by IRENE CASELLI

The dictatorship that forced Juan Carlos Chirgwin out of Chile ended 16 years ago, but the Outremont resident is worried that a new, profit-driven regime may be threatening his native country.

When he found out last year that the Canadian gold company Barrick Gold Corp. planned to move three millenary glaciers to open up a gold mine in northern Chile, alarm bells rang in his head.

He got together with other Chilean Quebecers and formed the Opposition Campaign to the Pascua-Lama Project Working Group. With support from around 20 organizations, including Greenpeace and MiningWatch Canada, last month the group sent a letter to Chile’s former president Ricardo Lagos, asking him to stop the project.

Ecocide in waiting

Meanwhile, executives at the company’s Toronto headquarters were celebrating the merger with their former rival Placer Dome, which in January won Barrick the title of the world’s largest gold producer. As they reiterated to the media that the project was environmentally-friendly and the ice could be relocated with simple, low-tech measures, executives were confident that the mine would be approved soon.

But neither side was overly enthusiastic when, last month, the Chilean environmental authorities finally gave the green light to the mine on the condition that the glaciers not be touched.

For Barrick, it meant re-evaluating its initial estimates for what, according to the company’s projections, is one of the largest underdeveloped gold reserves in the world. Its latest plan is to develop the mine around the glaciers. In a telephone interview from Toronto, Vince Borg, the company’s vice president of communications, said that most of the gold doesn’t sit directly under the ice. He said that the company is willing to lose up to 28,000 kilograms of precious metal (or one-17th of the reserve’s total estimated capacity) to avoid relocating the ice.

For Chirgwin and a broad coalition of local farmers, indigenous groups, scientists and environmentalists, the approval of the project meant that the Chilean government had once again failed to give priority to the environment. The preservation of the glaciers is in fact only one issue in a list of environmental concerns involving the valley below Barrick’s property—an ecosystem that, ecologists warn, could be easily disrupted by intrusive mining techniques.

Raúl Montenegro, a renowned Argentinian ecologist, calls the plan ecocide. “This decision is irresponsible,” he says. “Twenty years of wild mining will not pay off for future environmental troubles and lack of water.”

Chile’s economy has historically relied on mining, and the wealth of the Andes has attracted foreigners since the Spanish Conquest. Although the main revenue for the country still comes from mining, a growing number of regions in the north now depend on agriculture, and the country’s reputation abroad relies heavily on the quality of the avocados, grapes, olives and wine that it exports.

The Huasco Valley, directly below Barrick’s properties, belongs to the growing number of flourishing oases whose agriculture is based on an intricate irrigation system that originates from the Andean glaciers. The valley, which lies at the fringe of the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth, has an average annual rainfall that rarely reaches 20 millimetres.

Paulo Herrera is one of the 8,000 people in the valley who make a living out of agriculture. The grapes in his district, Alto del Carmen, are sold as far as the United States, but he worries that the Pascua-Lama mine will contaminate the water.

“I have the responsibility of cultivating healthy products,” he says. “If I can’t do that, I’m out of my job.”

Water worries

The Huasco Valley may be El Dorado for Barrick, but the reality for the locals is harsh. The valley’s region has an unemployment rate of 18.4 per cent, double the national average. Pascua-Lama, which includes portions of mountains in Chile and Argentina, will create 5,500 temporary jobs between the two countries during the initial three-year construction phase, and another 1,600 jobs over the mine’s 20-year lifetime.

“These are short-term jobs,” says Chirgwin. “The economic benefit for the Chilean people is minimum, while the environmental risk is maximum.”

According to the economist Montenegro, the dust of the minerals coming from the operation will pollute the waters and will eventually also affect the glaciers by diminishing their capability to reflect light.

Another risk comes from cyanide contamination. Cyanide, the most widely used chemical for gold extraction, is highly toxic. Canadian regulations say that drinking water may not contain more than 0.2 milligrams of this chemical per litre, as larger quantities would provoke death by suffocation.

MiningWatch Canada, a non-governmental organization that oversees mineral policies and practices, sees potential for danger in what it calls Barrick’s arrogant corporate attitude.

“The company has made no efforts to develop an environmentally friendly project,” says representative Jamie Kneen. He says that if the company were to choose an underground operation instead of an open-pit one, there would be fewer risks of water contamination.

An underground mine would be economically unfeasible, says Barrick’s Borg. He admits the company will use cyanide but says incidents are rare. He also says Barrick has considered the needs of the local population. Their new plan includes 34 water-monitoring stations, a diversion channel to avoid contact between the water and the minerals, and the building of a five-million-cubic-metre water reservoir.

Local weakness

But locals are wary of Chile’s infamously weak environmental monitoring. Over the past two years, a multimillion-dollar wood-pulp plant has been accused of causing the death and migration of rare swans and the destruction of a natural sanctuary in southern Chile. And a sewage plant in the capital Santiago, partially owned by French water giant Suez, has been accused of contaminating the air. In both cases the government has only applied minimal fines.

Last week environmentalists in Santiago appealed last month’s ruling on the project. Chirgwin and other protesters, however, doubt that newly-installed president Michelle Bachelet, despite her stance in favour of the protection of the glaciers, will have the political strength to revert the decision.

“If the project goes ahead, it’s a bad sign for the Chilean democracy,” warns MiningWatch’s Kneen. “If there’s a serious environmental problem, money isn’t going to bring back the valley’s water balance. Once the genie is out of the bottle, nobody can put it back.”