Carlos Choc goes on the 22nd of each month to sign at the El Estor court, a few kilometers from Puerto Barrios, in the Caribbean of Guatemala.
It doesn't matter where he is, if his son is sick, if he has a job or if his life is in danger every time he goes to the office of the Public Ministry.
Every 22nd of the month he must appear before an official to ratify the provisional measures against him.
Choc is an indigenous journalist from his municipality, El Estor, with almost 75,000 inhabitants.
He normally covers road accidents, the flooding of the river, the lack of water or the inaugurations of the mayor of this Mayan Q'eqchi 'Q'chi region, made up of dozens of communities dotted with the imposing green of the mountains of Guatemala.
He visits communities with tape recorder and notebook in hand,
Community Press
.
It can be said that Choc, who has just turned 39, is
the
journalist of his town.
That was until the nickel mine owned by the Russian giant Solway, based in Switzerland, came to dominate all information.
The huge crater, one of the largest open-pit mines in Central America, has turned its town into a place of transit for dozens of trucks that every day leave loaded with red earth in the direction of Ukraine.
Since then, he has been collecting stories about skin rashes, a strange stain that appeared in the lake, the laments of a dismissed worker or the consequences of the state of siege decreed by his president.
Carlos Choc working in Izabal, Guatemala.Community Press
A leak of eight million documents received by Forbidden Stories and that includes internal conversations, executive orders, repressive strategies, financial statements and emails reveals the submission of the State of Guatemala to the mining company, the concealment of environmental damage or the good results obtained during the time in which the mine should have stopped operations due to a court order that required a prior consultation.
The investigation, in which journalists from media such as
Le Monde
,
The Guardian
or
The Incetercept have collaborated
, is part of the 'Green Blood' series, about the work of journalists threatened, imprisoned or killed while investigating environmental issues.
Two years later, the investigation continues with the publication of 'Mining Secrets'.
On May 27, 2017, Carlos Choc had the misfortune of being the only journalist to take a photo that changed his life.
It was the body of Carlos Maaz lying on the asphalt.
Maaz was part of a group of fishermen who were protesting against the ferronickel mine that bores holes in the land of his town and that supposedly had released a strange red stain that had brutally reduced the fishing of the lake.
During the repression, the police denied that anyone had died, but Choc proved otherwise and the mine and the authorities accused him of instigating a crime.
Carlos Maaz lies on the ground after the confrontation with the national police. Carlos Choc
The weight of the state fell on him.
First they issued a search and arrest warrant and then they opened a legal case against him.
In his town, El Estor, it hasn't gone any better either.
They have threatened him, they have entered his house, they have killed his dog and the open legal case threatens to distance him from his children.
The only thing that Carlos has not stopped doing is writing on his old computer, although he visits his town less and less due to the threats.
Carlos Choc is the victim of a chain of corruption in which he gets the worst of it and which has a Russian mining company as the protagonist.
A vast rain of millions, falling from top to bottom on all the powers of Guatemala.
The investigation by Forbidden Stories (FS) and its partners reveals the practices with which the Fénix mine operates, owned by Solway Investment Group, a Swiss-based multinational with Russian capital that operates in Guatemala under the acronym of the Compañía Guatemalteca de Níquel (CGN) and Pronico.
Located in a biosphere reserve, Fénix is one of the largest open-pit mines in Central America, with access to Lake Izabal and an Atlantic port a few kilometers away.
The nickel multinational employs some 2,000 people directly and another 2,000 indirectly,
but it is confronted with a part of the population that denounces the contamination of the lake, damage to health, corruption and the climate of terror that has spread among those who oppose the mine: fishermen, journalists, opposition politicians and even the priest from town.
The maneuvers include the manipulation of a judicial order of the Constitutional Court, the purchase of Mayan leaders and police, gifts to judges or the suspicions that surround various ministers and the president himself, Alejandro Giammattei, who has persecuted judges and prosecutors who They have tried to investigate their links with Russian mining companies until they were forced into exile one after the other.
opposition politicians and even the village priest.
The maneuvers include the manipulation of a judicial order from the Constitutional Court, the purchase of Mayan leaders and policemen, gifts to judges or the suspicions that surround various ministers and the president himself, Alejandro Giammattei, who has persecuted judges and prosecutors who They have tried to investigate their links with Russian mining companies until they were forced into exile one after the other.
opposition politicians and even the village priest.
The maneuvers include the manipulation of a judicial order from the Constitutional Court, the purchase of Mayan leaders and policemen, gifts to judges or the suspicions that surround various ministers and the president himself, Alejandro Giammattei, who has persecuted judges and prosecutors who They have tried to investigate their links with Russian mining companies until they were forced into exile one after the other.
04:37
A LEAK reveals the abuses of the PROYECTO FÉNIX mine |
THE COUNTRY
Aerial view of the El Estor area.
|
On video, an account of the people's struggle against the mining company.
Photo: AP |
Video EPV
The thousands of emails and documents stored on a two-terabit hard drive reveal the plans to displace the villages from the area of influence of the mine, the preparation of tables classifying the neighbors as friends or enemies of the mine, the threat of spreading the rumor of an AIDS epidemic and, of course, the espionage of the most popular fishermen and journalists like Carlos Choc.
To get an idea of the tone used, in one of the emails, the management of the mine last October demanded that President Giammattei put an end to some protests in El Estor, which prevented the passage of his trucks: "We request the immediate intervention of the authorities to actively participate in achieving the stabilization of the situation”.
At that time, according to the Human Rights Ombudsman, Jordán Rodas, the mine was operating “illegally” since an order from the Constitutional Court, issued two years earlier, required a public consultation among the population.
Two weeks later, the Guatemalan government declared a state of siege in Izabal and decided to send 500 soldiers to El Estor and a similar number of police and anti-riot police.
In other cases, the tone is one of paternalism, such as when he gives away masks (“so that he has us on the radar”) or uses the fishermen of the community, who today fish less than ever, to promote the quality of life that they they enjoy since the nickel giant landed in their town.
In other cases, the mine does not hesitate to resort to mafia strategies to divide the Mayan communities, as when Víctor Castellanos demands in an email sent on October 6, 2014 to Crisanto Reyes, coordinator of community projects, “to think about what actions to take power away from usurping communities (...) a strategy of espionage to obtain information.
If we only have to pay to obtain that information, ask for the authorization and we will do it, ”he tells her in the email.
List of expenses by the mine in the task of evictions.
The Guatemalan police at the service of the mining company
In June 2019 EL PAÍS visited Carlos Choc, toured El Estor and interviewed dozens of neighbors, fishermen, city council officials, mine workers, the general director of CGN, Dimitri Kudriakov, and even the town priest.
Among other anecdotes, one of the emails found confirmed that EL PAÍS and other European colleagues who passed through El Estor were spied on with drones and photographs during their coverage.
At that time, the population was shocked by police brutality.
They protested, for example, about the 150 trucks that cross their town morning, afternoon and night loaded with mountains of ore without paying a single tax, about the suspicious red spot that appeared in the lake, about strange skin diseases or about police brutality. applied to dissolve the fishermen during the last demonstration and that ended with a fisherman being shot dead by a police officer in 2017. Thanks to the emails reviewed by this team, it is now known that gasoline, patrol cars and even the meals of the agents of the National Civil Police (PNC), sent by the Government to pacify the protest, was paid by the mine.
Between 2014 and 2017, CGN-Pronico provided the National Police in El Estor and Río Dulce with 35 gallons of gasoline per month, in addition to extra funds for food for police personnel, payment of rent for premises, and other expenses such as vehicle and tire repairs.
In total, the Police received 1,443,940.36 quetzales (about 193,000 dollars) from the Russian company.
The revised accounting of the mining company has revealed that payments to the police increased each time the fishermen organized and protested against the eviction of communities installed on lands that CGN-Pronico claimed as their own.
According to two Guatemalan lawyers consulted, receiving money from a private entity is not illegal, as long as the money is channeled through the National Treasury and after a cumbersome administrative process.
in addition to extra funds for food for police personnel, payment of rent for premises and other expenses such as vehicle repair and tires.
In total, the Police received 1,443,940.36 quetzales (about 193,000 dollars) from the Russian company.
The revised accounting of the mining company has revealed that payments to the police increased each time the fishermen organized and protested against the eviction of communities installed on land that CGN-Pronico claimed as their own.
According to two Guatemalan lawyers consulted, receiving money from a private entity is not illegal, as long as the money is channeled through the National Treasury and after a cumbersome administrative process.
in addition to extra funds for food for police personnel, payment of rent for premises and other expenses such as vehicle repair and tires.
In total, the Police received 1,443,940.36 quetzales (about 193,000 dollars) from the Russian company.
The revised accounting of the mining company has revealed that payments to the police increased each time the fishermen organized and protested against the eviction of communities installed on land that CGN-Pronico claimed as their own.
According to two Guatemalan lawyers consulted, receiving money from a private entity is not illegal, as long as the money is channeled through the National Treasury and after a cumbersome administrative process.
The Police received 1,443,940.36 quetzales (about 193,000 dollars) from the Russian company.
The revised accounting of the mining company has revealed that payments to the police increased each time the fishermen organized and protested against the eviction of communities installed on land that CGN-Pronico claimed as their own.
According to two Guatemalan lawyers consulted, receiving money from a private entity is not illegal, as long as the money is channeled through the National Treasury and after a cumbersome administrative process.
The Police received 1,443,940.36 quetzales (about 193,000 dollars) from the Russian company.
The revised accounting of the mining company has revealed that payments to the police increased each time the fishermen organized and protested against the eviction of communities installed on land that CGN-Pronico claimed as their own.
According to two Guatemalan lawyers consulted, receiving money from a private entity is not illegal, as long as the money is channeled through the National Treasury and after a cumbersome administrative process.
Imposing his will was not limited to the streets.
In February 2018, the company launched an offensive to evict the Q'eqchi' population established in a community known as Setal, in the vicinity of the mine.
To guarantee the success of the eviction, according to the leaked emails, the mine budgeted an extraordinary "support" payment to the police of El Estor and the neighboring municipality of Río Dulce.
According to his calculations, an investment of 650,856 quetzales (about US$90,000) would be needed during the eight days that the police operation would last, according to the document that summarizes the meeting between the mine and the El Estor police chief.
Police check a fisherman at a checkpoint in El Estor, in the northern coastal province of Izabal, Guatemala, Monday, October 25, 2021.Moises Castillo (AP)
The spending plan included the payment of food and lodging for 2,000 police officers and the mobilization of 300 patrols "from different parts of the country," according to a table prepared by the security management in February 2018 and sent to the general directors of the mine.
The expenses contemplated different scenarios in case the eviction was violent and there were "injured, detained, kidnapped or dead".
In the mine's response, to the question "did you make donations to the Police (PNC) during the evictions in Izabal and Panzós?"
the miner replied: “No”, in an email sent by Forbidden Stories.
A mine confronting the Mayans
In 1970, the reddish lands that surrounded the largest lake in Guatemala, Izabal, located in the east of the country in the midst of the most spectacular foliage, called the attention of foreign companies due to the amount of nickel they contained.
Until then, there were only a few small communities of Mayan origin in the area that lived from fishing.
The government of the dictator Carlos Arana Osorio, known as the "Jackal of the East" for his brutality, then granted a concession for its exploitation to a Canadian company.
After several decades in Canadian hands in which the mine produced less and less, it finally ceased activities in the 1990s. In 2011,
the mine passed into Russian and Swiss hands when Solway started up the Phoenix mine to extract as much nickel as possible taking advantage of increased demand due to the boom in batteries and electric vehicles.
From Puerto Barrios, in the Caribbean of Guatemala, it was transferred by boat to the Ukraine where, until the beginning of the Russian invasion, it was processed.
Fishermen wait to be able to fish in Lake Izabal. Moises Castillo (AP)
According to Solway, the mine creates 2,000 jobs and "contributes to social and infrastructure development," says its website.
It is one of 64 in Guatemala and contributes 0.7% to GDP, according to the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies (ICEFI).
In recent years, the mine has been at the center of controversy due to environmental deterioration and protests by the population.
In 2019, the Constitutional Court forced the Ministry of Mines to stop its operations until a public consultation was held to ask the Mayan leaders if they wanted continuity or not.
A query that ultimately won mine.
However, the leaked documents have revealed that both the stoppage of operations and the consultation were a farce.
The revised accounting data.
they verify that during the more than two years that it had to be closed, the mine continued the activity, removed more land and recorded record profits during that period.
According to the response sent by the mine to this investigation, “since the suspension of the license, the Ministry of Energy and Mines has carried out several inspections to guarantee that extractive activities are not carried out in compliance with the sentence, within these hearings the review of the status of the warehouses with mineral extracted from the Fénix license prior to the suspension”.
On the increase in the area detected via satellite,
The company responded that “the vegetation was removed in order to carry out hydrogeological studies and rainwater channeling systems to control soil erosion.
These two activities are required mechanisms according to the environmental management plan (...) the suspension of the mining exploitation license does not limit the continuation of the project's environmental commitment activities”, he pointed out.
At the same time, the documents consulted indicate the efforts to manipulate the consultation from the offices and another details the need to "buy leaders" in three neighborhoods of El Estor with donations for "key actors and interested parties" related to the question.
In them a roadmap is drawn to direct and take control of the vote.
One of the folders includes documents on the actors participating in the consultation, concepts, discussion in the communities, “toxic questions” that opponents of the mine could ask and the arguments with which they could come out.
In addition, a mapping of the 46 communities that were defined to participate in the consultation is included, with a position in favor of the company (29), against the company (5) and neutral (12).
In at least one case, the Perioridas confirmed how a Guadalupe Xol Quinich leader was expelled from the Indigenous Council, who met with the mine after she refused to accept a payment from CGN-Pronico.
Xol Quinich, an ancestral leader and member of the El Estor Indigenous Council, refused to sign a friendly agreement to confirm that the company had properly consulted local communities.
The price of her signing was 3,000 quetzales (400 dollars), she said in an interview with EL PAÍS.
When she refused to sign, she was expelled from any governing body.
"We are very divided between brothers and sisters in the community," she says, sitting on a bench in her house in a flowery patio with banana trees and bougainvillea.
Divide communities as a strategy
The documents consulted confirm the mining company's strategy to buy, co-opt or divide the community.
The documents reviewed show that Solway made a donation of 34,000 dollars for the purchase of ten fishing equipment with the to maintain the leaders and partners of the Bocas del Polochic Fishermen's Association as allies, says the CGN-Pronico document entitled "participation community” of 2019. The money made it possible for some fishermen to end up participating in promotional videos of the mine on social networks thanking the aid received to improve fishing.
Fishermen on Lake IzabalBenjamin Thuau / Radio France
In other cases, the strategy was less friendly, as was the case of Las Nubes, a community that refused to be relocated, alleging ancestral ties to the land.
The mine's response in February 2020 was the implementation of a "work plan" aimed at achieving resettlement with a strategy that proposed firing workers who refused to hand over their land or contaminate cardamom crops with chemicals.
In another document from the same month, the ideas for displacing Las Nubes residents were even more radical and included spreading rumors of an AIDS epidemic among community leaders, setting fires, destroying cardamom crops with chemicals, or spreading the rumor that a mediator received his house as a bribe.
The authors of the report point out the "pros" and "cons" of each strategy.
In the section on the positive aspects of burning crops, they point out “the destruction of their methods of subsistence”.
In the disadvantages section they included the danger of hiring criminals and that they may be discovered for it.
The prevailing strategy is summed up in the phrase repeated several times: “Pay a bribe”.
To the question were there plans for company representatives to spread rumors about community leaders who had HIV/AIDS.
Were those plans implemented? The mining company replied "That information does not correspond to reality."
The prevailing strategy is summed up in the phrase repeated several times: “Pay a bribe”.
To the question were there plans for company representatives to spread rumors about community leaders who had HIV/AIDS.
Were those plans implemented? The mining company replied "That information does not correspond to reality."
The prevailing strategy is summed up in the phrase repeated several times: “Pay a bribe”.
To the question were there plans for company representatives to spread rumors about community leaders who had HIV/AIDS.
Were those plans implemented? The mining company replied "That information does not correspond to reality."
the magic carpet
In June 2020, President Giammattei, in power for two years, received a letter from the general manager of CGN-Pronico, Sergey Nosachev, in which he asked for “support to guarantee free movement in the municipality of El Estor.”
A month later, Giammattei responded forcefully to the request by declaring a state of siege in the department of Izabal.
Immediately afterwards, the president of Guatemala mobilized hundreds of soldiers to El Estor to stop the "violent acts" against the police "instigated by criminal groups whose purpose is to destabilize the departmental and municipal authority," the official decree stated.
During those police days,
President Alejandro Giammattei at the National Palace of Culture in Guatemala City, on June 1, 2021. SANDRA SEBASTIAN (REUTERS)
Where does such diligence come from?
Suspicions of links between President Giammattei and Russian metal businessmen began with a complaint by the anti-corruption prosecutor, Juan Francisco Sandoval, published in The New York Times.
On June 23, his office (FECI) opened an investigation following the complaint of a witness who presented evidence that a group of Russian and Kazakh citizens related to the Mayaníquel company delivered a carpet full of banknotes to Giammattei for his campaign, which the press baptized like 'the magic carpet'.
According to the witness, a delegation of three Russian businessmen and a Kazakh associated with Mayaníquel arrived in Guatemala on April 26, 2021 on a private plane from Brussels.
Three days later, according to the witness who spoke to prosecutors,
foreigners visited Giammattei who was given “a rug that was wrapped as a gift with a red ribbon that tied it.
When carrying said package with another person, I was able to determine that it contained cash wrapped in packages inside it, ”he confessed.
A month after that alleged delivery, on May 28, 2021, Mayaníquel obtained a new license to exploit nickel and other metals in the south of Izabal.
The company had applied for this license 11 years earlier, but the permit came only after the visit of the Russian delegation.
“It was that file,” says Sandoval from a home in Washington, where he has had to go into exile, that motivated his boss, Attorney General Consuelo Porras, to remove him from his post a month later.
A carpet,
The implacable Judge Arteaga
The ability of mining money is that it has managed to permeate all social and political levels.
Police to Mayan leaders or ministers have been benefited by the Russian millions.
Not even the judge who receives all legal cases in El Estor, the implacable Edgar Aníbal Arteaga López, of the Court of First Instance for criminal, drug trafficking and crimes against the environment in Izabal, has been left out of the cascade.
Arteaga's name first appeared in the country's newspapers when two Mexican drug traffickers were arrested a few years ago next to a recently crashed plane containing a million dollars.
The judge considered that there was no risk of flight if he let them continue their judicial process in freedom and, because of him, they were never heard from again or a significant million-dollar pinch.
In a small courtroom with the air conditioning blasting, Arteaga bangs the rings on the table as he commands silence and threatens to vacate his courtroom.
In May 2019, during the preview of the trial against several fishermen, the judge was implacable with the indigenous people whom he accused of crimes such as attempted murder, kidnapping or instigation to commit a crime, the same crime that he attributes to the journalist Carlos Choc who covered the protest.
During the hearing, the judge rejected an interview with EL PAÍS about his persecution of all those targeted by the mine.
More than two years later, among the documents reviewed, an email with the subject “URGENT” was found, where those responsible for CGN-Pronico awarded Christmas gifts between key figures and one of them was for Artega.
In the response received, the mine justified the gifts by saying that "It is a common practice in Guatemala to send Christmas baskets to friends with whom it has interacted during the past year" but denied having given any to the judge "Christmas baskets are only they give to people when it is not prohibited by law.
For example, Christmas baskets are not given to judges."
In his last interview with EL PAÍS, Choc leaves the conversation halfway because he has to run to the bus.
He has 12 hours left to travel to Puerto Barrios where he has to appear tomorrow to sign.
Tomorrow, like every day on the 22nd, justice reminds him that he is to blame for all of the above.
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