massive destruction of glaciers, rivers and farms!!!
In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed by 2 glaciers. Water is a most precious resource, and wars will be fought for it. Indigenous farmers use the water, there is no unemployment, and they provide the second largest source of income for the area. Under the glaciers has been found a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. To get at these, it would be necessary to break, to destroy the glaciers – something never conceived of in the history of the world – and to make 2 huge holes, each as big as a whole mountain, one for extraction and one for the mine’s rubbish tip.
The project is called PASCUA LAMA. The company is called Barrick Gold. The operation is planned by a multi-national company, one of whose members is George Bush Senior. The Chilean Government has approved the project in 2006 after promises by the company that the glaciers will be “preserved” and the community will be provided with jobs and investments. The project has already started and the destruction of the environment has began. The region’s glaciers are the source of specially pure water, and because of the use of cyanide and sulfuric acid in the extraction process, that water is unlikely to remain pure for very long. Every last gram of gold will go abroad to the multinational company and only pittance will be left with the people whose land it is. They will also be left with a degraded and destroyed environment, poisoned land and will suffer the resulting illnesses, the liability for which Barrick will deny on the grounds of doing its business “legally”.
Even though some have been bought, many still refuse to accept the inevitable. The hope now of putting brakes on this project is in getting help from both Chilean and international community. The world must know what is happening in Chile. The place to start changing the world is from here.
Sign the petition! www.thepetitionsite.com/3/say-no-to-the-project-pascua-lama
For current information on what’s going on go to: www.miningwatch.ca/search.php?query=pascua+lama+project&action=search(English) and www.noapascualama.org (Spanish).
For more information about Barrick current activities in Chile and elsewhere go to: www.protestbarrick.net (info about local protests: http://protestbarrick.net/article.php?id=141 and Barrick’s “incentives”: http://protestbarrick.net/article.php?id=199).
About mining practices in general go to: www.nodirtygold.org/home.cfm
The Chilean Government must stop the Pascua Lama project to protect the whole of 3 glaciers, the purity of the water of the San Felix Valley and El Transito, the quality of the agricultural land of the region of Atacama, the quality of life of the Diaguita people and of the whole population of the region.
Original source: reprinted email found on www.snopes.com and www.miningwatch.ca, updated by information from www.protestbarrick.net.
