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Diaguita Huascoaltinos Declaration 2012 to Barrick Gold Corporation

by Diaguita Huascoaltinos Indigenous and Agricultural Community
May 2nd, 2012

We have survived all manner of invasions for more than 500 years, and never before in history, as an Original Peoples, have we been so violated as we have been today by this mining corporation that has invaded the deepest foundations of our ways of life and customs.

You have violated in an unmeasurable way our way of life and peaceful reality.

You have violated our self-determination and with your benefits for paupers, you have destroyed the innate source of our sustenance in the name of �self-determination.�

Thanks to your arrival, Barrick Gold, today in the Valley, we have something that we never before have had, and that in other places is called anxiety and depression. Our people, no matter how old, are suffering because of what they see and what you do through your skillful and sinister irresponsible mining.

Already, many Diaguitas Huasco Altinos, see the situation of agriculture and ranching as a depressing activity. The ground water is controlled, and through a certain science, no one can tell us with any certainty that the water is not contaminated. For this reason the buyers of our fruit have slowly disappeared.

We are unhappy, because of you, Barrick Gold� you are our worst misfortune� misfortune that we do not deserve.

Friends and entire families have left for other lands because they see no future. We have become enemies like never before in history with our fathers, mothers, and siblings. We have definitively lost millennial glaciers, sacred mountains, meadows and marshlands of our wild animals, sanctuaries in the mountains, and petroglyphs which have been looted and destroyed. Unconscious people have arrived, your mining workers that don�t respect our way of loving our Mother Nature.

Even so, Barrick Gold, we have not lost our dignity, and with the autonomy that makes us who we are, we will continue resisting your savage and invisible plan of Eco-cide.

We remind you that in many places in the world where you are destroying the planet, there are chosen ones in this life whose only reason for being is to counteract your plans.

Signed: The guardians of nature in Huasca Alto

 

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