Chile

(Ottawa) Even as houses near Barrick's mine in the highlands of Papua New Guinea are being burned down in a joint military and police action, Jethro Tulin is in Canada to address shareholders and government officials, whom he considers complicit in the suffering of his people as a result of Barrick's Porgera Joint Venture mine.

Watershed, a documentary by Lauren Rosenfeld, intimately captures agrarian life in the heart of the Andes Mountains and portrays the struggle of a Chilean farming community to preserve its culture, land, and water rights. Pascua Lama, an open-pit gold mine owned by the Canadian Barrick Gold Corporation, is the first of many projects under construction in the Cordillera between Chile and Argentina.

A report on the activities of Goldcorp around the world: “Given the rapid pace of mergers and acquisitions that Goldcorp has made over the last few years, it is too early to see how the new expanded company will behave in the real world, and what kind of social and environmental responsibility it will assume.”

On May 2nd, 2007, as part of an "International Day of Action" against Barrick, protests took place in six different countries as well as in Toronto, Canada, where Barrick is based.

On the same day, Canada's second largest gold mining company, GoldCorp, was protested at their annual meeting in Vancouver.

For more information about these actions, go to www.protestbarrick.net.

This past March 9-11, representatives from civil society organizations and churches throughout Latin America met to share and discuss the situation of environmental injustice which communities and organizations are confronting as a result of the activities of transnational mining corporations.

The Canadian mining map was produced by the Halifax Initiative during the National Roundtables on Corporate Social Responsibility and the Canadian Extractive Industry in Developing Countries. The Roundtables, which took place between June and November of 2006, fulfilled one of the recommendations made in the groundbreaking report, Mining in Developing Countries and Corporate Social Responsibility, tabled by the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade (SCFAIT) in June 2005.

On January 25, 2006, 48 people were arrested when Chilean federal police (Carabineros) broke up the blockade that had been in place since the night of Monday, January 22, to prevent the passage of heavy trucks and mining machinery. After the arrests, the local community returned to re-take the intersection. According to the protesters, the peaceful occupation and blockade will be maintained indefinitely.