In the Valle de San Felix region of the Andean Cordillera, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed by 2 glaciers. Indigenous people of the area depend on this water for subsistence and farming. Pascua-Lama is a cross-border property located in the highly prospective Frontera District, which straddles Chile's Region III and Argentina's San Juan Province. It is approximately 150 kilometers southeast of the city of Vallenar, Chile and 300 kilometers northwest of the city of San Juan, Argentina. In 2000, Chile and Argentina completed ratification of a Mining Treaty between their two countries and in third quarter 2004 it was officially signed into law by the two governments.
Unfortunately, the glaciers lie over a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. With the rise in world tensions, the precious metals price is rising and making even formerly prohibitively expensive mining projects attractive. In this case, it will be necessary to destroy the glaciers since the concept is to use open cast mining to extract ore. The mining company
proposes to make 2 pits: one for extraction and one for the mine's spoilage.
The company is called Barrick Gold. The project is called PASCUA LAMA and currently, Barrick's land holding in the Frontera District is 3,041 square kilometers.. This is a multi-national company, one of whose members is George Bush Senior. The Chilean Government has approved the project to start this year, 2006, but indigenous farmers have got a temporary stay of operations. If mining operations destroy the glaciers, they will not just destroy the source of specially pure water, but they will permanently contaminate the 2 rivers so they will never again be fit for human or animal consumption because of the use of cyanide and sulfuric acid in the extraction process. In addition, these are ores rich in sulphides, which will further contaminate the water sources and acidify them: there is little hope that waste will be adequately contained, or that there will be efficient oversight of this remote operation.
All gold will go abroad to the multinational company and not to the people whose land it is. They will only be left with the poisoned water and the resulting illnesses. The farmers have been fighting this for some time, but now have been forbidden to make a TV appeal by a ban from the Ministry of the Interior. Their only hope now of putting brakes on this project is to get help from international attention. The world must know what is happening in Chile.
Efforts to publicize this are picking up. An online petition (usually limited in effect, in my opinion) has been started (noapascualama@yahoo.com), but it is surely more effective to contact the Chilean and Argentinian governments and the Bush family to let them know that this is visible to all of us. Despite everything else we address our attention to at DailyKos, we can show we care about this region of our earth, too. Ask the Chilean Government to suspend authorization of the Pascua-Lama project to protect the integrity of the 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.