Sonal Gupta, the National Observer

An email from the CEO of a mining company to an Ontario First Nation chief is causing an uproar over how resource companies engage with Indigenous communities. 

Barrick Gold Corp. (Barrick) has chosen, once again, not to hold its annual shareholder meeting in-person in Toronto this year and instead, has moved proceedings to a highly-controlled online format.   For many years community members, often Indigenous peoples, from villages surrounding Barrick mines have travelled from as far away as Papua New Guinea and Chile to Toronto to be able to speak directly to shareholders and the board of directors.

The following blog was written by Diana Martin of MiningWatch Canada and María Alejandra Torres García of Earthworks.

In 2022, [1] and again in 2024, [2] Indigenous Kuria from villages surrounding North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania filed cases in Canada against Barrick Gold Corporation [3] (Barrick) for alleged “acts of extreme violence committed by Mine Police in the service of Barrick in and around the North Mara Mine.” [4] The 29 plaintiffs include victims

Between 2022 and 2024, Indigenous Kuria from villages surrounding North Mara Gold Mine in Tanzania filed cases in Canada against Barrick Gold Corporation for alleged human rights abuses in and around the North Mara mine. MiningWatch Canada attended the hearings in Toronto and has prepared this report where we: 

As the Diaguita Patay Co Indigenous Community, we express our firm opposition to Barrick Gold's new attempt to encroach on our territory through its “El Alto” mining exploration project, located in the same area impacted by the failed Pascua Lama mine. This is not about 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.

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.

MiningWatch has long supported communities in Latin America who are protecting their lands and livelihoods from the harmful impacts of Canadian mining. Across the board, we’re seeing environmental defenders who speak out against these projects be hit with trumped-up criminal charges in an effort to intimidate them and silence their opposition. Threats and attacks against communities are continuing.

More than 100 Chilean, Canadian, and other international organizations and coalitions published an open letter today in solidarity with environmental defenders who are being harassed and persecuted for defending their territory in southern Chile from a Canadian rare earths mining company.

The Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC) urges governments to call for an immediate global moratorium on deep-sea mining to send an urgent political signal defending the ocean, multilateralism, and UNCLOS, following today’s announcement by The Metals Company (TMC) USA of its application to mine the international seabed under U.S. domestic law.