Canada's Shameful Exports

Fifty years of bloody conflict, economic greed, and environmental devastation

Sojourners Magazine, May 2015
By Emilie Teresa Smith

This article examines horrendous Canadian mining practises in Guatemala, the Philippines, Chile, Argentina, Paua New Guinea, Tanzania, D.R. Congo, El Salvador. 

CANADIAN MINING companies have left a trail of destruction around the world—mostly in places where people are poor and vulnerable.
The earliest conflicts caused by Canadian mining exploded in Guatemala in the early 1960s when the nickel company Inco dug into the northern mountainside of Guatemala’s largest freshwater lake, Lago Izabal. Almost 155 square miles of traditional Kekchi-Maya land was expropriated to create Inco’s Exmibal mine. As the region descended into bitter war, Guatemalan oligarchs and their military, with the support of Canadian-mining and U.S. geopolitical interests, exterminated all popular dissent. Dozens of Kekchi leaders were killed or disappeared; four prominent leaders who had published a report condemning the Inco-Exmibal deals were brutally assaulted and two of them assassinated. The Exmibal mine operated for three years before Inco abandoned it, never paying a nickel in royalties to Guatemala.

Image Source:  UC Observer

Meanwhile, in the Philippines, Vancouver-based Placer Dome arrived on Marinduque Island and sunk in a filthy copper mine. Over the next three decades, Placer Dome operated the Marcopper mine, devastating the local environment and its communities. From 1975 to 1991, Placer Dome dumped 200 metric tons of toxic waste into Calancan Bay, and in March 1996 a massive rupture from the tailings pond flooded 60 villages with toxic waste, permanently destroying community lands, rice fields, and shrimp marshes. The Boac River was declared dead, and the U.N. pronounced it a major environmental disaster. The entire Marcopper mine project was abandoned; no major attempt at clean-up ever took place. In 2006, Placer Dome was taken over by the giant, Toronto-based Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest mining companies. In 2008, the provincial government of Marinduque began a lawsuit, but Barrick has fussed and delayed, dragging the court case on endlessly.

Barrick is also responsible for the massive $8.5 billion boondoggle of the Pascua Lama gold mine. Saddled in the Andes between Chile and Argentina,the mine threatens to blow up hundreds of glaciers and drastically impact the Atacama Desert—one of the driest regions of the world. In response to the long-ignored concerns of Diaguita Indigenous communities and others, the Chilean government eventually suspended Barrick’s license, but glaciologists report that the pre-mining activity has already wreaked irreversible destruction in the area.

Papua New Guinea hosts the massive Barrick Porgera mine, built right on top of local Ipili communities; multiple claims of grave human rights violations have been reported. Bought-off police and mining company security guards have been accused of murder, beatings, home burnings, and gang rape. The former chair of Barrick, Peter Munk, was quoted in a Canadian newspaper in 2011 that “gang rape is a cultural habit [of the traditional people of Papua New Guinea]. Of course, you can’t say that because it’s politically incorrect.”

Horrendous violence has also been reported at Barrick’s mine in Tanzania. And shadows of the same story emerge inD.R. Congo: Security guards for Montreal’s Anvil mines have been accused of providing cover for government soldiers engaging in the massacre of civilians. In El Salvador, Vancouver’s Pacific Rim (now OceanaGold) sued the Salvadoran government, claiming that the country violated international trade law by refusing to allow the company to dig a massive gold mine that would have drastically polluted the country’s thin water supplies. Four community activists of the Cabañas region, where the project was to go in, have been murdered, including Dora Alicia Recinos, who was eight months pregnant when she was shot dead.

The common denominators in these countries and elsewhere are corrupt local officials with ready access to people-controlling violence—a perfect environment for Canadian mining. The low-paying jobs, taxes, royalties, and other economic gains in the short term in no way compensate for permanent environmental devastation and community conflict inevitably caused by mining.

- Submitted by Gareth