Fortuna Silver And The Oaxaca Uprising
A FJA Interview with Ed Williams conducted by Marc Choyt, Director, FJA USA
FJA: First, let’s start with your background as a journalist. Who have you worked for and where are you working now?
Ed: I work mainly in public radio—I wrote my first story for NPR in 2006, on U.S. coca eradication policy in Peru. I’m currently working as Senior Reporter and Public Affairs Director for KDNK, an NPR station in Carbondale, Colorado.
I’ve also written for Texas Monthly, the Austin American-Statesman, and others. My story on the Oaxaca conflict ran in the October 2011 issue of Z Magazine.
FJA: What initially brought you down to Mexico?
Ed: I was researching indigenous communications networks in the 2006 Oaxaca uprising for my MA thesis at UT Austin. The mining conflict happened to erupt while I was there, so my focus changed to that issue.
FJA: What were your findings?
Ed: They weren’t pretty. NAFTA opened up Mexico’s mineral resources to Canadian mining corporations, which are some of the most powerful in the world. Mexico’s lax environmental and labor enforcement mean that those Canadian companies can reap enormous profits by skirting on pollution control and safety standards. The state government suppresses protesters with police and plainclothes paramilitary operatives.
Oaxaca has a very large Zapotec and Mixtec demographic. They are mostly rural, living on the same communal land they fought for in the Revolution of 1910. Many of them are subsistence farmers, which makes them much more vulnerable to contamination from mining operations like the one in San José del Progreso.
When the Fortuna Silver Mines arrived there, they secured the permits to a huge swath of indigenous land in secret meetings with Mexican officials. The population didn’t realize the mine was coming until they saw the heavy equipment arriving; by that time Fortuna had the rights to mine their land as they saw fit.
FJA: How are the indigenous people being affected by the silver mining? Can you give specific examples and locations?
Ed: The San José mine just went into operation, so it will take a little more time to gauge what the environmental effects are, and who knows if there will ever be a scientific analysis—one concerning thing, though, is that the company built the tailings pond (to store slurry and waste) just a few hundred yards from the village’s only freshwater reservoir.
There are many examples of similar projects turning out very bad for the communities, though. One is San Jerónimo Taviche seven miles from San José. Toxic byproducts from older mining projects poisoned the soil and groundwater there, and after losing their farmland, many residents moved to urban slums in the capitol city. I was able to get toxicology reports from cattle in that area that died from cadmium, mercury, arsenic and lead poisoning. Losing a cow is devastating for a subsistence farmer.
At another mine site 45 miles to the north, Fortuna’s former partner on the San José Project, Continuum Resources, contaminated the soil with heavy metals and dried up 13 of the 20 springs in the indigenous village of Calpulalpan de Mendez.
Fortuna has not made the environmental impact statement available for the San José project.
Aside from environmental questions, the mine has created severe social conflict in the community. Secret meetings between mining reps and local politicians, alleged payoffs to mine supporters, and the manipulation of indigenous government have created tensions that have erupted into violence on several occasions.
FJA: Have the people organized in any way to oppose the mining?
Ed: Anyone familiar with Oaxaca will tell you that the peasants there don’t take abuse quietly. An organized resistance movement developed there in the early stages of the mine’s development, due largely to the local government’s complicity in the operation and its refusal to address the community’s concerns.
There have been several uprisings—one, in 2009, shut the mine down completely (a violent police raid returned the property to the mining company). There have been intermittent attacks against the mine since then, all of them nonviolent as far as I’m aware, such as sabotaging the pipeline the mine uses for water.
The indigenous anti-mining activists have organized themselves into a group called the Coordinadora for short, and have aligned themselves with the teachers’ movement that shut down the state after the violent repression of a peaceful protest in 2006. The Catholic Church has also come down on the side of the indigenous activists, though one outspoken priest was kidnapped and tortured by mine supporters and later arrested by police under the false charge of inciting violence.
FJA: Do they have any recourse with either the government or Fortuna?
Ed: Technically they could. Mexico is a signatory to the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People, which many believe to be violated by the mining company. There are other legal questions that could potentially come down on the side of the protesters—for example, the mining company was legally required to get a written agreement from the indigenous ejido council before their permit could be valid. That never happened, so many think the mine is operating illegally.
But historically it’s been very difficult for poor Mexicans to take this kind of issue to court. The people affected by the mine are among the most marginalized in the country. Step one would probably be a qualified law firm that would take the case pro bono, and who knows if the Mexican court system would hear the case, through.
FJA: Do you know where Fortuna sells its silver?
Ed: I wish I did, but it’s very tough to track the silver once it leaves the mining site. The raw materials get sent off to smelters in Northern Mexico, then the refined ore goes on to buyers in China, the U.S. and anywhere else you can imagine. There’s so little transparency with the system that it would take a lot more resources than I have to find out the places the silver and gold end up.
FJA: What can we in the jewelry world do to help?
Ed: Tell your friends—one of the biggest problems with conflicts like this one is a lack of awareness on the part of the international public. If people begin to become aware of the abuses taking place, maybe the mining companies will start to work with less impunity.
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