[Translated by Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

"Mirador, a time bomb?" - 13 February 2023

More than ten years after the signing of the contract with the Chinese capital company Ecuacorriente S.A. and three years after the start of industrial mining in the country with the operations of the Mirador mine, the benefits for the Amazonian population have not arrived... Scientific studies warn that the economic costs of transforming Ecuador into a mega-mining country would exceed the benefits by billions of dollars, not to mention the social, environmental and cultural costs that are difficult to quantify in monetary terms.

The lack of clear laws, cumbersome licensing processes, the large number of tax exemptions for large mining companies, the limited experience of state officials, the lack of prior and environmental consultations and the absence of control and oversight of large-scale activities such as mega-mining cause grey areas in the traceability of public resources ... In Ecuador, mega-mining has been promoted by the last three governments, by private productive sectors and by associations representing large multinational corporations as "one of the great engines of the national economy". But as early as the 1990s, mining exploration began under the impetus of new legal frameworks sponsored by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These first projects unleashed social conflicts in various territories, such as Intag, in the province of Imbabura. Over the last decade, a number of large-scale industrial mining projects are already in the exploratory phase and two of them started operations in 2019 to extract mainly copper, gold and silver.

Geographer and professor at the School of Government and Public Administration of the Institute of Higher National Studies (IAEN) Andrea Carrión recalled that former president Rafael Correa "discursively positioned mining as a political and economic strategy" that would generate foreign currency to promote public investment and redistributive spending.... Under the idea of a strategy sown since then, that government and the two that succeeded it promoted the large-scale mining projects Mirador, Fruta del Norte and Panantza-San Carlos, located on the Amazonian slopes of the provinces of Zamora Chinchipe and Morona Santiago. Alberto Acosta - Minister of Energy and Mines during the first five months of Correa's regime, president of the 2008 Constituent Assembly and now one of the biggest detractors of Correa's extractivist policies - explains that these plans also included projects such as Quimsacocha (now called Lomalarga) and Río Blanco, located in the Andean highlands of the province of Azuay, among other projects in the pipeline... This government strategy deepened the socio-environmental conflicts unleashed in the 1990s: Violent evictions, contamination of water sources, soil and other phenomena that Acosta and several environmental organisations warned would occur and that, over the years, have worsened...