* Newmont carrying out technical, cost evaluations
* Plan called for $4.8 bln investment, biggest in Peru
* Minister says has “tools to make things happen”
LIMA, April 23 (Reuters) – Newmont Mining has shown
its “willingness” to improve the environmental mitigation plan
for its proposed gold mine known as Conga, Peru’s government
said on Monday, as it seeks to overcome opposition to the mine.
Mines and Energy Minister Jorge Merino said he would confer
with officials from U.S.-based Newmont to define how the
mitigation plan would be altered after a team of independent
environmental auditors recommended a series of changes that
could increase the cost of the controversial project, now
estimated at $4.8 billion.
“We are going to sit down with them. They’ve said they are
evaluating the proposed measures recommended by the auditors,
but I think there’s a good willingness on their part,” Merino
said on RPP radio.
Over the weekend, Carlos Santa Cruz, Newmont’s chief for
South America, said the company would carry out “technical and
economic evaluations” of the auditors’ recommendations, which
called for the miner to preserve two of four alpine lakes that
would be displaced by the mine and replaced with reservoirs.
President Ollanta Humala on Friday urged community activists
to stop protesting against the stalled mine’s construction and
said the government would make sure the company adheres to
strict social, environmental and labor goals.
His comments to end a months-long impasse came two days
after the auditors encouraged the company to build larger
reservoirs to guarantee more water supplies.
Newmont’s plans fueled protests in the northern Cajamarca
region late last year as some townspeople feared the most
expensive mine ever attempted in Peru would leave local farmers
without sufficient water supplies and cause pollution. The
mine’s construction has been halted since November.
The leaders of the protests – Gregorio Santos, who is the
president of the region of Cajamarca, and Wilfredo Saavedra, who
runs an environmental group – have said the Conga project isn’t
viable and have frowned on the auditors’ recommendations.
Some of the protesters’ arguments against the mine were
undercut by the report from the auditors – who said water in the
lakes is unfit for human or animal consumption because it is
naturally toxic.
The auditors said the reservoirs would provide year-round
water supplies to towns that currently suffer during the dry
season, but encouraged Newmont to increase the storage capacity
of the reservoirs to provide even more water.
STATE’S TOOLS
On Monday, Prime Minister Oscar Valdes was asked if the
central government would impose the country’s largest ever
mining investment on community groups in Cajamarca who say they
are opposed to the mine.
“The president of Cajamarca will have to understand that he
needs to ensure development for his people,” he told reporters.
“We favor dialogue, but the state also has tools to make things
happen.”
Peru’s Constitutional Tribunal has ruled that a regional
ordinance Santos passed that said the mine could not be built
was unconstitutional and on Friday public prosecutors opened an
inquiry against him over allegedly using public funds to finance
anti-Conga protests.
Police have detained Saavedra at least twice amid protests
that blocked roads and later released him. A lawyer, Saavedra
spent a decade in jail for belonging to the Marxist insurgency
group Tupac Amaru. He later reinvented himself as an
environmentalist.
Santos and Saavedra have at times seemed to criticize
Humala, a former leftist, for drifting too far to the right
since taking office in July in Peru, where rural communities
have long complained about not seeing the fruits of the
country’s vast mining sector. A third of Peruvians live in
poverty.
“The fight in Cajamarca is political. What we are asking for
is a change in the extractive economic model backed by Humala,”
Santos said in Sunday’s El Comercio newspaper.
