The Canadian Mining Company Dominicans Call “Worse Than Columbus”
We traveled to the Dominican Republic to talk to rural farmers and workers battling a Canadian mining company. “We had no concept of what the devil was until Barrick Gold came to our lands,” one person told us.
A photo of Manuel González and his wife Damiana Ramirez, both of whom are activists, standing in front of a protest marking in Yamasá, Dominican Republic. (Courtesy of Jaclynn Ashly)
The animals were the first to die.
“I used to have a small pig farm,” eighty-year-old Mitelia Lima says, sitting outside her modest home located right along the Maimón-Cotuí highway in the Dominican Republic’s province of Sánchez Ramírez. The highway leads to a mine operated by Barrick Gold, a Canadian mining company. She pauses from her speech as a large truck barrels by, drowning out her voice.
“These pigs were my main source of livelihood, along with chickens and growing cacao beans,” she tells me. Things changed in 2012, shortly after Barrick Gold took over operations at the Pueblo Viejo mine, near the city of Cotuí, located about sixty miles north of the capitol Santo Domingo. “But then they started to die. My pigs would give birth to more than a dozen piglets and all of them would die within a few weeks.”
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