Salvadorans Mobilize Against Gold Mining

In the fields above Carasque, you can still find shrapnel from bombs the Salvadoran Air Force dropped on the village in the 1980s. Early this fall, signs of a new threat began appearing on the mountainside – survey tags left by a Canadian mining company searching for gold.

Benigno Orellana, the community’s representative to the Municipal Council in Nueva Trinidad, says, “Right now, the permission is for exploration, later it will be for exploitation.” He’s worried:

“If the mining companies come in, it will be worse than the twelve years of war. This is a project of death for our communities and a project of wealth for those who exploit us. They will leave behind a desert where we can’t sustain our crops, can’t feed our animals, and can’t get water to drink.”

That’s a fate people in Carasque aren’t willing to accept – after surviving decades of violence and repression, they are not about to allow a mining company to force them off their land.

Earlier this year, the Salvadoran government granted two Canadian companies – Au Martinique Silver and Intrepid Minerals – licenses for gold exploration in the department of Chalatenango, near the Honduran border. Au Martinique’s website promises investors that “El Salvador has the lowest risk profile for investment in all of Central America.” But what they haven’t taken into account is the region’s strong history of community organizing, and the lengths its people are willing to go to defend their land and their livelihood.

A Project of Death

According to Oxfam America, “Gold mining is one of the most destructive activities in the world. The production of one gold ring generates 20 tons of waste.” Cyanide, used to separate gold from ore, can be deadly in small doses. It leaches into groundwater and soil where it can persist for years.

Most people in Chalatenango are subsistence farmers, growing what they can in poor soil, and supplementing their meager earnings with money sent by relatives living and working in the U.S. Debt has already driven many families off the land, and with cheap imports from subsidized farms in the U.S. driving crop prices down, many more will have to leave the land in the years to come. Water and soil contamination from gold mining could deal the final blow to communities like Carasque that are already struggling to survive.

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