Five years after a Chilean court made an historic ruling ordering the permanent closure of Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama project and ahead of tomorrow’s Barrick’s AGM, the Indigenous community of Diaguita Patay Co in the Huasco Valley is denouncing renewed threats from mining. Barrick is looking to develop another mining project in the same protected area, a biosphere home to several important glaciers that sustain the surrounding agricultural valley.

The company has begun “seeking approval from the Environmental Evaluation Service (Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental) to deploy 43 drilling platforms” for its new “El Alto” exploration project. The community of Diaguita Wicaikocua has confirmed that heavy machinery is being operated in the vicinity of the Toro 1, Toro 2, and Esperanza glaciers.

Sebastián Cruz, President of the community of Diaguita Patay Co, says  “This is not a new project. Rather, it represents a recycled strategy that is underhanded and opportunistic, aimed at bypassing the court ruling that ordered the permanent closure of Pascua Lama due to the irreparable environmental harm it caused.” 

Lucio Cuenca of the Observatorio Latinoamericano de Conflictos Ambientales (OLCA) also denounces the exploration project, saying “What we are seeing here is a Pascua Lama 2.0, occupying part of the same mining concessions as the original project.” 

Pascua Lama’s closure 

On September 17, 2020, the First Environmental Court of Antofagasta, Chile ordered the total closure of the Pascua Lama mine, fining Barrick Gold over CAD $12 million for serious environmental infractions. While construction did begin on the mine, it never became operational before this court-ordered shutdown.

Pascua Lama was a controversial project right from the beginning, due to its lack of compliance with environmental resolutions protecting local ecosystems and a lack of consent from affected Indigenous communities. The company’s exploration and construction activities have left long-lasting impacts on the glaciers, which are the principal source of freshwater for the valley – impacts which were anticipated by the communities long before the work began and that, according to Lucio Cuenca of OLCA, are still being felt today.

“Barrick Gold has still not presented a plan to close the failed Pascua Lama project,” Cuenca continues. “This is unacceptable. A company that has been sanctioned and ordered to shut down operations, which has neither complied with the plan to restore the high Andean ecosystem that it destroyed nor with the closure order, should not be allowed to pursue exploration activities with the aim of generating a new project in the exact same area.”

The court-mandated closure of the Pascua Lama project has led to several class action lawsuits against Barrick Gold in the US and in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, where plaintiffs allege that Barrick and several of its executives made material misrepresentations to investors about the company’s compliance with environmental and water requirements at the mine. Barrick settled the US class action suit in 2016 by paying over USD $140 million to investors. The class action suits in Canada are ongoing.    

New project, same problems

In response to this latest attempt by Barrick Gold to resume mining activities in this sensitive ecosystem, Indigenous communities in Chile who have been resisting mining in their territories for 25 years have filed formal complaints against “El Alto” with the Superintendency of the Environment and the General Water Directorate, requesting an urgent investigation, sanctions, and the effective protection of glaciers and water sources in the high mountains of the Huasco Valley. 

Cruz, further urges project investors to “Take responsibility and make ethical choices, understanding that they are backing an initiative that violates rights, affects ancestral territories and is located in an area protected by Chilean environmental courts.”

"It should be top of mind for Barrick shareholders that ‘El Alto’ is located in the same area and represents the same errors and abuses as the company’s failed Pascua Lama mine,” says Viviana Herrera, MiningWatch Canada’s Latin America Program Coordinator. “We join local communities in Chile in urging Barrick to stop its exploration activities in the glaciers and make the full and permanent closure of Pascua Lama its priority.”  

For more information, or to arrange an interview, please contact:

• Sebastián Cruz - President of Comunidad Diaguita Patay Co, (Spanish) +56 9 53970527
• Lucio Cuenca - Director - Latin American Observatory of Environmental Conflicts, Chile (OLCA) (Observatorio Latinoamericano de Conflictos Ambientales, Chile). (Spanish)  +56 9 92402706
• Viviana Herrera, Latin America Program Coordinator at MiningWatch Canada, [email protected], 438-993-1264 (Spanish/English)