Mining myths, paradoxes and realities

Central America is scarred with visible signs of the voracity of Canadian mining companies and throughout the region communities are resisting. But they are also suffering and getting sick. Central America’s reality can’t be analyzed without looking at the disasters and struggles mining is provoking.

Giorgio Trucchi

Over the last two decades the mining industry, metallic mining in particular, has once again become very important in Central America. This new boom is due both to the decreased regulation of its activity by the national governments and to the high international prices for metals such as gold, which in 2013 was listed at $1,300 an ounce (28 grams), an increase of some 350% over the last 15 years, coupled with paradoxically growing demand.

Two additional factors have further expanded Central America's mining activity: the unceasing demand for iron to produce raw steel by China, the world's greatest iron consumer, and various new guidelines by countries in the North to insure imported industrial minerals given that their own mines are becoming exhausted.

A region “franchised” to mining

According to the 2011 study “Impact of metallic mining in Central America” by El Salvador’s Center for Research into Investment and Trade (CEICOM), mining companies, especially Canadian ones, have been granted concessions to exploit 14% of the entire Central American territory.

The report’s executive summary on the impact of Canadian mining operations, submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), states that Canadian companies are responsible for between 50% and 70% of Latin America’s mining activity.

Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala are the countries with the most franchised territory and greatest number of mining concessions awarded to companies, both national and trans¬national.

Honduras has the most concessions

The country with the most concessions is Honduras. The “Analysis of the mining situation in Honduras 2007-2012,” prepared by the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI), shows that 72 metal mining concessions are already granted and 102 more applications have been submitted. But the Honduran Center for the Promotion of Community Development (CEHPRODEC) says this is an understatement and mentions 837 potential metallic and non-metallic mining projects, amounting to almost 35% of Honduran territory.

Guatemala and Nicaragua
are going down the same road

In another analysis presented in 2013, ICEFI revealed that 107 metallic mining concessions have already been granted in Guatemala and 359 new applications are pending. If we add non-metallic projects to these figures, the total comes to an overwhelming 973 projects. Guatemalan grassroots movements warn that the total area franchised to mining companies exceeds 32,000 square kilometers, almost 30% of the country’s territory.

Nicaragua is facing a similar situation. The Humboldt Center report, “Current state of the mining sector and its socio-environmental impact in Nicaragua 2012-2013,” reveals that nearly 18,000 square kilometers of Nicaraguan territory, 13.5% of the total, is now under franchise to 446 mining projects.

Costa Rica puts on the brakes

In 2010, after a long national awareness-raising and mobilization campaign, Costa Rica’s legislature voted unanimously to prohibit open-pit mining and the use of cyanide and mercury in mining activity on its territory.

El Salvador stalls the projects

El Salvador has 29 metal mining projects plus 36 non-metallic ones, but none of them are currently operational. Since 2008, various civil society organizations in El Salvador have engaged in extensive and detailed counter-information work to sway public opinion on the harmful effects of metal mining. They sought to counteract the pro-mining media campaign forcefully promoted by the companies developing exploratory projects with support from big corporate media and Salvadoran rightwing political parties.

The grassroots organizations found an ally in that task in then-recently elected President Mauricio Funes (2009-2014), which led to the setting up of a de facto moratorium on open-pit mining.

The decision of the new government and the FMLN’s Legislative Assembly representatives to hold off granting any new mining permits enabled the reintroduction onto the parliamentary agenda of debate on a comprehensive bill to define a specific regulatory legal framework for any type of extractive activity.

“Unfortunately, the extractivist perspective of the other parties has delayed what we believe to be an urgently needed step,” FMLN representative Lourdes Palacios, secretary of the Legislative Assembly’s Environment and Climate Change Commission, told us. “But the new President, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, has already stated openly that he’s against metallic mining, giving us the chance to continue insisting on the urgency of discussing this issue.”

Mining congress in Managua

This August, Managua hosted the First International Mining Congress, in which delegations of governments and mining companies as well as experts in engineering and geology from more than 25 countries in Latin America, Europe, the United States and Canada debated innovations, programs and technical and geological advances in mining exploration and operations.

Simultaneously, grassroots and popular movements from all over Central America held an alternative regional forum for the defense of shared resources, where they denounced the false myths governing the mining industry and the serious socio-environmental impact this activity and the extractivist model in general leave in their wake.

The development myth

The first myth is that mining operations generate wellbeing and development. “It’s artificial development,” we were told by Honduras’ Pedro Landa, a member of CEHPRODEC. “The mining companies establish themselves in a territory for a set time for the purpose of extracting a nonrenewable resource. As the resource runs out, the investment and everything that had been generated disappears and what remains are ghost towns, economic recession and environmental devastation.”

Furthermore, the companies negotiate extremely low royalties for what they extract and contribute virtually no taxes n to the host country. In the end they leave the country minimum income compared with the export earnings from the resource they extract.

At more than $442 million, gold was Nicaragua’s top export commodity last year; the 3% royalty for the gold extracted was insignificant compared to such enormous profits by the mining companies. “They take the lion’s share of the money and leave the crumbs and don’t care what happens afterward,” explained Tania Sosa from the Centro Humboldt. “When the gold runs out, they pack up and go, abandoning the few jobs they created and leaving only desolation and environmental damage.”

The contribution of mining operations to the national economy of Central America’s countries is marginal, fluctuating between 1.25% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in Honduras and 2.5% in Nicaragua. “If we compare this with agricultural activity, which in Honduras represents almost 40% of the GDP, it’s obvious we’re seeing an erroneous policy that’s heading for failure,” Landa told us.

The employment myth

A second mining myth is that it creates massive employment. Studies conducted by CEHPRODEC show that at the peak of their operations, medium-sized mining companies such as those operating in Central America create only 250-300 direct jobs and 1,200 indirect jobs.

In Honduras, mining’s employment generation absorbed an average of only 0.2% of the economically active population, a little more than 6,300 jobs. In Nicaragua and Guatemala this percentage is a bit over 2%.

These are informal, poorly paid and intermittent unskilled jobs. Landa explains that “the companies operate for an average of 10–15 years then move or start a series of ownership transfers to create a ‘corporate veil’ that prevents identification of the owner. That way they hide those responsible for the environmental impact that slowly begins to appear.”

A new myth: “Green” mining

The creation of environmentally friendly mining, a sort of “green mining,” is the third big lie transnational capital wants to present as reality.
“Internationally it is widely known that mining is a disastrously contaminating industry and causes damage that can probably never be repaired,” said Ricardo Navarro, president of the Salvadoran Center of Appropriate Technology (CESTA)-Friends of the Earth. “In such a small, densely populated country as El Salvador, mining and the use of huge quantities of water and poisons have a disproportionately destructive impact on eco-systems.”

Mining companies need a lot of water to do their work. According to the Humboldt Center’s publication, “Mining or the power of money,” these companies use as much water in one day as a peasant family would in 20 years. Furthermore, highly toxic cyanide is used in the leaching process to separate gold from the rock. The European Union prohibited its use in mining in 2010. The open-pit model causes further serious contamination from heavy metals: lead, arsenic, mercury, zinc and aluminum.

According to CEICOM, 20 tons of rock have to be removed, an average of 4 kilos of sodium cyanide is used and 28,000 liters of water are squandered per second for each ounce of gold extracted. Moreover, two or three grams of mercury are required for every gram of gold. All this poisoned water ends up in huge tanks, where it is stored temporarily then flushed into rivers and streams.

“The mining companies assure us that by using new technology it’s possible to create environmentally friendly mining. They even swear that at the end of mining operations the areas they occupied are in better condition than they were before. The truth is that this process accelerates socio-environmental degradation and destruction of the area,” Pedro Landa warned. He described how Honduras has some eight “environmental liabilities”: mines that were never dealt with adequately and today are creating serious health problems for the population. Additional serious effects include deforestation, air pollution from the dust created by the explosions, loss of the fertile soil layer...

The consequences:
Serious health damage

“In Valle de los Ángeles, a tourist area on the edge of Tegucigalpa, a mine that closed more than forty years ago continues to generate an unimaginable quantity of acid water contamination,” said Landa. “The mining operation left mountains of waste where you can find it all: mercury, lead, arsenic, cadmium, aluminum, iron... When it rains, water the color of blood runs out due to the quantity of heavy metals it contains.”

For Dr. Juan Almendárez, director of the Center for Prevention, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture Victims (CPTRT) and former rector of the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), the way mining affects healthis one of the most serious problems is causes.

Whowillpay?

“To determine whether or not there is contamination, we cannot continue thinking about health from a capitalist and reductionist standpoint, based solely on the minimum and maximum values defined by the US Environmental Protection Agency. We must see it as the whole of life and living things. In this sense, what mining seriously changes and destroys is the wholeness of life in a place, in a community,” explains Almendárez.

In the flagship cases of the Valle de Siria in Honduras and San Miguel Ixtahuacán in Guatemala, the mining operations left behind serious skin problems, premature births, congenital malformations, miscarriages, loss of sight and hair loss. “Who will pay for all these outrages against human health?” the doctor wonders out loud.

Giorgio Trucchi is a journalist. This text first appeared in Opera Mundi and Adital. Editedbyenvío.

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