Accidents in Chubut due to the mining law
After a long history of negotiating with the Chubut government and facing widespread resistance from the environmental sectors, Canadian mining company Pan American Silver has decided to cancel the activity in the province and put the Christmas project on hold, a megaproject in which he had promised to invest $ 1,000 million.
An enterprise that never caught on: from 2003 to December last year, the Christmas Project, which involves some 10,000 hectares of the central plateau of Chubut, has been practically stopped. Only in December 2021 did the provincial legislature approve the Mining Zoning Law, which allowed its operation.
Although the legislation has given the green light, the social refusal meant that the provincial governor finally decided to repeal it, less than a week after approval. This final setback came as a shock to the company, which decided to restructure its operations in that province and to revoke the Navidad project, which was already in an advanced exploratory phase.
According to the provincial newspaper El Chubut, Pan American Silver fired the people it hired for the initial businesses and paid them the corresponding remuneration. To justify this decision, he would have informed them of his intention to do so disarm its operations in Argentina, given the lack of political support.
This was assured by sources close to the company Clarione, that despite this decisionn, the company no “from Argentina will not withdraw. Obviously the operations they had in Chubut will be restructured. But the intention is to stay in Argentina. “The signature, one of the leading silver miners in the world, has been linked to the province since 2010, the year in which it acquired Aquiline Resources.
With the Navidad Project, which owes its name to the fact that the first exploratory results were obtained on December 25th, the company aimed to get 7.5 million ounces of silver per year and has promised the creation of some 2,800 jobs, with 800 direct employees. It was an ambitious gamble: Christmas properties are, according to Pan American Silver itself, one of the largest undeveloped silver deposits in the world.
After the news of the company’s departure from the country was known, the Chamber of Commerce, Services, Tourism and Industry of the Chubut Plateau (Camecch) issued a harsh statement in which it targeted the political leadership and described the region. like “that uncomfortable corner condemned by provincial politics to star only charity campaigns “.
Specifically, the complaint is due to the failure to submit a new bill to the provincial legislature that would allow the company to operate in that region in the eight months that have passed since the social revolt in the capital of Chubut and which would lead the government to reverse.
“Not only they have not presented any proposals in the provincial legislaturethere, but they haven’t even visited the region, which they only visit to show themselves in pictures giving away used clothes, “the company camera said.
In off, a source expert on the matter explained that behind Chubut’s anti-mining rejection there is a political background. “The one who boycotted the Christmas Project from the beginning was the businessman Cristóbal López, who even tried to keep the operation. There was always a political conflict there that fueled the demands of the environmentalists,” he said. assured him. Sources close to Pan American Silver declined to comment.
Source: Clarin
