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BRIEF BACKGROUND
INTERVENTION TODAY
MILITARY
Surprise -- The Very Dark Side of U.S. History
Many Americans view their country and its soldiers as the "good guys" spreading "democracy" and "liberty" around the world. It just ain't so.
RECENT RISE IN MILITARISM
SOA/WHINSEC
ILEA
Plan Colombia
Mérida Initiative
ECONOMIC
Free Trade Agreements
Plan Puebla Panama
Millenium Challenge Grants
POLITICAL
Elections
Civil Liberties/ Human Rights
ENVIRONMENT
Mining for gold and silver
Privatization of water, electricity, health,
education
Hydroelectric projects
Superhighways
Free trade zones
BRIEF BACKGROUND
Tom Barry, Central America Fact Book (Grove
Press, 1986), pp.4-6.
The United States began meddling in
Central American affairs soon after the Mexican-American Ward
in the mid-1800s when politicians and investors looked to the
region as the next U.S. frontier.
By the 1900s U.S. gunboats were dashing
in and out of Central American ports to enforce political order
and “protect U.S. property.”
· 1927 Marines fought against the guerrilla forces
of Augusto Cesar Sandino in Nicaragua
· 1954 Washington toppled the elected government of
Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala which had infringed upon the domain
of the United Fruit Co.
After the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Washington
developed a new approach to military and economic aid for Latin
America: the Alliance for Progress: economic aid which would
better living conditions and encourage top-down reforms. However,
the Alliance for Progress was based on the belief that U.S. aid
could promote reform as a remedy for revolution if it were accompanied
by military counterinsurgency programs. So we saw
· 1961 marked the failed invasion of Cuba attempting
to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro
· 1973 the CIA participated in the coup which overthrew
the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile.
· 1983 the “Contra War” against the revolutionary
government of Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Movement.
· 1980s U.S. Military advisors and massive military
aid to the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras
fueling wars that lasted into the 1990s.
Intervention Today
Following the Peace Accords signed in the 1990s,
a plan similar to the Alliance for Progress in vision but not in
name was put forward:
Economic control of the hemisphere with security against terrorism,
drugs and gangs required to “protect our interests.”
IFCLA includes information in the newsletter,
alerts and on the webpage.
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Some areas to watch:
MILITARY
RECENT RISE IN MILITARIZATION
Some examples: IFCLA Headlines will provide up to date information
SOA/WHINSEC
- The School of
the Americas (SOA), in 2001 renamed the “Western Hemisphere
Institute for Security Cooperation,” is a combat training school
for Latin American soldiers, located at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Initially established in Panama in 1946, it was kicked out of
that country in 1984 under the terms of the Panama Canal Treaty.
Former Panamanian President, Jorge Illueca, stated that the School
of the Americas was the “biggest base for destabilization in Latin
America.”
The SOA, frequently dubbed the “School of Assassins,” has left
a trail of blood and suffering in every country where its graduates
have returned. Over its 59 years, the SOA has trained over 60,000
Latin American soldiers in counterinsurgency techniques, sniper
training, commando and psychological warfare, military intelligence
and interrogation tactics. These graduates have consistently used
their skills to wage a war against their own people. Among those
targeted by SOA graduates are educators, union organizers, religious
workers, student leaders, and others who work for the rights of
the poor. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been tortured,
raped, assassinated, “disappeared,” massacred, and forced into
refugee by those trained at the School of Assassins. www.soaw.org
- IFCLA sponsors buses to the annual vigil
and protest in Columbus, GA where we join with thousands of people
who oppose the U.S. training of Latin American soldiers and officers
at the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.
This happens the weekend before Thanksgiving around the anniversary
of the assassinations of the six Jesuits and two co-workers at
the University of Central America on Nov. 16, 1989.
- IFCLA supports legislation to end funding for the school. Representative Jim McGovern reintroduced the Latin America Military Training Review Act (HR 2567) on May 21, 2009. This legislation would suspend operations at the SOA/ WHINSEC, investigate torture manuals and human rights abuses associated with the school, and conduct an assessment of military training in Latin America. (Representative Clay and Carnahan are co-sponsors)
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.2567
contains the text of the legislation.
Latin America Military Training Review Act directs the Secretary of the Army to suspend operation of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (Institute). Suspends the authority of the Secretary of Defense to operate such an education and training facility until submission of a report containing the results of an investigation in response to violations of human rights to which training at such Institute contributed.
Establishes: (1) a joint congressional task force to assess appropriate education and training for DOD to provide to military personnel of Latin American nations; and (2) a commission to investigate activities of the United States Army School of the Americas and its successor institution, the Institute.
ILEA www.state.gov/p/inl/crime/ilea
- The government of Tony Saca in El Salvador
agreed to allow the U.S. to open an International Law Enforcement
Academy in his country. Currently, classes are being held at
the Military Airport of Illopongo. Another SOA?: A Police Academy in El Salvador worries critics
- The difficulty with this plan is the merging
of military training and civilian police. Faculty have been guaranteed
immunity from prosecution.
- The Committee in Solidarity with the People
of El Salvador www.cispes.org
have a campaign in place to work against this academy.
- U.S. to resume
training militaries (news report)
Barbara Slavin/USA Today/November 10, 2006
WASHINGTON – Concern about leftist victories
in Latin America has prompted President Bush to quietly grant
a waiver that allows the United States to resume training militaries
from 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries. The administration
hopes the training will forge links with countries in the region
and blunt a leftward trend.
Daniel Ortega, an American nemesis in the
region during the 1980s, was elected president in Nicaragua
this week. Bolivians chose another leftist, Evo Morales, last
year.
A military training ban was originally designed
to pressure countries into exempting American soldiers from
war crimes trials. The 2002 U.S. law bars countries from receiving
military aid and training if they refuse to promise immunity
to U.S. service members who might get hauled before the International
Criminal Court.
The White House lifted the ban on 21 countries,
about half in Latin America or the Caribbean including Bolivia,
Brazil, Mexico and Peru, through an Oct. 2 presidential memorandum.
The ban remains in effect for some countries.
Venezuela, whose President Hugo Chavez is a critic of the Bush
administration, remains ineligible because it is on a State
Department list of countries alleged to have permitted the trafficking
of women and children for sexual exploitation and forced labor.
PLAN COLOMBIA
www.plancolombia.org • www.csn.org
- Allegedly intended to fight the production
of coca and cocaine in Colombia, the $2 billion-U.S. "Plan
Colombia" assistance package (currently renamed "Andean
Initiative") has 80% of its aid going to the Colombian police
and military for weapons, training and helicopters. While this
policy meant huge contracts for U.S. defense contractors paid
for by U.S. tax-payers, it translated into abruptly stopping a
peace and dialogue process between then Colombian President Andres
Pastrana and the leftist rebel groups, stepping up the war in
the country's 50-year civil struggle.
Recently elected Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has actually
intensified the fighting against the two main rebel groups, the
FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) and the ELN (Army
of National Liberation) with newly delivered U.S. weapons and
helicopters. Colombia is now sinking into a hellish spiral of
violence with more bombings and kidnappings, more disappearances
and murders of opposition figures and union leaders and intensified
warfare by the Colombian military. Plan Colombia is helping to
combat the leftist guerilla-movements, not the narco-traffickers.
- While the U.S. Congress had demanded that
U.S. military assistance be used only to fight drug-trafficking
and not to meddle in the Colombian civil war, the U.S. State Department
has found a way to sidestep this issue by officially announcing
a shift in priority from fighting drugs to fighting so-called
"terrorism". This makes it easier to target the actions
of irregular armed groups in Colombia with a focus on leftist
groups controlling territories rich in natural resources, oil
in particular.
- IFCLA has spoken with Senator Bond’s office
(Appropriations Committee) and challenged Monsanto for its role
in the aerial fumigation programs.
- The area of focus for Plan Colombia is the
oil rich area of the country. Surprise?
PLAN MEXICO/MERIDA INITIATIVE
The Mérida Initiative is a security cooperation between the United States and the government of Mexico and the countries of Central America, with the aim of combating the threats of drug trafficking, transnational organized crime and money laundering. The assistance includes training, equipment and intelligence.
In seeking partnership with the United States, Mexican officials point out that the illicit drug trade is a shared problem in need of a shared solution, and remark that most of the financing for the Mexican traffickers comes from American drug consumers. U.S. law enforcement officials estimate that US$12 to 15 billion per year flows from the United States to the Mexican traffickers, and that is just in cash, i.e., not including the money sent by wire transfers.[1] Other government agencies, including the Government Accountability Office and the National Drug Intelligence Center, have estimated that Mexico's cartels earn upwards of $23 billion in illicit drug proceeds from the United States.[2][3]
U.S. State Department officials are aware that Mexican President Felipe Calderón’s willingness to work with the United States is unprecedented on issues of security, crime and drugs,[4] so the U.S. Congress passed legislation in late June 2008 to provide Mexico with $400 million and Central American countries with $65 million that year for the Mérida Initiative. The initiative was announced on 22 October 2007 and signed into law on June 30, 2008.
•Americans finance Mexican traffickers
•Mexican Drug Cartels Move North
•GAO Report on Drug Control, October 25, 2007
•Thomas Shannon, Assistant Secretary of State 2009 (pdf)
Mérida Initiative (Wikipedia)
US Embassy-Mexico
Witness for Peace works on this issue:
More than $1.4 billion of our taxes have already been dumped into this losing war. Despite a nearly tenfold increase in U.S. funding for Mexico's military and police, drug-related violence in Mexico continues to soar, claiming over 20,000 lives since 2006.
Has a single person been spared Mexico's drug violence because we bought 8 Black Hawk helicopters for the Mexican military? Conversely, how many lives have been ruined by that same military, which committed a reported 3,388 human rights violations in the last three years while receiving over $1 billion of U.S. tax dollars?
Mérida's failure to curtail drug-related violence stems from a failure to recognize the drug trade's roots: U.S. demand and Mexican poverty. As long as addicts in Los Angeles continue to provide an ample market for cocaine, cartels in Tijuana will kill to control that market. As long as Mexican youth see no legitimate employment alternatives, they will continue to work for those cartels. No one in the U.S. has been weaned off of cocaine addiction by Mérida's gift of night vision goggles to Mexico's police. No one in Mexico has found viable alternatives to drug-running because Mérida bought the Mexican Navy two surveillance planes.
The peaceful future that violence-stricken Mexicans seek cannot be found in the barrel of a gun, but in well-funded Mexican schools and well-stocked U.S. drug rehab clinics.
Now the Merida Initiative is moving to Honduras…
THE MERIDA INITIATIVE & THE US ROLE IN FOSTERING ORGANIZED CRIME IN CENTRAL AMERICA
By Annie Bird, Rights Action co-director (annie@rightsaction.org)
THE MERIDA INITIATIVE (CARSI & CBSI) & HOW IT WORKS
John Negroponte launched the Merida Initiative in 2008 when he served as Assistant Secretary of State for the Western Hemisphere. Initial coordination in Central America took place during Negroponte’s official tour of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in June of 2008 to promote the initiative.
Later CARSI, the Central America Regional Security Initiative, and the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative (CBSI) were divided off from the Merida Initiative, which now refers exclusively to the Mexican portion of the program.
In the 2008, 2009 and 2010 appropriations bills, a total of $258 million dollars were appropriated for Central America, $1,322 million for Mexico and $32 million for the Caribbean.
Merida Initiative funds are coordinated by the State Department via three bureaus within the State Department. The Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs administer the majority of the funds, appropriated to the International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement (INCLE) account. The Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs administers funds appropriated as part of the Economic Support Fund, and funds appropriated to the Foreign Military Financing account are administered through the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs.
However, the actual implementation of activities is carried out by other agencies, such as U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). Significant coordination is also carried out with the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice (DOJ), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), among others.
The Merida Initiative promotes inter-agency coordination and particularly joint national security actions by police and military. Central America nations have been struggling for over 20 years to remove militaries from internal security functions following the genocide and massive human rights violations carried out in the 1980’s by Central American militaries, with strong U.S. support.
ORGANIZED CRIME & VIOLENCE IN CENTRAL AMERICA
Levels of violence in Guatemala, Honduras and EL Salvador have grown over the past decade to such an extent that United Nations statistics demonstrate that the level of killing is higher than even during the internal armed conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, and are among, if not the, highest murder rates in the world.
It is interesting to note that while the Sandinista government in the early 1980s dismantled the corrupt security forces in Nicargua, which currently enjoys a lower murder rate than Washington, DC, no such process occurred in other Central American nations. In El Salvador and Guatemala, in theory, new civilian police forces were constructed following the “peace processes” of the 1990s, however many military personnel were simply shifted directly into the police, and parallel death squad structures were immediately articulated within the police forces.
It is worth noting that the militaries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have been heavily implicated in drug trafficking. In the case of the Honduran and El Salvadoran militaries, they undertook extensive collaboration with the covert Contra supply network operated by White House aid Lt. Col. Oliver North out of the Ilopango air base in El Salvador, at a time when internal Central Intelligence Agency reports, a Department of Justice report and a Congressional report all document that the Medellin drug cartel contributed cash to the Contra effort in exchange for accommodation of their activities by CIA and other US authorities.
US Ambassador to Honduras at the time, John Negroponte, was a key bulwark of support for the Contra support.
The 1980’s set the stage for the growth of organized crime in the region and the creation of the mechanisms for impunity that allow them to flourish, including the structuring of the justice system in the current and 16th Honduran constitution, approved during a military government in 1982.
It is also interesting to note that in the recent coup attempt in Ecuador it has been alleged that police anti-narcotics units that took over control of the airports had been trained by and maintained close relations with the US embassy.
JOHNSTON VISITS GUATEMALA, CONCERN OVER REGIONALIZATION OF CICIG
On October 19th, David T. Johnson, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, visited Guatemala focusing on reviewing the International Commission Against Impunity and Corruption, a United Nations sponsored effort to prosecute organized crime networks through the Guatemalan justice system with the assistance of international lawyers.
Currently there is an effort to regionalize CICIG, creating similar programs in Honduras and El Salvador. Though debate is ongoing, Honduran human rights organizations fear that the ongoing control of the justice system by the authors of the June 2009 military coup will make it impossible for a CICIG type program to effectively combat impunity, and that such a measure, structurally ineffective from the start, would lend legitimacy to the coup government currently engaged in massive human rights violations, which is anxious to gain reentry to the Organization of American States (OAS).
The Honduran pro-democracy, coup resistance movement, born in the wake of the June 2009 military coup, hopes to convoke a National Constituent assembly to create a new constitution that would restructure the justice system. Members of the Resistance explain that structural weaknesses in the justice system can only be addressed through the drafting of a new constitution.
THE OFFICIALS WHO MOST INFLUENCE CARSI IN HONDURAS
The ambassadors in the different countries included in the Merida Initiative, CARSI and CBSI play a key role in implementing in defining the activities. The current ambassador to Honduras is career diplomat Hugo Llorens. Most Hondurans believe Llorens played a key role in consolidating the coup, and even in carrying it out.
In 2002, during the failed coup attempt in Venezuela, Llorens was the Director of Andean Affairs in the National Security Council, the key advisor to George W. Bush on Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador issues.
Honduran Minister of Security Oscar Alvarez has been implicated in gross human rights violations, including massacres, when he last served as Minister of Security in Honduras from 2002 to 2005 under then president Ricardo Maduro. Alvarez participated in Pepe Lobo’s first official act as ‘de facto’ president of Honduras, the signing of a security cooperation agreement with Colombia, signed by then Colombian President Uribe.
Colombian security forces, especially during the Uribe administration, have committed massive human rights violations including the kidnapping and killing of urban youth, transporting them the jungle and dressing them as guerrilla combatants to demonstrate to the press as victories in Colombia’s internal armed conflict, a practice known as “false positives.”
US Assistant Secretary of State David Johnson was appointed to his current position in 2007, during the Bush administration. He served the Clinton Administration White House from 1995 to 1997 as Spokesman for the National Security Council. From 2002 to 2003, under the Bush administration, during the early stages of the US invasion of Afghanistan, Operation Enduring Freedom, Mr. Johnson served as Afghan Coordinator for the United States.
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ECONOMIC
FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS
- NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, etc. This alphabet soup
really is about opening markets for U.S. goods and services in
Central and Latin America and getting cheap labor in free trade
zones.
- The agreements are signed by the Presidents
of the countries without consultation with the people. Most are
ratified in the middle of the night, sometimes with a police or
military encirclement of the building where the Assembly is voting.
- Preliminary studies by economists are showing
that the effects of the agreements will be devastating for local
economies.
PLAN PUEBLA PANAMA
- Plan Puebla Panama, a project of the Inter-American
Development Bank, The seven central American countries signed
this agreement to implement the plan promoting trade, tourism,
education, the environment and a single power grid across nine
southern states of Mexico and central America.
- IFCLA includes information about PPP in our
educational work.
MILLENNIUM CHALLENGE GRANTS www.mcc.gov
- The Millennium Challenge Corporation is a
United States government-owned corporation responsible for the
stewardship of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). MCC is
designed to promote, support and ensure accountability for the
innovative foreign aid strategies it administers with the following
principles:
· Reduce Poverty through Economic Growth: focus on
agriculture, education, private sector development, capacity building…
· Reward Good Policy: assistance given to those who
govern justly, invest in their citizens, encourage economic freedom…
· Operate as Partners: the countries will be responsible
for identifying the greatest barriers to their own development,
ensuring civil society
participation, and developing an MCA program
· Focus on Results: clear objectives, benchmarks to
measure progress, procedures to ensure fiscal accountability and
sustainability.
- At the present, the communities affected
by projects funded by the MCC have not been included in the design
or impact process.
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POLITICAL
ELECTIONS
- A pattern of intervention in Latin American
elections
· Public statements by U.S. Ambassadors claiming candidates
on the left would end remittances, bring disaster to the country…
· Envoys from Washington campaigning for the rightist
candidate
· National Endowment for Democracy funding campaigns
- A disregard for self-determination especially
in campaigns against the elected leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia,
Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador…
CIVIL LIBERTIES/HUMAN RIGHTS
- Pressure for anti-terrorism policies and
laws to make El Salvador “safe” for investment
- Mines in El Salvador anti-mining community leaders killed
- Unsuccessful support for Guatemala on the
Security Council of UN
- Impunity for Human Rights violators under
the guise of reconciliation
- Ten Journalists killed in Honduras since January 2010, hundreds of people killed or disappeared since the coup in 2009.
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ENVIRONMENT
Throughout South and Central America transnational
corporations are investing in projects without any regard for the
environment or for the health and safety of the inhabitants of the
regions where they work. The long-term effects will be devastating.
Communities are organizing in opposition to the destruction of their
homes and farms, the contamination of their land and water, and
the end of their culture and way of life.
- MINING FOR GOLD
AND SILVER
- PRIVATIZATION
OF WATER, ELECTRICITY, HEALTH, EDUCATION
- HYDROELECTRIC
PROJECTS
- SUPERHIGHWAYS
- FREE TRADE ZONES
____________________________
Barrick
Gold Strikes Opposition in South America
by
Glenn Walker, Special to CorpWatch
June 20th, 2005
“Barrick! Listen! Chile will not surrender!, No to Pascua Lama!,”
roared a crowd of protestors as they paraded through the streets
of Santiago, Chile. The crowd was addressing Canadian mining giant
Barrick Gold, in response to the company's proposed bi-national
“Pascua Lama” open-pit mine
on the border of Chile and Argentina.
In what has so far been the climax of a campaign that is quickly
gaining momentum, the protestors gathered on June 4th in both Santiago,
Chile's capital city, and in the northern city of Vallenar, near
the Pascua Lama site. Each protest drew an estimated 2,000 people
in a lively atmosphere of carnival and traditional dance and ritual.
The groups condemned Barrick Gold’s plans as greedy, heavy-handed,
and called the proposed mine an environmental and social nightmare,
shouting, “We are not a North American colony!”
Barrick Gold, a powerful multinational already notorious for its
dealings in North America, Australia and Africa, plans to extract
an estimated 500,000 kilograms of gold (along with silver, copper
and mercury) from the site over a 20 year period. Before doing so,
however, the company will relocate significant parts of the Toro
1, Toro 2 and Esperanza, three giant Andean glaciers. Barrick hopes
to transfer the three glaciers to an area with similar surface characteristics
and elevation by merging the three into the larger Guanaco glacier.
The anticipated environmental impact, coupled with the removal of
a major source of water for surrounding communities, has local Chileans
up in arms. But Barrick Gold appears un-phased by the opposition.
After all, Pascua Lama is one of the largest foreign investments
in Chile in recent years, totaling US$1.5 billion.
As with many gold mines, the Pasuca Lama mine would employ cyanide
leaching for on-site processing of the ore. Cyanide is a chemical
compound which, even in very small quantities, is extremely toxic
to humans and other life forms. If leaked from a mine site or spilt
during transportation, it can quickly cause massive toxicity problems
for an entire ecosystem, while mobilizing other persistent and toxic
heavy metals, as well.
For this reason the people of the Huasco Valley – the area where
the headwaters of the mine site flow – are extremely anxious about
the risk of poisoning their water source, along with the significant
problem of large dust plumes released by mining activity.
“The air we breathe, the water we drink and the land we cultivate
have more value than the gold coveted by multinationals,” wrote
the people of the Huasco valley and a number of environmentalists
recenly in a letter to the Chilean president that pleaded for a
halt to the project.
Barrick's plans to “relocate” three glaciers – 816,000 cubic meters
of ice – by means of bulldozers and controlled blasting, is seen
by mine-opponents as symbolic of the company's utter insensitivity
to the environment. As headwaters for a water basin in an arid region
receiving very little rainfall, many opponents are gravely concerned
for the ice. They say the mechanical action involved in moving the
glaciers will irreversibly melt much of it, jeopardising a delicate
ecological balance further downstream.
“A glacier isn’t just a chunk of ice you can pick up and move,”
says Lucio Cuenco, from Latin American Observatory of Environmental
Conflicts (OLCA). “It’s part of a water basin, and if you move it,
you’ll disrupt that ecosystem”.
The three glaciers also constitute a precious source of environmental
knowledge. Ice is a natural preservative and glaciers this large
undoubtedly carry information on the flora and fauna of the area
and the history of many thousands of years of the South Andes.
There are also severe occupational health and safety issues with
the mine. According to Cesar Padilla, also of OLCA, several deaths
have already been reported as part of the initial construction.
Nataneal Vivanco, an organic farmer from the Huasco Valley, also
voices deep worries about the safety of the mine workers.
“They say they are a “responsible” company but I don’t know to what
level because right now, although they haven’t even started to work
fully, there’s been 15 deaths,” Vivanco says.
Vivanco’s claim is echoed by activist groups campaigning against
the mine, who allege that at least 15 workers have been lost. But
details of exactly how the deaths occurred are unclear and the municipal
councillor who is said to have an official list of the deaths was
unavailable for comment.
Barrick Gold did not wish to comment on the issue to CorpWatch,
but has consistently denied the potential scale of their effect
on the Huasco Valley and its inhabitants. They maintain that the
project is good for the region in that it will generate thousands
of local jobs, that safety standards are high, and that the environmental
effects of the mine are negligible.
“The impact on water quantity is minimal, the impact of water is
none,” claimed Vince Borg, Barrick Gold’s vice president of communications
last month in a statement to the Dow Jones Newswire.
“We're not surprised at all by a number of activists coming out
and offering their view and distorting some facts rather than focusing
on reality,” he added.
Despite the company's claims, the regional environmental commission
CONEMA, in a recent report, has expressed concern that the company
has shown little consideration for the possibility of down-stream
pollution and that there is “inconsistency” in their related figures.
The CONEMA report has called for the glacial relocation plans to
be scrapped and for the mine to instead be downsized or established
underground so as to lessen potential environmental impacts. Barrick
Gold is still compiling a response.
In the meantime, in an effort to stymie the growing opposition to
the project, Barrick Gold has released a major TV ad campaign championing
“responsible mining.” The company has also offered US$10 million
to fund local educational and cultural community projects.
The fund has been dismissed as an attempt to buy silence by mine-opponents
who claim the money offered is miniscule in comparison to the profits
that will be made and the damage that will be done.
Indeed, as the world’s second biggest gold producer with 13 major
mine operations worldwide, and another five in development, Barrick
Gold is certainly not short on cash. What’s more, they are not required
under Chilean law to pay taxes on their takings and have so far
avoided having to pay a bond as insurance if something were to go
terribly wrong.
These fierce accusations of corporate irresponsibility and greed
are certainly not the first the massive mining company has had to
handle. In the past they have been accused of burying alive 50 miners
in Tanzania (through a company they now own), of playing a heavy-handed
role in attempting to silence opposition through expensive libel
cases, and of blatantly disregarding community and environmental
concerns all over, from the US, to Latin America, Africa and Australia.
George W Bush Sr. also appears in the long list of grievances about
the company. From 1995 to 1999 he was the "Honorary Chairman"
of Barrick's "International Advisory Board," during which
time he was said to have forced laws favourable to the company.
Barrick Gold expects to have full approval for their Pascua Lama
project by the end of the year. Meanwhile opposition continues to
swell.
Nataneal Vivanco says that on top of the safety problems and potential
contamination to water (which he worries could ruin his chance at
organic certification), Barrick's presence has caused another kind
of contamination.
“The conflict that we are having -- one against the other, those
in favor and those against the mine -- is a type of contamination,
a social contamination."
Interesting new resources:
After Recognition: Indigenous Peoples Confront Capitalism
Dancing with Dynamite: A Book on Social Movements and States in Latin America by Ben Dangl
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