The last two days I spent in the mountains in northern Huehuetenango, where a series of community consultations over mineral mining took place on Tuesday, in mainly Mayan Akateca communities in the farmlands surrounding San Rafael la Independencia. Thanks to a friend from NISGUA I had the opportunity to witness this rare moment of community gathering and to document the events of the day.
La Consulta Comunitaria de Buena Fe (‘The Community Referendum of Good Faith’) took place on the background of the opposition of Guatemalan communities to international megaprojects such as hydroelectric dams and especially chemical mineral mining operations. On such is the Marlin mine, an open-pit gold mine in the San Miguel Ixtahuacán and Sipakapa municipalities of San Marcos to the south, and since its opening in 2005 the subject of massive local opposition. And with good reason, as the impact on the local environment has been nothing short of disastrous. With little or no local consultation or consent prior to beginning construction, the company behind the Marlin mine, Montana Exploradora, pressured communities of San Miguel Ixtahuacán into selling their fertile ancestral lands, and people found themselves uprooted and displaced to infertile lands they couldn’t farm. From then it got worse; the mine is an open-pit mining operation where gold is extracted from the ore by a chemical process using cyanide and enough water per hour to sustain an average Guatemalan family of the area for 22 years. What follows is like the Plagues of Egypt unleashed upon the lands: water depletion and contamination, structural damages to houses due to underground vibrations, health issues such as vicious skin infections in children and a rise of cancer cases. As the mining cmopany has increased its use of security personnel, the area has also seen an increase of disappearences and mysterious deaths. In San Miguel Ixtahuacán, the sense of vigilance is mixed also with a sense of fear and oppression. When I visited a community in San Miguel Ixtahuacán with a big group, we were unexpectantly met by armed San Marcos police who insisted to escort us on the entire journey on the pretext of protecting us; it felt more like surveillance, as I think it was, on request of someone else.
The mine in San Marcos is owned by Goldcorp, a Canadian mining giant of which Montana is a subsidiary. Goldcorp has continually denied any responsability and in biased Environmental and Human Rights Impacts Assessments claim there’s no relation between their mining operations and the environmental damages and health issues of the surrounding communities. But if you ask any independent organizations you’ll hear a different story, or better yet, if you ask the people. The local opposition movement against mining in Guatemala have in part risen out of the local resistance in neighbouring Sipakapa to Goldcorp’s operations that are expanding from San Miguel Ixtahuacán into Sipakapa. For almost five years Sipakapa has resisted Goldcorp’s influence, witnessing as they could the destruction being done to Ixtahuacán. Since mid 2005 the residents have organized community consultations where they put the mining to a popular vote which is then presented to Congress. The consultas should be seen as part of the larger resistance movement in Guatemala, but they form an important and inspirational capacity. In selling off their land piece by piece to foreign investors it gets harder and harder for the government to ignore the signatures of hundreds of thousands of farmers’ votes against mining licensing to foreign companies, as more and more community consultas take place around in the country.
Back in Huehue, I spent the night in the casa of Don Miguel, a local patriarch of Caserio Canicham, a small settlement of ten or so houses. Most of the people speak Akateco and little or no Spanish, but during dinner with Miguel we did have some great conversations, in which the inevitable question soon popped up: Whether there were work to be found in Europe. Don Miguel worked in the fields for 30 years, but family in the States – everyone has some family in the States or Mexico – have made it possible for him to build a colourful annex to his house here in the hills. The toilet’s still a tiny shed down before the cornfields, but I guess you have to prioritize. Empathetically (at least I’d like to think) I guess I said something about the World economic crisis ‘n’ all, and that it’s probably tough to find work anywhere.
The next morning at the consulta most of Canicham showed up prepared. I was acting as an independent observer to the proceedings, which I did as best I could, and snapping pictures when I could get around to it. Although I did attract a fair bit of attention, being the only outsider present in a group of forty-eight people, I think I balanced well enough between being a photographer and some kind of authority of international standing and was accepted as such .. perhaps a bit over the top, as the assembly secretary Francisco Diego gave off the impression I’d flewn in directly from Europe to oversee the consulta (though he could have done that as a courtesy towards me, he’s that kind of guy). In any case, I won’t hide a certain pride in knowing that my name was meticulously written into the community act to be entered into the municipal records.
If my presence at the consulta caused any uneasiness or stifled curiosity from the elders -I don’t know which- I think it fell apart after goofing around with the kids for a few hours. Of course they all turned out to be incredibly resourceful, which I think is the case with most kids who grew up under pretty dire straits, like life in this countryside; after our shared efforts of building a tiny church out of twigs, they were suddenly all over the place finding ever more unlikely construction materials and the church had turned into several towers of babel.
So this was what the consulta was all about: everyone was there. Every head a vote, and it was made by the book and with pride. A hand raised in favor, a hand raised against. It was a popular vote, direct democracy in one of is purest forms and I’m glad I was there to witness the members of a small community not yet affected by mining, unanimously say no to the exploitation of their ancestral lands.
Pictures will be up soon.
