A corporate warning to El Salvador: Give up your gold or pay $315 million

[Judi Lynn]

Jamie Stark August 1, 2014 07:52


A corporate warning to El Salvador: Give up your gold or pay $315 million

As Salvadorans debate a mining ban due to pollution concerns, a large mining company has filed suit against the government.


SAN SEBASTIAN, El Salvador — Vasita Escobar is certain that chemicals from the abandoned gold mine upriver from her house are slowly killing her family.

“This company that has destroyed life, wanted to keep going,” said Escobar, in reference to Commerce Group Corp., a Wisconsin-based outfit that stopped mining for gold in San Sebastian in 2006 after permit difficulties. “My kids never get better—they’re always skinny. They always breathe the river water, they play in there. When I see my kids suffering, I know others’ are too.”

A 2012 study confirmed Escobar’s fears: the river next to her home is contaminated with 9 times the acceptable limit of cyanide, and 1,000 times the acceptable level of iron. Cyanide is part of the chemical cocktail used on such mining sites to separate precious metals from excavated rock, and can run off into land and water.

In El Salvador as around the world, the process of digging up and crushing rock during gold mining releases naturally-occurring arsenic. But here, some of that arsenic filters through into the nearby river. When swallowed by children, it can lead to poisoning and even death.

More:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/rights/el-salvador-gold-mining-lawsuit

[Louisiana1976]

1. El Salvador should tell Commerce Group Corp. to pound sand. Because it doesn't want more

pollution and doesn't want to pay the $315 million.

[TIMETOCHANGE]

2. WTF.

I didn't know that about gold mining. So pulling it out of the ground causes cyanide and arsenic to be released. The cyanide bit should be a hell no. The arsenic bit, I don't know what easy solution there it to that. The mining company should pay the families for their suffering and help them move else where completely at the company's expense. The company should also be taxed and have that money put in a Trust fund to provide for clean up of these chemicals as well as help provide medical care for later discovered victims. This is frigging horrible. That changes my view on gold mining quite heavily. They never showed folks on the History Channel using cyanide and they never talked about the release of arsenic.

[Demeter]

3. I believe that because the gold is so thinly veined in the ore

they use the cyanide to dissolve the matrix and release the gold dust. Then they wash it away like old time panning, and the gold being heavy, sinks to the bottom.

[Judi Lynn]

4. What a shame human beings, fauna, flora, the waters all pay the price for their greed.

The people who know this will happen to their environment who try to prevent the unforgiveable destruction very often get terrorized, sometimes tortured, and murdered by the mining companies' hired monsters. Any efforts made to hold any of them responsible usually fall to the ground and they all continue to make out like bandits.