Photo of Dominican worker recently injured during labor unrests at BG/GC
This writer first became interested in Barrick Gold/Goldcorp, while watching Dominican TV journalist Marino Zapete's afternoon news commentary show titled "El Jarabe", which airs via TeleradioAmerica Channel 45 and a radio network, Monday-Friday at 2:00 PM throughout the Dominican Republic, Stateside and other points in the Caribbean. Being a new resident in the Dominican Republic, this was my first media exposure to a serious environmental incident at Barrick Gold/Goldcorp's Pueblo Viejo Dominicana (PVDC) gold mine, located in the municipality of Cotui, province of Sanchez Ramirez, Dominican Republic. This incident took place on March 2010.
But before narrating these events, I must bring to attention the Dominican media's de facto blackout specifically concerning the presence of Goldcorp at PVDC. It is open knowledge that both BG and GC admit on their websites, to their respective 60/40 per cent participation at the PVDC open pit gold mining complex at Cotui. Strangely enough, neither the Dominican State nor Dominican mainstream media, have publicly acknowledged the presence of Goldcorp at PVDC. It is noteworthy that in all press releases concerning the present contract between the Dominican state and BG, Goldcorp is not mentioned as a party to this contract. One of the reasonable assumptions this observer could make, would be the adverse international attention that Goldcorp has gained, while violating human rights and causing environmental and health hazards in Central America in the recent past.. This can be corroborated by reports from such groups as Rights Action, which for years have reported on these violations. For instance in 2010 the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a judicial instrumentality of the Organization of American States (OAS), issued an order against Goldcorp for the suspension of its notorious Marlin mine in Guatemala. Rights Action has reported extensively, on Goldcorp's violations of human rights as well as causing environmental and health hazards connected with its operations at the Marlin mine, affecting the Mayan people of that Central American nation.
As mentioned previously, an incident occured at PVDC on or about March 16, 2010, which was reported in a recorded broadcast over Teleradiomerica Channel 45 in Dominican Republic. As I watched this report I could barely believe my own eyes. A male Dominican TV cameraman and a female reporter, were being pushed and shoved away from a local medical facility, where Dominican workers affected by the environmental incident at PVDC had been hospitalized. The TV commentator Marino Zapete, a very prominent Dominican media personality of many years' experience, commented in his usual folksy style about the "Peruvian mastodon", who was the security thug that impeded the free access of news people to the affected BG/GC workers at the clinic. As a U.S. citizen residing in Dominican Republic, I could not comprehend how foreign security personnel employed by BG/GC, would obstruct Dominican news people from interviewing the patients at the clinic, apparently affected by the environmental incident at the mine. Later during this report, I found out that the hospitalized workers were kept incommunicado from their families for the duration of their hospitalization which was about 24-48 hours, and their cell phones confiscated during this incident.
The Dominican Academy of Sciences and its environmental commission, later on made an extensive scientific analysis of the incident, and concluded that due to the symptoms and treatment received by the patients at the clinic, the environmental incident was caused by a toxic substance which was discharged into the surrounding atmosphere at PVDC. The official PR release by BG/GC on the other hand, was that the incident was caused by so-called bacteria, at the company's dining facility, something that could definitely not be proven due to the preponderant scientific evidence, as analyzed by the Dominican Academy of Sciences. Among the Academy's indictment of this incident, was the fact that it was discovered that many of the Peruvian workers at PVDC, were in all likelihood working in an undocumented status, as they were kept virtually segregated within the confines of the PVDC mining complex, and could not freely move within the Dominican national territory . It was also noteworthy, that during the period of the incident, no Dominican officials were allowed to enter the premises of PVDC in order to independently ascertain what really happened, lending more weight to BG/GC's loss of credibility in their PR statement, as well as drawing the logical inference that BG/GC were hiding the real truth behind this incident, and did not want the general public to be aware of the real causes of the intoxication of their Dominican workers.
The general conclusion that a reasonable observer to this whole incident could arrive at, was that it became apparent the Dominican state had abdicated its sovereignty over its national territory where BG/GC was operating its PVDC mining complex, as no Dominican authorities were allowed to immediately enter and investigate the matter in question.
As of this writing on October 2012, recent mass protests have taken place by social movements and the community at large, in the municipality of Cotui where PVDC is located, with some degree of violence being displayed both by protestors and the Dominican national police. These protests were for the request of more work positions by Dominican nationals at the PVDC mine, which supposedly already began the operation of its four autoclave systems, in order to start producing gold from what is openly known as one of the world's largest and most productive open pit gold mining operations.
