Javier Milei was in a reflective mood earlier this month. “Why did the Creator give us the planet?” mused Argentina’s president at the Córdoba stock exchange. “To contemplate it?” No, not that…
Milei’s government wants to modify a 2010 law – the first of its kind – that protects each of Argentina’s 16,968 glaciers (almost 10% of the global total) and periglacial zones. The change sailed through the senate on 26 February with 40 votes in favour and 31 against.
If it passes Congress next month, scientists will no longer determine which glaciers are “safe” and which are to struck off the national inventory and mined for copper, silver and gold. That decision will be in the hands of regional politicians – principally in Mendoza, renowned for its wine, and further north in San Juan, the spine of which is formed by the metal-rich Andes. Keen to shake those hands are mining giants BHP, Rio Tinto, Barrick, Shandong Gold and Glencore.
All have projects under way or in the works. Many of their bosses have visited Milei in recent months, grinning for pictures around the table where the president’s symbolic chainsaw glints (las fuerzas del cielo is written on its blade: forces of heaven).
“Once a glacier is destroyed, there’s no turning back,” said Enrique Viale, an environmental lawyer from Buenos Aires. “These glaciers give water, work and life to 7 million people. This is an invitation to destruction.”
Viale, the founder of an alliance for environmental lawyers, helped get the 2010 law passed. After dedicating 30 years to the protection of the environment, he is furious. And he is not alone.
More than 100,000 Argentinians signed up to debate the law change – the Escazú treaty, signed by 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, grants citizens the right to participate in decision-making that concerns the environment. It would have been the world’s largest public audience. Last week, the government allowed 200 people to speak. Viale was among them, calling the process a “farce”: a public audience that wasn’t public and had no audience.
He sees the proposed change as part of a global far-right “packet” of loosened environmental protections (earlier this year, in a wildfire-blighted country, Milei chainsawed through a rule that protected forests from being torched and then sold on).
All this while the UN declares the world has entered an “era of global water bankruptcy”.
More than half of Argentina’s animal species live in areas fed by glaciers, which act like water tanks. They contain 70% of the country’s fresh water and release it throughout the year, from the Andes into surrounding areas, many of them arid. Campaigners say changing the glacier law threatens water security and runs the risk of pollution with uranium, cyanide, mercury, arsenic and lead – all used in mining or byproducts of it.
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Luis Juez, from Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party, voted for the 2010 protection. Last month he voted to weaken it, telling activists he described as “ecological terrorists” that the change poses no threat, that it will create jobs.
“Today it’s as if everyone lives in an igloo in the middle of a glacier surrounded by penguins,” he said.
Juez is among those who believe Argentina is on the verge of a copper boom. Last month, Australian-Canadian Vicuña Corp announced an $18bn plan to mine copper, gold and silver in San Juan.
The Anglo-Swiss multinational Glencore has plans to invest more than $12bn in two projects in the country’s north. For years the glacier law had helped stall one of these, El Pachón. The “rock glacier” in question was struck from the regional “safe” list after a study found it was not strategically important. This is disputed.
Four or five projects are ready to break ground if the law is modified, according to Viale. Huge investment, but at what cost, ask critics.
They cite vanished glaciers on the other side of the mountains in Chile, the rate at which glaciers are melting worldwide, polluted Argentinian rivers. In 2015, more than a million litres of cyanide solution – used to extract gold from rocks – leaked into rivers near Barrick Gold’s periglacial mining site in Veladero, San Juan. The company was fined $9.3m. More spills have happened there since, one caused by falling ice.
In 2013, Chilean authorities fined Barrick Gold more than $16m for environmental offences at its Pascua Lama project on the border with Argentina. The country’s environment agency found arsenic and sulphates in the groundwater. Eventually the pit was closed.
More warnings come from Brazil, another of Argentina’s neighbours. Two years ago BHP and Vale paid £23bn in compensation after a 2015 disaster at a mining site killed 19 people and polluted the Doce River for 420 miles, all the way to the Atlantic. Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva said: “I hope the mining companies have learned their lesson.” Argentina will be hoping the same.
Back in Buenos Aires, thousands of comments flooded the public audience livestream: Los glaciares no se tocan (hands off the glaciers); El agua no es un negocio (water is not a business).
Milei offers his own ideas about water. If it is abundant and nobody owns it, “companies can pollute it all they like”, he said. “Its value is zero.”
Mining companies have been perforating Latin America for 500 years. Viale has a simple message for them: “Leave the southern territories in peace. Stop turning us into zones of sacrifice for your excessive profit.”
He pauses. “Argentina has in its genes a history of social struggle. We won’t be quiet. We’re going to fight.”
Photograph by Diego Levy/Bloomberg via Getty Images
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