Unveiling Canada's Role in Chile’s Environmental and Political Conflicts

[polly7]

Unveiling Canada's Role in Chile’s Environmental and Political Conflicts
By Cyril Mychalejko

Source: Toward FreedomWednesday, March 21, 2012

http://www.zcommunications.org/unveiling-canadas-role-in-chile-s-environmental-and-political-conflicts-by-cyril-mychalejko

A new report reveals the Canadian mining industrial complex's responsibility for social discord and environmentally-destructive policies in Chile's Patagonia region.

“Far away, on the southern cone of South America in Chilean Patagonia, exists one of the most beautiful, still-virgin territories on Earth. There, an intense struggle is taking place that most Canadians have never heard of, but that intimately involves the Canadian mining industry, the Canadian government, and millions of Canadian pensioners and investors,” notes Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow in the report's introduction.

The report, Chilean Patagonia in the Balance: Dams, Mines and the Canadian Connection, asserts that Canada's mining industry, which leads the world in mining investment with more than half of its assets in Latin America, accounts for 33 percent of electricity demand in Chile while advantageously exercising enormous influence in setting government policy there.

The report focuses on the Aysén region, which has seen protests and social discord since the announcement that the hyrdroelectric “development” plan would move forward last May. The project will potentially affect 12 of Aysén’s major rivers and involve five dams on the Baker and Pascua Rivers.

[TrogL]

1. Keep digging deeper

You'll find Conservative Party supporters are behind all this.

[polly7]

2. +1 Yes, absolutely.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Sadly adding this to my own files. What a shame. It must be stopped as soon as possible.

Very few people are aware that the former President of the U.S., George H. W. Bush is deeply connected to Canada's Barrick Gold, either.

Have been watching for reports of these monsters for years. They, like the other rapists, plunders, murderers, and theives destroying the world have been at this evil business for ages.

From near the ending of the article:

In July 2011 Greenpeace claimed that Barrick Gold's operations in northern Chile along the border with Argentina are responsible for the significant shrinking of three small glaciers, which farmers in the region rely on. Barrick initially wanted to remove the glaciers, but widespread opposition due to obvious environmental concerns stopped the plan. However, the Center for Human Rights and the Environment, an NGO from Argentina, reported that local water supplies have been contaminated as a result of Barrick's local projects.

“The media in Canada is fairly silent about protests happening in Chile, unless it ties into some other big news story. I've talked to some reporters that have admitted that they get so many stories about mining conflict that they barely even think that it qualifies as news anymore. … It's a great example of how cynicism promotes systemic injustice,” said Sakura Saunders, editor of ProtestBarrick.net, a website that provides research and organizing information around mining issues. The site focuses on Canadian mining giant Barrick Gold.

The Council of Canadians’ report also notes that in 2010 “five assassinations resulted from conflicts around Canadian mining developments in El Salvador, Guatemala and Mexico.” Part of the problem, the report states, is the Canadian government's “unwillingness to hold the Canadian extractive industry to basic environmental and human rights standards in its international operations.”

A modest piece of legislation that would have empowered the federal government to investigate claims of human rights and environmental abuses and punish companies found guilty by withholding funding was rejected by Canadian legislators—even after receiving testimony that women were gang raped and tortured at a Canadian mine site in Papua New Guinea.

Thank you, polly7.

[sabrina 1]

4. How sad, Canada is becoming as bad as the US. Was it always involved in these projects

or is it since just the past decade when Harper and Bush became became bosom buddies?

[naaman fletcher]

6. its alwasy been as bad,

if anything it is worse now, as canada emerges as a major natural resource country.

[polly7]

5. You're welcome Judy Lynn.

I see red every time I read of Barrick Gold's involvement in this and our gov'ts ignoring the horrors of it. I've sent three letters to our MLA about it in the last few years, and heard nothing back but lip service.

I had no idea George H.W. Bush was connected, that's interesting.

[Judi Lynn]

7. Just discovered this material in a search: George Bush's "Heart of Darkness" --

George Bush's "Heart of Darkness" --
Mineral Control and Africa

by The Staff of the Executive Intelligence Review
Printed in the Executive Intelligence Review, January 3, 1997

On Dec. 1, 1996, former President George Bush gave an
interview to {Parade} magazine, in which he stated: ``I
don't want to be at the head table anymore. I care about
being a good citizen. I don't join boards of directors,
and I don't go into business deals. I've had every
opportunity to join in putting a petrochemical plant in
Kuwait, a chance to make money. I haven't done it. The way
I make a living is giving speeches. Get paid a lot of
money for giving a speech. No conflict of interest.''

This statement was an outright lie; a lie that Sir
George Bush arranged to appear in the pages of a weekly
newspaper insert that reaches millions of households in
every part of the United States. George Bush does, indeed,
have a very important foreign corporate affiliation: In
May 1995, the Canada-based Barrick Gold Corp. created an
international advisory board around the personal
leadership of Bush, and Bush was designated ``honorary
senior adviser'' to that board--a legal fiction to
disguise the former President's active role as chief
business developer for the company.

~snip~
It is understandable that Bush did not wish to
advertise his ties to Barrick. The company is not only an
important corporate element of the London-centered Club of
the Isles and the British global raw materials cartel--a
British link that might prove embarrassing to Sir George,
at a point when Anglo-American relations remain at a low
point, and when British propaganda organs are leading an
all-out assault upon the U.S. Presidency. But, Barrick,
along with the South Africa-based Anglo American Corp., is
engaged in a strategic metals grab in Central Africa,
which is being abetted by the greatest genocide per capita
in modern times.

From April 1993, when Uganda's President Yoweri
Museveni, on behalf of London, launched the genocide of
the Hutu majority in Rwanda, through to the ongoing
invasion by the same Museveni-led forces in eastern Zaire,
Central Africa and the Horn of Africa have been turned
into a killing field. Local, British-sponsored
``countergangs'' have been unleashed to depopulate a
region that possesses the world's richest strain of
precious metal deposits, while a string of Club of the
Isles metals cartels, including Barrick, moves in for the
kill.

More:
http://american_almanac.tripod.com/bushgold.htm

[center]~~~~~[/center]

Aug. 1, 2001, 4:18 p.m. EDT
U.K. libel suit hits U.S. Web site
Barrick Gold forces investigative journalist offline
By William Spain, CBS.MarketWatch.com

CHICAGO (CBS.MW) -- In a case with implications for investigative journalism in the Internet age, a Canadian mining company has successfully used British libel law to shut down part of a U.S.-based Web site.

The case, which pits Barrick Gold, Barrick Goldstrike Mines and their chairman, Peter Munk, against Guardian Newspapers Ltd., was settled Tuesday with Barrick and Munk winning an apology and monetary damages from the Guardian -- as well as the deletion of a story from a U.S.-based Web site.

At issue was a piece written by American Greg Palast, a freelance reporter, regular columnist for the Guardian's Sunday Observer and occasional contributor to the BBC's flagship nightly television news program.

"The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," which appeared on Nov. 26 of last year, focused on large corporate and individual donations to the Republican Party and the presidential campaign of George W. Bush.

More:
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/uk-libel-suit-hits-us-website

More on that story:

Published on Friday, July 20, 2001 by Salon.com
Exporting Corporate Control
A Gold Company with Ties to the Bush Family Tries to Muzzle a Muckraking Journalist

by Joe Conason

Globalization's glad prophets tell us that when the golden arches of McDonald's finally encircle the world, liberty will flourish beneath them. But so far, the evidence that open economies promote open societies is hardly conclusive -- and today there is a case pending in the courts of the United Kingdom that suggests a far less happy prospect: that the suppression of free speech and independent journalism suffered in other countries may someday cross international borders as easily as a shipment of frozen hamburger.
The plaintiffs in this case are Barrick Gold Mining, a huge firm based in Canada, and Barrick's chairman, Peter Munk, a Toronto multimillionaire with many powerful friends such as former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and former U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush. The defendants are Guardian Newspapers, London publisher of the Guardian (which I have occasionally written for), Britain's premier liberal daily, and the Observer, its Sunday paper.

On Nov. 26, 2000, the Observer published "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," a column by investigative reporter Gregory Palast (who has written for Salon) that outlined the cozy relationship enjoyed by the Bush family and the Barrick interests. Palast, who happens to be an American citizen, pointed out that Barrick's U.S. subsidiary, Barrick Goldstrike, had donated over $100,000 to Republican committees in recent years; that Goldstrike had previously obtained a very sweet deal to mine gold on public lands in Nevada, pushed through during the final days of George H.W. Bush's presidency; and that the former president had landed on Barrick's payroll after leaving office, to peddle his influence with foreign leaders in exchange for a salary and stock options.

Palast's column went on to discuss other Barrick ventures in Indonesia, Zaire and, most controversially, Tanzania, where he mentioned a report by Amnesty International alleging that in 1996, a company later bought by Barrick had participated in the "extrajudicial killing" of dozens of small-scale artisanal miners, in order to clear the Bulyanhulu gold pits, a rich site to which the company claimed title. The story behind that alleged incident is long and somewhat murky, but this much is clear: Several independent newspapers in Tanzania reported in August 1996 that as many as 52 miners were buried alive when bulldozers operated by Kahama Mining Co. Ltd., a firm later acquired by Barrick, filled in the pits, assisted by armed troops. The miners had until then successfully resisted KMCL's attempt to evict them from the land, a tract some 30 miles south of Lake Victoria.

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/views01/0721-08.htm

[polly7]

8. Wow. Thank you for all this.

It figures that among Munk's two bff would be Mulroney and Bush ....... two men who've done more to harm relations and people in NA than almost anyone besides Reagan.

Barrick has got a lot of evil to answer for. Canadian people need to wake up! and get this stopped, somehow. I hope you don't mind if I add your information here to what I have to send on to my MLA. He grew up only a few miles from me and though while I'm sure he thinks I'm a pain in the ass now that he's in gov't in Regina, he does read my letters and at the very least, might just consider how bad this is. So thank you, again.