Thu Aug 2, 2012, 12:12 PM
polly7 (20,582 posts)
Mexican Farmers Up Against Canadian Mining Goliaths
By David Bacon
Source: America’s Program
Thursday, August 02, 2012
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 Beristain, 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 Beristian 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.”
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Mexican Farmers Up Against Canadian Mining Goliaths (Original post)
|Judi Lynn||Aug 2012||#1|
Response to polly7 (Original post)
Thu Aug 2, 2012, 01:56 PM
Judi Lynn (111,688 posts)
1. Amazing how slickly the mines and the Mexican legislature worked together
to take over the land which had been the home to so many indigenous people, while removing everything the mines didn't want to pay, or respect, or protect. Taxes were removed, any possible restrictions were removed, and of course the people who lived there were removed, some after being tortured, of course, thereby sending the message to surviving communities they'd better get in line or experience more of the same themselves.
Got it all wrapped up, tied with a bow just in time to be even more open for bidness just as the US Congress rolled out NAFTA for congenital money worshippers everywhere, at the tragic expense of the working people of this hemisphere.
So some of the by-products are open ponds of cyanide-laden liquid seeping into the aquifers, and poision all living things in the area. Active area streams simply drying up, disappearing, animals, birds, fish, etc. destroyed along with poisoned people who didn't have to wait for the paramilitaries to torture them, being tortured from inside their own bodies already.
The mining technology improves, streamlines, evolves, while the "human hearts" in charge corrupt, bring grief and suffering to everyone not able to escape their malicious, sadistic degradation of the world they've stolen.
In the end, the monsters are STILL going to have to pay, one way or another, for the damage they've done. It will all come back to them in time.