Beneath the surface in Oaxaca: Canadian gold mines

A quick “Google search” for Canadian ownership of Mexican gold mines turns up mostly corporate press releases.  Even within Canada, the extent of Canadian ownership of Mexican mines — the the environmental and social costs engendered by Canadian firms is seldom mentioned.  Canadians own  about 40 percent of Mexican mines, and 75% of mining equipment used in Mexico is imported from Canada.

Dawn Pawley, writes in The Dominion (“a monthly paper published by an incipient network of independent journalists in Canada since May 2003. It aims to provide accurate, critical coverage that is accountable to its readers and the subjects it tackles) on one of the most overlooked foreign-controlled industries in Mexico.

Skyrocketing gold prices, favorable mining laws and a recent flood of speculation-linked financing for junior mining companies have opened up the way for Vancouver-based Continuum Resources to buy up the majority of the mining concessions in the state of Oaxaca. The reactivation of the historic “Natividad” site, reportedly Oaxaca’s richest gold and silver mine, has been spearheaded by Continuum, majority owners in a joint venture which started up in 2004 with a Mexican firm. At the Natividad project alone, Continuum holds more than 54,000 hectares of concessions.

It was gold that first brought Cortés to Mexico, and Mexican gold that financed the Spanish Empire.  After Independence, Britain and the United States vied for economic control of the new Republic, mostly in a bit to gain control of the gold (and, later, other mineral resources).  Although the 1910-20 Revolution returned Mexican resources to Mexican control, under NAFTA, it hasn’t only been the United States that has attempted to control key Mexican resources.

While Canada itself is a major mining country (including gold mining), it has gained more and more control of the Mexican mines — and, with the price of gold still going up — continues to operate mines like Natividad.

As Pawley explains, using the Natividad mine as her focus, these operations are not in the best interests of the locals, in theory, the owners of the minerals.

“While other companies have shied away from exploration due to the violence in Oaxaca, Continuum has been able to acquire highly prospective properties with very large land areas due to a lack of interest there.”

Continuum has made good off of “protest and violence,” doing deals with Oaxaca’s corporatist governments, and joining a host of other mining companies, like Vancouver’s Eurasian Minerals in Haiti and others in Colombia, aiming to make a profit in parts of the Americas where repression and violence are often directed against popular movements.

The Canadians may not be torturing people (and good on them), but they are robbing them and poisoning people throughout the world.  Much of the anti-NAFTA protests you see in rural communities are only incidentally directed at local administrations.  Those crooks have to get their loot from somewhere.  And, in places like Oaxaca, the moneybags are in Vancouver.