"Lawsuit against El Salvador mining ban highlights free trade pitfalls", 27 May 2015

El Salvador...has an estimated 1.4m ounces of gold buried underground, as well as silver and copper...In 2008, after mining operations polluted the water supply in San Sebastián...then-president Antonio Saca stopped issuing new mining permits...In the mid-2000s...Pacific Rim began exploring for gold in El Salvador. The company was granted exploratory permits and was on track to receive extraction permits when the government put an official halt to mining...Pacific Rim, saying it had done its due diligence on environmental impacts, pleaded with the government to reconsider. When the country wouldn’t budge, Pacific Rim sued...More than 3,000 free-trade agreements govern international investor-state disputes...The Pacific Rim case, which has been ongoing since 2009, has been a mix of public and private...OceanaGold, the Australian mining company that bought Pacific Rim in 2013, isn’t giving up its hopes of mining in the country. Despite the arbitration process...a spokeswoman for Oceana, says the company’s “strong preference is to negotiate an outcome to the permitting impasse”...