Blood of Extraction
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Skye/Hudbay: Fenix
The Fenix mine is another important example, located in the Maya Q’eqchi community of Las Nubes. Fenix has the potential to become one of the largest nickel mines in the world. The history of the property stretches back to the Cold War years of military dictatorship. Then-Canadian mining giant, INCO, together with the American company, Hanna Mining, formed EXMIBAL in 1960, four years after the military coup against Jacobo Árbenz. EXMIBAL lobbied the military dictatorship, and eventually obtained a 365 square kilometer concession in 1965 on land that had been identified for the agrarian reform proposed under Árbenz but which was annuled following the coup. Maya Q’eqchi communities argue that they have never conceded the land, nor were they consulted about the mining project. When community resistance to INCO grew in the 1970s, as Cold War geopolitical tensions in the country intensified and ultimately led to civil war and the scorched earth campaigns of the 1980s against indigenous communities, EXMIBAL and the Guatemalan government responded with repression. Death squads assassinated opponents and issued death threats to others.405 But the repression of EXMIBAL’s opponents and the company’s close relationship with the dictatorship made it a target of guerrilla forces until it ceased operations. EXMIBAL returned to the country after the war ended in the 1990s, and eventually sold the concession in 2004 to Skye Resources, whose chief executive was a former director of INCO.406 Skye kept up the tradition of violence and dispossession when its efforts to reactivate Fenix were met with opposition. Ultimately, unable to contain the negative international criticism and fierce local opposition to Fenix, Hudbay – which purchased Skye in 2008 for C$460 million in order to obtain Fenix – sold the project in August 2011 to Cyprus-based equity investor Solway Group.407
Tahoe Resources/Goldcorp: El Escobal
El Escobal is a silver mining project in the advanced exploration stage. It is owned by Tahoe Resources, which is headquartered in Nevada—likely so it can benefit from the U.S. trade agreement with Guatemala—but whose major shareholder is Goldcorp. With a total investment of C$406 million, El Escobal could soon make Tahoe one of the largest silver producers in the world.408 Despite President and CEO Kevin McArthur’s claim to a Gold conference that Escobal “is in a region that is receptive to the mining industry,” three communities adjacent to the project have voted overwhelmingly against it in community referenda. One resident in the community of San Rafael Las Flores has resisted the company’s ongoing efforts to get him to sell his land, despite it being completely fenced-in by the mine.409
Radius Gold: El Tambor
El Tambor is a gold and silver exploration project owned until recently by Vancouver-based Radius Gold.410 The site is situated in El Carrizal, between the municipalities of San Pedro Ayampuc and San José del Golfo. Starting in early March 2012, people from both communities held protests at the entrance to the mine, rejecting its presence altogether. Members of the Frente Norte del Área Metropolitana (Northern Front of the Metropolitan Area), have aimed to halt exploitation and force the company and government to hold a popular consultation to decide El Tambor’s fate. Community members brought money and cooking supplies to sustain the protesters at the mine entrance. One community activist, Johana Morales, demonstrating an understanding of the devastating consequences Canadian mining has already had in Guatemala and Central America more broadly,411 noted her concerns about exploration at El Tambor being allowed to proceed, “in the future, the mine could contaminate our water supply, which could affect the health of our children, because of the chemicals they use to extract the metals. This is why we are demanding that the project cease operations in our communities.”412 Movement leaders have faced reprisals: security guards working for Radius entered the community of San José del Golfo in early April and fired shots in the air until they were physically detained by residents.
Repression intensified on June 13, 2012, when Telma Yolanda Oquelí Veliz was almost killed for her activism against the mine. “She was on her way out of the camp when her vehicle was cut-off by a car and a motorcycle and her would be assassin shot three bullets at her,” reports Canadian journalist, Dawn Paley.
One of the bullets pierced her abdomen and remains lodged inside her, too close to the spinal cord to be safely removed. Oquelí suffers ongoing pain as a result of the shooting. Her attackers, who she thinks are connected to the municipality of San José del Golfo and to the mining company, have never been identified.
Miguel Díaz Morales, an eighty-three-year-old community resident who spent numerous nights at the blockade, told Paley he was fighting for his “children, and for our land, on which they were born.…We defend our land because we have the right to do so. We’re free and we have the right to defend our lands.”413
In a visit with community residents in San José del Golfo in July 2012, we were told repeatedly how peaceful and legal protests were met with repression and intimidation. For example, Jorge López, a resident active in the anti-mining resistance, explained how the struggle the community has been carrying out has been “using legal means” such as “peaceful marches” only to be consistently dismissed or ignored. “They have not wanted to reach a solution to this problem because there have been attempts to talk with the Minister of Energy and Mines, the Minister of the Environment, but they have just stood us up.” Instead of good faith negotiation, López explains that they
have received threats, death threats, via telephone. Graffiti that indicates a warning has been painted on the houses of those of us who identify as being part of this struggle. Because there are no leaders. Here, we are one for all, and all for one.414
“Look,” Antonio Reyes Romero, another anti-mining activist in the community told us,
what we want is this. The answer is simple, but doing it is the difficult part. What we want is for there to be no more mining exploitation.…And in this case it is Radius from Canada doing the exploiting. So, the government of Canada is not going to do it [stop Radius on its own]. But the people of Canada can do it. They can demand that the Canadian government tells Radius not to come and bother Guatemala.415
DIALECTICS OF RESISTANCE AND MILITARIZATION
Canadian mining expansion into Guatemala needs to be understood in the context of the country’s transition toward a new model of accumulation, the growing popular resistance and social polarization that this model has fostered domestically, and the dramatic remilitarization of politics that the state and ruling class have initiated as a way of maintaining control and reproducing the system as a whole in conditions of growing instability. Canadian investment and geopolitical orientation toward Guatemala is deeply complicit in the devastating social consequences flowing from these new configurations of power and oppression. If the post-war dynamic of 1996–2003 was one of relative demilitarization, reduction of violence, depoliticization of everyday life, and thoroughgoing defeat and disarticulation of popular social movements and the organized Left, since 2003 a new cycle of class struggle, with a heightening intensity coming both from above and below, has been set decisively into motion.416
The political economy of this new conjuncture has been characterized by a process of soaring bank profits; reconcentration of landownership in the countryside in the hands of both foreign and national capitalists, including capital tied to narco-trafficking; a turn toward capital intensive farming of sugar cane and African palm; the construction of vast hydroelectric developments; mega-highway projects, such as the Franja Transversal del Norte (a planned highway in the northwest of the country of 330 kilometers which will traverse the departments of Huehuetengango, Quiché, Alta Verapaz, and Izabal) and the Corredor Tecnológico de Guatemala (Guatemalan Technological Corridor, which is conceived as an earthbound canal connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific via a vast highway); and, most crucially, oil and mining expansion.417 The new development strategy of the ruling class has transformed the Guatemalan territory into a space of accumulation oriented toward the interest
s of national and international capitals while simultaneously spiking the severity of ecological damage, displacement of indigenous communities, and the destruction of peasant economies. Other results have been increasing levels of poverty, growing numbers of unemployed, underemployed, and informal proletarians, and a surge in migrant labourers leaving the country for Mexico and the U.S. as part of an array of complex survival strategies. All of these components together have meant a concomitant uptick in social conflict.
Mario Godínez is a university professor and member of the Movimiento Nueva República (New Republic Movement), which was in turn part of the Frente Amplio (Broad Front) that ran on a Left ticket in the September 2011 elections against the far-Right candidacy of Otto Pérez Molina of the Partido Patriota (Patriotic Party). In a 2011 interview with the Uruguayan sociologist Raúl Zibechi, Godínez succinctly captured the basic outlines of the new model of accumulation and the violence integral to its character:
The expansion of the capitalist model is coming at us from two directions: The growth of agribusiness, above all sugar cane and African palm, and the expansion of mining, and the privatization of water that goes along with it. At the same time, the country has been turned into a drug-trafficking corridor from the south to the United States, with a huge dispute over territory on the border between Guatemala and Mexico. All this creates a complex scenario. The old oligarchies have entered into alliances with drug traffickers and with transnationals. That annuls a state that was already weak, both in terms of citizen’s rights and in terms of security. A good part of the current violence is provoked by “guardias blancas,” as we already have 60,000 private security forces and 15,000 police. In reality, this so-called private security–legal or illegal–protects the mafias through a process of re-militarizing the country.418
The fallout from these economic and political developments has been an intensification of social discontent from the dispossessed, marginalized, and exploited communities. If a new bloc of social movements has thus far been unable to consistently project alternatives at the national level, there has nonetheless been fierce and growing defensive resistance at local and regional levels, led by a renewed militancy within Mayan indigenous communities. While the range of demands of new movements is eclectic and diverse, the most impressive and impactful have been those movements responding to the intertwined human dispossession and environmental degradation involved in the capitalist exploitation of natural resources, including, most centrally, mining, hydroelectric, and oil development projects.
In the five-year period stretching between 2005 and 2010 there were approximately 2,180 protests at the national level, with 242 in 2010 alone. The most common were demonstrations (82), road blockades (53), sit-ins (27), building occupations (15), and strikes (10). The most important protagonist and social subject in this terrain of unrest, according to Guatemalan sociologist Simona Violetta Yagenova, was the rural Mayan indigenous community.419 In 2011, spurred by an electoral contest in which the extreme Right was set to win, the number of protests expanded still further to 522. In 2012, an impressive 493 protests were carried out, with the tactical repertoire unfolding as follows: demonstrations (225), road blockades (90), building occupations (63), sit-ins (47), and strikes (28). Geographically, the protests tend to be strongest in the western region of the country, as well as in the capital, Guatemala City. However, in recent years the relatively quiescent eastern region, including Zacapa, Jutiapa, Jalapa, and Santa Rosa, has begun to experience processes of community resistance as new licenses for exploration have been granted to multinational mining companies.420
The generalized, if still incipient, process of principally rural indigenous resistance to the extractive industries has been met with an equally generalized process of militarization from the state and aligned paramilitary forces.421 The “accumulated violence” of genocidal war “wasn’t resolved by the peace accords,” according to Godínez:
Now security has been privatized with an alliance among the criminal groups that were active in the 1980s, formed by anti-communist soldiers and youths paid to destroy the popular movement. We call these paramilitary groups “guardias blancas.” They didn’t disappear with the accords. They acquired their own power, which now appears to be linked to international gangs, the maras, who are linked to emigrants in the United States and other Central American countries. There is a division of labor: violent gangs are linked to drug sales at the retail level while the trafficking is organized by the big cartels, such as the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico, which has positioned itself in Guatemala. Guatemalan soldiers, elite groups such as the kaibiles, along with Mexicans make up the Zeta cartel. They were contracted by the cartel to take care of business.422
In the decade leading up to 2012 there were at least 120 reported assassinations of activists resisting mining development in Guatemala.423 In her survey of social conflicts in the country in 2012, Yagenova reports that over that year there were seven assassinations of leaders in rural community activism, the massacre of seven indigenous peasants by the military in Totonicapán at a road blockade, and an attempted assassination of one more anti-mining activist leader.424
One can also chart with ease the formal militarization of Guatemalan politics since the peace accords. In 1999, reforms recommended in the peace accords that would have removed the military from responsibility for internal security were narrowly defeated. That same year, the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) won the presidential elections. In spite of the fact that a civilian, Alfonso Portillo, took the presidency, the party was founded by a former dictator, and General Efraín Ríos Montt, responsible for massacres during the war, was re-elected to congress and remained head of the FRG.
In 2000, renewing the practice of internal security, the military returned to active duty in police patrols, anti-narcotics activities, and the guarding of prisons. In 2003, military forces began their renewed involvement in forcible evictions of peasants from land occupations initiated by small peasants, including the removal of eight hundred families in the Polochic Valley in 2011. By 2005, the armed forces had become intensely implicated in the state coercion of anti-mining activism, including the murder of one man the year after soldiers shot at a crowd protesting the Canadian-owned Marlin mine. States of prevention and emergency were declared at different intervals during the presidencies of Óscar Berger and Álvaro Colom, during which military power was increased and basic constitutional rights were restricted. These interventions were motivated, above all, by the state’s desire to repress protests against mining and electricity projects. Under Colom, in 2009 the infamous Ixcán military base was reopened, a locale that saw over one hundred massacres during the war, and is now the neighbour of a planned—and contested—highway development.
In December 2010, the first state of siege (martial law) since the end of the war was declared; followed by others in 2011 and 2012. While ostensibly motivated by a need to control drug traffickers, the geographic perimeters of the zones under martial law and the timing of the directives make it clear that these were straightforwardly efforts by the state to clampdown on social protest through unmitigated military presence and force. Perhaps the most powerful expression of the remilitarization of Guatemalan politics, however, came with the September 2011 election of retired general Otto Pérez Molina, who was responsible for overseeing the massacres of highland indigenous peasantries during the war.425 According to Godínez,
a zone of militarism is being reborn in regions where natural resources are abundant and there are mega mining projects. That’s why we can say that this is militarism at the service of big multinational firms.…We’re facing a backwards shift towards dictatorship, even though there are elections. In Guatemala they are trying out ways to protect investments by neutralizing the state.426
Canadian mining companies are deeply and directly imbricated in these overarching dynamics.427 Indeed, the latest state of siege declared by the Pérez Molina regime, on May 1,
2013, turned precisely on developments fifty miles southeast of the capital city at Tahoe Resources El Escobal silver mine, one of the five largest deposits of silver in the world, where hundreds of protests had been blocking roads and engaging in other militant forms of direct action.428 Private security guards employed by the company “shot and wounded several local residents on Saturday [April 27, 2013] in San Rafael Las Flores, on the road” in front of the mine.429 Martial law was decreed by Pérez Molina for thirty days in four municipalities surrounding the El Escobal mining project—Jalapa, Mataquescuintla, and Casillas, in addition to San Rafael Las Flores. Freedom of movement, assembly, and protest, and the basic constitutional rights of detainees and prisoners were suspended. According to reports, Alberto Rotonda, the head of security at Tahoe’s mine, was “overheard giving the order to shoot, among other comments and insults, while some injured have stated that they saw him draw and fire a weapon as well.”430 Rotonda was arrested and charged with attempted homicide after he tried to flee the country.
The latest state of siege comes in the wake of a long history of conflict over the Tahoe operation. Tahoe representatives and the Guatemalan government “are hostile towards us,” explained Oscar Morales García when we visited San Rafael Las Flores in July 2012. Morales García is a member of the Local Committee in Defence of Life, which has become an important participant leading the struggle against Tahoe:
The mining company has filed complaints in the Attorney General’s office against us for kidnapping, terrorism, and coercion. We have been accused of crimes. And this is only because we want to have a consultation in the municipality. We have received death threats. And they don’t even have the courage to do it themselves face to face. They send someone to say, “hey, they’re going to kill you.”431