After years of deliberation, public debate and protest, Costa Rica’s National Assembly this month issued a rare unanimous vote in favor of a bill prohibiting open-pit gold mining. The legislation, expected to be signed into law soon by President Laura Chinchilla, also outlaws the use of cyanide and mercury in all mining activity. Open-pit mining involves extraction of metals from an exposed hole, or borrow, in the earth, and often entails the use of toxic chemicals to extract minerals from ore. The issue has been at the center of national politics in Costa Rica since 2009, when then President Oscar Arias declared the Crucitas open pit gold mine proposal by the Canadian company Infinito Gold to be of “national interest.” The announcement by...
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Five days after Argentine President Cristina Kirchner signed the country’s new glacier-protection legislation into law, an Argentine federal judge has suspended implementation of the measure on grounds its prohibition on mining in glacial and peri-glacial areas might infringe on the constitutional right of provinces to control their natural resources. The decision was handed down Nov. 2 in the Andean province of San Juan, site of the biggest mining projects in the country. On Oct. 28, Kirchner had signed the legislation following the measure’s narrow and hotly contested approval the previous month. Judge Juan Miguel Gálvez of San Juan federal court, temporarily suspended the law’s implementation in the province pending a review of the legislation’s constitutionality—a process expected ultimately to involve the country’s...
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Paraguay’s government has launched a land-acquisition effort aimed at saving a nomadic Indian tribe from the chain saws and bulldozers of ranchers in the dense scrub forest of the Gran Chaco. The hunter-gatherer Ayorea Totobiegosode, numbering only a few dozen, have had no contact with outsiders since 2004. But authorities believe the Indians’ existence is threatened by ranchers and farmers pushing into ever more remote regions of Paraguay’s portion of the Chaco, which is a vast, semi-arid region that stretches from western Paraguay into northern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia and a sliver of Brazil. The Paraguayan government response has been to enter into negotiations with ranchers and other landowners in the Gran Chaco to purchase large tracts of land that would give the...
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Costa Rica has unveiled a program to stimulate small-scale production of renewable energy, hoping the move will help it meet its goal of reducing its dependence on fossil fuels and achieving carbon neutrality by 2020. Already, Costa Rica allows private developers capable of providing installed capacity of up to 50 megawatts from renewable sources to sell energy to the national grid. Such developers—generating energy from wind, hydro, geothermal and biomass sources—now supply nearly 30% of the nation’s 2,300 megawatts of capacity. The program, launched Oct. 25 by the governmental Costa Rican Institute of Electricity (ICE), allows homes and businesses to produce their own renewable energy from solar, wind, biomass and small-hydro generators, and deliver their excess energy to the national grid...
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