Canadian Mining in Costa Rica: the Quaker Connection

Smiling with Wolf. I caught "Walking with Wolf" co-authors Wolf Guindon and Kay Chornook outside of the Monteverde Friends Meeting House on Sunday January 3rd, 2010.

Well, not so much a connection as much as an observation. Okay, there’s no real connection at all, but it makes a hell of a title.

I’m reading “Walking with Wolf,” about Wolf Guindon, one of the Quakers who came from Alabama to settle in Costa Rica’s Tilerán Mountain Range in 1951.  The Quaker settlement became Monteverde, one of our planet’s most cherished & biologically diverse cloud forests (my wife and daughters live in Monteverde while I study at Upeace during the school year). Wolf’s co-author Kay Chornook set Wolf up with a small recording device back in the 90′s to document his thoughts as he roamed the network of footpaths above Monteverde. Once again, as I follow Wolf into the wilderness through his stories, Canadian mining companies meander back into the Dispatch from a Small Planet.

I’ve been writing about Canadian mining companies both here in Costa Rica and in Guatemala — they operate throughout the Americas.

"Walking with Wolf" is one well-told story after another. I'm learning a lot about the place I now call home: Monteverde. ~a.

In the mid 1960′s a Canadian company was exploring sulfur extraction at several “camps” in the Peñas Blancas region.  Here’s the interesting part:  they never started digging because as the Vietnam War was winding down it caused a glut in the price of sulfur.  How’s that?  Turns out the sulfur was being used as a defoliant.  Yup, they stopped using Agent Orange and the price of sulfur plummeted.

Not only was the glut a good thing for the forests and people of Southeast Asia, but for the cloud forests on the eastern side of continental divide above Monteverde.  The mines never happened and the forests were eventually bought by the Monteverde Conservation League and are now a part of the Children’s Eternal Rainforest — the largest privately owned reserve in Central America.

Canadian mining in Central America, however, is not ancient history: Urgent Action Needed Now

Less than a week ago a second anti-gold mine activist was assassinated in El Salvador.  On the day after Christmas Dora Alicia Sorto Recinos, who was eight months pregnant, was assassinated in the community of Trinidad in the department of Cabañas.  She was carrying her two-year old who was shot in the leg.  Her husband is on the board of the Environmental Committee of Cabañas, organizing against Pacific Rim’s El Dorado gold mine and has survived three attacks on his life to date.

Urgent Action is needed:  read the Rights Action alert now.

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