CANADIAN MINING COMPANY TO SUE GOVERNMENT OF EL SALVADOR FOR ‘LOST FUTURE EARNINGS’
Rights Action forwards this Miami Herald article about Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company that is suing the government of El Salvador for "alleged losses", under CAFTA, the Central American Free-Trade Agreement.
CANADA PENSION PLAN (& OTHER PENSIONS & FUNDS)
Canadians who pay into the CPP (Canada Pension Plan) [as well as other pensions and funds, we are sure] will benefit from this unjust legal suit, if successful, as the CPP has investments of over $3,000,000 in Pacific Rim.
UNJUST GLOBAL “DEVELOPMENT” SYSTEM
These legal manipulations show how “free trade" agreements are more aptly called "Corporate and Investor rights" Agreements.  Pacific Rim Mining Corp. will use its Nevada U.S., subsidiary, Pac Rim Cayman LLC, to sue the government of El Salvador for hundreds of millions of dollars in “alleged losses”, because the U.S. is a signatory to CAFTA, and not Canada.
Pacific will sue El Salvador under CAFTA (Central America-Dominican Republic-United States of America Free Trade Agreement), arguing that Pacific (and its shareholders and investors) are losing future profits because Pacific did not receive the final permits it wanted from the El Salvadoran government.  The arbitration process will follow the "Rules of Procedure for Arbitration Proceedings" that are administered by the "International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes ("ICSID")" that is affiliated with the World Bank.  (The World Bank invested $45,000,000 in Goldcorp Inc’s open pit cyanide mine in Guatemala that is causing multiple health and environmental harms and human rights violations.)
WHAT TO DO:  See below.
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EDUCATIONAL DELEGATION TO GUATEMALA, JULY 6-14
Please join this trip that will investigate DAM “DEVELOPMENT” PROJECTS UNDER-MINING HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE ENVIRONMENT.  Over 9 days, delegates will meet with development, enviro and human rights experts and activists; visit Chixoy hydro-electric dam affected Mayan-Achi communities; visit Mayan-Q’eqchi communities that may well be harmed by the pending Xalala hydro-electric dam; visit Mayan-Mam communities being harmed by Goldcorp Inc’s huge gold mine.  INFORMATION: Karen Spring: spring.kj@gmail.com
“MINING INVESTING IN CONFLICT” SPEAKING TOUR, ONTARIO, QUEBEC & MARITIMES, APRIL 26 – MAY 18
Carlos Amador, member of the Siria Valley Environmental Defense Committee (Honduras), and Francois Guindon, Quebecois activist living in Guatemala and working for Rights Action on issues related to mining, are on a speaking tour right now.  To find out where they are, Francois Guindon, c: 819-329-0223; francois.guindon@gmail.com
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PACIFIC RIM MINING SUING EL SALVADOR:
MINING COMPANY SEEKS ARBITRATION OVER 4-YEAR DELAY IN EL SALVADOR
By Blake Schmidt, Miami Herald, April 27, 2009
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador -- Canadian mining company Pacific Rim will take the Salvadoran government to international arbitration court for alleged losses caused by government ''inaction'' due to permit delays for what would be El Salvador's biggest mine to date.
The company has been waiting for four years for final permits for the underground gold mine, which faces staunch opposition from Salvadoran environmentalists and church leaders as the first large-scale mine in 70 years in Central America's smallest country.
The case is among the first international investment disputes under the Central American Free-Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, which eliminated barriers to trade and laid ground rules for such disputes. The Vancouver-based company invested $77 in exploration after it received initial permits in 2005.
WATER WORRIES
But the government of outgoing President Tony Saca has been under pressure from an increasingly powerful environmental movement, which is backed by the Catholic Church, to ban mining of precious metals. Opponents say the effects of mining would be multiplied by El Salvador's small size and dense population, and that giving Pacific Rim the green light would set the wrong precedent for more than two dozen other proposed mining projects here.
''El Salvador is very small and all mining projects are near the Lempa River, which is the country's main water source,'' said Rodolfo Calles, a coordinator for the Church-funded organization Caritas, a fierce anti-mining group.
The 320-kilometer Lempa is one of Central America's longest, snaking through Guatemala and Honduras before flowing into El Salvador's Pacific. With a basin that covers half of El Salvador, the river irrigates the country's farming industry and supplies drinking water to more than half of residents in greater San Salvador.
President Saca fears mining would cause cyanide contamination of water much in the way it did in the 1950s at the El Dorado mine, the same underground mine in the eastern region of Cabañas which Pacific Rim wants to reopen and expand.
''I won't give any mining exploitation permits because mining is definitively harmful,'' Saca said.
Saca's position has been echoed by his successor, president-elect Mauricio Funes, whose left-wing FMLN party ended 20 years of right-wing rule with their victory in the March elections. Funes will officially take power in June.
But Pacific Rim says their environmental processes would leave no pollution and that the Saca government's foot-dragging has left the project in a costly state of limbo.
TIME TO DECIDE
''We've met all conditions under the law. So there's no basis for the government of El Salvador to fail to make a decision. It's gone way beyond timeliness,'' said Barbara Henderson, Pacific Rim's vice-president of investor relations.
The underground mine would create hundreds of new jobs in a depressed region amid an economic crisis and would leave a minimal environmental footprint, Henderson says. The company would detoxify all cyanide, a toxic chemical used to extract gold from ore, using a process known as INCO. The company's water cleaning process would contribute to surrounding communities by leaving water so clean that it's potable and then rerouting it back into a river that runs dry during the dry season.
''You could basically stick a cup in the water and drink it,'' Henderson said.
But Pacific Rim's promise of jobs and eco-friendly practices haven't convinced El Salvador's staunch anti-mining lobby. The archbishop of San Salvador, José Luís Escobar Alas, has said El Salvador doesn't have the capacity to regulate mining. And the previous archbishop, Fernando Saenz Lacalle, was key in launching the country's anti-mining movement. The church helped form the National Board Against Metallic Mining, which has picked up 10,000 signatures in its effort to lobby Congress to ban mining altogether.
Carolina Amaya, of the environmental group Salvadoran Ecological Unity, says mining would be a ''death sentence'' for her country. El Salvador is widely considered one of the hemisphere's most environmentally degraded countries, where less than a third of the country's tree cover still stands and soil and water pollution are rife.
''El Salvador has enough environmental problems without mining,'' Amaya said.
STARTING WITH SPAIN
Spanish colonizers began small-scale mining in some parts of El Salvador in the 1500s. The country has since seen sporadic small-scale mining, but El Salvador has seen the least mining development among Central American countries. The few 20th century mining projects were abandoned as leftist guerrillas waged a civil war in the countryside against military and paramilitary forces.
But since the end of the bloody 1980-1992 civil war, the right-wing ARENA party has opened the country to trade and investment, making El Salvador the first CAFTA signee, implementing sweeping privatizations of key sectors and switching the currency from the colon to the U.S. dollar. As exploration technology advanced and commodity prices skyrocketed, interested mining companies began flooding El Salvador with proposals.
Henderson said with today's mining technology, a country as small and overpopulated as El Salvador can mitigate potential environmental harm from mining. The British nongovernmental organization Oxfam, however, pointed out in a study released last year that the mining industry in Central America has given local residents little say in how the industry affects their lands and livelihood and has had an insignificant role in sustainably reducing poverty in mining areas. The El Dorado mine, for instance, is said to house some 1.4 million ounces of gold, which could produce some $200 million. But Oxfam says Central American residents only receive a small fraction of wealth produced by mines which often only operate for a few years. Pacific Rim's El Dorado mine would operate for about six years.
Pacific Rim says mining opponents are only punishing poor campesinos in Cabañas who would benefit from 500 new jobs to be created by the mine. Though the company at one point employed nearly 300 workers, it began slashing its workforce last year amid delays and is looking to invest in Guatemala and Costa Rica instead.
The company's Nevada-based subsidiary filed a notice of intent to pursue international arbitration against the Salvadoran government in December, which the company plans to file in a matter of weeks, Henderson told The Miami Herald.
But the company still harbors hopes that the Salvadoran government will come around and will continue to seek support from Church leaders, environmentalists, and the FMLN leadership as Funes prepares to take over the government's reigns.
''We'll try to continue our sort of diplomatic approach to the whole thing,'' Henderson said.
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THE GLOBAL “DEVELOPMENT” GAME
At work here, one sees the anti-community development, pro-corporation nature of CAFTA (and other "free" trade agreements) that are, in many ways, no more than Corporate and Investor rights agreements.
This legal manoueving of Pacific Rim must be opposed at every turn, in Central and North America.  If successful, it might open the gates for more global companies and investors to sue for compensation every time they don't get what they want.  One can imagine a situation when a company will “invest” in a country, knowing it will not get the permits, simply so that it can then sue for compensation and “lost profits”.
WHAT TO DO
TO MAKE TAX-DEDUCTIBLE DONATIONS for Indigenous and community-based organizations resisting the harms caused by large-scale “development” projects (mining, tourism, hydro-electric dams) and implementing their own community development projects (schools and scholarships, health clinics, solidarity economy productive projects, etc), human rights and environment projects, make check payable to "Rights Action" and mail to:
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BOOKS TO READ: Eduardo Galeano’s “Open Veins of Latin America”; Howard Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States”; Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”; Paolo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”;
WWW.RIGHTSACTION.ORG- Based in Guatemala, Rights Action (with tax-deductible legal status in Canada and USA) funds and works with community-based Indigenous, development, environment and human rights organizations in Guatemala and Honduras, and also in El Salvador, Haiti, Oaxaca and Chiapas; and educates about and is involved in activism related to global development, environmental and Indigenous and human rights struggles.

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