Real Change News | Mining and McDermott

June 2, 2010
Vol: 17 No: 23

News

Mining and McDermott

by: Julia Cechvala , Contributing Writer

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The water in the bottles was brown and cloudy, but this protest was not about the oil disaster in the Gulf but a potential mining operation in El Salvador.

The bottles of murky water were props for street theater put on by the Washington Fair Trade Coalition and Seattle CISPES, an El Salvador solidarity group, as part of a protest May 27 over Rep. Jim McDermott’s (D-Seattle) lack of support for the Trade Reform, Accountability, Development and Employment (TRADE) Act.

The protesters’ focus centered on a mine in El Salvador proposed by Pacific Rim Mining Corporation, which would use water and cyanide to extract gold. The mine would be sited in the basin of El Salvador’s largest river, causing a coalition of groups to raise concerns about the mine’s impact on drinking water. The Salvadoran government denied Pacific Rim mining permits, but the company is now suing the country for hundreds of millions of dollars of lost potential profits. The Canadian company was able to do this under the U.S.—Central America Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA, after opening a subsidiary in Reno, Nev.

“The whole goal of our current trade regulation is to eliminate any barrier to trade,” says Kristen Beifus, Director of the Washington Fair Trade Coalition, who helped lead the protest. The coalition is calling for support of the TRADE Act, which would reform previous trade agreements such as CAFTA and prevent lawsuits like the one brought by Pacific Rim against El Salvador.

Dressed in business suits to represent the executives of Pacific Rim Mining Company, a group of protesters mocked their own dramatic deaths after drinking from the bottles of brown water in a toast to Rep. McDermott. “All of these corporate goons are dead because of their own greed,” Beifus then said of the “dead executives” to the assembled crowd of around 40 people.

The drama played out in front of Rep. McDermott’s office in order to call on the Congressman to co-sponsor the TRADE Act. McDermott so far has not joined 141 of his Democratic colleagues in co-sponsoring the legislation. “He needs to be taking a lead,” says Beifus.

Protesters included five students and a teacher from the Northwest School, an independent college preparatory school in Seattle, who had been on a recent trip to El Salvador. Suzanne Bottelli, a teacher at the school, said the idea of a country not having the sovereignty to make its own laws and protect itself from what could be permanent environmental damage was “terrifying.”

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