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Just days after the Argentine Supreme Court upheld the federal Glacier Protection Law in a suit brought by Barrick Gold requesting a suspension of the law for its Pascua Lama (which is known to impact glaciers), the Argentine environmental organization CEDHA and the Fundación Ciudadanos Independientes (FuCI), filed a complaint to Canada’s Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor accusing McEwen Mining of disregarding glacier impacts at its Los Azules Project in San Juan province.
The Center for Human Rights and Environment (CEDHA), the Argentina based group which monitors mining company compliance with local and international laws and standards, along with their partner group FuCI in San Juan, are pushing for greater corporate accountability in the respect and protection of glaciers and permafrost zones, critical to year long water supply to hot, dry, and arid regions of the Central Andes. CEDHA has worked since 2008 to get a glacier protection law passed and implemented in Argentina and has carried out an extensive glacier inventory of more than 2000 glaciers located near mining operations, including in the vicinity of projects sites such as Veladero & Pascua Lama (Barrick Gold), El Pachón and Filo Colorado (Xstrata Copper), El Altar (Peregrine Metals), and Los Azules (McEwen).
In a recently published study, CEDHA found McEwen Mining is intentionally misleading shareholders on its corporate website, falsely claiming “there are no ice glaciers present in the project area”, while at the same time, carrying out a multi-year inventory and analysis of the glaciers for the Los Azules project. Recently, McEwen’s hired glacier specialists held a public meeting confessing that glaciers were in fact present in the project location.
McEwen has not observed basic due diligence, say CEDHA and FuCI. They should be both recognizing and avoiding glacier impacts at its multibillion dollar investment/exploration project. Since McEwen’s buyout of Minera Andes, the project team has even backed away from engaging with CEDHA to address glacier issues. CEDHA found more than 200 glaciers at or near enough to the project site to warrant further in-depth studies.
Argentina’s new national glacier, which received strong backing last week from the Argentine Supreme Court (in an attempt by Barrick Gold and Xstrata Copper to debunk the law through injunction requests to the court), not only bans mining in glacier zones, but calls on companies like McEwen to prove that their projects do not impact glaciers and permafrost. If they are found to impact glaciers, they should cease and repair impacts, and if avoiding impacts is not possible, they could be told to pack up and go home by the federal and provincial mining and environmental authorities.
The Los Azules project team, run by Minera Andes, before McEwen bought the company in January of 2012, had initially engaged with CEDHA to review findings, and had even invited CEDHA to the project site to make ocular observations of the glaciers identified and analyzed through the use of publicly available Google Earth images. That site visit was canceled immediately after the McEwen takeover. Shortly afterward, McEwen published on its website that there were no ice glaciers present in the project area. This change of position, the announcement by the company denying glacier presence, and the collapse of engagement, drove CEDHA and FuCI to file the complaint before the Canadian Mining Ombudsman.
CEDHA requests the CSR Ombudsman to engage McEwen, to recognize glacier impacts and cease operations until a proper study is carried out. If the Ombudsman is not able to sway the company to comply with its due diligence, both environmental groups are ready to file a legal complaint against Los Azules to stop the project, which they claim is currently violating the Argentine National Glacier Law.
For more information:
Jorge Daniel Taillant
[email protected]
tel. +54 9 351 507 8376
link to complaint filed against McEwen to the CSR Counsellor
https://center-hre.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Request-for-Review-McEwen-CEDHA.pdf
link to full glacier impact report:
https://center-hre.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Glaciar-Impact-Report-Los-Azules.pdf