[R-G] Heads They Win, Tails You Lose: Canadian Nickel Companies in Guatemala

[Anthony Fenton]

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1261/1/

Heads They Win, Tails You Lose: Canadian Nickel Companies in Guatemala

Written by Dawn Paley
Upside Down World
Thursday, 01 May 2008

"INCO's Guatemalan plans have been gathering dust for nearly a decade.
I thought by the end of 1962 we would start a project and I have
thought so ever since." Harry S. Wingate (former INCO chairperson),
Fortune Magazine, March 1970.

On October 10, 2007, Andrew Grant from Vancouver's Skye Resources
officially announced a new beginning for nickel mining in the Izabal
region in northeast Guatemala. The press touted the creation of six
thousand jobs and a thirty-year mine life, while vice minister of
Energy and Mines Jorge García Chiú broke down how, starting in 2009,
the government will collect $54,000,000 in taxes from the company each
year.

Just over three months later, on January 30, 2008, Skye announced that
they could not get the financing needed for the project, and that the
mine would not go ahead until US financial markets improved. Since
then, Skye's CEO, Ian Austin, and William Enrico, the VP of
Operations, have resigned from their positions. While the company
would have shareholders believe otherwise, this massive nickel mining
project has met the same fate that its predecessor did some thirty
years ago: on hold until further notice.

The story of Skye Resources in Guatemala is a story that's been told
before, almost to the letter. The dominant narrative is about the
wonders of economic development thanks to a large, Canadian owned
nickel project. Instead of Skye Resources, the major player in
Guatemala's past was one of Canada's top hats: the International
Nickel Company (Inco).

The history of North American mining projects in the region is a
window to understanding the current activities of Skye Resources in
the area, and it puts today's race for minerals, led by Canadian
mining companies, into context.

War Metal and a Flurry of Coups

Before Inco arrived on the scene, the Hanna Mining Company acquired
licenses from the military government of Castillo Armas to mine in the
Izabal region in Guatemala in 1956. The licenses were granted two
short years after the US State Department and the Central Intelligence
Agency planned, organized and financed a coup d'état against Jacobo
Arbenz, the country's democratically elected president.

Hanna Mining Company was a major donor to the Republican Party. The
former president of Hanna, George Humphrey, was Secretary of the
Treasury during the Eisenhower administration, and is said to have
maintained close relationships with John Foster Dulles. In addition to
Hanna's entry into Guatemala two years after the coup d'état, the
company set up or bolstered operations in Iran after the 1953 coup,
and in Brazil following the coup in 1964.

Inco bought an 80% share in the Guatemala project, known as Exmibal,
from Hanna in 1960.

According to a report written for the North American Congress on Latin
America in 1974, "Exmibal was to make a $250 million investment in
Guatemala, doubling all previous foreign investment, and causing a
major shift in the Guatemalan economy; Exmibal was granted the right
to mine, refine, and export 60 million pounds of nickel annually for
the next 40 years."

In 1954, the US defense department noted that nickel "comes closest to
being a true 'war metal'," because of its importance in building
modern engines for airplanes and jets, as well as in armor plating for
war ships. During the Korean War, more than half of the US supply of
nickel was used for military production.

Nickel has long been designated a "strategic mineral" by the US
Department of Defense. Today, nickel is an essential metal that still
plays a huge role in war, but also has a variety of uses in
manufacturing electronics, vehicles and as an alloy with other metals,
like stainless steel.

Aid Money to the Private Sector: The Inco Precedent

Inco's Exmibal mine was delayed a number of times before production
actually started.

Though a smelter, power plant and furnace were constructed, and mining
and income tax laws were rewritten after years of wrangling by Inco's
lawyers and employees, the mine only operated for three years, from
1978 until 1980. A grand total of 11,000 tons of nickel was produced,
out of a planned 1,200,000 tons.

Such an operation, producing only a fraction of the nickel predicted,
was only made possible by huge subsidies and financing given to Inco
by the US and Canadian governments and International Financial
Institutions.

As of 1977, financing of Exmibal included a $15 million dollar loan
from the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank, $13.5
million dollar loan from the US Export Import Bank, a $17.25 million
dollar loan from Canada's Export Development Corporation, and $6
million from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration
(itself a creation of US AID).

"That the Canadian state would contribute to something like this
should not in itself cause surprise" states Jamie Swift in his book
The Big Nickel: Inco at home and abroad, continuing "The history of
Canadian government support to private industry dates back to the
construction of the CPR and Confederation."

Penny Lernoux explains the preferential treatment extended to Inco by
North American governments in her book in Cry the People: "...while
Washington had no qualms about advancing the Guatemalans $13.5 million
for the nickel project, for years it refused to lend them money for a
road to the Atlantic Coast that would have put United Fruit's
inefficient International Railways out of business."

Meanwhile, the World Bank recently came under renewed scrutiny in
Guatemala because of their 2004 loan of $45 million to Glamis Gold
(now Goldcorp) for the construction of the controversial Marlin mine.

Repression as a Rule, in Times of War and Times of Peace

Swift notes that "...just as the United States had made Guatemala
'safe for democracy' in 1954, so Colonel Carlos Arana Osoria made even
these provinces safe for Inco in 1968."

Many academics and labour leaders who denounced the Exmibal project
were assassinated or forced into exile as part of making Guatemala a
"safe" place for Inco.

In Alta Verapaz, home to a large section of the Exmibal concession,
there were 65 massacres during years of internal conflict. The Panzós
Massacre, which took place 30 years ago this May, was rooted in
repressing indigenous demands for land titles in the midst of an
influx of foreign direct investment. Panzós is the next town west from
the Exmibal project, in the heart of Guatemala's so called "nickel
district."

Descendents and relatives of people who were killed or disappeared for
speaking out against the Exmibal project still live in the area.
Entire Mayan Qeq'chi communities who were displaced to make way for
Inco persist in their demands for their historical right to title over
land for housing and harvest.

In September of 2006, five landless communities occupied lands which
they have historical claim to, but which Skye Resources claims to own.
The communities were violently evicted from the lands in November of
2006, and again in January of 2007.

Skye Resources' chief of Security during the evictions was a military
man named Mynor Padilla.

During January evictions, community members' houses were burned to the
ground and the army participated in intimidating the communities, in a
blatant betrayal of the 1996 Peace Accords. People present at the
evictions said that they were reminded of "wartime" by the violent and
threatening actions of the company.

After a video circulated on You Tube showing the evictions, the
company's representatives whom had once stated that they would evict
the communities "as many times as is necessary," started negotiating
with the communities about their right to stay on the land. Through
the process, the company has settled with two of the communities.

The Ghost of the Nickel Project that Never Was

"Over the last 15 years, the government has officially proclaimed the
reconstruction of this road three times. It was one of the first
things President Berger announced when he was elected four years ago,"
says Eloida Mejía, an El Estor resident and member of the Association
of Friends of Izabal Lake. We were talking in the back of a beat-up
pick up truck, carrying us and a dozen other people from Fronteras to
El Estor on a Tuesday evening.

All along the road the water in the potholes reflected the moonlit sky
above. The narrow bridges required careful steering, and the
thirty-five kilometers of gravel took over an hour to cover. The route
where the company was -according to their technical report- already
supposed to be running twenty tractor trailer round trips day and
night, was quiet save the odd oncoming bus or pickup truck. Fireflies,
of which there are estimated to be 25 species in the region, offered
the only distraction from darkness on either side of the road.

It's not just the road that makes the company's plans seem far from
reality. It's the history, the ghost of the great nickel project that
never was. When they took over the concession in 2004 from Inco, Skye
Resources was expecting to drive up their share price and sell the
company to a major nickel mining company. When they didn't get any
bids on their attempt to sell the project, Skye Resources announced
that they would build the mine and carry out the project themselves.

The company's plan required them to raise nearly a billion dollars by
2014. More than half of the funds are needed to build a petroleum coke
fired power plant to power the mine. In December of 2007, the company
contracted Morgan Stanley to raise the bulk of the funds, and in
January the company announced that they had defaulted on their
financing. Ian Austin, who stepped down as president of Skye in
February, cashed in $480,000 worth of Skye shares in late March, a
nice retirement bonus for the president of a company whose balance
sheets have never been out of the red.

The company claims that it is "... preparing to initiate construction
once financing is in place." Tension is high in the surrounding towns.
After the project delays were announced, the congressperson for
Izabal, Byron Chacón, blamed the people who occupied company lands for
the failure of Skye Resources to begin mine construction.

The human cost of speculation on the financial markets by mining
companies is high. This is evidenced by the grave human rights abuses
that have been committed on behalf of Inco and Skye Resources. This
mining project is but one example of what the promises of
"development" and "corporate social responsibility" mean for the
people directly affected by these projects.

Dawn Paley is an independent journalist from Vancouver, British  
Columbia.

Photos by James Rodriguez. Mimundo.org (unless otherwise noted).

Works Consulted/Further Reading

Devrell, John. (1975). Falconbridge: Portrait of a Canadian Mining
Multinational. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company.

E.D.B., F.G. (November, 1968). The Hanna Industrial Complex: Part 3.
NACLA Newsletter, Volume II Number 7.

Jones, Susanne (1974). Pushing Counterrevolution in Guatemala. NACLA.

Lernoux, Penny. (1980.) Cry of the People: United States Involvement
in the Rise of Fascism, Torture, and Murder and the Persecution of the
Catholic Church in Latin America. New York: Doubleday and Company.

NACLA. (1974.) "EXMIBAL promised to become as central to the
Guatemalan economy as the United Fruit Co. had been 50 years earlier."
NACLA Report on the Americas.

Swift, Jamie. (1977). The Big Nickel: Inco at Home and Abroad.
Kitchener, Ontario: Between the Lines.