Guatemalan Beaches Threatened by Iron, Gas Operations

Guatemalan Beaches Threatened by Iron, Gas Operations
By Danilo Valladares

“If they come here to extract iron from the beach, it will mean the destruction of our natural wealth and the end of tourism,” warned Leonel Palma, a hotel employee in Puerto de San José on Guatemala’s Pacific coast, where the government has granted mineral exploration licenses.

“Tourists come here to swim and relax, but if there are mining operations on the beach, what will they do then?” asked Palma, who greets visitors upon their arrival at the Costa Verde Hotel, 113 kilometers from Guatemala City.

Environmentalists, academics and local communities have vocally opposed the licenses granted by the government of social democrat Álvaro Colom for the reconnaissance and exploration of the iron sands on the country’s southwestern coast.

“There are fears, because we have already lived through situations like what happened when they built the dock at Puerto Quetzal (located next to Puerto de San José) and seawater leaked into freshwater wells,” something that continues to happen when there are heavy swells, said José Urbina of the non-governmental Local Power and Development Collective, based in the southern department of Escuintla.

On May 28, a peaceful demonstration will be held in Puerto de San José to highlight the opposition to iron mining operations on the southern coast, Urbina told Tierramérica.
Guatemala

In 2009, the Ministry of Energy and Mines issued three reconnaissance and exploration licenses to Tikal Minerals, a subsidiary of Mayan Iron Corporation, for an area of 292 square kilometers in the departments of Escuintla, Retalhuleu and Suchitepéquez.

Mayan Iron Corporation is based in Australia and has attracted substantial investment from China. The company is named after the ancestral indigenous peoples of Guatemala and was created for the purpose of exploiting the oil sand deposits in this Central American country.

Until now, however, none of the three projects proposed by the company has been given permission to proceed. In fact, on April 5, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources rejected the only environmental impact assessment submitted so far by Tikal Minerals for one of those projects.

The authorities determined that “the project is not environmentally viable,” because it would lead to extractive activity that could create “serious risks for the integrity of the country’s coastal-marine ecosystems and repercussions on the health and safety of the population of the coastal region.”

Mining the iron would require extracting the sand with excavators or dredges and transporting it to a plant where the minerals, mainly magnetite, would be separated out by using magnets. Once this process is completed, 90 percent of the sand would be returned to the beaches, and the iron would be transported from a local port to China.