Taking Stock of Canada’s Mining Industry: Ecuadorian Landmark Lawsuit Challenges Canadian Mining Imp

[cory777]

Source: Briarpatch Magazine

A community leader in her mid-20s, Ramírez is one of three Ecuadorian plaintiffs suing the Toronto Stock Exchange for over $1.5 billion. The lawsuit alleges that violence in their rural community could have been avoided had the TSX not listed the Copper Mesa Mining Corporation (formerly Ascendant Copper), which is also named in the lawsuit. The TSX Group and TSX Inc. are accused of causing or materially contributing to alleged violence committed by the company in response to local opposition to an open-pit copper mine. An environmental impact study had indicated that the mine would displace several communities and jeopardize the health of forests and rivers in the northwestern valley of Intag. The defendants have vigorously denied the allegations.

“I ask the noble people of Canada,” Ramírez stated in her comments when the civil suit was filed in March 2009, “that you demand from your elected authorities significant changes in your national legislation so that what has happened with Copper Mesa in Intag will never happen again, not in Intag nor in any other part of the world.”

The TSX is a principal source of global mining financing today and specializes in services for junior mining companies like Copper Mesa. According to the Mining Association of Canada, 55 per cent of the world’s publicly traded mining companies were listed on the TSX at the end of 2008, far more than any other stock exchange. Canadian stock exchanges also provided 31 per cent of the world’s mining equity and handled 81 per cent of financing transactions for the global mining industry between 2004 and 2009.

In Latin America, a prime target for Canadian mining investments, Canadian-listed companies operate roughly 1,400 projects and have been the focal point of widespread protests and human rights abuses throughout the region. Just in the past year, anti-mining activists have been reported killed in Mexico, El Salvador and Guatemala in presumed relation to Canadian projects. In Argentina and Honduras, Canadian operations have led to complaints of water scarcity, contamination and illness. In Peru, a Canadian mining operation has provoked opposition among northern Amazonian peoples who question why a national park intended to protect their territory was reduced by half, giving miners access to pristine forests in headwaters of great importance to them. Alleged human rights violations and abuses by such companies are seldom investigated and almost never brought to justice.

Read more: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/ecuador-archives-49/2485--taking-stock-of-canadas-mining-industry-ecuadorian-landmark-lawsuit-challenges-canadian-mining-impunity

[protocol rv]

1. LOL

So now they got lawyers chasing the stock exchange. No wonder God can't sue the devil no matter how hard he tries, all the lawyers go to hell.

[Peace Patriot]

2. I am appalled by your laughing at the illness of poor people and destruction of the environment

--but not surprised by it. You are also a defender of Chevron-Texaco's vast toxic oil pollution in Ecuador--what has been called in numerous articles and reports "the Rainforest Chernobyl"--muddy oily toxic ooze bubbling out of the ground and in the rivers and streams over an area the size of Rhode Island that has caused high rates of cancer, high rates of spontaneous abortion and vast destruction of fisheries and water quality, and of the livelihoods of thousands of Indigenous, in the Amazon forest. You even belittled one of the Indigenous tribespeople who testified about the horrors of this spill. You said, “Indian presenting a complaint?”

(Comment 36, here
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x30994 )

The "they" you refer to are people who have faced death threats and mortal fear with courage and persistence--poor people, who often take the brunt of corporate pollution, and environmental and social activists who see its horrible impacts and help organize efforts to fight back.

The sentiments that you express about these things are often crude, gut-level assertions reminiscent of the "tea baggers" but nevertheless serve the interests of multinational corporations and the super-rich. The "they" whom you so sneeringly refer to are trying to inflict social responsibility on one of these corporate vultures and your response is ridicule and laughter because there are so few ways to do so, and ordinary people have so little power in such situations. You laugh at their illness. You laugh at their horror at what has been done to Mother Nature. You call them "they." You question their word. ("Indian presenting a complaint?") You are callous to their suffering like those who profit from inflicting illness and depravation on the poor and hire 16 P.R. firms to revile them. Your attitude is so out of tune with what is right and humane and what is real that I wonder why you are inflicting such views on us here at DU--a forum for progressive and activist U.S. Democrats.