Ejido de Carrizalillo Press Release
...Following 42 days in the encampment in front of gate #4 of the Los Filos mine belonging to your company, Canadian firm Equinox Gold, so as to pursue negotiations over a new social-cooperation agreement, your negotiation team withdrew on October 14 as a result of their incapacity to address the proposals and agreements that we had discussed days prior. This situation has provoked deep anger and concern in the Ejido given that, on Tuesday October 13, we had made gains in several points that gave us hope that the encampment and the mine closure would soon come to an end. As we have said from the beginning: this process started a result of lack of fulfillment of our agreement and the principal difference with the new agreement is that it will incorporate means to ensure that your company will not violate its agreements again.
We have grown tired of the talk of good faith and being referred to as “a community of interest” for your company, because in talks over each clause your team has been trying to incorporate conditions that are innegotiable for us as an ejido. The lies have gotten to such a point with your company that we have received manipulatory information presented by your team as if they were proposals, thinking that we are incapable of understanding and treating us as if we were children. The only thing this has reaffirmed, which we indicated from the start: Equinox is a company with a serious racist and discriminatory attitude. Consider for yourselves a simple issue of skills training concerning a project that is all about mining, your company proposes that we come up with a joint program to be trained in things not at all related to mining. Will workshops on how to make fruit jelly or undertake trades or agriculture help us when our lands have been occupied and drenched with sodium cyanide? For us, the mere fact of these things that your team has proposed underscores what we mentioned from the beginning: you are a Canadian company that thinks that Mexico is your colony...