Blood of Extraction

by Todd Gordon

  The company’s obstinance towards the local communities has sparked a series of direct actions in response, including a mobilization of more than four hundred people to block the entrance to the project in January, 2012. On September 17, 2012 a transport truck carrying tubes and electrical cables along the main highway toward the mine was intercepted by community residents who confiscated the materials. The next day, deposits from the mine were burned up along with a transport vehicle. Two months later, when authorities attempted to hold a forum in the community of Mataquescuintla, enraged community residents burned down a hotel and looted dynamite from the mine.432 Amadeo de Jesus Rodríguez Aguilar has been a leading activist in the Local Committee in Defence of Life, prompting a spurious Tahoe claim that he kidnapped their security personnel after he peacefully disrupted a meeting of shareholders who were visiting the area from North America. He wanted to challenge the rosy picture of the mine’s popularity painted by Kevin McArthur, former president of Goldcorp and founder of Tahoe Resources in 2010, but the company used the incident to incite a clampdown on the activities of opponents, knowing full well that the government and its security apparatus are strong sympathizers with the Canadian mining industry.433 “Tahoe’s silver, minerals and gold in San Rafael are now stained with blood,” notes Morales García. “It may be true that the government authorized an exploitation license, but what would be called a social license for Minera San Rafael doesn’t exist here. It doesn’t exist and it never will.”434

  The expansion of Canadian mining capital into Guatemala in the 2000s has been constitutive of the latest cycle of class struggle centred in the Guatemalan countryside.435 Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than in the case of the Marlin mine. As Marlin went into production, and inspired the rapid growth of exploration, without consultation with local communities, the anti-mining movement picked up steam and spread. Between 2005 and 2008, for example, within the wider array of social movement activities there were 1,482 protests specifically related to opposition to mining.436 The bulk of the movement is comprised of small farmers from poor indigenous communities organized to defend their land and ecologies. One of the more militant and grassroots organizations formed to resist the mining industry, the Consejo de los Pueblos de Occidente (Council of the Peoples of the West), is fighting dispossession under the slogan of “In Defence of the Territory.”437 It is devoted to community-based direct action, rather than spending its time lobbying the government and mining corporations, or focusing principally on legal challenges through the courts.438

  The ongoing support Goldcorp receives from the Canadian state has translated into virtual impunity surrounding its practices vis-à-vis the Guatemalan government. It has been the mining-affected indigenous communities themselves that have organized against and directly challenged the company. Opponents have engaged in a variety of actions against the mine to try and physically stop it from moving ahead—often at great personal risk. Beginning in December 2004, protesters blocked a convoy of mining equipment destined for Marlin for forty-two days. The blockade ended when police, under orders from then-President Oscar Berger, attacked it, firing on protesters. One protester, Raúl Castro Bocel, was shot and killed, and dozens more were injured. In January 2005, a local Bishop led an anti-mine protest of three thousand people in the provincial capital, and has subsequently faced death threats as a result. The initial blockade and state response led to the formation of the Regional Council of Indigenous Authorities of the Western Highlands, which demanded respect for the indigenous communities’ territories; prior consultation with indigenous communities before any mining projects commence, including exploration; and an end to criminalization.439 These organizations of resistance persisted in the face of ongoing repression. In March 2005, for example, local resident Álvaro Sánchez was shot dead in the street walking home from a bar by a security guard working for Glamis. That same month, a vehicle belonging to an indigenous leader was torched, and he and two other anti-mine activists received death threats.440

  In January 2007, representatives from communities opposed to the Marlin Mine submitted a petition to the company listing their grievances. Their complaint was dismissed by the company and, according to the community representatives, the activists were insulted by company officials. On their way home from the company offices, the community members were attacked by Goldcorp security. Rocks were thrown at them, guns were fired, and security tried to force one person into a car. The activists managed to defend themselves, but when they reported the incident to police no action was taken on their behalf. After learning of Goldcorp’s response to the petition, roughly six hundred people from towns that neighbour the Marlin mine gathered that same day and began to blockade the roads to the company’ installations. The National Civil Police’s riot squad was called, and was soon joined by upwards of five hundred Guatemalan soldiers. Despite the state’s aggressive show of force, the blockades were held for more than ten days, forcing the company to agree to negotiations. But as soon as the blockades were lifted the company declared it was no longer going to negotiate, and instead initiated penal charges against twenty-two local residents. Seven of those people had arrest warrants issued against them, and, according to some community activists, Goldcorp urged the Guatemalan government to lay charges against them.441 Two community leaders were violently detained by National Civil Police officers—transported in Goldcorp vehicles—at their home in the early morning hours. However, in a rare positive turn of events, which speaks to how outrageous the charges were, the judges overseeing the trial eventually acquitted five of the seven and put the other two on probation and levied US$500 fines.442

  Despite Goldcorp’s heavy-handed approach to defending its investment, opposition to the project did not subside. In 2007, anti-mining activists in the municipality of Sipakapense spread their resistance to the electoral arena, competing in municipal elections through the Comité Cívico Sipakapense (Sipakapense Civic Committee). Led by an anti-mining activist, their “No to Mining” mandate proved popular and they defeated the well-funded pro-mining candidates. While intimidation of mining opponents did not stop, the persistence and popularity of the resistance forced Goldcorp to shift tactics slightly and more aggressively dangle their pro-mining carrots in the region. The company opened offices in five different communities and offered cash to residents for household or community projects. To counter the results of damning environmental studies conducted by multidisciplinary teams of scientists on the hazardous contaminating impact of the mine on local water supplies, the company financed an “independent” water analysis by a front organization called the Communitarian Environmental Monitoring Organization, which unsurprisingly found no contamination downstream from the mine.443 Goldcorp also paid lobbyists to go door-to-door to promote mining and encourage people to sell their land. Taking advantage of the poverty in the region, Goldcorp managed to purchase the loyalty of some residents through financial assistance or job offers, and has used this to claim they have community support and to drive a wedge into the communities.444

  “Goldcorp insisted that the mine improved local welfare, since 64 percent of the 1,900 people working in the Marlin mine were said to be from San Miguel and Sipakapa,” notes sociologist Leire Urkidi. “However, increased alcoholism, prostitution and rape, division among people, and the criminalization of resistance were other social impacts that were mentioned in the area.”445 This view was born out by Florencio Yoc, a community anti-mining activist we spoke to in July 2012. “So, that’s the problem here in San Miguel,” Yoc told us, “the Marlin mine company only comes to create more division among families.”446

  In spite of obstacles created through repression at the hands of private security and the Guatemalan army, as well efforts at cooptation through petty handouts on the part of Goldcorp, the resistance continued to grow. “Led by the priest and some local authorities,” the sociologist Leire Urkidi explains,

  the resistance to mining spread throu
gh Sipakapa’s communities. Several leaders from Sipakapa visited other mining areas in Central America, such as Valle de Siria in Honduras, and engaged in regional networks against mining. The Central American Anti-Mining Network was a key information and discourse source for Guatemala’s incipient movement.447

  In June 2008, Gregoria Pérez, a local Mayan farmer opposed to Marlin, intentionally damaged a power line Goldcorp runs across her property to feed its mill. When Goldcorp employees went to fix the line they were blocked by anti-Marlin activists. As the fight over the powerline, and the mine more generally, continued in July, Secretary of State (Foreign Affairs and International Trade) Helen Guergis visited Guatemala where she met with representatives of Canadian investors. The press release announcing her visit describes Guatemala as an important partner of Canada in the region.448

  A year later, in June 2009, after its efforts to purchase land from residents failed, Goldcorp illegally brought exploration equipment and vehicles onto community and private property of the Mayan Mam population of Sacmuj in the village of Ágel. After receiving complaints from local residents, Goldcorp signed an agreement to withdraw its equipment, vehicles, and workers on June 12. At the same time, Goldcorp requested and received a police and army presence, along with private company security, to protect its workers. When the company failed to uphold the agreement, exploration equipment and a vehicle were burned.449 Tensions continued to mount after that incident, including an attempt to assassinate four community leaders in San Miguel Ixtahuacan in August 2009, when a truck tried to run them over while they were walking along a road near the ADISMI offices in Máquivil.450 On July 7, 2010 in Ágel, San Miguel Ixtahuacán, an opposition activist was badly wounded after being shot in the head in her home. The attack came after she had received several threats for her participation in anti-Goldcorp movement. Around the time of this shooting, several other activists were run off of local roads by cars.451 Then, the following September, Goldcorp again attempted to enter Sacmuj in order to expand its operations in the region.452

  In San José Nueva Esperanza we spoke to Diadora Hernández, a leading Mayan peasant opponent of the Marlin mine who was shot in the face in early 2012. She now has a prosthetic eye and has lost hearing in her right ear. “I would like the company to leave,” Hernández said,

  because now there are going to be more problems because they started to explore here below my land. And they [the family on the land below hers] have not planted corn, and the rumour is that they are going to sell [their land to the Goldcorp]…there is no tranquillity. I am sad.

  Hernández has not been silenced, however, maintaining her role in the struggle and appealing to the government to act in the interests of the community, and against the mine, out of conscience:

  And what is the government going to do? Is it going to sell us to the mine? And us? What are we going to do?…I always thought it would be better for me to go talk to the government. Why don’t they listen to us?453

  As in the cases of Tahoe and Goldcorp, Skye Resources has also been a Canadian subject of anti-mining resistance in Guatemala, as well as the source of state and paramilitary repression of popular movements. Skye’s mining permit covered land that includes seventeen Maya Q’eqchi communities. In early 2007, five communities in the area were violently evicted by several hundred military, police, and company security. In Lote 8, armed forces shot tear gas at residents, who fled into the forest as their homes and crops were destroyed. When residents returned over the next week to start rebuilding, the various armed forces came back and destroyed one hundred make-shift huts and, while laying siege to the community, soldiers, police, and company security gang-raped at least five women.454 The original eviction at Lote 8 was partly captured on film by Canadian doctoral student Steven Schnoor. Schnoor’s video includes a woman protesting her eviction and still shots of the violent expulsions. When questioned about the video and violent evictions by the NGO Breaking the Silence, Canadian ambassador, Kenneth Cook, resorted to attacking Schnoor’s character with wild claims that the footage was fake: the woman in the video, he insisted, was an actor and the still shots were taken during the civil war in the 1980s. When his effort to get a retraction and apology from Cook and Foreign Affairs failed, Schnoor successfully sued them for damages, the Canadian judge finding that Cook’s comments were “defamatory” and “reckless.”455

  Feeling pressure from the indigenous communities and growing international attention as a result of the violence, Skye Resources sold the project to Hudbay Minerals in 2008. But neither the resistance nor the violence abated. In late September 2009, violence and intimidation escalated against residents of Las Nubes, leading to the assassination of one Hudbay opponent. In the same period, Hudbay security forces along with police and, according to community members, paramilitary forces visited Las Nubes and told residents to leave, destroyed a community structure, and fired live ammunition at residents. Then on September 29, security forces attacked a blockade set up in front of the Hudbay complex, several protesters were badly injured, and Adolfo Ich Chub, a Maya Q’eqchi teacher from nearby La Union who had two weeks earlier denounced the Fenix mine in a public meeting, was kidnapped and then hacked to death by Hudbay security. Several hours later, in the early hours of September 30, a mini-bus carrying Maya Q’eqchi leaders was machine-gunned, leaving several people severely injured. One of those wounded, Pablo Bac, whose father organized against EXMIBAL until he was disappeared in 1981, suffered ongoing health complications and died the following March.456 Hudbay responded to the bloodshed by arguing that its security “showed great restraint and acted only in self defense.”457

  This was self-evidently a message to mining opponents that mining interests are willing to employ terror strategies echoing the days of Guatemala’s civil war. Apparently without irony, the Mining Association of Canada (MAC) awarded Hudbay with its 2009 “Towards Sustainable Mining” award, which was presented to the company on Parliament Hill during MAC’s annual “Mining Day on the Hill.”458 Popular opposition persisted all the same, and in early 2011 Hudbay suffered a rare legal setback when the Constitutional Court of Guatemala agreed with one community in the permit area, Lote 9, that it had collective rights to its lands and the government must issue it a land title.459 At the same time, negligence lawsuits were being brought against Hudbay in a Toronto court by the sexual assault victims, the widow of Adolfo Ich, and another community member, German Choc, who was shot and paralyzed by security forces.460

  In a throwback to Cold War ideology, it is commonplace for the mining corporations and the Guatemalan state to dismiss anti-mining protests as the phenomena of a discredited minority, little more than malcontents who have been incited by outside agitators, often international environmental NGOs. One of the more effective forms of rebutting this dismissal has been the grassroots organization of dozens of community referenda, or consultations, in which community members have been able to voice their views. Since 2005, at least sixty such consultations have been held, with Guatemalans voting decisively against future mining projects taking place in their communities. Over seven hundred thousand people, in a country of 14 million, have participated in municipal referenda and said no to mining.461 In one particularly telling indication of the explicit support enjoyed by the anti-mining movement, in the department of Huehuetenango, where the most exploration licences are to be found, all municipalities except for the capital have voted resoundingly against mining projects, with high levels of participation in the consultations.462 On one level, these referenda are based on Convention 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO), which requires that prior to the implementation of legal measures or developmental projects that could impact indigenous peoples the signatory state must carry out consultations “with the objective of achieving agreement or consent to the proposed measures.” Convention 169 also requires that “relocation shall take place only with their free and informed consent.”463

  On another
deeper level, the consultations are rooted in activist efforts in often impoverished and historically oppressed indigenous communities to renew a sense of grassroots democratic participation, self-organization, and governance over the lives of their communities and the critical economic activities that will shape them. “We think that one main principle of the movement of consultations is that the means cannot be separated from the ends,” said one representative of the Council of the Peoples of the West:

  We truly think that this is one distinctive characteristic of communitarian consultations.…We think that the first step is to organize ourselves and protest against the existing order, against the transnational consortium, against economic and sexual exploitation, against racism, etc. But to organize ourselves in a manner where the means are consistent with the ends, and where we could create the desired future human relationships. It means to organize ourselves without a centralized authority, without charismatic leadership, in a manner where we could create the ideal egalitarian society of the future.464

  The response of both the mining industry and the Guatemalan state to these initiatives has been to dismiss or ignore them altogether. In June 2005, the community of Sipakapa organized the country’s first community referendum on the Marlin project, and the mine was rejected by 98 percent of voters. Glamis ignored the results.465 Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled that the referendum against the Marlin Mine was unconstitutional and therefore was not binding on mining companies or the government. To many, this is seen as a flagrant violation of indigenous rights as expressed in international law, to which the Guatemalan state is a party. The ILO’s Committee of Experts, discussed above in relation to the Marlin mine, has specifically targeted Guatemala’s mining regime for criticism due to its systematic violation of indigenous rights. The ILO has called on the Guatemalan government to “neither grant nor renew any licence for the exploration and exploitation of natural resources…while the participation and consultation provided for by the convention are not being carried out.”466