In Guatemala, an open pit nickel mine is accused of wreaking havoc on the environment and violating the rights of indigenous peoples. The mine is run by Russians and Ukrainians, nationalities that, although fighting a war in Europe, are allies in Central America due to their expertise in nickel extraction. A mine that does not cease its operations despite the rulings of the highest courts that require it.
Neither the Supreme Court of Justice nor the Guatemalan Constitutional Court have been heard by a gigantic open-pit nickel mine that refuses to close its plant in Central America. It has rained on the company a cluster of accusations from the civilian population over the years: from polluting the largest lake in Guatemala to corrupting the highest spheres of the State so that neither local laws nor international codes stop their operation.
The mine in question is made up of the Guatemalan Nickel Company and the Pronico processing plant, both belonging to the Swiss multinational Solway Investment Group. Its leaders are Russians and Ukrainians who export the excavated material to the main plant in Ukraine and from there to the whole world for the manufacture of all kinds of batteries. Even more so since the outbreak of the war, because as Russia is one of the main producers of nickel in the world, its price in the markets soared above 30 percent.
So production doesn’t stop. Dozens of trucks loaded with earth travel through the unpaved streets of El Estor, the small town in northeastern Guatemala visited by France 24’s team of Central American correspondents to verify that the mine’s chimneys expel columns of sediment 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
One summer of 2017, Lake Izabal was dyed red
The nickel mine operates on the shores of Lake Izabal, the largest in Guatemala, and from which a dozen Mayan Q’eqchí indigenous peoples source their fish.
Between March and April 2017, the fishermen of El Estor observed that an extensive strip of the lake turned red“as if it were blood”, in the words of Julio Anselmo Toc, current vice president of the municipality’s fishermen’s union.
It was clear to this native fisherman that the stain on the lake came from the red, soot-laden smoke expelled from the mine’s chimneys, especially when the boilers go into overdrive at night.
Concerned about the lake, the fishermen demanded an explanation from the local authorities, but according to Anselmo, “unfortunately in our country everything is co-opted by the company.” Outraged, they took to the streets in May of the same year to exercise peaceful resistance.
The 12 days of protests were broken up by riot police who opened fire with cluster weapons which killed Carlos Maas, a fisherman. To top it off, the Ministry of Environment concluded that the reddish color of the lake was derived from an algae bloom, caused by the mouth of the waste dragged by the Polochic River. In other words, the ministry cleared the mine of all blame.
It is a destructive and polluting company and for us fishermen it is a threat
But the fishermen did not believe this version and managed to get two international laboratories to analyze water and soil samples from Lake Izabal at the request of El Estor, taken that same summer. And both the results of the Environmental Protection Agency for North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, as well as those of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), registered what was suspected: high levels of heavy metal contamination that could only have come from an open pit mine.
The results confirmed Anselmo’s opinion that the mine “is a very destructive and polluting enterprise and for us fishermen it is a threat.”
The battle of the indigenous Mayan Q’eqchi against the nickel mine, for which they have sued the State
Escorting Lake Izabal rises a mountain range where 16 indigenous communities of Mayan Q’eqchi origin live, descendants of the native peoples who inhabited northeast Guatemala and southern Belize. One of these communities, the one called Lot 9 of Aguacaliente, has sued the Guatemalan State before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights for a lawsuit with the Solway nickel mine.
According to Carlos Pop, defense attorney for Lot 9 of Aguacaliente, in order to sue a State before an international organization it is necessary to have exhausted all the legal instances of a country and that said State has failed to comply with the mandates of its highest courts.
And it is that according to Pop, the State of Guatemala has violated the rights of indigenous peoples multiple times in relation to the nickel mine. One of them is having disrespected Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, which obliges the State to consult indigenous peoples whether or not they approve the operation of a mine on their ancestral lands.
Another accusation that Pop exposes is that it would have been the State itself that would have hindered the titling of land for the indigenous people of Lot 9 of Aguacaliente, by having deliberately cut a page from the book of deeds of the National Land Fund to favor the extraction of the mine and put the indigenous people at risk of losing the land for which they paid the State 32,000 quetzales from 1985 to 2002.
It is because of these types of actions that the Inter-American Court began in February 2022 the trial against the Guatemalan State that the indigenous people long to win, among which Rodrigo Tot, winner of the Golden Environmental Prize in 2017, stands out, and who denounces that his son was murdered in 2012 for his fight against the nickel mine.
However, in the words of Carlos Pop, “Guatemala has been one of the OAS countries that has failed to comply with the most sentences of the Inter-American Court.” And since the Inter-American Court does not have coercive powers, it is likely that whatever the ruling is, the State will not abide by it.
Journalists from ‘Forbidden Stories’ assert that the nickel mine has bought from the Guatemalan State for years
World-renowned newspapers such as ‘The Guardian’, ‘Le Monde’ and ‘El País’ were among the 20 media outlets that participated in the international consortium Forbidden Stories, author of the project ‘Mining secrets’ or ‘Mining secrets’ published on March 6, 2022. The exhaustive investigation in which 65 journalists worked for six months revealed thousands of leaked documents in which it is evident that the mine has allegedly corrupted the Guatemalan State.
According to the report, thousands of reports from the mine were found that prove payments made directly to the police for the eviction of peaceful resistance; bribes to high state officials to shield the mining extraction license; intimidation of local journalists like Carlos Choc; as well as the creation of community organizations that supposedly represent the people of El Estor and that endorse the operations of the mine.
Before the publication of Forbidden Stories, the directors of the mine issued a series of statements in which they affirm that the information disclosed is “adulterated and distorted since it was obtained criminally during cyberattacks that negatively affected the company’s computer system.” France 24 knocked on the doors of the mine in the making of this report and obtained contact with its public relations manager, who evaded the requested interviews and did not respond to the questionnaire of questions sent by mail.
What this medium was able to verify directly in El Estor is that opinions about the mine are divided. For José Maquín, a mechanic operator, the company has brought economic progress to the town and employment opportunities for nearly 2,000 families. But for fishermen, indigenous people and local and international journalists, the mine is determined to take advantage of corruption in Guatemala in order to extract the nickel that corrodes the environment and threatens the survival of ancestral peoples.
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