Post by Wendy Tyndale

“The first thing they do is to remove the people, their houses, crops, trees and animals. Then they begin to break open the mountain until they reach the rock that contains the gold, silver and other minerals of great value. To do all this they use big machines, explosives and all that is necessary to take away our resources.”

A leaflet of the Front for Life in San Marcos, Guatemala, describes to people in the municipalities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipacapa what the presence of a giant mining company in their region means. It explains that in order to process the rock an enormous quantity of water is needed - 250,000 litres an hour – so that another consequence of this activity will be a shortage of water in the area. Worse still, the cyanide used in the process will poison the water supply, the people and animals that drink it and the crops that are irrigated with it. It will also pollute the air.

So, asks the Front for Life, what will be left for us from the open pit mining? The grim answers it gives are based on the experience of people in Honduras and elsewhere: “Harm to our health, more poverty, mountains destroyed and soil contaminated, conflicts among people, polluted water” and, in addition to all of this, “corruption”.

“Our life, the life of our families and of future generations are worth much more than all the gold and silver in the world”, says the Front and, reflecting the spirituality of many of the movement’s members: “Let us remember that we are not the owners of the land but only the stewards of it. NO TO MINING!”

The people who live in the areas that have been selected for mining activities in the department of San Marcos are Mayan: Mam in San Miguel and Sipakapense in Sipakapa. For several years they had been concerned about people who were arriving from outside to buy land “using deception, coercion and promises of development for the communities”. But it was only in 2003 that the motives of these strangers became clear when a company was installed in the region to mine gold in villages of San Miguel and Sipakapa.     

Alarmed and dismayed, the local people began to take action.  Encouraged by the Bishop of San Marcos, Alvaro Ramazzini, they have formed a coalition of indigenous and Catholic organisations to organise protests. A protester was killed in Los Encuentros, Sololá on 11 January this year as peasant farmers tried to hold up a truck carrying equipment to the mine and Ramazzini has received a series of death threats as a consequence of his support.

The company that is developing the Marlin mine in San Marcos is Montana Exploradora de Guatemala S.A., a subsidiary of the Canadian multinational, Glamis Gold Ltd. that has also been managing the San Martín mine in Honduras for several years. In Honduras children have been suffering from skin diseases and loss of hair and a report commissioned by Caritas-Honduras documented high levels of water contamination. Supported by the Honduran Cardinal Oscar Andrés Rodríguez, the communities around the mine have been protesting since 2002.

The history of Canadian mining companies even in their own country leaves little room for optimism. Fewer than 20 Canadian indigenous communities have managed to negotiate agreements with the companies whose activities have left thousands of abandoned mines in indigenous territories, many of them leaking toxic waste into the water supply.

The Guatemalan government gave a concession to Montana without informing the local people, let alone consulting them. This clearly violates Convention 169 of the ILO on the Rights of Indigenous and Tribal Peoples of which Guatemala became a signatory in 1996. The company will only leave one per cent of its profits in Guatemala (50 per cent for the Government and 50 per cent for the municipalities affected). Forests will be cut down and huge craters left which will lead to a high risk of landslides. Already armed patrol guards have been preventing the local people from going to visit other communities and even from working in their own fields. And San Marcos is not the only place in Guatemala where all this is taking place: exploration is also going on in the Petén, Quiché and Alta Verapaz.

At the beginning of December last year, the Ministry of Mines and the Environment held the First National Mining Forum in which environmentalists, the private sector, the World Bank and the UNDP as well as the Canadian Embassy participated. The Vice-Minister for Mines and Energy, Carolina Roca, declared that the National Forum was the beginning of a process of agreements that would improve the climate of governability in Guatemala and assure the investors of a favourable context for their investment. However, social and environmental movements in Guatemala dubbed the event as “propaganda” and held their own Alternative Forum of Resistance to the Mining of Metals. Peter Van de Veer of the World Bank believes that more consultation by the government will be necessary, as local opposition will risk investors pulling out but the protest movement fears that consultations will come too late.        

The reform of the Mining Law of 1997 is on the agenda of the Guatemalan Congress but the debate is polarised between those who want the mining companies to pay 10 rather than one per cent of their revenue to Guatemala and those who wish to scrap any payments whatsoever, in order to be more competitive on the international market.   

The Constitution of the Republic and the Peace Accords signed in December 1996 to end 30 years of civil conflict commit the Guatemalan Government to protect both the people of Guatemala and the country’s natural resources. Following a thousands-strong march on 1 April in San Marcos led by Bishop Ramazzini, the Vice President of Guatemala, Eduardo Stein, said that there might have to be a “temporary postponement” of mining activities. But are we not witnessing once again the power of multinational corporations to overrule national laws, to violate national interests and to disregard the most elemental rights of the people who get in the way of their relentless quest for profit?


Sources:

•    Leaflet of Frente por la Vida, San Marcos (undated but sent to me by Movimiento Trabajadores Campesinos of San Marcos 3rd week in April 2005)
•    Inforpress 10 December, 2004
•    Canadian solidarity movement La mineria canadiense en el mundo, February 2005 (sent to me by MTC not further identified)
•    Comunicado de los pueblos mayas Sipakapense y Mam, y de organizaciones sociales comprometidas con el altiplano marquense , San Miguel Ixtahuacán, noviembre 2003
•    Internacional Indian Treaty Council, 17 January 2005: Guatemala: mining, repression and local development needs.