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Nearly two years after the largest mining disaster in Argentina’s history, local affected communities have little hope that that courts will hold the Canadian mining giant behind the devastating spill of 1 million liters of a cyanide cocktail accountable as the company continues to rack up a record of toxic mishaps with little recourse.
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An Argentine judge recently told Reuters that the world’s largest gold mining corporation, Barrick Gold, failed to complete mandated improvements to the Veladero mine in the South American country’s western San Juan province. The upgrades could have prevented the third cyanide-laced spill in less than two years, according to the judge, prompting likely sanctions against the company.
"If they had changed pipes as ordered, the decoupling (of pipes) would not have occurred," Pablo Oritja, a judge in the affected town of Jachal, told Reuters on May 5, adding that the situation "will eventually end in sanctions against the company.”
But community members in Jachal, fighting for Veladero to be shut down once and for all in the face of a proven destructive environmental history, aren’t convinced that the court will take adequate action against Barrick.
“We don’t believe that the local judge, Oritja, will seriously sanction the company given what has happened — three spills and (the court) didn’t order the closure of the mine and immediate remediation,” Gisela Carrizo, a member of the local assembly fighting against Barrick called Jachal No Se Toca, told teleSUR. “We assume that it will be the same as always — an administrative fine and nothing more.”
And while even such basic penalties for the mine’s actions remain pending, environmental activists believe it would be too little too late.
“We don’t think that sanctions will be able to remedy the damage that this company is causing to the environment,” Carrizo argued.
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Barrick spewed over 280,000 gallons — 1 million liters or the equivalent of at least 40 percent of an Olympic-sized swimming pool — of cyanide solution at the Veladero mine on Sept. 12, 2015, contaminating five rivers in what experts have described as the worst mining disaster in Argentina’s history. Since then, Veladero has seen two more smaller spills, putting Barrick on the hook to potentially face a fine of more than US$9.8 million, according to San Juan’s Mining Minister Alberto Hensel.
The company vastly downplayed the severity of the 2015 spill, originally reporting the leak at just a fifth of its actual size. Repeated attempts by the company to sweep the disaster — and the corporate negligence surrounding it — under the rug have prompted serious skepticism from activists, who don’t trust the Toronto-based gold miner will clean up its act. Instead, they argue the Veladero mine should be shut down for the well-being of the environment — including fragile glaciers — and local communities.
“Barrick has continuously downplayed the environmental impacts and size of their spills, and delayed making necessary fixes to their operations to prevent future spills,” Sakura Saunders, a Toronto-based mining justice activist and founder of the organization Protest Barrick, told teleSUR. “The community no longer trusts this company and it seems that this mistrust has spread to the judiciary as well.”
Environmentalists, including Greenpeace Argentina, have long called for Veladero’s closure, pointing to the fact that the San Juan area where the mine is located is home to a UNESCO-designated biological reserve and is protected by country’s national glaciers law.
Affected community members agree that Barrick can’t be trusted to operate the open-pit cyanide-leaching gold mine — one of Argentina’s largest — in a safe way.
The Veladero case is one in a host of environmental and human rights abuses suffered in Latin America at the hands of Canadian mining corporations.
According to the mining justice organization Protest Barrick, the global mining giant has a reputation for manipulating weak regulatory structures to “rob Indigenous people of their lands, destroy sensitive ecosystems and agricultural land, support brutal police and security operations, and sue anyone who tries to report on it.”
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