Canadian Mining Firms invade, Chiapas, Mexico brutalizing the indigenous people

Chiapas, Mexico, Latin America: Rights-violations by mining firms
24 April, 2012 – SIPAZ blog

On 24 April in a press-conference held in the cultural space El Paliacate, Gustavo Castro from the organization Other Worlds Chiapas AC and Luis Hernández from the Digna Ochoa base Committee for Human Rights read a communiqué from the Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4).

The communiqué notes that “Mining firms invade our territories, the majority of them Canadian, and they violate all our basic rights. Throughout the Mesoamerican region they have caused displacement from people’s lands and livelihoods, generating grave impacts on health, as in the case of Valle de Siria in Honduras, San Miguel Ixtahuacán in Guatemala, and Carrizalillo in Mexico.”

The communiqué notes as well that “In their passage through our territories they have left aquifers poisoned, communities and families divided; they have provoked deforestation, loss of biodiversity, and loss of food sovereignty for campesino and indigenous regions. They have contributed to the corruption of the local and national authorities in our countries, and they are principal actors in the growing repression and criminalization to which we have been subjected by our governments, when we demand respect for our rights or denounce the environmental injustices they carry out. As a result of this, activists, human-rights defenders from Panama, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico have been incarcerated, threatened with death, injured, and even murdered.”

In light of this context, they enumerated a series of demands and announced several initiatives that the M4 suggests be carried out against mining extraction, including a campaign against the ColdCorp transnational firm. …more