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THE DIRTY BUSINESS OF RESOURCE EXTRACTION


 Bill Lee September, 2, 2019 

There is a recent article in the Guardian1 about the many deleterious effects on a community in West Papua, Indonesia of a copper mine operated by a company owned by a multinational conglomerate. It is more than unfortunate that this story is not at all unusual in its outline of the destructive effects the particular mine has had on the culture, environment and the local community. Resource extraction companies are, in my experience, the most avaricious and ruthless examples of raw capitalism in action in the world today. Profit is the god of these companies and any person or community that stands in their way will by assailed using the most virulently brutal and deadly tactics that they these companies are allowed (by bought and paid for governments) to get away with. Resource extraction companies, particularly as they have been operating in the vulnerable countries of the Global South have been allowed to destroy, people, communities, environments and cultures in their overwhelming lust for profit. 

The way the system works is that “juniors”, usually small mining companies focused on exploration, location and development of “properties”(often Canadian based) do the original dirty work. This involves the exploring, drilling in a particular area of interest and buying off local, often impoverished peasants, as thugs who are sent out to intimidate (usually using very brutal methods, including disappearances, torture and murder) the opposition in the community. These “junior” companies then sell their “holdings” off to the giants like Gold Corp or Valle (at a nice profit) and the like who then are allowed to claim, thanks to the laws favouring capital over people, that they have no responsibility for the damage caused by the former “owners”. 


I spoke of my experience. It is from time spent in El Salvador, the small Central American country with a delicate ecology and which has cursed, not only by the many, many years of the depredations of colonial oppression but by its having a variety of base and precious metals under its fragile surface. My wife and I were working with a small NGO concerned with the preservation of environmental of the country. Over our time there we have been taken to a few areas where the tender mercies of these junior mining companies have been visited on local populations. These involve rivers poisoned, to death, by cyanide, mercury, sulphuric acid and other toxic substances used either in the initial drilling activities or the actual mining processes. As well we have met families suffering the Part of a "dead" river in San Sebastian, El Salvador. The "pretty" colours are caused by various heavy metals and poisons that have leaked in to the water from a mine, abandoned in the 1980's by a Canadian mining company. - photo by Cecelia Lee effects of the poisoning, loss of the ability to use their water sources and the rise in illnesses like Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoningii . Finally we have spoken with people who have been harassed and whose neighbours have been “disappeared” and murdered with no one yet brought to justice. While the people show great resolve and resilience in their continuing resistance it is maddeningly obvious that their wonderful energies could do if they were they free to put them to full time use farming and raising their families without fear of harassment, intimidation and death. 

Mining is an age old enterprise and one that is, and has been, important in the development of human civilization. It could be dangerous but in the times prior to the Industrial Revolution the projects were smaller and more simple, and they had a great many less (though not zero) impacts on the local communities and environments. The contemporary big time mining projects under present day capitalism is quite a different matter. The huge multinational corporations who operate and profit obscenely from the system are totally alienated from the people, their communities and their environments who suffer the “externalizing” of the local costs of their development and production businesses. They are the successors of the former rapacious national colonizing powers which extracted resources and left ruin in their wake. Under capitalism, profit from this enterprise is adored and served, while people, their cultures and communities, as well as local environments are sacrificed. Its a profoundly filthy contemptible business all round. 


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i (https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2016/nov/02/100-bn-dollar-gold-mine-west-papuanssay-they-are-counting-the-costindonesia?fbclid=IwAR0QvfBmckKDAuukPhp6n4GiDhmc6EdWrsszahnp3ZOpMhGTMjNYqgjNlGI).
ii We are familiar with this scourge in Canada with Indigenous communities, like Grassy Narrows in Ontario, being one of the most well known who have been dealing with the scourge for years while corporations and governments continue to try to avoid responsibility.

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