What’s a gold pendant or ring worth in the grand scheme of things? If you’re living in the path of a Canadian gold mining company in Azacualpa, Honduras, the cost includes digging up a local cemetery where six communities have been burying their dead for two centuries.
Since the late 90s, three successive Canadian mining companies have operated the open-pit San Andres gold mine in the highlands of western Honduras. The mine’s history hasn’t been pretty: cyanide spills, health complaints and forced displacements.
Its latest owner, Toronto-based Aura Minerals Inc., which acquired the mine in 2009, announced earlier this month that it had finally cut a deal with the community, securing a “social license agreement” around moving the cemetery and relocating 139 families from the community into new homes in the vicinity.
Company CEO James Bannantine heralded the agreement as a glittering example of corporate social responsibility, saying in a statement to the press: “We have aligned ourselves with international, Canadian and Honduran law and ensured good governance and respect for the environment, employment and human rights.”
But not everyone sees the deal with quite the same lustre.
Back in June, Honduras Solidarity Network (HSN) published a 28-page report chronicling years of land rights violations, bad faith negotiations and community resistance surrounding the Aura-owned mine.
Things really started heating up in 2014 after residents protested the expansion of the mine with a two-week blockade. Security forces, including Honduran military and police, responded with tear gas. Nineteen community members were arrested. Others beaten during the protest. Frustrated residents facing months of stalled negotiations mounted another blockade last year, after which there were more arrests. When the blockade resumed this spring, three members of the local environmental committee received death threats, according to HSN.
“The so-called agreement has been made under coercion,” HSN coordinator Karen Spring tells NOW.
Resisting large resource projects has become especially deadly in the Latin American country since the military-backed coup that ousted left-wing president Manuel Zelaya in 2009. Almost 30 per cent of the country’s land became earmarked for mining, leading to an explosion of confrontations with affected communities. Between 2010 and 2014, 101 environmentalists have been killed in Honduras for their opposition to various projects.
Indigenous and feminist activist Berta Cáceres was murdered for her opposition to a hydro dam project, not a mine, but a report by non-profit Global Witness notes that Cáceres’s case is “emblematic of the systemic targeting of environmental defenders in Honduras.”
In the wake of her murder earlier this year, a delegation of Canadian First Nations women leaders and legal and human rights activists visited Azacualpa in April and came face to face with 180 workers at Aura’s mine, some reportedly armed with machetes and throwing rocks. Eight people were injured in the confrontation. The delegates called on the Canadian government to do more to defend the villagers fighting the mine.
Bev Sellars, chair of First Nations Women Advocating Responsible Mining, said at the time that “Canada has blood on its hands, and unless things change significantly, a bad situation will only continue to get worse in Honduras and in other parts of Latin America where community activists are regularly criminalized and killed.”
MiningWatch Canada’s Jen Moore says Canadian mining companies are more culpable than most in Honduras. Moore says the Harper government lobbied for a new law that lifted a long-standing moratorium on new mining permits, a policy that Moore says “would have been politically and socially untenable” prior to the coup.
Pressure on the Trudeau government to rectify the situation in Honduras and throughout the Americas has been mounting. In April, close to 200 Latin American and international organizations sent the PM an open letter calling for sweeping changes to Canada’s global mining sector.
One of the high-profile signatories, Padre Ismael Moreno, aka Father Melo, a Jesuit priest, radio host and human rights champion, travelled to Canada last month to urge the PM to respect those Hondurans “who have said no to large-scale mining.”
Representatives from Global Affairs Canada’s Office of the Extractive Sector Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Counsellor visited Azacualpa in July to hear the community’s concerns firsthand, but Moore says the CSR office has no power to do more than mediate dialogue in cases of conflict.
Hedme Castro, a coordinator with Honduran-based ACI-Participa (Association for Participatory Citizenship) met with reps from CSR during their trip and last week wrote to the office expressing her disappointment “that [your office’s expression of] understanding has not been reflected in the definitive suspension of the mining company.”
Diana Khaddaj, a spokesperson for the department of Global Affairs, acknowledges that “Canadians expect our businesses operating abroad to respect human rights, labour rights, all applicable laws, and to conduct their activities in a socially and environmentally responsible manner.”
As to what Canada’s doing on that front, Khaddaj says, “The Minister of International Trade [Chrystia Freeland] and Global Affairs Canada are actively meeting with industry, stakeholders and with the CSR Counsellor for the Extractive Sector to evaluate how to strengthen our practices.”
But critics say voluntary corporate social responsibility amounts to self-policing unless Canada brings in a mining act like the one Liberal MP John McKay unsuccessfully tabled in 2009 and again in 2014 (and Trudeau voted for as an opposition MP). The alternative is laws allowing communities like Azacualpa to use our courts to pursue criminal charges against companies that commit abuses. In December, BC’s Supreme Court ruled against hearing a civil claim launched by half a dozen Guatemalans against Tahoe Resources. Meanwhile, three cases against Toronto’s HudBay Minerals are still gradually proceeding toward hearings.
Says Spring, “This is a Canadian problem that needs to be dealt with in Canada.”
ecoholic@nowtoronto.com | @ecoholicnation
By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.
