RE:From SRS RoccoWeeble, the issues are complex. Nobody is making light of people who have been hurt. My own reference to "frivolous" was in reference to the attempted shareholder class actions being instituted by ambulance chasers, not the action that was filed in Canadian court on behalf of protestors who were injured.
As far as injured parties are concerned, you have to realize that from the perspective of a company the LAST thing you want is to see somebody get hurt. Apart from the decency side of the whole thing, the second that injury happens the situation escalates out of control. On the other hand if you are an "action group", the FIRST thing you want to see is for somebody to get hurt, for the very same reason - you are deliberately trying to cause the situation to escalate. Therefore you mislead and exploit people and whip up paranoia and distrust to try to get them to block roads and cause havoc. You risk nothing yourself - you just incite other people to put themselves in harm's way. Meanwhile the company tries to keep order by hiring third party security personnel, who tend to be of dubious reliability under the best of circumstances, and half of whom can be bribed by the very same action groups to fire the rubber bullet that causes the injuries.
So now by incompetence or duplicity somebody is injured. Canada tries to "do the right thing" by letting a lawsuit proceed in Canada (albeit four years later), but what are they not thinking? The message back to the home country is clear - Canada is insulting and belittling the Guatemalan judicial system by implying that the only way a person can get justice is in a court outside of Guatemala. As long as that legal action is active on the Canadian books, Guatemala is in danger of civil riots against their own judicial system unless their system takes action to "prove" that they are the "champions of the people". Hence the situation we are now in with the trumped up "mining permit" situation. Care to reconsider who are the good guys and the bad guys in this dog's breakfast?