President Chinchilla has another victory, the Appellate Court decision to keep the ban on the open pit gold mine in Cutris de San Carlos alive.
During Ms. Chinchilla presidential campaign, she had gone on record that she opposed any new open pit mines. This week it appears that she kept her promise by influencing the judges when the appeals courts declined to lift a ban on the open pit gold mine in Cutris de San Carlos.
The company, Industrias Infinito S.A., (Costa Rican subsidiary of a Canadian company), cannot keep developing the mine even though former president Óscar Arias Sánchez declared it to be in the national interest. Obviously, he was looking at the millions or billions of colones revenue ; a nice sum of money to be dumped into the government.
The main issue in this [day one] protest and controversial project focused on over 100 hectares of trees that would be cut to develop the mine. Costa Rican Supreme Court (Sala IV) ruled last April (see, Crucitis Mine Protest) Infinito can proceed with its open-pit gold mine, striking down complaints from environmental groups that the project was destroying virgin forest. But this week the Tribunal de Apelaciones Del Contencioso Administrativo del Segundo Circuito Judicial ruled in favor of nature, which got a standing ovation from environmentalists.
Sala IV had made another decision back in 2008, which gave protection to the almendro amarillo (English: mountain almond tree) a tree that is on the mine site and it is the preferred home of the great green macaw, which is endangered. Also, this year, a Japanese biological research team reported more than a dozen animals a month are dying from vehicles on the Costanera Sur near the Parque Nacional Carara. Some of these are ocelots and sloth that are threatened, which no doubt added ammunition to the court’s decision. The biological teams report got the Transport Ministry into thinking about shutting down the highway, so no more animals would die. Obviously, this would strangle some of the access to the mine, causing more discontent to the miners and owners.
Will this be the end? … and the environmentalists have won?
As of now, we see it as a matter of economics and business principal. The price of gold has soared, which will mean a sizable profit for the company and its investors, which has been reported to be over $20 million. And Infinito has spent 10 years in developing the mine and had obtained all the required operating and eco permits from the government, including the blessing of the court last April. One of commitments Infinito made, they promised to plant 10 trees for every one it has to cut down and bring the land back to its nature state as many of the open-pit mines in the US have done.
To put it bluntly, it will probably end up in a lengthy and very costly legal battle, where the only winners will be the attorneys, like the Villalobos Brothers investor’s lawsuit.
Environmental activists may have claimed a battle victory for now by temporary halting the mining project, but not the war. Costa Rica, our guess is, will face the possibility of being sued, and then being assessed with a huge award by some international arbitration panel or within Costa Rica courts themselves to recoup their time and expense for a project they got the government’s “a-okay” to do so in the first place.
http://tiny.cc/bl32h
Bill C-300
Corporate Accountability of Mining, Oil and Gas Corporations in Developing Countries Act, Canada (October 27th 2010)
If passed, Bill C-300 will:
* Put in place human rights, labour, and environmental standards that Canadian extractive companies receiving government support must live up to when they operate in developing countries.
* Create a complaints mechanism that will allow members of affected communities abroad, or Canadians, to file complaints against companies that are not living up to those standards.
* Create a possible sanction for companies that are found to be out of compliance with the standards, in the form of loss of government financial and political support.