Thursday, September 22, 2011

HudBay Minerals (HBM) (HBM.to): Touchy feely community relations sure beats hacking 'em to death with machetes

Me? I get all confused about these things. After all what with Hudbay (HBM.to) (HBM) now building its Constancia mine in southern Peru, it's only right that the company reaches out to locals. For example the $10,000 it just donated to a local university to sponsor "The Hudbay Classroom" that'll teach all things mining to keen minds. As part of the promo blurb, the company told us (translated):

"This agreement is part of our framework of responsibility and social inclusion, whose objective is always to provide to the communities where HudBay operates."

Which does compare favourably to the way it used to do business in other LatAm countries. For example at its Fenix project in Guatemala two years ago:
"Just over a year ago, my husband, Adolfo Ich Chamán, was killed by security forces employed at the Fenix mining project in Guatemala – a mining project owned by Canadian company HudBay Minerals. In the afternoon of September 27, 2009, I watched my husband leave our house for the last time. I later learned that mine security forces had surrounded my husband, dragged him through a gap in a fence and hacked at him with machetes. Then the mine’s chief of security shot him in the neck at close range. This attack was unprovoked."

The good news is that since that event, when HudBay employees murdered an anti-mining activist at its mine project in Guatemala, HudBay sold the project to another firm. So that doesn't count any more, right?