Unequal Partners, Unequal Exchange: Goldcorp, the Mexican State, and Campesino Dispossession at the...

153Unequal Partners, Unequal Exchange

Unequal Partners, Unequal Exchange: Goldcorp, the Mexican State,

and Campesino Dispossession at the Peñasquito Goldmine

Claudio Garibay, Andrew Boni, Francesco Panico, and Pedro Urquijo

Centro de Investigaciones en Geografía AmbientalUniversidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Dan KloosterEnvironmental StudiesUniversity of Redlands

AbstractThe new geography of mining in Latin America extends open-pit mining to rural Mexico, with drastic impacts on land, water, and other livelihood resources of peasant societies. This study shows how a Canadian mining company gained access to the land and water resources it needs to operate the Peñasquito mine in northern Zacatecas, how it defused subsequent peasant protest, and acquired great mineral wealth in exchange for minimal compensations to local communities. The role of state agents in brokering negotiations and in interpreting the resulting agreements was particularly significant. Researchers should examine the tactics mining companies use to obtain land and water and to silence peasant protest, as these underlie a broader process of unequal economic and ecological exchange between core and periphery. Keywords: Mexico, open-pit mining, political ecology, accumulation by dispossession, unequal ecological exchange

ResumenLa nueva geografía de la minería de tajo a cielo abierto en América Latina se extiende al México rural, con efectos drásticos sobre la tierra, el agua y otros recursos de subsistencia de las sociedades campesinas. Este estudio muestra como una empresa minera canadiense ganó el control de la tierra y agua necesaria para operar la mina Peñasquito en el norte de Zacatecas; como desactivó las protestas campesinas posteriores, y como ha logrado tomar grandes volúmenes de riqueza mineral a cambio de compensaciones minúsculas a la sociedad local. El papel de los agentes del Estado en la negociación y la interpretación de los contratos legales resultantes es particularmente significativo. Los investigadores debieran examinar las tácticas que las corporaciones mineras utilizan para tomar territorialidades campesinas y acallar la protesta campesina, porque estas dan forma a un proceso más general de un desigual intercambio económico y ecológico. Palabras clave: México, minería de tajo a cielo abierto, ecología política, acumulación por desposesión, intercambio ecológico desigual

Journal of Latin American Geography, 10 (2), 2011 © Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers

154 Journal of Latin American Geography

The New Geography of Mining in Latin America Eduardo Galeano (1997) details 500 years of exploitative resource extraction in Latin America, in which mining has enriched imperial, neo-imperial, and urban elites while inflicting damage on rural environments and societies. Over the past two decades, Latin America has experienced another surge in mining investment (Bridge 2004a; Bebbington, Bebbington, Bury et al. 2008; Bebbington, Hinojosa, Bebbington et al. 2008; Canel, Idemudia and North 2010). This new geography of mining frequently involves the exploitation of ores no longer found concentrated in veins, amenable to shaft and tunnel mining, but rather dispersed at low concentrations in large areas, requiring open-pit mining (Mudd 2007). In other words, the new geography of mining in Latin America has moved from “open veins to open pits” (Bebbington 2009: 7). Mining companies present themselves as responsible agents of progressive change, and governments almost invariably support mining in order to access the foreign exchange, employment, and tax revenues it generates (Canel, Idemudia and North 2010; Bebbington, Bebbington, Bury et al. 2008; Bebbington, Hinojosa, Bebbington et al. 2008). Nevertheless, the political ecology of this new round of resource extraction still consists of fragile landscapes subjected to environmental disruption and livelihood destruction for the benefits of accumulation elsewhere (Bebbington 2009; Downey, Bonds and Clark 2010; Muradian and Martinez Alier 2002). Mining generates a host of environmental damages, especially to water resources, which are borne most intensively by the people who live in mining areas (Bridge 2004b; Bebbington and Williams 2008; Bebbington and Bury 2009). Open pit mining also destroys cultural and historical landscapes laboriously constructed by local people over long periods of habitation. Geographers increasingly study how this process creates social protest on the part of rural and urban societies affected by mining. Drawing on fieldwork in Peru, for example, Bury shows how the social and environmental impacts of mining corporations are transforming rural livelihoods and inspiring protest (Bury 2002: 3; 2004; 2005). Such conflicts are often given greater intensity by the perception that well-being has not increased in proportion to mining companies’ profits (Bebbington and Bury 2009: 172-196), and by the perception that mining corporations capture the resigned acceptance of local communities by maliciously seizing local political institutions, coercing community leaders, and corrupting government bureaucrats (Garibay 2010). For the mining company, the local community is an obstacle to the business of mineral extraction. The company needs a legal contract through which the community cedes its legal and traditional rights to their territory during the time needed to extract the mineral wealth. Frequently, communities resist signing contracts when they realize the scope and characteristics of the proposal or organize protests to repudiate contracts they come to consider unjust. Given that the object of dispute is the territory itself, conflicts quickly unfold into multiple fronts, such as skirmishes over property rights to land, access to water, rights of way, relocation of settlements, water and soil pollution, health effects, and impacts to symbolic landscapes. In addition, there are sorties and flanking movements to eliminate elements of the opposition, such as lawsuits against local leaders involved in blockades, public accusations of bribe-taking against government bureaucrats, and threats or assaults against movement leaders. The new geography of mining involves accumulation by dispossession (Harvey 2003), which is essentially capital accumulation through predation, fraud, and violence. Currently, various forms of privatization effectively appropriate public goods and commonly held resources such as those inherited by tribes, ethnic groups, communities, or cooperatives. Dispossessed resources are made available to transnational capital at


very low, or no costs. In this way, it forms part of an unequal economic and ecological exchange between North and South. The environmental aspect of world systems theory, ecological unequal exchange describes the transfer of most of the benefits of resource extraction from the South to the North while segregating most of the social and environmental costs in the South (Jorgensen and Clark 2009 for a brief review; Bunker 2005; Emmanuel 1972). Accumulation by dispossession becomes an expression of what is literally a “political” economy: the negation of inherited rights, the exercise of power to tear apart previous social arrangements, the imposition of a new social regime, and conflict between the capitalist core and marginal social groups resisting their dispossession. The emergence of social movements around mining shapes the geographies that unfold, and these social protests, in turn, are shaped by asymmetries in power between communities and mining companies, and the influence of the state, especially in the drafting and implementation of community-corporate contracts (Bebbington, Bebbington, Bury et al. 2008; Canel, Idemudia and North 2010; O’Faircheallaigh 2010). They are also shaped by conceptions of harm and fair compensation that often differ between actors such as mining executives and members of rural communities, whose conceptions of justice are rooted in very different societies (Douglas 1993; Schroeder 2000). Drawing on research on the Peñasquito mine in Zacatecas, Mexico, this study contributes to this understanding of conflict with an ethnography of rural dispossession in a Mexican mining landscape. It illustrates how the corporation establishes a relationship with the local communities that seems to enact economic and ecological uneven exchange --taking the greatest share of wealth possible and transferring the environmental and social costs to the local population with impunity. At the same time, it shows how communities protest and blockade their dispossession, and –based on arguments of injustice– try to renegotiate a just agreement while confronted with a state apparently subordinated to the interests of the corporation. The study sheds light on the process by which companies respond to protest by modifying agreements in ways that maintain their access to mining space and water resources, and demonstrates the influence of government and political party actors in facilitating rural dispossession. Furthermore, the study highlights important aspects of the new geography of mining in Mexico, which has received less attention in the geographic literature than Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Mexico is important in the new geography of extraction in Latin America. With US$1.6 billion of foreign direct investment in mining, Mexico was the tenth most important target of mining investment during the period 1990-2001 (Bridge 2004a), and in the following decade, US$17 billion was invested (SE 2011). Currently, 286 mining companies are operating in Mexico, including 210 Canadian companies, 44 US companies, eight Australian companies, six UK companies, and 18 from other countries. These companies have 757 current mining projects for both precious and industrial metals, of which 615 are in an exploration phase, 20 in development, 71 in production, and 51 suspended (SE 2010; SE 2010 b). These mining projects take place in inhabited rural territories. Half the Mexican land area is owned as collective private properties by 31,514 small rural communities (ejidos and comunidades agrarias), many indigenous, and all with forms of internal governance and external representation reflected in Mexican constitutional law. The other half of the national territory is owned by thousands of small private landholdings (pequeñas propiedades)(INEGI 2009).


Methodology The Peñasquito case study is part of a broader research project into the new geography of mining in Mexico funded by the National University of Mexico and Mexico’s National Council of Science and Technology. First, a set of mining project overviews were developed using news reports and public documents from mining companies and the Mexican government. From this group fieldwork has been conducted to develop five comparative case studies, including the Peñasquito and San Tiburcio mines en Zacatecas, Los Filos and La Media Luna mines in Guerrero, and the Real de Catorce mine in San Luis Potosí (Garibay and Balzaretti 2009, Garibay 2010, Boni 2010). Together these five mines affect eleven communities. This article draws on research on the Peñasquito mine, which is the largest mine currently operating in Mexico. Initially, peasant leaders who were identified in press reports were interviewed, and snowball-sampled to also find members of the community who are indifferent to, or who support the mining company. A series of open-ended interviews were conducted aimed at four general themes: 1) The general outlines of community livelihood and history; 2) the links established between the mining company and the communities, such as contracts and informal agreements, demands, and issues of disagreement; 3) the communities’ forms of political organization, interest groups and their positions regarding the mining company; and 4) the other key actors involved, such as politicians, government bureaucrats, and NGOs. These interviews were repeated until a point of saturation was reached when interviews generated little new information and key themes and reports began to be repeated. In total, six one-week visits to the area were conducted, in teams of two to three, led by Claudio Garibay Orozco.1 In several cases, it was possible to conduct group interviews and to accompany community members on visits to parts of the communities’ territory. Several times, community members invited us to accompany them as silent witnesses to negotiations with the mining company. To enrich the community visits, other actors involved in the cases were also interviewed, including government agencies, members of political parties involved, municipal presidents, imprisoned community leaders, hydrologists, and mining experts. All the interviews were video-recorded, unless permission was denied. A total of approximately 56 hours of interviews were conducted with 14 individuals. In addition, we conducted two four-hour collective interviews with 12 or more people.

Unequal Partners in the Peñasquito MineGoldcorp Peñasquito mine is solely owned by Goldcorp, Inc., an international mining corporation with headquarters in Vancouver, Canada, ranked among the top three gold-producers worldwide (GoldVal 2010), with operations concentrated in North and South America.2 It owned US$102 billion of mineral reserves at June 2010 prices (LBMA 2010; LME 2010), assets of US$21 billion, and enjoyed annual sales of US$2.7 billion in 2009. The mine exploits a disseminated ore body, consisting of 1,191 billion tons of mineralized rock, with average grades of 5 grams of gold per ton of ore, 29 g/ton silver, 3.2 kg/ton lead, and 6.9 kg/ton zinc. The deposit’s geometry (900 to 300 meters in diameter and over 500 meters in depth) requires the removal of 3,135 billion tons of sterile rock. About one fifth of the ore is to be leached using a cyanide solution (Bryson et al. 2009). Thus, after 22 years of operation, more than 4.3 billion tons of rock will have been extracted, more than 400 million cubic meters of fresh water, and close to 40


million MWh of electric power will have been consumed (Minera Peñasquito 2006). Huge pits and permanent waste deposits will cover hundreds of hectares of land. A projected 10.2 million tons of actual metals will be recovered (Bryson et al. 2009). Goldcorp’s 2009 mineral reserve report states the following proven and probable reserves for Peñasquito: 17.4 million ounces of gold, 1.046 billion ounces of silver, 15.334 billion pounds of zinc, and 7.062 billion pounds of lead. These reserves are programmed to be extracted over a period of about 22 years, following the mine’s formal opening in 2010. The current value of these reserves is nearly US$57 billion (Table 1). The average production cost for each ton of ore extracted and processed will be US$12.12. Given that 1.191 billion tons of ore will be mined and processed, the total cost of production (before taxes) is US$14.43 billion (Bryson et al. 2009).

In sum, the estimated sale value of the metals extracted from the Peñasquito deposit is US$56.9 billion; the total cost of production before taxes is US$14,434 million; and the net profit for this mining enterprise is US$42.5 billion. Naturally, these figures will vary according to fluctuations in metal prices and actual extraction costs. They may even be exaggerated for the benefit of shareholders. Nonetheless, they indicate the scale of revenue expected from the Peñasquito project. A great deal of money is at stake.

Four ejidos in the Mazapil Valley Achieving those returns requires interactions with the people who own the land area being transformed. Peñasquito mine is located in the heart of the semi-arid Mazapil valley, in the northern end of the state of Zacatecas (Figure 1). The mine site directly occupies a total of 7,961 hectares: 4,156 ha for the mining complex proper, 2,328 ha for more than thirty water wells and a surface piping network used to bring water to the mining area, and 1,477 ha of reserved lands in the surroundings. The footprint of the mine falls on four ejidos: 5,790 ha of Cedros, 1,067 of El Vergel; 447 of Mazapil; 667 of Cerro Gordo, and 103 hectares bought directly from private landowners (Bryson et al. 2009). Some 1,500 people inhabit the affected ejidos: 771 in Cedros, 223 in El Vergel, and 542 in Cerro Gordo and Mazapil.3 They are mestizo descendents from the workers of the haciendas who won collective ownership of their lands during land reforms following the Mexican Revolution. On family parcels no bigger than 5 ha, the ejidatarios farm maize and vegetables for home consumption and regional markets. Their cattle, sheep and goats graze in extensive common areas. Groundwater is essential to both these activities; fields are irrigated by well-water and cattle are watered by wells spread throughout the ejidos’ territories. Households combine farming and cattle-ranching with cyclical, temporary migration to work in regional cities and in the United States. The ejidos have

Table 1. Value of the Peñasquito mine

Metal Proven and probable reserves

Market price (June 2010 avg.) Total (US$ millions)

Gold 17.4 million oz US$ 1,220 /oz 21,753 Silver 1,046 million oz US$ 17.41 /oz 18,211 Zinc 15,317 million lb US$ 0.78 /lb 11,947 Lead 7,103 million lb US$ 0.71 /lb 5,043 Total income

56,954

(Sources: Bryson et al., 2009; LBMA, 2010; LME, 2010).


strong links to each other through family ties, a shared livelihood, participation in each other’s village celebrations, and relative isolation from the rest of Mexico.

Figure 1. The Peñasquito mining complex, land tenure, and farmlands in the Mazapil valley. (Map by: A. Boni with data from Bryson et al., 2009;

INEGI, 2003; REPDA, 2011; SPOT, 2007)

In each ejido, the Ejido Assembly is the highest authority. Formed by the recognized ejidatarios, the assembly elects members to an executive leadership group. A Comisariado Ejidal has three members, who act as president, secretary, and treasurer, and are in charge of all issues pertaining to the ejido’s lands, water, and other resources, as well as the management of its assets and businesses. Additionally, the assembly elects two members to a Consejo de Vigilancia (Oversight Committee) to oversee the Comisariado’s performance. These positions are renewed every three years by a formal election overseen and validated by an agrarian inspector.

The Process of Dispossession The Mexican legal framework favors mining. In Mexico, the subsoil is the property of the nation, but the Mining Law, together with the Foreign Investment Law, permits global corporations to own 100 percent of Mexican mining concessions through local subsidiaries. Mining legislation does not require the payment of mining royalties to the state. Formally, mining companies pay taxes only on income with rates similar to that of an ordinary citizen, 28 percent. However, the federal government may give secret tax exemptions to private companies. Mining concessions are given for 50 years, renewable to 100. Concessions can be bought and sold without any state intervention, and this market has led to subsoil latifundia held by global mining corporations. Mining legislation simply omits any mechanism of consultation with landowners and local populations potentially affected by mining, and since 1992, agrarian legislation facilitates commercial access to the lands of ejidos and agrarian communities through a temporary land occupancy agreement.4 The mining law declares mining to be in the public interest over any other use or exploitation of the land (Mining Law, Art. 6) so that in case of individuals, ejidos, or


indigenous community landowners who refuse to voluntarily surrender their land to the mining company, the federal government can order their expropriation “for the public good.” In the event of a refusal to sign an agreement, the mining law establishes a mysterious procedure where bureaucrats from the Ministry of the Economy and the Agrarian Reform Agency can unilaterally assign the occupation of rural land to mining companies.5 Environmental legislation also facilitates mining expansion. It has only two specific regulations regarding mining: one concerns the management of cyanide and the other regulates the confinement of mining spoil in dams. Mexican environmental legislation does not consider the landscape as an integrated environmental value in and of itself; it sees it only as parts. Thus there is always a way to justify granting environmental permits and sacrifice the landscape piece by piece. The Kennecott Company discovered the Peñasquito deposit in 1994. In 1998, Western Silver bought the claim rights and established its subsidiary Minera Peñasquito S. A. de C.V. to continue exploration. The subsidiary was bought by Glamis Gold in 2006, which was absorbed by Goldcorp the same year. The local communities were unaware of such transactions affecting the land beneath their feet. Villagers saw teams of geologists with drilling equipment, to whom they happily gave access to their lands, hoping for a new mining bonanza that would bring job opportunities. In 2006, news broke out that ‘los canadienses’ had found a major gold deposit under a rocky mound called El Peñasquito. Residents thought the Canadians would build an underground mine similar to the one they are familiar with at Salaverna, 15 kilometers away, and so they received the news with naïve optimism. In the people’s memory mining had always been an alternative source of income to supplement rural activities. Families were enthused; many thought the mine would bring back their sons who had fled north for better jobs, and that with miner’s wages they would improve their crops, increase their cattle, renew their irrigation and farming equipment, leave behind their hardships, and live a better life. Peasant dispossession began the same year, when lawyers representing Minera Peñasquito asked the Ejido Assemblies of Cedros, El Vergel, Cerro Gordo, and Mazapil to cede their lands to the company by means of a temporary land-occupancy agreement.. By 2007, Goldcorp was developing the mine site. The mine was formally inaugurated it on 22 March 2010, with a visit and speech by Mexican president Felipe Calderón. He commended Goldcorp’s executives and the Canadian ambassador to Mexico, Guillermo Rishchynski “. . . for creating the jobs we Mexicans are so in need of; it’s just great to have you here to help us make our economy grow faster.” President Calderon said that Canada, the United States, and Mexico are complementary economies: “the first two intensive in capital, Mexico intensive in labor.” President Calderon said his administration is working hard to promote further investments in the mining sector, creating conditions of legal certainty, security, clear rules, and other support necessary to make Mexico a good place in which to invest (Calderón 2010). Goldcorp executive Chuck Jeannes thanked collaborators at all levels of the Mexican government for making the Penñsquito project happen. He reminded the audience of Goldcorp’s US$1.7 billion-dollar investment in the project as well as the corporation’s commitment to environmental protection, human rights, and philanthropic actions that, in his view, prove the company’s corporate responsibility towards the local communities. “Our shareholders, our employees, but also the communities where we operate welcome us. We are committed to this vision.” (Jeannes 2010).


A Community-Corporate Agreeement: False Expectations and Hidden Implications Dispute over the land-occupancy agreement with the Cedros ejido illustrates how the mining company turned community welcome into conflict. Cedros ejido was formally established in the year 1947 as a result of the agrarian reform process distributing the old Cedros Hacienda’s lands among its workers and tenants. Over the years, the ejido managed to consolidate collective ownership to a total of 23,074 hectares, of which 3,300 are used for farming while the rest is dry scrubland used for grazing cattle (Boni 2010). The ejido is the shared property of 423 ejidatarios, who are the formally recognized ejido landholders and heads of extensive households totaling 771 residents. This population lives in four settlements, one of which, the village of Peñasquito, had to be relocated to access the ore body (Figure 1). For the mining company, control of Cedros’s land is crucial, since below it is the mineral deposit, and it needs the surface for mineral processing facilities and mine waste-dumping. Access was attained in March 2006, when the ejido authorities and the company’s legal representative signed, before a notary public, an agreement by which the ejido ceded to the company the rights for 4,525 hectares for a period of thirty years, extendable to thirty more, allowing the company to mine and refine ores, pump groundwater, deposit mining waste, and construct infrastructure. In exchange, the ejido received US$2.1 million6, equivalent to US$472 per hectare, as sole payment for the duration of the agreement’ (RANZ 2006: 3). The ejido accepted:

…that the land will be returned with all changes and alterations that it may suffer as a result of The Company’s mining activities and expressly waives its right to make any future reclamations regarding this issue.”

Further, it is declared that:

“…the parties agree that any obligation not confirmed in writing will be legally non-existent and lacking validity”.

The ejido relinquished the right to contest the content of the agreement (RANZ 2006:3).

The actual text of the agreement signed by the ejido’s Comisariado and Comite de vigilancia was never discussed in the assembly. The community was not informed by the company –nor by the office of the Agrarian Attorney General– about the magnitude of likely landscape destruction and groundwater depletion involved by the new mine’s development. They were led to believe this was a shaft and tunnel mine like those previously worked in the region. During contract negotiations, the company’s representatives were accompanied by a Visitador agrario (Agrarian Inspector) from the office of the Agrarian Attorney General, who helped cajole the ejidos’s assemblies to accept and sign the agreements. In formal terms, the office of the Agrarian Attorney General is a federal-level agency established to defend and advise peasant communities. Most commonly, the Agrarian Inspector is an important figure at the local level. They intervene whenever an ejido’s governing body is renewed, attest the legality of internal elections, mediate internal disputes over parcels, and mediate land and water rights conflicts with neighbors. The Inspector is an influential outsider who can exercise a great deal of influence in the decisions taken in the ejido’s assembly. The negotiation was between highly unequal partners, with critical information held back. One ejidatario said:


....the mining company brought in about ten lawyers; we the ejido had none to defend us. We were not on equal terms. I think that from then on all came out to the advantage of the company. [....] They told us that our lands would be expropriated if we decided not to sign, so the people grew uneasy; it had also been a tough year for our pockets. Right there they offered 22 million pesos [US$2 million]; an amount we sure had never seen. But when it was all distributed, it was 52,000 [US$4,900] for each ejidatario. [....] They never gave us [the assembly] any explanation; they never read us the agreement from the beginning. They showed us a pile of papers and said that was the agreement, too long to be read. But when we actually saw it, the agreement was only eight pages long. Right from there they cheated us. I won’t say if our Comisario sold out to the company, though he never let us see the agreement...I’m not looking for suspects....(Lucio González (pseudonym), Cedros ejidatario, June 2009.)

Another ejidatario, however, believed the agreement was signed because the ejido’s leadership committee had already been bought out:

Pancho Manrique [pseudonym] came in as the new Comisariado with money on his mind. He’s the one who sold the water and sold the land. [....] Then began the negotiations, and Pancho was found –like they found me and everyone– in great need and wanting to get ahead. [....] Pancho is now on the company’s payroll and goes to work whenever he likes [....] If he wasn’t bought out by the company, where did he get the money for that brand new pick-up truck, or to buy a water tanker truck and a dump truck, which he has working for the mining company? The company has the whole leadership bought and on its payroll. (Jorge Rodríguez (pseudonym), Cedros ejidatario, March 2009)

Two years later, the company found itself in the need to extend its domain over the land of Cedros ejido in order to install an extensive network of groundwater wells and surface piping to bring water to the mine site. Goldcorp’s representatives appeared once more with the purpose of signing another similar agreement with the landowners. Weeks earlier, the corporation’s public relations machine had arrived at the ejido communities to deliver some gifts: sewing machines for the women, walking aids for the elderly, soccer uniforms for the youths, toys for the children, and food packages for families. They remodeled some chapels and schools. They also had ejidatarios sign up for training courses with the promise of giving them jobs. Others were hired as workers in the company’s plant nursery to “help protect the environment.” At the signing of the second agreement, in June 2008, past promises, threats, and even the first agreement’s clauses were reproduced. But this time, the ejido’s newly elected Comisariado asked for more money in exchange for the 1,265 hectares the company was now seeking. Negotiations resulted in US$3.77 million for the ejidatarios, half of which were to be dedicated exclusively for “the development of productive projects” in the ejido (RANZ 2008). With this the mine’s “social workers” could influence the ejido’s internal life under the precepts of “community development.” This process of territorial dispossession occurred in similar fashion in the other affected ejidos. From the year 2006 to 2010, Goldcorp accrued 7,971 hectares from four ejidos (Cedros 5,790 ha; El Vergel 1,067 ha; Mazapil 447 ha; Cerro Gordo 667


ha) and 103 hectares bought directly from private landowners (Bryson et al. 2009). In general terms, this expanse includes the lands best suited for farming and cattle grazing. The impact, however, has been far greater because of water implications.

Peasant Dispossession by Groundwater Mining Mazapil valley consists mostly of dry land with a mean annual precipitation of 324 mm (CONAGUA 2007). Native vegetation is composed mainly of cacti, agave, and other xerophytes. The scant rainfall seeps into the ground and rises out at springs that constitute the source of the valley’s main stream, the Arroyo Grande. This stream flows intermittently several kilometers down the valley until it disappears into a vast plain of a closed (endorheic) basin, locally known as a bolsón, where it feeds the Cedros Aquifer (Figure 2). The recharge area covers nearly 557,000 hectares, while the accessible water table covers 90,900 hectares(CONAGUA 2007). Figure 2 shows the location of the mine site and the company’s water wells.

Figure 2. Mazapil groundwater system: ‘Acuífero Cedros’.(Map by: A. Boni with data from Bryson et al., 2009;

CONAGUA, 2007, 2009; REPDA, 2011).

Since the sixteenth century, farmers, cattle-ranchers, and households have accessed this ground water resource through shallow wells, or norias, dug along the intermittent stream banks. Typically, these wells are hand-dug pits of about 4 meters in diameter and up to thirty meters in depth. The wells are now equipped with wind-driven pumps, and well-water is piped for distribution to the villages and fields. Since the 1970s, several wells were developed to extract water from depths ranging from 100 to 150 meters using electric pumps. The irrigated farmland in the Mazapil valley totals about 1,500 hectares (INEGI 2003; SPOT 2007), and is used to grow corn, chili pepper, alfalfa, radish, sorghum, and beans, which are sold to regional markets such as Saltillo, Monterrey, and Zacatecas. Well-water also supplies livestock drinking areas. The


economic and social viability of these communities requires groundwater availability. Its depletion signifies the end of the peasant economy and the expulsion of the population. On 21 June, 2007, peasants of El Vergel ejido assembled in the village’s meeting hall and, in the presence of a notary public, ceded 1,063 hectares of common land to Minera Peñasquito for it to:

Undertake groundwater exploration, extraction, and consumption, as well as any necessary drilling and piping necessary for any mineral exploration and extraction to be done in the mining claims held by Minera Peñasquito S. A. de C. V. for a period of thirty years. (Notaría Pública 52, 2007)

In exchange the ejido received US$0.5 million.

This agreement, along with that signed with Cedros ejido months later, gave Goldcorp control of the neighboring lowlands, where most of the groundwater is found. With this small area, of only 2,328 hectares, the company now has open access to the entire Cedros aquifer, which concentrates the rainwater from a 557,000 hectare catchment (Figure 2). In order to extract the amount of 40 million metric meters it needs annually, the company has drilled at least thirty wells and built a wide-ranging network of piping that brings the water to the mining complex. In May 2010, only a few months after the mine’s official opening, all the shallow wells neighboring the mine had dried up. In the village of Las Mesas, where some thirty peasant families live, all five norias, used for cattle, family gardens, and human consumption, have dried up completely for the first time ever. The same has occurred with the single well in use by the three families living in Las Palmas. As an implicit acknowledgement of this fact, the company sends a tank truck of water, every once in a while. In a similar fashion, four wells at the town of Cedros, used for watering crops and hundreds of head of cattle have seen the water level descend farther than ever before experienced. Peasants of El Vergel also worried about their 650 hectares of irrigated land. They have nine 150-meter-deep wells, some of which have begun to “cough” as the pumps sucked water mixed with air. Farmers must then turn off the pumps and wait until more water seeps back into the well. Goldcorp’s 300-meter wells have not experienced such problems.7

CONAGUA increases the recharge rate The Comisión Nacional del Agua (CONAGUA) is the federal government agency responsible for water management in Mexico. One of its many duties involves assessing the water balance for the country’s aquifers, in order to estimate the volumes of water that may be extracted by users through concessions. In 2007, CONAGUA published a technical study on groundwater availability in the Cedros aquifer. The results of the study, which was prepared by a group of specialists from the University of Sonora, were the basis for establishing –through federal decree– the amount of water that could be permitted for extraction. The water input in the Cedros aquifer is represented by the sum of rainwater that infiltrates to the subsurface (vertical recharge) and groundwater flowing in from neighboring aquifers (horizontal recharge). The corresponding annual values of these attributes are 5.4 million m³/yr and 4.7 million m³/yr, respectively, which result in a mean annual recharge of 10.1 million m³. As an enclosed basin, there are no aquifer outputs to streams or underground flows. Artificial outputs, corresponding to water pumped out of wells, were estimated at 6.6 million m³/yr. This would suggest the availability of only


3.5 m3/year without depleting the aquifer (Table 2). To estimate the legal availability of water from the aquifer, however, CONAGUA does not take into account the actual amount of water extracted, but only the permitted volume, in this case 4.45 million m³/yr (SEMARNAT 2002), leaving 5.65 million m3/year legally available.

Almost all of this legally available water was permitted to Goldcorp. By the end of 2010, the Registro Público de Derechos de Agua (REPDA), managed by CONAGUA, contained only two concessions for water extraction in favor of Minera Peñasquito, summing a total volume of 4.8 million m³/yr to be extracted with ten wells (REPDA 2011),8 leaving a small positive balance of legally permitted water. Nevertheless, in early 2009 the company stated it was pumping 8 million m³/yr and expected to double the amount by year’s end (Bryson et al. 2009: 105). This is nearly double what it was legally permitted to extract, creating an estimated hydraulic deficit of -4.5 million m³/yr (Table 2). In its 2009 technical report, Goldcorp claimed to hold permits for the extraction of 35 million m³/yr. The same document makes unclear reference to two water concessions, one in August 2006, the other in early 2008, for the extraction of 4.6 and 9.1 million m³/yr, respectively (Bryson et al. 2009: 31-32). These figures do not conform to what is recorded in the national register of water rights. Furthermore, Goldcorp plans to extract up to 40 million m³/yr through a network of wells that has been operating since March 2010 (Bryson et al. 2009: 31, 105). This volume is four times higher than the mean annual recharge of 10.1 million m³/yr estimated by CONAGUA. This rate of extraction implies the depletion of water reserves that have accumulated throughout the geologic past. CONAGUA’s response to this has not been to press Goldcorp to decrease pumping or to close down any wells. On the contrary, CONAGUA created additional water by decree. In a decree of August 28, 2009 (SEMARNAT 2009), the mean annual recharge of the Cedros aquifer was increased from 10.1 to 54.4 million m³/yr. Initially, the update lacked a technical study backing up the new data but merely added a front-page addendum containing the new decreed values (CONAGUA 2009). Months later, a new technical study provided a revised mathematical model used to calculate the amount of recharge, and this greatly increases estimated water availability over what was previously calculated. If only rainfall were responsible for this increase, precipitation in the Mazapil valley region would have risen from 327 mm/yr to over 1,500 mm/yr, reaching values that correspond to Mexico’s rainiest forests. Whatever the validity of the new study, it is clear that peasants’ wells and norias have suffered losses since the mine began operating. In early 2011, CONAGUA issued a new permit for Goldcorp to extract 16.87 million m³/yr, totaling 21.7 million m³/yr, well within the newly decreed availability (REPDA 2011).

Table 2. Water balance of the Cedros aquifer (all values in m³/yr).

Annual recharge

Annual pumping output

‘Real’ annual availability

Permitted volume

‘Official’ annual availability

Before Goldcorp 10.1 6.6 3.5 4.45 5.65Goldcorp’s declared and permitted extraction 8.0 4.8

Totals 10.1 14.6 -4.5 (deficit) 9.25 0.85 (Sources: Bryson et al., 2009); CONAGUA, 2007; REPDA, 2011).


Peasant Blockades and Demands for Re-negotiation On the morning of 20 April 2009, a group of more than 1,000 peasants from Cedros and El Vergel blockaded Peñasquito mine (Figures 3 and 4).. Lucio González (2009), a Cedros ejidatario, recalled:

They leased the land for thirty years, extendable to thirty more. What they gave us was a joke. They paid fifty cents per square meter. [....] We are not asking for gifts, we are not asking for charity. All we want from them is respect. We demand what is owed to the ejido. [....] The land is ours and among the richest in gold worldwide. I believe we deserve a part in all this. [....] They took advantage of our ignorance and our indigence. They promised us the moon and the stars and did nothing but destroy our land; we won’t be able to use it anymore, we’ll get nothing from it afterwards.

Another ejidatario, José Jiménez (2009) declared:

Our government turned its back on us by not advising us, possibly because they have some interest. We’ve organised ourselves, we’re alone, this is all arbitrary. They are the richest mining company in the world [....] It’s a joke what they have done to us. We want to renegotiate. They say we are crazy, but they won’t even give us a job.

The peasants argued that the company was not complying with Articles 58 and 60 of the federal mining code (SECOFI 1999; Jiménez 2009), which state that mining companies must pay annual compensations to ejidos whose lands have been subject to mining activities. They also claimed broken promises of employment and other benefits offered verbally by corporate representatives. The ejidatarios turned for advice and support to the Frente Popular de Lucha de Zacatecas (The Zacatecas People’s Front of Struggle, FPLZ), an organization with ties to the leftist parties Partido del Trabajo (PT) and Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), led by federal congressman (diputado) José Narro Céspedes. Ideologically, the group and its leaders share common ground with the governor of the state of Zacatecas, Amalia García, of the PRD.

Figure 3. Ejidatarios blockading the Peñasquito mine. ©Zocalo, Saltillo (Jiménez 2009).


Figure 4. Municipal police during the blockade of the mine. ©Zocalo, Saltillo (Jiménez 2009).

The State Response to a Blockade: Sponsored Negotiations The first reaction from the Zacatecas State government to the blockade came from the Under-Secretary of State Affairs, David Frías: “If the ejidatarios wish to be partners and gain profit, they may invest in the New York Stock Exchange,” he said (Valadez Rodríguez 2009, authors’ translation). The next day the Secretary of State Affairs, Carlos Pinto, negotiated an end of the blockade in exchange for establishing a negotiating table in the Zacatecas State government building. Meanwhile, the Agrarian Attorney General’s Office and the Secretariat of the Economy reviewed the contracts and stated that the ejidos had voluntarily accepted the terms for the occupancy of their land, concluded that the articles requiring annual payments were not applicable to this case, and rejected attempts to nullify the existing agreements. Following this legal defeat, on the afternoon of 15 June 2009, 15 ejidatarios from Cedros and El Vergel renewed negotiations with Goldcorp’s representatives in the state of Zacatecas government building. Initially, the ejidatarios asked for the sum of US$10 million a year, a value similar to what they believed Goldcorp was paying to campesinos affected by the Los Filos mine in Guerrero (Garibay and Balzaretti 2009). Armando Escárcega, Goldcorp’s representative, rejected that amount and reminded them of projects the company had negotiated with the government of Zacatecas to benefit the communities of Cedros and El Vergel, such as financing fish farms, vegetable farms, road paving, etc. The ejidatarios argued that those projects were government-funded and cost nothing to the company. The atmosphere grew tense and the Secretary of State Affairs, apparently neutral, called for a recess. During the recess, ejidatarios and their advisors from the FPLZ agreed to ask for US$4 million to cover the six months remaining in the current year, followed by yearly payments of about US$10 million. When the negotiations resumed, the ejidatarios spelled out their proposal. The company offered US$2 million: one in cash, the other through a trust for the development of community projects. Following some


discussion, the Secretary declared another recess. While the Secretary and the company representatives withdrew from the room, Undersecretary David Frías told the ejidatarios that their “pretensions” were excessive. “Lower your demands!” he told them.9 He invited the ejidatarios to dinner in a nearby restaurant. During the meal, Congressman José Narro and Felipe Pinedo, leaders of the FPLZ arrived. Narro telephoned the Secretary of Zacatecas State Affairs, Carlos Pinto, making sure to be overheard by the ejidatarios. He arranged a private meeting with the Secretary, followed by a two-hour meeting with a commission of four ejidatarios, the FPLZ leaders, the Secretary, and three company representatives. At 3.00 A.M. the commission reappeared, and Narro informed the ejidatarios that it was only possible to negotiate US$2 million in cash and one million in a trust fund. The FPLZ advisor assured them this was the best they could do. An hour later, the commission left the room discouraged: having settled for US$3 million, the company declared the amount covered both ejidos, Cedros and El Vergel. The meeting ended abruptly at 4.00 a. m. and was scheduled to resume the following Monday. The next meeting was only attended by ejidatarios of Cedros ejido, who settled for a US$3 million annual payment. This multiplied the ejido’s income from US$5.912 to US$66 million over the 22 years of mining. In exchange, they relinquished the right to modify the agreement and stated their recognition that Minera Peñasquito is committed to the region’s development involving significant spending and, therefore, its operations will not be hindered in any way by actions of Cedros ejido. Ejidatarios of El Vergel filed a law suit against Goldcorp.

Unequal Exchange Initially –i. e. before the blockade of April 2009– Goldcorp intended to expend a total of roughly US$9.5 million10 to compensate local people for the destruction of 7,961 hectares of rural land, dispossession of water, and environmental damages (Table 3).11

After the April 2009 blockade, peasants from Cedros managed to settle with the company for US$3 million annually. This is equivalent to US$66 million for the estimated life of the mine of twenty-two years. El Vergel’s law suit against the company has resulted in the court ordering Goldcorp to pay US$11.06 million13 as compensation for the use of the ejido’s land for the past four years (Valadez Rodríguez, 2011). The other ejidos were not able to renegotiate payments, thus, after the Cedros blockade, the company’s total payments to ejidos comes to about US$84.56 million.

Table 3. Goldcorp payments before the 2009 blockade

Recipient Area ceded Payment(US$ millions) Cedros Ejido 5,790 ha 5.912 El Vergel Ejido 1,265 ha 0.5 Mazapil Ejido 447 ha 0.422 Cerro Gordo Ejido 667 ha 0.629 Private lands12 103 ha 0.094 Peñasquito village Relocation of 15 houses 0.354 Cerro Gordo and Mazapil Ejidos 120 ha 1.132 Payments to various ejidatarios: (Fencing, piping, road improvements).

0.472

Total estimated payments 9.515

12 This is a conservative estimate is adjusted downwards from peasants’ testimonies, in which many recalled private owners selling their lands at “very good prices.”


To put these payments in context, they can be expressed as a share of Goldcorp’s mineral reserves at Penasquito, its expected net income, or its production costs at the mine (Table 4). Before the blockade, for every US$100 of metals to be extracted, the corporation retains US$99.99, while communities receive 2 cents. After the blockade, communities received about 15 cents per $100. Before the blockade, for every US$ 100 of expected net income, Goldcorp gets US$99.98, while the communities’ share was 2 cents. After the blockade, the community’s share rose to 20 cents, per $100. As a share of production costs, such as facilities and other infrastructure, acquiring and setting up machinery, management expenses, and, of course, a payment for the right to access the land hosting the ore, communities received 7 cents for every $100 invested. After the blockade, their share rose to 59 cents. It should also be noted that even among the communities, these compensations for loss of territory, water, and way of life are not evenly distributed. Ejido Cedros, the community best able to leverage protest, receives most compensation. Employment benefits do not provide significant additional compensation to the ejidos. The company employs 8,000 people during the first three years of project development, and then a workforce of 3,500 until mine closure in 2033. In practice, these employees have been skilled workers from outside the local area. By the end of the year 2009, only 70 people of Cedros and El Vergel had been hired in the mine with monthly salaries below MX$5,000 (currently about US$425).14 Workers’ salaries have little multiplier effects in the local economy. Workers spend their salary in their places of origin or in the mine’s own dining halls, laundry facilities, stores, and dormitories. Four years since the mine began development, economic activity in the head town of Mazapil has scarcely changed: there are rental houses, prepared food businesses, an auto parts shop, two small low-end hotels, a gas station, and a brothel. On the other hand, land and water dispossession is destroying the livelihoods of 1,500 people.

The Limits of Compensation as a Justification for Dispossession Can such a dispossession be justified or compensated? An absolute veto on environmental transformations and dispossessions would go too far because it would preclude the possibility of transforming environments in ways that meet human needs, especially of the poor. On the other hand, the general interest in the wellbeing of humanity, the end of poverty, and the enhancement of local capacities and opportunities should not be equated with stock market values, global corporations, or global centers of finance and industry. Humanity is composed of a myriad of local communities, but socio-environmental problems like the dispossession discussed here, take place in a context of asymmetrical wealth and political power which preclude the pursuit of alternative modes of production, consumption, and distribution (Harvey 1996: 400). Perhaps a case could be made that the livelihood of the residents surrounding the Peñasquito mine should be sacrificed for the good of the nation. A full analysis of the benefit to cost ratio of the Peñasquito mine at the national level is beyond the

Table 4 Benefit distribution: Payments to local communities before and after 2009.

Item Value (US$)

Payment to the communities before 2009

Payment to the communities after 2009

US$ % US$ % Value of reserves 56,953,809,200 9,515,000 0.02 84,560,000 0.15 Net income 42,518 849,200 9,515,000 0.02 84,560,000 0.20 Production costs 14,434,960,000 9,515,000 0.07 84,560,000 0.59


scope of this paper, indeed, one of the problems with mining development in Mexico is the lack of transparency surrounding such issues. However, the high costs in water loss, environmental impact, rural displacement, the use of foreign subcontractors for much of the work, and the expected repatriation of profits suggests that net national benefit has not been established. In general, Latin American tax and royalty policies –as promoted by the World Bank – tend to recoup little of the value generated by mining, and this is exacerbated by trade mispricing, reporting low values for exported metals and high values for a company’s imported equipment and materials (Kumar 2009). Imagine that there were sufficient gold, diamonds and petroleum under the city of Vancouver to supply a significant portion of world demand for those products. Would it be valid to raze that city, erase its culture and quotidian life in order to distribute those minerals on a world market, enriching –let’s say– Chinese concession owners? From the perspective of a resident of Morelia, Mexico, the answer might be yes: it is appropriate to relocate the residents of Vancouver in order to improve the wellbeing of the global society. The residents of Vancouver would probably disagree. The comparison might seem absurd, given that Vancouver is a world center, housing the corporate headquarters of Goldcorp and other important world actors. The Mazapil valley and the dispossessed ejidos don’t carry that weight. The people there are poor Mexican peasants nearly invisible on the world stage. In our opinion, however, despite the arguments Calderón made when inaugurating the mine, the national good does not justify the sacrifice of livelihood, either in the Mazapil valley or in Vancouver. For many, justice is met by distributing costs and benefits more evenly. From this perspective, dispossession is not a problem if compensation is adequate. However, local people lose land, livelihood, cultural landscapes, and landscapes of memory that are not reducible to money. In the same way that trade in toxic waste can be said to enhance a monetized concept of welfare, when disparate values are monetized, concepts of justice that are merely distributive work to protect powerful interests, to close debate on more radical alternatives, and to reaffirm existing patterns of unequal economic and ecological exchange (Schroeder 2000; see Harvey’s discussion of the Lawrence Summer memo, Harvey 1996: 368 ff). Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession rests on the act of appropriating the goods of one person or social group through coercion, with the goal of increasing the quantity of capital available to another person or group. The questions of justification and compensation therefore imply a debate between the values invoked by the dispossessors compared to the values of those who resist their dispossession. This dilemma is especially severe in the context of the new geography of mining because of the extent of landscape destruction, the destruction of local modes of living, and the environmental impacts which leave local people with a stark choice between exile or suffering the health and quality of life implications of remaining. In this sense, a just compensation is even more difficult to achieve, not only because of the problem of assigning prices to landscape and livelihood, but also because of the challenge of justifying the destruction of a one group’s world in exchange for large amounts of wealth enjoyed by other groups.

Conclusions Mining companies in Mexico have 757 current projects for gold, silver, and related metals, of which 71 are in production (SE 2010; SE 2010b). This account outlines the experience of local communities resisting the dispossession of their land and resources in one of those cases. Local people were misled about the consequences of the mine.


Agreements were misrepresented as they were being legalized, but then used to govern future interactions. Federal agencies that should have protected peasant interests failed to be proactive. The federal water management agency overturned previous technical studies without clear justification, apparently becoming an accomplice in groundwater depletion. After peasants protested and asked for greater compensation for these harms, the state government pressured, divided, and appeased the peasant protestors. It is unclear if the political organizations acting as mediators better represented the peasants’, or the company’s interest. The study demonstrates the value of examining the process of contracting between communities and mining companies, which can limit the community’s ability to engage in future rounds of struggle. It is essential that communities have a clear understanding of what the contract entails (O’Faircheallaigh 2010), but this investigation shows how mining companies and their government allies use misrepresentations and obfuscations to disempower an unequal partner. This study also affirms calls to better understand the role of the state in affecting mining-development relationship at the mine level, and in shaping the outcome of mining protest (Bebbington, Bebbington, Bury et al. 2008; Canel, Idemudia and North 2010). Most importantly, however, it shows the active role of an immensely wealthy and influential company –together with state allies– in undermining protest movements and maintaining access to mining landscapes and water resources. Research into the new geographies of mining in Latin America may need to place greater emphasis on the tactics of dispossession employed by mining companies and their allies in the state. As the quality of accessible mineral deposits decline, powerful publically-traded firms use such tactics to acquire access to mineral deposits worldwide. They use open pit mining techniques to extract these remaining low-concentration ores, using enormous machines that move, pulverize, and leach millions of tons of ore for small proportions of precious metal. This necessitates radical conflict over land and water between the mining companies and deeply-rooted local communities. In traditional, underground mining regions, tunneling left the surface area free for other cultural uses and generated work opportunities which could sometimes be integrated with regional livelihoods. In contrast, the new geography of mining excludes all other economic and cultural uses from a land area much larger than the mine itself. At the same time, they provide little or nothing to the local population. Corporate organization and modern transport and communications technology make it more profitable to acquire machinery, supplies, and services from a global network than from local suppliers. As far as labor goes, less is required and it is more convenient for big companies to contract qualified workers from regional centers than to train local people. In effect, there are few links to the local and regional economy. This ethnography suggests that the new geography of mining in Latin America again reinforces an unequal economic and ecological exchange in which core nations seize the resource wealth of peripheral nations, leaving them with environmental degradation and displaced peoples, whose protests are often silenced, made ineffective, or brutally repressed (Downey, Bonds, Clark 2010; Muradian and Martínez Alier 2002). In that sense, this current encounter with mining may differ only in detail from the one Galeano (1997) described during the colonial and neo-colonial periods.

Acknowledgements The realization of this paper was made possible by the funding of the Programa de Apoyos a Proyectos de Investigación en Innovación Tecnológica (PAPIIT)-


UNAM (Project name/number: ‘Paisajes sociales mineros’/303108) and the Programa Nacional de Becas de Posgrado of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (beca/registro: 26656/223345). We also wish to extend our thanks to Martín Olmedo for his most valuable contributions during field work. We also thank the editor and the external reviewers for their many helpful comments.

Notes1 All fieldwork was conducted only by the Mexican authors.

2 The Mexican properties owned by Goldcorp are the mines Los Filos (Guerrero), El Sauzal (Chihuahua), and Peñasquito (Zacatecas). Goldcorp has recently sold its mine in San Dimas (Durango) and has withdrawn from the exploration project El Limón in the state of Guerrero.

3 Figures for Cedros and El Vergel are from the 2010 Census. To estimate the populations of the Mazapil and Cerro Gordo ejidos, which live together in Mazapil, we took the 2000 figure for the population of Mazapil. By 2010, there were more than 3000 temporary inhabitants of Mazapil, working on mine construction.

4 In Spanish, a convenio de ocupación temporal de tierras (SRA 1992).

5 Mexican mining law explicitly denies peasant communities the right to oppose mining land occupancy. Any discrepancy, it says, will be resolved in favor of mining interests: The Ministry [Secretaría de Economía] will resolve favorably the temporary occupancy or right of way within fifteen days after submitting the application, as long as: I. The affected party’s conformity is properly confirmed; II. The area in concern lies within the mining claim; and III. The value of the accorded compensation is at least equal to the value estimated by the Commission [Comisión de Avalúos de Bienes Nacionales]. In the case of temporary occupancy or rights of way in ejido or communal lands, procedures must conform with the Agrarian Law’ [authors’ translation]. Secretaría de Comercio y Fomento Industrial, ‘Reglamento de la ley minera’, Diario Oficial de la Federación (Mexico City, Feb 15 1999), art. 56: available at www.diputados.gob.mx/LeyesBiblio/.

6 Exchange rate: 10.6 Mexican Pesos to one US dollar. This is the average value from March 2006 to June 2008, when most negotiations and payments were made in local currency (www.banxico.gob.mx).

7 “Los pozos empezaron a toser” is the original phrasing that describes the sound made when the pump pulls in both water and air, due to the descent of the water level. The authors are aware of the fact that water table depth varies throughout an aquifer, and that comparison between well depths alone may not result in an accurate assessment of the effects of over-pumping; nevertheless, empirical data related to the drying wells in addition to information regarding the general attributes of the Cedros aquifer (cf. CONAGUA 2007) allow for such comparisons.


8 The title numbers on Goldcorp’s registered extraction permits are 07ZAC120326/36FMDL08, 07ZAC120195/36FMDL08, and 07ZAC120616/36FMDL09.

9 Pedro Sergio Urquijo’s fieldnotes: Reporte de reunión: Goldcorp, ejidatarios y Secretario de Gobierno (Zacatecas, 15 June 2009).

10 See note 6.

11 This final estimate was made by bringing together documents offered by the ejidos and interviews with ejidatarios. We acknowledge a certain margin of error in relation to the exact amounts, however, in the following lines the reader may observe these inaccuracies are irrelevant when Goldcorp’s benefits are contrasted to those of the peasants.

12 This is a conservative estimate is adjusted downwards from peasants’ testimonies, in which many recalled private owners selling their lands at “very good prices.”

13 Exchange rate: 11.76 Mexican Pesos to one US dollar (April 2011, www.banxico.gob.mx).

14 These data were obtained in several interviews with peasants and mine workers during the years 2009 and 2010.

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