Pacific Rim to El Salvador: What’s yours is mined

For years Pacific Rim, a mining company based in Vancouver, Canada, has been pushing to reopen the El Doardo mine in El Salvador against the will of the people and their government. Now the company is suing the Salvadoran government for $77 million.
On October 21st, the Committee In Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (cispes) hosted Miguel Rivera, an activist from El Salvador, who spoke about the struggle to assert the rights of the people over those of the corporation. Rivera is the founder and current vice president of the Association of Friends of San Isidro (asic).

Rivera is from the town of San Isidro in the region called the Cabañas, where Pacific Rim acquired the El Dorado mine site in 2002 and began an intrusive exploration process to determine the amount of gold and silver in the hills.

In 2004, the company applied to the Salvadoran government to have their exploration license converted to an exploitation license (yes, it’s actually called an exploitation license) but was denied because of widespread opposition to the mining project.

Pacific Rim ignored the concerns of the Salvadoran people and their government, and reopened the Canadian company’s dormant subsidiary in Nevada in order to take advantage of Article 10 under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (cafta), which allowed them to sue the government of El Salvador for $77 million dollars for “profit infringement.”

Now the two parties are in arbitration under the World Bank. The money that El Salvador risks losing is money badly needed for public services and government programs. If the Salvadoran government is forced to pay Pacific Rim, it will be a punishment for nothing more than doing what governments are supposed to do—protect the rights and interests of the people who elect them.

Why isn’t it in the interest of the people to have a new gold mine in the Cabañas? Pacific Rim argues, of course, that the mine will create jobs for the people who live in this rural area. However, according to cispes, the gold mining industry contributes only .04% to El Salvador’s gdp, while Pacific Rim’s website details their plans for taking away 43.6 million dollars in “free cash flow,” which is an estimate based on the price of gold as set at $400 per ounce. Currently the price of gold is $1,000 per ounce.

Besides contributing little to the Salvadoran economy, the El Dorado mining project would cost the people of El Salvador a great deal in health and environmental degradation. In 2005 a hydrogeologist conducted a technical review of Pacific Rim’s Environmental Impact Assessment and concluded that the study lacked important data and testing. A study cosponsored by two Salvadoran groups—a Catholic organization and an environmental ngo—found that Pacific Rim’s open pit mining process would contaminate local water supplies with mercury, cyanide, arsenic, zinc, and aluminum.

Probably the most astounding report to come out of the many studies that have been conducted to disprove Pacific Rim’s promise of “green mining” is that the process would use over 200,000 gallons of water a day—the same amount that one Salvadoran family uses in twenty years.

Members of the communities located near the El Dorado mine site have seen firsthand the results of this kind of waste and pollution. The Environmental Committee of the Cabañas organized a tour of the San Martin gold mine in neighboring Honduras. People from the Cabañas visited the communities near the mine and met people suffering from rashes and skin disorders caused by the pollution of their water supply.

Miguel Rivera spoke about this at Evergreen, noting that Pacific Rim countered these testimonies by saying that the Hondurans did not have rashes because of polluted water, but because they were dirty.

This racist assertion can’t explain what Salvadorans on the tour learned next: that the Honduran government conducted a study that found the residents of this area to have dangerously high levels of arsenic and other chemicals in their blood. Equally disturbing was the fact the ten rivers in the region have dried up as a result of the mine’s water usage. This information has extreme implications for the people of El Salvador, where 30% of the rural population lacks access to clean water.

Water contamination would affect not only the health of the people, but would also impact agriculture and threaten food security.
None of these things have happened yet in the Cabañas, but even with the El Dorado mine unopened, Pacific Rim’s presence has wreaked havoc among the communities there.

Activists opposing the mining project have been threatened, attacked, and killed. Miguel Rivera spoke about his brother, Marcelo, who was working as a legal representative of the asic, and was a member of the Board of the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining in El Salvador.

Last June, Marcelo disappeared. A few weeks later, his mutilated body was found at the bottom of a well on the outskirts of town. Lying on the ground nearby was a military manual on forced disappearances. Despite this evidence, the right-wing Salvadoran attorney general maintains that Marcelo was last seen with drug dealers, and that his murder was the result of a drunken altercation.
You can watch a short documentary about Marcelo’s murder and the ongoing battle with Pacific Rim at www.jamiemoffett.com/marcelorivera .

cispes encourages folks to call Tom Shrake, president and ceo of Pacific Rim, and tell him to withdraw the lawsuit against El Salvador. You can reach him at (888) 775-7097.