A tale of two frogs, seven mining companies and much, much more.
(updated December 2024)
Carlos Zorrilla
From the outside, it’s easy to get the impression that this is one of those black-and-white battle between two endangered frogs and a giant transnational trying to a large-scale open-pit copper mining project. In part, you’d be right, but it’s much more than that.
You could say it all started in the 1980s, when a Belgian government-funded expedition discovered a potential mining site in northwestern Ecuador, on the slopes of the biodiverse Toisán mountain range, in an area known as Intag. In the following decade, the Ecuadorian government requested support from the Japanese government to assess the site’s true mining potential. Japan, then, as now, imported 100% of its copper. A coincidence no doubt. Thus, entered the scene compay number one, Bishimetals, a subsidiary of the giant Mitsubishi Corporation. The exploration of Bishimetal was entirely funded by the Japanese government through the Japan International Cooperation Agency; JICA.
They drilled dozens of test wells deep underground, right in the middle of some of the most threatened and biodiverse tropical forests in the world. The mountainous cloud forests of northwestern Ecuador are home to hundreds of endangered species, including the two frogs featured in this story. They are part of the most biodiverse Hotspot , the Tropical Andes. It was Bishimetal ’s presence that triggered the creation of DECOIN, the oldest regional environmental organization in the region and, to date, leading what has become the oldest resistance to a mining project the country (now in its 30th year)
After four years of exploration, Bishimetals confirmed that the site held promise for large-scale copper mining. In 1996, they published a preliminary environmental impact study for a small copper mine that predicted huge environmental and social impacts, including “massive” deforestation, river pollution with toxic heavy metals, and the relocation of four communities. The following year , local communities reacted to the potential scenario by burning the mining camp to the ground. That was enough to make Mitsubishi abandon Intag and its copper dreams. In uncovering the site’s mineral potential, Bishimetals also polluted pristine rivers and streams with heavy metals that bubbled up from underground aquifers pierced by the drilling . Three decades later, some of the abandoned wells are still polluting the area’s rivers and streams .
The World Bank and Mining Company Number Two
One of the least-kept secrets in the underdeveloped world is the Bank’s role in facilitating extractivism around the globe. It does this not only by lending billions of dollars to mining and oil companies, but, even more devastatingly, by weakening mining and oil legislation in developing countries. It’s not so common anymore, but when they did, they helped finance the “modernization” of mining legislation in more than 100 developing countries. The goal was, according to the Bank’s account, to help develop those countries’ economies. Never mind that those poor countries tend to suffer much worse economic and social outcomes when they rely on resource extraction to power their economies, a phenomenon known as the natural resource curse.
In reality, the “modernization” of mining legislation resulted in radical deregulation, making it cheaper and easier for transnational capital to extract resources from poor countries. Ecuador was one of the countries affected by the initiative. In our case, environmental safeguards were drastically weakened and a series of tax breaks were instituted to attract mining investment. And it worked. The changes attracted a horde of mining companies to the country, including many Canadian ones of dubious reputation. One of them would end up in our place and, unsuccessfully, try to continue the Bishimetals’ work.
But before we delve into the sordid history of the Canadian Copper Mesa, let’s look a little more at the World Bank project that made it possible for the Canadian company, and others like it, to wreak social and environmental havoc on local communities. Prodeminca was the name the World Bank gave to the so-called development project for Ecuador (an acronym for Proyecto de Desarrollo Minero y Control Ambiental). The main goal of the project was to open up the country to mining. The Bank would do this not only by funding the deregulation of the country’s mining legislation, but also by creating mineralogical maps that highlighted the country’s promising mining areas, thereby saving mining companies untold millions of dollars in exploration costs. The main region studied was western Ecuador, where Intag and the Toisán mountain range are located. Importantly. The project was carried out against World Bank guidelines, in that it did not exclude the country’s national parks from mining exploration. If Ecuador is now plagued by hundreds of mining concessions and dozens of social conflicts, it is largely thanks to the World Bank and the Prodeminca project .
In late 1990, DECOIN demanded that the World Bank conduct an evaluation of the project based on probable violations of its policy. The Bank sent its Inspection Panel to investigate as a result of our action- one of the few times that the Bank has approved such an inspection. Although it did not stop the project, since it was too late and most of the information had already been disclosed, the Panel concluded that the project violated several of its policies.
Copper Mesa
In Canada, virtually anyone with a little money can start a mining company. The country is known for having very lax regulations for the creation and listing of companies on the country’s stock exchanges. It’s the main reason why most of the world’s publicly traded mining companies are based in the country. For decades, it has been a mecca for scammers who rely on lax regulation and oversight to scam investors. Copper Mesa, formerly known as Ascendant Copper, was one of those companies (it changed its name to Copper Mesa in 2008). The junior company was founded with the sole purpose of selling the Llurimagua mining concession to a large company. Their idea was to continue Bishimetal’s exploratory work in the hopes of finding a larger copper deposit, which would make the concession more valuable.
The forests of Llurimagua are where the two endemic frogs live along with over 90 other especies facing extinction. Much more of this chapter of the three decades of resistance is told in the documentary Under Rich Earth , but to cut to the chase, after five years of trying to aggressively develop the project, including the use of paramilitaries and a scandalous judicial system used to intimidate the director of DECOIN as well as several opponents from around the mining site, they had to abandon the project due to fierce resistance. This was around 2009. In 2010, the Toronto Stock Exchange delisted the company. However, to achieve this, it was necessary for the inhabitants of Intag, with the support of DECOIN, to sue the Exchange for complicity in human rights violations, a measure that set a precedent in Canada. Without money extracted from investors ignorant of what the company was doing in Ecuador, the company had no more $ to violate our rights. Good riddance to company #2!
Enter companies three and four
For a couple of years, everything was relatively quiet, until Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, decided he needed more money to finance his political career. He turned to Chile and the state-owned mining company, CODELCO, to try to regain ground lost by Bishimetals and Copper Mesa. Codelco is the world’s largest copper producer, and its mines are located in the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world. The Atacama Desert is the complete opposite of the cloud forests of Intag, filled with mosses, bromeliads and orchids, with rivers and streams everywhere and where it rains between 3 and 5 meters a year. In stark contrast to the Atacama, where water is so scarce that miners are now desalinating water from the Pacific Ocean and pumping it to more than 3,000 meters above sea level. The Llurimagua concession alone contains 43 pristine water sources on just 4,829 hectares. There are many other stark contrasts between the two sites, not the least of which is the night-and-day difference in biological diversity. The region’s montane cloud forests are home to hundreds of endangered animals and plants . Two of those species, the long-nosed harlequin and the Intag hardy Intag Resistance Rocket Frog, have been found at the mining site and nowhere else on the planet. The frogs are just two of more than 20 endangered frog species found withing the concession. Given the global amphibian apocalypse caused by the chytrid fungus , which is wiping out the world’s frog species , one would think that arguments for conserving Intag’s forests would be superfluous. And yet the amphibians at Intag are not alone. They are joined by three critically endangered monkey species, one species of fish, several species of trees, orchids, and birds. So far we have been able to identify 94 species on the endangered list. And almost every month a new species is discovered. One of the monkeys, the brown- headed monkey (Ateles fusciceps ), is one of the 25 most endangered primates in the world. If we add to this the record of a jaguar in 2024, which was captured by a camera trap, as well as sloths and several other plant and animal species on the different red lists, you will have an idea of how criminal it would be to exploit mines here.
To give an appearance of legitimacy and make people believe that this was not just another transnational extractive project, Ecuador created its own state mining company, ENAMI, to join Codelco. Despite selling the initiative as an “Ecuadorian project,” a story that very few believed, the presence of the companies was firmly rejected. It was then that the government of then-President Rafael Correa turned to its police and army. There is no need to hire private security when you have the entire repressive apparatus of the State at your service.
In May 2014, the Intag area was violently occupied by 400 elite police and army forces to ensure the presence of Codelco and Enami in the mining concession. They remained there for months and violated basic human rights. Given the lack of independence of the judicial and legislatve branches of power at the time (a hallmark of President Correa’s regime), Codelco was able to set up a camp in primary forest that was being managed by communities for ecotourism, and was able to began advanced exploratory activities. For three years, Codelco, with the demonstrated complicity of state regulators , polluted pristine rivers and streams and deforested primary forests . The activities drastically impacted the community’s ecotourism. It was also during this time that our small environmental organization, Decoin, was able to contract the Jambato Center to conduct a scientific study, where the long-nosed harlequin frog (Atelopus longirostris) was discovered, which had not been seen for decades. Rare enough that the IUCN had classified it as extinct. Three years later, a much rarer frog was discovered by biologists from the Jambato Center within the same concession. Scientists consider it to be new to science, and it has been named the Intag endurance rocket frog . Neither of the two has been reported anywhere else on the planet.
Today, there is a group of community members trained in amphibian identification who monitor the community forest, and they have identified new species not reported in the environmental impact studies of the three mining companies that have conducted studies. This new information will be part of future legal actions to stop what would be one of the most atrocious mining projects in the world if it were carried out.
The Intag Resistance Rocket Frog
The discovery of the frogs gave us a stronger basis for filing a constitutional challenge to stop the mining development. We successfully argued in the trial that the mining development would violate the rights of Nature, a right enshrined in Ecuador’s Constitution. We argued that it would do so by causing the extinction of the two frog species, as well as negatively affecting the habitat of dozens of other endangered species that require good quality water for their existence.
A victory full of hope
After losing in the first instance, DECOIN supported the members of the communities near the mining project, and another lawsuit was filed alleging violation of the Rights of Nature and lack of environmental consultation. This time we managed to win not only in the provincial court of Imbabura, but the ruling was confirmed by the highest court in Ecuador, the Constitutional Court in March 2023. The ruling determined that Codelco had to stop all mining activities within the mining concession. As of December 2024, Codelco has complied with the court’s ruling.
Enter Mining Companies #5, 6 and 7.
As the two state-owned companies (Enami and Codelco) attempted to come to an agreement on how to create a new company to mine the copper from Llurimagua, Ecuador was approached by Broken Hill Properties (BHP) and Hanrine to develop the mine Even though Hanrine so far has not been seen in Intag, it teamed up with Enami to have the rights to explore in six mining concessions all around Llurimagua. Hanrine is the Ecuadorian subsidiary of Australia’s Hancock Prospecting .
The UK and Australian-based BHP is the largest mining corporation in the world and holds several concessions in Intag — concessions that they have been unable to develop due to strong opposition from communities. While it is not known what BHP offered the Ecuadorian government for the Llurimagua project, according to press reports , Hanrine offered it $400 million in cash . The offer was not enough to tempt the Ecuadorians to abandon the bilateral treaty with Chile that brought Codelco into the hyper-diverse forests of Intag in the first place.
Company Number 7
Canadian company Cornerstone made an unsuccessful attempt to explore within three concessions it holds in the parish of Cuellaje in 2021. In the parish of García Moreno and the case of the Los Cedros Protective Forest, the company failed completely once the Constitutional Court selected the protective action filed by the Municipality of Cotacachi against the government for authorizing mining in a Protective Forest. Cornerstone was acquired by the powerful Solgold in 2022, which has plans to open one of the largest gold, silver and copper mines in South America in the north of the province of Imbabura. Cornerstone wasted no time in realizing the strong opposition from the residents and authorities of that parish, and has not been seen since 2021.
Meanwhile, for various reasons, including the court ruling, an administrative challenge by civil society groups to a very poor environmental impact study, coupled with continued local opposition, plus disagreements over how Ecuador and Chile’s Codelco should divide the pie, no exploration has taken place in the Llurimagua concession since late 2018.
In preparation for the possible revival of exploration activities, we are preparing new lawsuits. Indeed, throughout the Andean country opposition to mining has grown exponentially, threatening other projects, including Hanrine’s and several Solgold projects. To date (December 2024), neither Hanrine nor the powerful BHP have managed to enter the concessions to explore.
What are the next steps?
At Intag we continue to prepare for another possible invasion by mining companies. We know that the frogs and all the other endangered species are still there. Almost every month another endangered species is identified that have not been included in the environmental impact studies (nothing else can be expected since they are financed by the companies). But that is not the only thing that remains in the territory. The copper deposit that lies beneath these rich soils and biodiverse forests also lies in the same place, as do the corrupt companies and even more corrupt regulators. So is the hunger for copper.
However, a new factor may upset all plans and topple three decades of resistance. I am referring to the demand for copper and other metals considered “critical” to fuel the energy transition. I do not call it a clean energy transition because the minerals that come from places like the Toisán mountain range in Intag will be extracted in violation of all kinds of human and Nature’s rights and leave behind unprecedented environmental devastation.
These minerals will be stained by poisoned rivers and ruined landscapes. The metals will cause species to become extinct. It will devastate some of the planet’s most biodiverse places, not to mention the trampling of human rights. In this context, it is clear that the resistance in Intag is not only fought just in Intag, but it is unquestionably tied in to the behavior of citizens of northern countries who consume these “environmentally clean” products without realizing where they come from and how much damage they do to communities and nature.
If you want to know more and support us, write to us at toisan06@gmail.com, and copy us at: decointag@yahoo.com
Photograph of the Intag Resistance Frog courtesy of Luis Coloma and Fundacion Jambato
For more information, see:
www.decoin.org and Decoin’s Facebook
23 reasons why Codelco should stay out of Intag
Several full-length documentaries have been produced about Intag’s struggle, including Under Rich Earth , Javier with I of Intag and Hugo Rebel Territory.
In addition, there are several short documentaries on Youtube , at: Mining, Intag and Mining , Intag