Students oppose Canadian mining company in Mexico [McGill Daily, 21.02.2008]

The McGill Daily

Thursday, February 21, 2008

By James Albaugh

Students oppose Canadian mining company in Mexico
Metallica Resources dismisses concerns that cyanide may enter local water supply

Students gathered at Vinyl Lounge last Wednesday for a fundraiser to support the opposition movement against Canadian mining company Metallica Resources’s operation of a mine in central Mexico.

The Montreal branch of the Broad Opposition Front (FAO-Montreal) and Concordia’s Mexican Students Association hosted the party to raise funds for a resistance cultural festival in Cerro de San Pedro, a village just hundreds of metres from the mine site. The FAO is a community organization from San Pedro opposed to the mine.

The opposition movement, which includes the FAO, Amnesty International, Mining Watch and KAIROS, a church-based organization that advocates social justice, has accused Metallica of a wide array of abuses, including corruption, environmental damage, and human rights violations.

“The goal of the movement is to shut the mine down, straight up,” said Cleve Higgins, FAO-Montreal member and McGill U2 History student.

Metallica, whose investors include CIBC, operates the open pit gold and silver mine through its wholly-owned Mexican subsidiary, Minera San Xavier (MSX). Metallica and MSX maintain that the mine meets all legal and environmental standards.

The cultural festival was an annual tradition well before the mine controversy, and the opposition movement has been organizing supporters at this festival for the past several years.

This year’s event was originally scheduled for March 1, but Metallica surprised organizers this year by scheduling a counter-festival on the same date as the original event, forcing the community and its supporters to postpone the festival by one week.

“They’re just trying to co-opt this cultural event,” Higgins said.

Geoffrey Rowan, Managing Director of Ketchum Public Relations Canada, a company Metallica hires for public relations, said the opposition has co-opted a long-standing folk festival.

“The controversy started four years ago when the town’s then-mayor opened it up or encouraged opponents of the mine to organize at the festival,” Rowan said.

Rowan described a scene in which student activists and outside agitators came into the village to protest the mine.

“It turned into a giant rave with lots of drug use and alcohol and loud music,” he said.

Don’t drink the water

In 2004, the Supreme Tribunal of Fiscal and Administrative Justice revoked Metallica’s permit to operate the mine in response to environmental concerns from local groups. However, neither the federal nor the state government enforced the ruling, and Metallica has since applied for the many permits required to begin operations.

Metallica uses a cyanide-leaching process to extract gold and silver from the mountain. Cerro de San Pedro is near the only aquifer in the area, which supplies water to the city’s home state of San Luis Potosí.

“If there’s any leak, there’s a high risk of [cyanide] getting into the ground water,” Higgins said.

Rowan maintained that MSX follows procedures to avoid water contamination.

“When properly done, it’s a safe process. Metallica does it properly,” he said.

Among the fundraiser’s attendees was Ricardo Enrique Rivera Sierra, a lawyer with FAO currently seeking political asylum in Montreal. Rivera Sierra claims that on April 14, 2007, several men beat him until he lost consciousness. The opposition believes that Metallica hired the men in an attempt to suppress dissent.

Rowan dismissed the claims.

Riviera Sierra said he was threatened with arrest after allegations that he incited several young people to commit vandalism. Government officials cited several confessions that pointed to Rivera Sierra, though Riviera Sierra contends that the government trumped up charges and that the confessions came under duress.

“They issued false charges against my person,” Rivera Sierra said in Spanish. “The media spread dishonest accusations against me.”

He left San Luis Potosí for Montreal on May 24.

FAO-Montreal and Concordia’s Mexican Students Association plan to hold another event at Mile End’s Volver Café on March 8, the same day as the opposition’s cultural festival in San Pedro. This event will showcase 30 posters of the village of San Pedro and a documentary, La Mutilación de San Pedro según San Xavier, a reference to the village and MSX.