CPA backs DENR closure of mining firms
>> Saturday, February 18, 2017
While
it is long overdue, the Cordillera Peoples’ Alliance welcomes the Dept. of
environment and natural Resources announcement this week on the closure of 23
mining operations in several parts of the country, including Benguet Corp.
While Lepanto Consolidated Mining
Company is among those up for suspension,
we are fervently pushing for the closure of this company for its
historical accountability to the destruction of people’s lands and polluting
and silting the Abra River and its tributaries for the past 80 years.
Over 100 years of BC’s open-pit mining
in Itogon has removed whole mountains and entire villages from the land
surface. After exhausting the gold ore, the open pit in Itogon is now abandoned
as the company has shifted to other economic ventures like water privatization,
small scale contract scheme and housing.
Benguet Corporation had denuded the
pine forests of Itogon, Baguio, Tuba, and Tublay. When they ran out of timber,
the mining company expanded their logging to Bobok in Bokod. Apart from
denuding the forests, the company also ruined the groundwater systems of Itogon
first with deep exploration drilling and the driving of tunnels then with
open-pit mining.
And apart from destroying watersheds
and groundwater systems, Benguet Corporation also polluted surface water
channels, land surfaces, and the air – with sulfurous oxides from the exposure
of massive amounts of mineral overburden, acid mine drainage, and huge volumes
of mine tailings laden with cyanide, other poisonous ore-processing chemicals,
and toxic concentrations of dissolved heavy metals.
The sediments and contaminants were
transported by rivers through Pangasinan to the Lingayen Gulf where they
sometimes caused fish kills. Up to the present, sediments from both active and
abandoned tailings dams continue to cause flooding and destruction of rice
fields and fishponds in the lowlands. They are also quickly silting up the San
Roque dam.
The people of Mankayan remember the
Abra River before the mine. It was deep and narrow, just 5 meters wide, full of
fish and surrounded by verdant rice paddies. Now there is a wide gorge of
barren land on either side of the polluted river. Fruit trees and animals have
died from the poisoned water and rice crops are stunted.
Environmental Investigatory Missions
were carried out by the Save the Abra River Movement in 2002 (and 2003)
validating and re-affirming community testimonies on the big role of Lepanto in
the pollution of the Abra River, destruction of ricefields, posing of health
hazards to communities and workers, among
others.
UN Special Rapporteur for the Human
Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of Indigenous Peoples Prof. Rodolfo Stavenhagen
in his 2002 visit to Mankayan also validated the same findings of STARM, with
concrete recommendations on human rights and indigenous peoples’ rights.
The suspension order for Lepanto has
yet to be served but it raises hope for an end to the mining operations that
have been destroying people’s lands and the Abra River. The people of Mankayan
have long called for the closure of Lepanto.
The DENR decision on BC and Lepanto
also shows that no amount of ISO certification will speak clearer or louder
than the collective voice of communities who suffered from the operations of
these mining giants. We hope that DENR’s
announcement for the closure and suspension be implemented swiftly, and that
accountability and just compensations is ensured.
Cordillera People’s Alliance
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