distribution of public wealth, encouraging
conservation, and achieving a balanced
development for the country leading to improved
conditions of life for the Mexican people." The
new mining law, however, says any potential
resource must be utilized, which gives the
exploitation of resources preference over all
other considerations.
"Concession holders can demand that land
occupied by a town be vacated, so that they can
carry out their activities," the two academics
write. "If land is used for growing food, that
has to end so that a mine can be developed there.
Forests or wilderness are at the same risk. This
legal requirement also applies to indigenous
people. Their land used for rituals or sacred
purposes, which contribute to maintaining their
identity, can be leveled or destroyed. This
provision violates ILO Convention 169 that
protects indigenous rights."
Language in the mining law now "prohibits
states and municipalities from imposing fees on
mining activity, and therefore deprives them of
any income from those activities that might
benefit them," the study concludes, even
prohibiting them from charging fees for permits
for the use of land or roads.
The mines promise jobs, but they produce
very few, Oaxacan activists charge, while their
social and environmental cost is high. Mining,
which receives enormous support from the Federal
government, employs only 0.29% of Oaxaca's
working population, according to "Migration and
Poverty in Oaxaca," a study by Ana Marguerita
Alvarado Juarez at the Autonomous University
Benito Juarez of Oaxaca. Even the Mexican
Secretary of Labor says the average daily wage
for miners in Mexico is 150 pesos ($12.50). Low
mining wages reflect the increased use of
contract labor, in which workers employed by temp
agencies have replaced thousands of people who
formerly worked directly for the mining companies.
On the other hand, farming, which
sustains over half of Oaxacan families, gets very
little government support, and small farmers
receive practically none of it. The mining
projects benefit, therefore, not the residents of
local communities, but the shareholders of large
corporations who exercise enormous influence on
the Federal government.
Aldo Gonzalez, a leader of the Union of
Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca
(UNOSJO) points out that the mega development
projects promoted by the Federal government,
instead of creating employment and rising living
standards, undermine them because they are
"designed from outside, and imposed on indigenous
territories and intended to benefit investors
instead of communities." As a result, he says,
"they have been met with protests by people and
communities whose land and water has been taken."
Leaders of the Binational Front of Indigenous
Organizations contend that this kind of economic
development not only doesn't stop the
displacement of communities, but in fact
accelerates it.
Gonzalez and FIOB leaders predict even
greater efforts throughout rural communities in
Oaxaca and the rest of Mexico to find
alternatives to development based on mines and
corporate mega projects. With a Federal
government committed to pushing those projects
forward, however, even sharper conflicts are
inevitable.
This article is based on research for a new book
coming from Beacon Press next year, The Right to
Stay Home, which examines the movements in Mexico
oppsoing displacement and forced migration.
For more articles and images, see http://dbacon.igc.org
See also Illegal People -- How Globalization
Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants
(Beacon Press, 2008)
Recipient: C.L.R. James Award, best book of 2007-2008
http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2002
See also the photodocumentary on indigenous migration to the US
Communities Without Borders (Cornell University/ILR Press, 2006)
http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4575
See also The Children of NAFTA, Labor Wars on the
U.S./Mexico Border (University of California,
2004)
http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9989.html
Two lectures on the political economy of migration by David Bacon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GgDWf9eefE&feature=youtu.be
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd4OLdaoxvg&feature=related
--
__________________________________
David Bacon, Photographs and Stories
http://dbacon.igc.org
__________________________________
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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