Residents of San Isidro (in Cabañas, El Salvador) look out over a valley where the Canadian mining company Pacific Rim proposed to mine gold and silver. Photo by Jeff Deutsch/Oxfam America.

There’s a legal battle underway in Washington right now, between the government of El Salvador and a Canadian mining company called Pacific Rim. Citing the threat of environmental damage, in 2009 the government of El Salvador denied a mining permit to Pacific Rim, which was planning to mine for gold and silver. So the company set up an office in the United States and is suing the government of El Salvador under the rules of the Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).  This has led to two years of hearings at the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, DC.

There’s a lot riding on this case for the government of El Salvador, beyond the $77 million Pacific Rim is demanding in the suit, which is about one percent of the country’s GDP. El Salvador is a small, densely populated country where there is already a lot of stress on the surface waters on which the citizens depend for drinking and for agriculture. Large-scale industrial mining could have irreversible effects on the country’s fragile and diminishing resources, and a number of courageous people who have dared to organize resistance to mining have been killed.

However when El Salvador signed CAFTA, it became subject to rules that might prevent it from denying mining companies the opportunity to operate on the basis of public safety or environmental protection. Companies can claim this is like having their businesses expropriated. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeff Deutsch is the manager of Oxfam America’s design and production team. Part of his job is to pay close attention to the images Oxfam uses to portray its work, often relying on pictures shot by others. On a recent field visit to West Africa, he photographed some of that work himself.

Trained as a graphic designer, Deutsch talks about what he captured with his camera—and why. In this third and last audio and photo blog, the familiar becomes strange and he finds beauty at every turn:

Watch Part I.

Watch Part II.

Jeff Deutsch is the manager of Oxfam America’s design and production team. Part of his job is to pay close attention to the images Oxfam uses to portray its work, often relying on pictures shot by others. On a recent field visit to West Africa, he photographed some of that work himself.

Trained as a graphic designer, Deutsch talks about what he captured with his camera. In this second audio and photo blog, he visits some of the communities in Ghana affected by large mining operations, and meets local people who are speaking out about it:

Watch part I.

Over the past few years I have visited a lot of communities affected by large-scale mining projects. In Honduras, Mali, Peru, Ghana, Guatemala, Cambodia, or Senegal, I usually hear about more or less the same problems: loss of land, loss of jobs, pollution, and despair.

No matter how much you hear about these problems, seeing them in the small towns, villages, and in the homes of people remembering a lost way of life is always shocking. I was reminded of this most recently in a small village called Faloumbou, in the far eastern border of Senegal. The entire village of 650 people, including all 35 of its farming families, had lost all the agricultural land they had used to grow millet, maize, and ground nuts. The government gave it to an Australian mining company. All their fields are now part of an open-pit gold mine. No one in Faloumbou had received any sort of compensation for lost land.

The chief of the village, Kourou Keita, asks a simple question: “We don’t know anything but farming, so if you take the land from us, how can we survive?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Father Marco Arana:

Reports about recent conflict in Peru have me thinking about a day I spent last November, riding around in the back of a truck in Cajamarca. I was with Father Marco Arana, a Catholic priest, writing a story about his work for our magazine.

At one point we passed a contingent of heavily armed men. Father Arana whipped out his phone and called his office to report their location. The men were elite police officers, he explained to me after he’d hung up, part of a DINOES unit (Dirección Nacional de Operativos Especiales, sort of like a SWAT team). They are used to quell violence that occasionally flares up near the Yanacocha gold mine when local farmers and indigenous people protest a lack of water or other problems that they attribute to mining. This type of violence is part of a pattern: indigenous people, farmers—those without sufficient political clout to get their local government to address a problem—sometimes block a road, or seize an oil well, anything to get someone to pay attention. Hopefully their protest will spur an official to come and talk with them, maybe promise to fix a problem, and everyone can go home.

Or DINOES can come.
Read the rest of this entry »