Up a creek without a paddle? 2016 Tahoe Resources reported Not looking too good for a quick recovery. Either sell the asset or build a really high barbed wired fence.
Escobal Mine has been, and continues to be, a subject of human rights abuse and violations from day one.
-tahoe hired this person for head of security:
Rotondo was apprehended at the airport La Aurora, when he trying to flee the country. Wire tapping of conversations between him and his son reveal that he planned to leave Guatemala for a while, because “I ordered to kill some of these sons of B!tches.”
-In January 2015, Norway’s $850 billion Government Pension Fund divested from Tahoe after conducting an investigation, concluding that Tahoe has and will likely continue to pose “an unacceptable risk of…contributing to serious human rights violations.” Similarly, Tahoe recently appeared on a list issued by the Dutch Pension Fund, Pensioenfonds PGB, of companies that the fund excludes from its investment portfolio. The basis for the exclusion is “human rights violations in Guatemala.”
-As explained in further detail below, it is unclear how many of these licenses are actually approved, as Tahoe may have recently lost three of these exploration licenses.
- Tahoe plans to expand into municipalities where the citizens, in officially-sanctioned plebiscites, have voted overwhelming to reject mining.
-Six of these municipalities have held official municipally-sanctioned plebiscites relating to the mine, in which eligible voters participated. The majority of voters in all six plebiscites voted against allowing mining operations in their communities. The results have been published in the official registry for government announcements, the Diario de Centro Amrica (also referred to as, “Gazette of Central America”) and by local NGOs. Two other plebiscites in municipalities outside of the immediate area of the pending concessions have also resulted in votes against the mine. Tahoe and its supporters brought at least four court cases to try to stop and invalidate these official votes, but the Constitutional Court of Guatemala has supported the legislation, which allows communities to hold plebiscites. Tahoe failed to disclose either the existence of these court cases, or the significance of these plebiscites on Tahoe’s expansion plans.
-Tahoe has consistently downplayed the degree of community opposition to the mine. It has described the opposition as being led by a small, unrepresentative group of individuals or by communities outside of the immediate area of the mine.