“If I knew that the world ends tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today” (Martin L.K.).

“He comes and takes all my gold away”, replies the young girl to him, singing. And what does he leave? A shabby province: deforestation, destroyed soil, trees indiscriminately cut down, owners that become employees and, especially, polluted rivers. The water for human consumption becomes turbid, poisoned, unhealthy: thousands of persons have survived without love, no one without water.

“Gold, gold, you took my gold away for yourself!”, and what did you leave to me? Deaths and mutations of fishes in the rivers, making our basic food a risk: 10 tons of toxic waste for every ring of gold, this is the cost. The investors are not from the place: they are Chinese, Colombians, north Americans; they come, work, destroy, take away the money with them and, what do they leave? Sick children and ill adults. Unfortunately there are local people who are fooled: they sign papers, sell their lands, agree to be employees. They do not foresee that soon the extraction of the gold ends: these foreigners will go away, they will take their machines with them and leave the local people without land, without employment, without anything.

See the Video: “The gold”  (Spanish). Few words are said, many images speak for themselves.

The pollution of the rivers in the Santiago-Cayapas basin (north part of the Esmeraldas Province) affects the ecosystem of the entire region -Eloy Alfaro and San Lorenzo Cantons-, harming the health of approximately 80,000 people approximately.

In spite of the intervention of the State and the efforts of president Rafael Correa’s government through military operations and confiscation of illegal machinery; in spite of the public works realized by Ecuador Plan and Luis Vargas Torres Mission, the entry in the territory of National Mining industry Enterprise (ENAMI EP) with the aim to regulate this extractive activity, meant not the end of rivers pollution, but its increase.

This reality is reaffirmed by the researches on the waters quality of these rivers, realized by the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador, Emeralds Branch (PUCESE) and the Central University of the Ecuador. According to the PUCESE research team, in the various kinds of fish, mollusks and crustaceans, the presence of heavy metals: arsenic, aluminum, vanadium, chrome, mercury, and others could be found.
The entry and installation of the ENAMI EP in the region, then, has not contributed to any positive change in the development of the mining extraction, on the contrary. The gravimetric machinery technology utilized by ENAMI EP for the gold extraction does not purify the waters used in the washing process: once buried though slowly these waters always end up in the rivers, since this technology does not take in account the climatic and geographical conditions of the zone.

Because of it, in Esmeraldas’ north zone, the health problems are worsening: as a consequence of the stagnant water, malaria increases; for the rivers pollution, skin diseases, among others, spread and for the installation of the mining camps the venereal diseases and the cases of AIDS grow. The continued exposure to this pollution and the presence, during years, of high levels of heavy metals in the water for human use, assure a humanitarian catastrophe without precedent in this region of the country.
The technical and political authorities concerned have not fulfilled their promise to develop a handcrafted and sustainable mining industry, with all the benefits that this activity would bring to the zone. What is worse, from the entry to the territory of the national ENAMI EP there has been stated the deterioration of the environmental and labor situation. See the analysis documented in a PowerPoint realized by the PUCESE (Spanish but with so many photos and tables that make it intuitive also to those who do not speak Spanish).