Chile suspends Barrick Gold mine on indigenous fears of pollution 11th April

A Chilean court on Wednes­day sus­pend­ed Bar­rick Gold Corp.’s Pas­cua-Lama mine after indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties com­plained that the project is threat­en­ing their water sup­ply and pol­lut­ing glac­i­ers.

A Chilean court on Wednes­day sus­pend­ed Bar­rick Gold Corp.’s Pas­cua-Lama mine after indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties com­plained that the project is threat­en­ing their water sup­ply and pol­lut­ing glac­i­ers.

The appeals court in the north­ern city of Copi­apo charged the Toron­to-based gold min­er with “envi­ron­men­tal irreg­u­lar­i­ties” dur­ing con­struc­tion of the world’s high­est-alti­tude gold and sil­ver mine.

Inte­ri­or Min­is­ter Andres Chad­wick wel­comed the mine’s sus­pen­sion and said he hopes the world’s top gold min­ing com­pa­ny can now fix prob­lems at Pas­cua-Lama.

“We’re not sur­prised at all and we think it is good that through a legal organ­ism, con­struc­tion work is sus­pend­ed while Pas­cua effec­tive­ly attends to the charges already made by the envi­ron­men­tal reg­u­la­tor,” Chad­wick told local Radio Coop­er­a­ti­va.

Bar­rick (TSX:ABX) said Wednes­day it was still await­ing for­mal noti­fi­ca­tion of the injunc­tion halt­ing con­struc­tion on the Chilean side of the Pas­cua-Lama min­ing project and would assess the poten­tial impli­ca­tions when it came.

How­ev­er, it said con­struc­tion activ­i­ties in Argenti­na, where the major­i­ty of the project’s crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture is locat­ed, includ­ing the process plant and tail­ings stor­age facil­i­ty, are not affect­ed.

Mean­while, the start date for the mine strad­dling the Andean bor­der with Argenti­na has already been delayed by more than six months to the sec­ond half of 2014. Cost over­runs have seen the price tag rise from $3 bil­lion to more than $8 bil­lion.

The injunc­tion stems from a con­sti­tu­tion­al rights pro­tec­tion peti­tion filed with the court on Oct. 22 by a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a Dia­gui­ta indige­nous com­mu­ni­ty and oth­er indi­vid­u­als against Barrick’s Chilean sub­sidiary and the region­al Envi­ron­men­tal Eval­u­a­tion Com­mis­sion.

That move fol­lowed a sim­i­lar peti­tion filed in late Sep­tem­ber by rep­re­sen­ta­tives of four Dia­gui­ta indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties against the Bar­rick sub­sidiary, Com­pa­nia Min­era Neva­da, with the EEC.

The plain­tiffs allege non-com­pli­ance with aspects of the project’s envi­ron­men­tal approval in Chile that have result­ed in neg­a­tive impacts on water sources and con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, or at least the risk of con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, of the Estre­cho and Huas­co rivers, accord­ing to infor­ma­tion sup­plied by Bar­rick.