Damage from the Marlin Mine

During my walks around the city of San Miguel Ixtahuacan, I am continually acosted by young boys who want to shine my shoes. The shoes are so covered with dust, and who knows what else, from trekking around San Miguel and Sipacapa that the boys cannot tell that they are not the type of shoes you polish. They are a metaphor for what the people of those municipalities have to put up with.

A couple of days before I left San Miguel, I finally had the chance to visit the Marlin mine. It takes up about 100,000 hectares, which have been completely deforested, and is scarred by a huge hole in the middle, which gets bigger by the day. While I was there, workers from the mine were cutting down more trees around the outside, preparing for further expansion into land abutting the current property. In the middle of the mine property is a huge lake filled with contaminated water (because they use water and cianide to process the ore).

Locals say that lake was never there before, and that they keep making it bigger. The mine says it can contain the water, but can that really be true? Can they really keep the lake from getting into the groundwater or rivers? One independent study has already been done that shows one of the local rivers is contaminated with runoff from the mine.

Worse, the mine uses some preposterous amount of water daily. I have read 250,000 gallons. A day. During the dry season, which is 6 months, that water is not being replenished. So in conversations with the locals, they told me that their underground springs are drying up. I saw only one of the dried up ones, but they say that 6 have dried up in one town alone. These springs are their water source for crops and animals. They also told me that trees are dying, and I had already noticed that. It is weird...just driving around the area you can see dried up trees.

The mine paid 4,000 quetzales (about $530) per cuerda (I have no idea what a cuerda is, but it is a small plot) of land. Even though the government and the mine already knew that there was gold and silver on the land, the people were never informed, so they sold their land for market price, but for far, far less than what it was really worth. They also say that the mine pressured them into selling..told them that they had already signed agreements with the government, and if the people did not sell, they would be forced off.

The bottom line is that if the water depletion continues, the people around the mine will be forced to dislocate, and where do you think they will go? I had a meeting on Friday with representatives from the diocesan peace and ecology commission and with the organization representing indigenous rights in the area, because they wanted to talk about whether permanent accompaniment would be feasible, because they have all been threatened with violence by members of the mine security force, and the Guatemalan military is in San Miguel, and the US military is in San Marcos.

Anyway, during the course of the meeting the guy from the diocese told me that in the San Marcos region they are also facing US-funded aerial crop spraying that is killing all the plants in its path, according to local campesinos who have lost their crops. The military says they are combatting the Mediterrean fruit fly. So they just fly overpeoples´ land and spray everything, without the knowledge and consent of the people living there. Just like Colombia. I am sure they suspect coca or marijuana, and are using the fly as an excuse.

It feels like the same story everywhere I go. And the US government is never the good guy, much as we wish and think we are. We are not the only evil party...the Guatemalan government comes off pretty bad, too, not to mention the World Bank and Canadian mining companies. But the US government is my government, and we are a democracy, and therefore I am responsible.