This week I’ve been learning more about the gold and copper mine near El Copé and the northern boundary of Omar Torrijos National Park. Julie Ray, the director of La MICA biology research station, mentioned the mine and the problem of its proximity to the protected ecosystem during the introductory tour of the park our first day in Panama, but there has been so much traveling and course work keeping me occupied that it hadn’t crossed my mind until recently.
An article we read for class this week, “The Politics of Development in Indigenous Panama” by Stephanie Wickstrom, resparked my interest and investigation. Wickstrom writes about the competition for control of resources as an inevitable part of a capitalistic economy. The competitors are the people who live on rich lands in poor countries, and foreign-owned multinational companies who can make a profit on the lands.
On a recent visit with Julie at her house in town, I asked her to tell me what she knew about the mine. It is Canadian owned company, and it is currently operating under the name Petaquilla Minerals, although according to Julie the name changes every time the mine shut down because of illegal practices and reopens several months later under a slightly different name. On the 15th of most months, representatives from the company come to El Cope to recruit men to work in the mine in 22 day shifts for $10 per day, which is an attractive offer considering steady work is elusive and $10 is a good wage. According to Julie, on the 15th of February, the day before we arrived in Panama, Petaquilla reps were offering men in El Cope $24 a day to work in the mine, which is an almost irresistible wage even though the work is grueling and the men return to town “emaciated” (Julie's word) from having done nothing beside work in the mine, eat, and sleep for the better part of a month. Julie says many come home and spend half of what they earned at the bar in the four days in between 22 day shifts. Then it’s back to work.
Beyond concerns over employment are concerns about environmental health. People who live near the mine and who eat the fish that live in the rivers that run down the mountain are realizing that there a trade-offs to the high wages and semi-steady employment Petaquilla provides. Because of arsenic run-off from the mine, the fish and shrimp and crabs are disappearing from the streams, and people have sure as hell noticed because that is what they eat. Uneducated and totally unfamiliar with ideas about ecology or environmentalism, women from the communities surrounding the mines have realized that if something in the water is killing fish, it is probably not good for their children either, and they are very concerned. In the past, they have protested the mine by creating human chains and log piles to block the road to the mine.
This information comes from Julie, my unofficial and admittedly biased source, and I wanted to compare what she said to other information, including Petaquilla’s own perspective. I was curious about the section of their website “Social Programs,” but the descriptions of said programs were short, vague, and did not even match the company’s stated goal of implementing the programs. Petaquilla says it strives to assist people with “ventures that will provide for a livelihood beyond subsistence farming, identifying more effective and efficient manners of production, and transferring the use of new technology,” but two of the programs in fact small-scale subsistence farming, and the other two are the very low-tech, minimally profitable ventures of making tamales and making hats. Beyond that the site says substantially little else to address concerns regarding environmental or community degradation.
A Google search of Petaquilla drags up an article from June 2009 by the organization Mining Watch Canada about REDAP—Red Antiminera Panamena—or Panamian Network Against Mining, which met in September 2008 and determined among other things that mining is a harmful activity which has negative effects beyond the period of time that a company can be held liable, that there is no economic or social benefit of mining to communities, and that communities are not given a voice when it comes to decisions of where and how much to mine. The committee resolved to ask the national government that Panama be declared free of open-pit mining, to create a law of socio-environmental and sustainable development, and to demand an investigation of Petaquilla Mine by the National Environmental Authority.
I will have to find out if anything came of these demands. For now, the only other thing I’ve found on Petaquilla is a billboard on the Interamericana highway we pass on our way back to El Cope from Panama City. It has a big picture of an open pit mine and “Petaquilla” in big letters, but I haven’t been able to read any more of it, even to know if it’s pro-mining and anti-mining. Last time we drove past Marc took a picture on his fancy camera and I was able to zoom in and write down the words. It’s definitely anti-mining. It give statistics about how much land, water, and toxic substances Petaquilla goes through every day and a the bottom is the web address ciampanama.org. CIAM seems to be a Panamanian NGO that promotes environmental legislation.
The Petaquilla Mine is something I want to learn more about before I leave Panama, but for now I need to finish this blog post and do a couple other things before bedtime.
I want to write about one more thing before I stop writing this very long blog post. We visited the mammoth sized Santa Rosa sugar refinery this week, which may sound boring but was actually bizarre and unforgettable. It’s the middle of harvesting season, which means that the refinery runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We got to walk directly through the facility, past TONS and TONS of raw sugar cane that was constantly being trucked in from the fields and dumped into intimidating turbines. We walked up the stairs and within arm’s reach of the cane being smashed into a pulp, and to the big brick furnace with little windows in the walls through which you could see hot orange flames. It smelled thickly like sweet wet hay.
I have no idea how sugar is refined though because it was really loud and I could not hear our tour guide, who was a petite, sharply dressed man who spoke comfortably and casually led us around the gurgling, gnashing machinery. Even though I could not hear his voice over the factory sounds, it was still fascinating because the factory itself was strange strange and faintly surreal. The pipes run in long and curving highways in different directions across the factory, and cryptic dials everywhere are covered in sugar dust, and the workers looked like cartoons of workers. One had a mustache that turned dramatically down at the corners of this mouth that gave him an impossibly droopy frown. But more than the visual strangeness was the idea that most things I eat, wear, and use on a daily basis are made in a factory like this one, which makes me want to visit more factories.
You can’t visit a huge sugar refinery and farm without thinking about the toll it takes on the soil. Santa Rosa has been operating for almost 100 years, and I wonder how much longer it can sustain intensive agricultural production and keep clearing hectares of forest to plant more sugar cane.
Both Petaquilla and Santa Rosa are companies that pay Panamanians subsistence wages for physically demanding labor that extracts resources from their land but does not build a sustainable economy in their communities. Most of the money from mining and from sugar refining leaves the country, and neither mineral extraction nor intensive agriculture are sustainable in the long run. But I’ve realized that if it weren’t for a huge consumer demand for copper for our cell phones and laptops, or for sugary food, this system of production would not exist. I am just as much a part of the problem as the executives that run the companies. So I think the only way to create industries that beneficial is to cultivate consumer demand for products that are produced ethically and sustainably, or to make better alternatives more profitable for companies.
That’s about it for now. Next week I get tag along to visit the shaman. To get there, we hike by the Petaquilla Mine. Until later!
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