Indigenous defenders opposing the Marlin mine were criminalised by a corporation and its state allies

Nina Lakhani writes in The Guardian about the community struggle against the Canadian gold-mining firm Goldcorp’s Marlin mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, in the west of the country. The Marlin mine is described as one of the ‘earliest documented cases of a transnational corporation – and its state allies – weaponising the legal system against environmental defenders’.

It has been 15 years since the anti-mining activist Patrocinia Mejía was forced to hide in the forest to avoid being detained by police, but the shame has never gone away.

Mejía was among scores of Indigenous environmental and land defenders criminalised for opposing a sprawling Canadian gold and silver mine in San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a rural Indigenous municipality in the western highlands of Guatemala, which divided the community and crippled the social movement.

“Neighbours accused us of being bad wives who neglected our children, of being anti-development. Even my mother turned against me. I was sick with stress for months, it was very hard,” said 63-year-old Mejía, who farms a handful of cows and sheep close to the now deforested mountain.

“We were so scared of being captured that we didn’t hold our meetings any more, and I was too afraid to show my face at protests.”

The Marlin mine was built in the early 2000s after the end of Guatemala’s brutal 36-year civil war as part of a wave of internationally financed extractive projects agreed, critics say, without proper consultation, environmental safeguards or economic benefits for local communities.

Natural resources on Indigenous lands have been exploited since colonial settlers first attacked Latin America, creating wealth for a few while fuelling violence, displacement and poverty for most. But the Marlin mine, which made its owner, the Canadian gold-mining firm Goldcorp, billions of dollars before closing in 2017, was one of the earliest documented cases of a transnational corporation – and its state allies – weaponising the legal system against environmental defenders.

You can read the full article, with links, and photos by Daniele Volpe, here, ‘Fighting a huge monster’: mine battle in Guatemala became a playbook for polluters.

Categories: Corruption, Criminalisation, Environment, Evictions, Genocide, Guatemala, Human Rights, Indigenous peoples, Justice, Land, Legal, Military, Mining, Resource Extraction, Violence

Tags: #guatemala, #guatemalahumanrights, Goldcorp, Marlin, Nina Lakhani, The Guardian