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Urgent Environmental Alert: Protect the Glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere
Say No to Barrick Gold’s Pascua Lama Project and save two rivers and three glaciers in Chile
In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed by 2 glaciers. Indigenous farmers use the water, there is no unemployment, and they provide the second largest source of income for the area. Under the glaciers has been found a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. To get at these, it would be necessary to break, to destroy the glaciers - something never conceived of in the history of the world and to make 2 huge holes, each as big as a whole mountain, one for extraction and one for the mine's rubbish tip.
The project is called PASCUA LAMA. The company is called Barrick Gold. The operation is planned by a multi-national company, one of whose members is George Bush Senior.
The Chilean Government has approved the project to start this year, 2006. The only reason it hasn't started yet is because the farmers have got a temporary stay of execution. If they destroy the glaciers, they will not just destroy the source of specially pure water, but they will permanently contaminate the 2 rivers so they will never again be fit for human or animal
consumption because of the use of cyanide and sulphuric acid in the extraction process.
Every last gram of gold will go abroad to the multinational company and not one will be left with the people whose land it is. They will only be left with the poisoned water and the resulting illnesses. The farmers have been fighting a long time for their land, but have been forbidden to make a TV appeal by a ban from the Ministry of the Interior. Their only hope now of putting brakes on this project is to get help from international justice.
The world must know what is happening in Chile. The only place to start changing the world is from here.
There are two courses of action to take:
1. Sign this online petition saying “No” to the project “Pascua-Lama”.
2. We ask you to circulate this message amongst your friends in the following way. Please copy this text, paste it into a new email adding your signature and send it to everyone in your address book. Please will the 100th person to receive and sign the petition send it to noapascualama@yahoo.ca to be forwarded to the Chilean government.
No to Pascua Lama Open-cast mine in the Andean Cordillera on the Chilean-Argentine frontier. We ask the Chilean Government not to authorize the Pascua Lama project and to protect the whole of 3 glaciers , the purity of the water of the SanFelix Valley and El Transito, the quality of the agricultural land of the region of Atacama, the quality of life of the Diaguita people and of the whole population of the region.
For more specific information on the proposed mine visit http://www.miningwatch.ca/index.php?/104/Pascua_Lama_Background
Visit the official Anti-Pascualama campaign website (if you can’t read this Spanish website use Alta vista’s Babel Fish to translate the web pages)
Signature, City, Country
1) Arteries International, Grantown on Spey, UK
2) Piers Voysey, Grantown on Spey, UK
3)
Image is Toro 1 Glacier under threat