Ecuador

Recently, Toronto-based Pinetree Capital bought a few million shares of Copper Mesa Mining Corporation, making it the largest share owner of a failing company currently embroiled in a lawsuit. Copper Mesa, until last year, was the owner of a couple of mining concessions in the Intag region of Ecuador. The Vancouver-based company is infamous for using the equivalent of paramilitaries in the anti-mining community of Junín. […]

`People before Profits!´ In the United States the motto can be seen on signs at protests or health care rallies, though it is a plea historically ignored by lawmakers in Washington. But in Ecuador, President Rafael Correa has translated this phrase into policy. […]

On April 26, 2009, Rafael Correa won re-election to the Ecuadorian presidency with an absolute majority of the vote. The victory cemented Correa’s control over the country as the old political establishment appeared to be in complete collapse. But social movements in Ecuador have become increasingly critical of his populist positioning. Despite Correa’s claims that under his administration the long dark night of neoliberalism is finally over, Indigenous movements have condemned him for continuing basically these same policies through large-scale mineral extractive enterprises. […]

After a week of marches and road blockades, Ecuador’s national indigenous movement and the government of President Rafael Correa have initiated talks. On Monday afternoon, a delegation of about 150 representatives from the three regional organizations of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) attended a meeting with the President and his cabinet in Quito. […]

“We’re crazy for water,” chanted about a thousand campesinos as they marched through the streets of downtown Cuenca in southern Ecuador on Monday. The march, called for by the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), was part of a nation-wide mobilization against a new water law. […]

“Welcome to the future,” says the sign behind the gated area where Vancouver-based Corriente Resources is developing an open-pit copper mine in Ecuador’s Southern Amazon. Bumping along in the back of a pick-up truck on her way to visit one of several communities slated to be displaced by the project, the idea that the future is fenced off with restricted entry for local communities that have lived on the land for years, even generations, hit home for Anne Marie Sam. […]

Civil society organizations in Ecuador say that President Rafael Correa’s 21st Century Socialism favors powerful economic groups and bodes poorly for Ecuador’s most-excluded. […]

Canada’s Nortec Ventures Corp., a mining company based in Vancouver, announced this month its intention of buying Copper Mesa Mining Corporation’s Ecuadorian assets. […]

Indigenous leaders delivered a lawsuit in Quito last Tuesday before Ecuador’s Constitutional Court asking that the country’s new mining law be declared unconstitutional. The case is the next step that the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE) is taking to try to put the brakes on large scale metal mining which has achieved unwavering support from President Rafael Correa’s administration. […]

In spite of proclaiming himself socialist and a defender of the general "well being," President Rafael Correa has been promoting the open-pit mining industry, which has provoked serious environmental and social damage throughout the region. […]