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| by A. David Dahmer |
| April 25, 2012 |
Jan Morrill, of the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining, is on a national tour talking about important mining issues.
The recent mining controversy in northern Wisconsin was far more complex than people would have you believe, says Jan Morrill as she stopped in Madison as part of a national tour she was embarking on. Morrill, who works for the National Roundtable Against Metallic Mining, is actively working to build international alliances on the issue of mining.
Morrill spoke from her own extensive experience on building U.S.-El Salvador ties in a talk called “Globalizing Mining Resistance” April 11 at Helen C. White Hall on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus.
Morrill has been directly working with communities resisting mining in El Salvador for four years and is currently the representative of the International Allies against Metallic Mining in El Salvador, a coalition of organizations in the U.S. and Canada working to support the struggles of Salvadoran communities for sovereignty over their natural resources. In her work, she coordinates closely with the National Roundtable against Metallic Mining, national organizations in El Salvador, and the communities that have been and would be directly affected by gold mining.
“I've been talking about patterns in the international mining industry and how what happened here in Wisconsin is not unique to here,” she tells The Madison Times in an interview at Ground Zero Coffee shop. “That's what has been happening in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and South America, the Philippines.”
Mining companies have come to communities in El Salvador, and now in Wisconsin, touting jobs and "environmentally safe mining" which uses, they claim, new technology and new techniques. But what they say is very different from what Morrill says she has seen firsthand.
“The only real way people have been able to protect their natural resources right now has been to push back against those mining companies and to organize themselves to get information to the decision makers who are deciding on the case,” Morrill says. “That's how the tribes in northern Wisconsin were able to align themselves with environmentalists and people concerned about water here in the southern part of the state and push back against legislatures. That's what is happening in El Salvador.”
The rural communities in El Salvador have formed a national coalition with environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), churches, health NGOs, and lawyers against mining companies that have been coming in. “They've been successful,” Morrill says. “There's a moratorium on mining right now.”
The key industry in El Salvador is gold mining and the big corporations are looking to do open-pit cyanide leach gold mining. “It's a process that mixes water, gold, and cyanide together to separate the gold from the soil,” Morrill says. “Obviously, that is really environmentally destructive and it has caused a lot of problems in Honduras and Guatemala and Mexico, so the Salvadoran communities where gold mining was being proposed have done a lot of research and work to find out the dangerous effects of that.”
Morrill has some success stories to share. One of the communities she works with is the site of a gold mine owned by a Milwaukee company, The Commerce Group. San Sebastian is now suffering serious environmental and health consequences as a result of the gold mining process.
“But they actually got the last right-wing president to revoke mining permits from The Commerce Group,” Morrill says. “The group contaminated a local water source through a process called acid mine drainage. The water in that community has basically been contaminated for the last 40 years and the community — with other groups in El Salvador — pushed the government to revoke the permits of the Commerce Group Company. They were the only company with a permit so right now there is no mining in El Salvador, which is a huge victory considering that El Salvador is a country the size of Massachusetts and it’s completely dependent on foreign investment for most of its industry. To stand up to transnational mining corporations is no small feat.”
Even if it succeeds in maintaining barriers against new mining projects, El Salvador still faces huge difficulties in restoring its rivers and streams so that its people can safely drink and use the water. Corporations have consistently refused to pay any compensation for remediating water and land contaminated by toxic metals leaking out of its closed-down mine.
Morrill first became interested in El Salvador when she went on a delegation to San Salvador when she was 17 years old and fell in love with the country and the people and got excited about the great organizing that was going on in that country. “I wound up being staffed for the Sisters Cities Project in the Salvadoran office for three and a half years,” she remembers. “The Sister Cities has had a campaign since 2005 to support the mining work in El Salvador and so when I became staff I was in charge of that campaigning and I didn't know anything about mining at the time.”
She learned everything she knows grassroots-style by talking to people in the local communities and working with the organizations in El Salvador. About four months ago she moved into her current position and now she is on a national tour.
“As I travel the country, I've seen that people have been really interested,” she says. “I think it's an issue that maybe a year ago would have been really abstract for people and hard to grasp but I think that with everything that has happened since last fall... there's been a lot of education work done in the state and people really get it.”
She's originally from Banghor, Maine. “It's interesting for me because three weeks ago a Canadian oil company hired a firm to rewrite all of Maine's mining regulation and introduce it into the state Legislature two or three weeks before the end of the session,” she says. “They said if it didn't get approved, 2,000 jobs were going to leave the state of Maine. So I've been coordinating in El Salvador with a couple of organizations in Maine to get more information to local representatives there.”
Morrill wants people to understand the pattern that mine companies are doing and to use the strategies that worked in Wisconsin to help in the struggle in Maine – and everywhere else.
“We can use strategies that worked in El Salvador to help the struggle in other places,” she says. “I just learned yesterday that there are drafts and rewrites of legislation for mining code in Minnesota. This issue is only going to become more prevalent and important as time goes on because the price of gold and iron and copper is going up.
“Our goals are to get out the information so it can be used and useful for people who are trying to protect their communities and their natural resources,” she adds. “I'm optimistic that we can be successful. There's a movement. It's not just me. As long as it's not just me, I'm optimistic.”
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