by Todd Gordon
Once Ascendant Copper set up shop in 2002, the movement was in a position to regularly mobilize opposition to the company’s presence in Intag, and, on several occasions, to burn down the centre of operations of mining exploration in the area. The conflict is ongoing, but the resistance has been able at least to slow to a crawl any significant exploration in the region.919 In response to the activist initiatives, Ascendant has deployed combined tactics of cooptation and coercion. For example, the company provides petty but important handouts to those communities who work with it, building roads, bridges, schools, health clinics, and other infrastructure that the state has never properly provided in the area. These efforts are accompanied by ideological campaigns in which informants are paid to ride local transit, where they praise the gains that mining development would bring to the area, and denounce the way that DECOIN and other social movement organizations are standing in the way of this potential prosperity.920 The company always also wields a club, however, in the event that promotional campaigns and clientelist ties to cooperative communities prove insufficient to quell anti-mining opposition. Coercion has assumed the form of death threats against organizers of the resistance, disruption of regular mail and emails of activists, and a massive law suit against the principal newspaper of the anti-mining mobilizers, Periódico Intag.921 In the company’s theatre of intimidation, a useful prop has been César Villacís, who was placed on the company’s board of directors. Villacís is a former Ecuadorian general and former head of the secret police, and in his frequent visits to Junín he lets the communities know that he has the backing of the Ecuadorian military. Such underlying forms of intimidation sometimes explode into open violence, as in a series of cases in 2004 in which pro-mining groups, visibly armed, were mobilized to physically assault the opposition and destroy their video equipment.922 Alberto Acosta spoke to us about his personal experience with such tactics during this period:
We can also see how some Canadian companies, such as Ascendant Copper, have tried to impose their objectives in an authoritarian manner in the country. They have established schemes of paramilitarism, in order to divide the communities of Intag, to intimidate these communities, and to impose mining activities. I was personally a witness to how this company mobilized people to protest against my presence as [former] Minister of Energy and Mines at the time because my politics ran against this type of corruption. I remember receiving threats and having rocks thrown at me during a meeting in the city of Ibarra, in the province of Imbabura. We saw how they acted, and how they threatened the communities. Thanks to the struggles of these very communities…we managed to disarm these paramilitaries, and achieved some justice. But there are still many problems in the region. I believe it’s important to highlight these events and what they signify.923
In July 2010, we met with Gloria Chicaiza, Coordinator of the Mining Campaign at Acción Ecológica. A clinical psychologist by training, Chicaiza has been involved in a series of urban popular movements since the 1980s, and has been a member of Acción Ecológica since 1996. Through her work she has been accompanying communities involved in anti-mining struggles continuously since 1997. “Just as in much of the rest of Latin America,” she told us, “Ecuador is a place of expansion for the activities of mining companies. In our case, above all, the presence of junior Canadian companies is most obvious, companies that have imposed themselves on this scenario.”924 Chicaiza turned immediately to the case of alleged assassinations related to the Canadian junior Ascendant Copper, and pointed out that there was a law suit against the company in Canada for abuses carried out in Ecuador. Beginning in 2009, three villagers from Intag, represented by a progressive Canadian lawyer, attempted to sue Copper Mesa Mining Corporation (TSX:CUX; formerly Ascendant Copper) and the Toronto Stock Exchange for failing to take sufficient action to reduce the risk facing community leaders who have encountered violence and threats as a result of their opposition to copper mining. An Ontario court threw out the lawsuit in May 2010, stating that “silence from the Directors cannot establish the requisite personal nexus between the acts and omissions of the Directors and what allegedly occurred in Ecuador to the plaintiffs.”925 But Chicaiza stressed that Ascendant’s activities were not anomalous:
[There are] other companies that are active in the Condor mountain range in the South, engaging in a range of nefarious activities, which have almost no visibility. In the South you have Ecuacorriente, or Corriente Resources, that has shifted some of its concessions to a Chinese mining company. Kinross is there, and a number of other companies with lower profiles. In the case of the Intag valley, it was possible to trace responsibility to Ascendant Copper, but in much of the rest of the country it has been more difficult. Other companies’ activities are similar, but they haven’t been connected with dates and facts in the same way. But we have testimonies of the people that have been driven from their land, others who have been physically attacked. Their testimonies say that those responsible were working for these mining companies. There have been violent confrontations.
Chicaiza described a public relations strategy of divide and rule, of cooptation and the promotion of false dreams, whereby:
Canadian mining companies have the strategy of coming in, causing enormous conflicts, dividing communities, and creating illusions about the standards of their practices back in Canada that are not true. We’ve had indigenous Canadians visit us who have told us that indigenous people in Canada are worse off than indigenous people in this country. The Canadian state doesn’t even respect basic international conventions on indigenous rights; indigenous peoples have lost their own territories. But Canadian mining companies talk about the high standards that they live by back home, that they’re from the Global North, and that everything that happens in the North is better. The idea is to convince people that they obey rigid standards back home and that they will do so when they mine here. So they have come and have tried to invent this image so as to conceal the real face of these companies.
What is more, these companies receive “overwhelming diplomatic support” inside of Ecuador, through which the Canadian embassy has created for the mining companies what Chicaiza calls a “diplomatic shelter” consisting of constant resources and official ambassadorial backing for attempts to build support for mining companies within the affected communities. The companies “distribute money in these localities in order to neutralize and to overcome local resistance,” creating tremendous acrimony and social damage in the communities as a result. However, what is more important to note, according to Chicaiza, is that despite this resource-rich infrastructure of diplomatic support and monies to bribe communities, resistance has persisted:
In almost no community where there is a Canadian mining company have they been able to wipe out resistance altogether, in spite of their attempts to distribute money, in spite of their attempts to divide communities. There are attempts to criminalize communities, to bring activists to trial, targeting leaders of these movements, in an effort to decapitate the anti-mining movements. Charges are brought against indigenous and peasant activists who don’t have resources to defend themselves, and whose time is therefore tied up in these proceedings. This is all a sign from the companies that they won’t respect the demands that the communities have. These activities have generated grave levels of convulsion in the country. When a mining project is installed, the conflict starts. But we still have hope, as the communities in resistance do, that we can stop this activity, that the resistance will triumph, that these local models of development will triumph. There are highs and lows in the struggle.
Between 2000 and 2006, difficult and often invisible groundwork was being done by organizers such as Father Juan de la Cruz, and Gloria Chicaiza and Luis Suárez of Acción Ecológica, and grassroots organizations such as the Coordinadora Campesina Popular (Popular Peasant Coordinator), to link the localized, and sometimes isolated, conflicts in the North and South of Ecuador and build a cohesive anti-mining orga
nization on a national scale that could have a political impact on the orientation of the state in this economic sector. In 2007, the Coordinadora Nacional por la Defensa de la Vida y la Soberanía (National Coordinator for the Defence of Life and Sovereignty) was formed as part of this effort, but because of its association with the traditionally top-down organizing of Maoism in Ecuador, it was viewed negatively by some other movements, such as the Movimiento Indígena Ecuatoriano (Ecuadorian Indigenous Movement) and quickly split and fragmented into various distinct anti-mining groupings. Other regional anti-mining organizations that emerged in this period included the Frente de Resistencia Sur a la Minería a Gran Escala (Resistance Front of the South against Large-Scale Mining), formed in 2007, and the Asamblea de los Pueblos (Assembly of Peoples, AP), formed in 2008.926 In spite of the failure of the various movements to cohere around a single national front of resistance, it was plainly evident that the anti-mining resistance was one of the most important movements developing in the country over this period, and was in a position to impact, at least initially, the character of the early years of the Correa government.
Crucially, the strength of these local struggles and regional organizations was evident in the Constituent Assembly process and the mining mandate that eventually passed within it, representing a significant thorn in the side of multinational mining capital generally, and Canadian mining capital specifically. We will return to the specificities of that mandate in a moment, after a brief aside on the activities of the Canadian embassy in the immediate aftermath of Correa’s election, and the lead up to the Constituent Assembly. The Canadian officials were aware that the anti-mining movement was growing in strength, in spite of its relative dispersion across different areas of the country.
THE EMBASSY MAKES ITS MOVE
Despite the violence surrounding the Canadian investment and the fierce opposition it has faced, the Canadian government nonetheless offered the industry its full support when the old mining law was thrown out by the Correa government and the industry’s future became the subject of a very heated national debate. As soon as Correa was elected on October 15, 2006—and before he assumed office—the embassy set to work meeting with mining executives and discussing “advocacy and interest protection.” The embassy initiated The Canadian Club of Investors after Correa’s election to demonstrate to the new government “that Canadian investors are united in Ecuador.”927 Canadian companies also established a new chapter of the Canada-Ecuador Chamber of Commerce in Cuenca which, according to the ambassador, will “better protect Canadian interests in mining.” In just three months following the election, thirty meetings were held between mining company executives and the ambassador and embassy staff as they prepared their strategy to confront the incoming government. Shortly thereafter, regular meetings between Canadians in Ecuador, from both the embassy and industry, and the new government representatives were initiated. Ambassador Christian Lapointe reported to Ottawa about a meeting with Correa in December “during which almost half of the discussion were [sic] dedicated to Canadian mining interests.” There was also a “long discussion” from this same period that the “HOM [Head of Mission] had with new Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Trade about this [mining].”928 On the CSR front—now a universal component of Canada’s attempt to present mining predation with a softer face—the Conscorcio Ecuatoriano para la Responsabilidad Social (Ecuadorian Consortium for Social Responsibility, CERES) was organized as a front composed of companies, industry organizations, and pro-mining NGOs.
With assistance from the embassy, it began promoting the fiction of the socially responsible and environmentally friendly character of the Canadian mining industry through public relations campaigns, including CSR seminars organized for mining staff and Ecuadorian officials.929 While the embassy played a central role in devising the Canadian response to the emerging developments on the ground in the country following Correa’s election, the Ecuador file clearly became a FAIT priority in Ottawa as well, which was in constant contact with embassy staff both to receive situational reports and to advise on working with mining executives—suggesting what kind of support that could be expected from the Canadian government, offering expertise in trade and investment law, making suggestions on public relations campaigns around CSR, and coordinating work between the embassy and Natural Resources Canada (NRCan).930
The embassy’s initial fears were only reinforced by what it perceived as a possible threat to private property in a draft of the constitution prepared by the Assembly. The embassy reported with alarm that “private property is only guaranteed if it has a social objective”—apparently forgetting about the social character of Canadian mining investment it pronounces to anyone willing to listen.931 Canadian companies were also watching the Assembly closely and, as reported in Ecuador, trying to influence its decisions as mining policy was being discussed, leading the Assembly president to complain specifically about the pressure from the mining industry.932
With customary cynicism, this was also the first period in which the embassy, with support from Ottawa, brought an indigenous “representative” from Canada to promote Canadian mining interests by extolling the virtues of the practices of Canadian companies at home. An April 2007 wine and cheese presentation on mining for embassy staff, Ecuadorian officials, and mining executives, for example, featured indigenous representatives from Ecuador and Canada “who include responsible mining in their vision of economic development.”933 This was a tactic that would be repeated after the Constituent Assembly released its mining mandate in early 2008, upping the stakes in the fight around a new mining regime. Don Clarke from the Black River First Nation in Manitoba, travelled to Ecuador in 2007 soon after Correa’s election as part of the effort to demonstrate the social and environmental responsibility of Canadian mining, and the benefits that potentially await Ecuador’s indigenous communities should large-scale industrial Canadian mining be allowed to proceed. Clarke brought his upbeat message that mining can be good for indigenous peoples—a position contradicted by many indigenous peoples in Canada, whose participation in Ecuador was obviously not encouraged by the embassy or industry. As for concerns that Canadian companies represent a serious environmental threat, Clarke stressed that “the Canadian mining industry is committed to responsible mining,” and quoted Jerry Asp, a mining advocate from the Tahltan Nation in British Columbia who was brought to Guatemala in 2004 by the Canadian embassy to defend Canadian investors (and whose British Columbian office was subsequently occupied by elders from his community seeking his removal from power for selling out to corporate interests): “One of the biggest things,” Clarke quotes Asp as saying, “is our people hopefully will recognize they are being used by the environmental groups” who are “the modern missionary.”934
MINING MANDATE
Perhaps the most striking signal that Canadian officials were correct to worry about the early dynamics of the Correa regime vis-à-vis the interests of Canadian mining capital in Ecuador, was the mining mandate issued by the Constituent Assembly on April 18, 2008. The mandate was passed in a period in which the anti-mining movement, albeit dispersed regionally and lacking a coherent national body, had clear political weight in the country, and was able to push the central features of the national dispute over multinational mining development to the centre stage of mainstream political debate, not least in the Constituent Assembly. Moreover, this was still a time in which the “mega-bloc” of the Left within the Constituent Assembly remained intact, and social movement allies such as Alberto Acosta, still Minister of Mines and Energy and President of the Constituent Assembly, and Mónica Chuji, Assembly member and President of the Working Group on Natural Resources and Biodiversity continued to exercise some power in terms of pulling the Correa administration leftward from the inside.935
In this setting, the mandate was passed, putting a moratorium on any new mining concessions and signaling that the government would re-establish control over man
y of the thousands of concessions that had been granted to multinational companies over the neoliberal period. According to the mandate, concessions that were located in ecologically fragile zones or protected areas or which had been acquired by companies that had not carried out requisite consultations with affected communities would be reclaimed by the state without compensation. The mandate also established that further legal reform was to be carried out with the intention of reversing any concessions that had been acquired through insider information by ex-functionaries of the Ministry of Energy and Mines and other politicians from the governments of the neoliberal period. It also suggested a cap whereby title holders would be restricted to a maximum of three concessions, and through this the prohibition of monopolies in the mining sector would be assured.
These far-reaching reforms led immediately to a fall in share value among the Canadian corporations that dominate the industry in the country.936 When the mandate was passed, scarcely 7 percent of the concessions that had been granted were in a phase of exploitation, with the remaining 93 percent still in various phases of speculation and exploration.937 The mandate was thus an attempt to normalize the activity of industrial mining that was to go ahead in the country, and to open up space for a wide-ranging national debate on its character. It called for the establishment of a state mining company with the capacity to intervene, regulate, and manage the sector, while investing in technologies that would limit future dependency on foreign multinationals.938
