“Yes to Life = No to Mining:” Counting as Biotechnology in Life (Ltd) Guatemala

What Counts?

The extreme difficulty of making visible the health consequences of chemicals became the single most significant characteristic of “chemical exposures” as a scientific artifact.
—Michelle Murphy³⁰

As a woman said at the meeting with Vinicio, “The problem with the mine is when you hear there’s a child with a rash or a health problem, they go and pay so the people won’t say anything.” COPAE activists trying to document health issues have been told someone has a sick child, but, literally from one day to the next, when they drive up to take testimony, have found people unwilling to say anything. A number of people told of a man who had fallen into the tailings lagoon (or maybe he went in to retrieve a soccer ball) who died soon after, but his widow, apparently promised help in educating her children, would not talk with COPAE. Kids have rashes and their hair is falling out, people have papers with numbers showing blood levels of heavy metal, but, like the legal framework for the consultas, these data need context. What makes a quantity into a quality—a threshold or standard, rather than just a number? How much is normal and when is it a danger? A health center run by the mine says one thing and doctors elsewhere contradict it. It’s hard to know what is making people sick. It’s hard to be precise about what causes misfortune.

While the possibilities of life sciences remain “amazing!,” the difficulties activists have encountered in applying even the most basic biotechnologies will be familiar to anyone following the struggles to separate the “Un-” from the “Limited” of corporate and government liability: in the United States and Canada as well as Guatemala. Counting is an essential technology here, simultaneously necessary and powerful, yet also weaker and far more uncertain than we tend to assume. Number, as Mary Poovey argues, is “epistemologically peculiar.” “[B]oth essential and insufficient,” it seems to simply describe but also requires a leap of faith.³¹

One difficulty in cementing the “amazing” potentials of life sciences to life, as it is lived on the ground, is the enormous resource breach between Goldcorp’s science—their well-stocked labs and well-paid experts, many with doctorates from the world’s most advanced research universities³² —and the small-scale operation maintained by COPAE, personed by a single biologist. With a master’s from the national university, committed and smart, Teresa Fuentes makes the monthly rounds from San Marcos to San Miguel and Sipakapa to take water samples (where she is able) and analyzes them in a sturdy, but rather bootstrap lab, relying on kids from the local university extension—who she herself is training in microscopy—to help keep up. She said, many people, even the nonscientists in COPAE, “think you just look in the microscope, but you need a lot of experience. We’re working with very toxic stuff, that could even kill you if you don’t know what you are doing. You need training, lab skills, and they just don’t get that at the university here.” She is also working with volunteers in the villages, training them in sample-taking and what to look for with the naked eye. While frustrated in their attempts to sample sources from the mine’s full circumference, as so much land is fenced off or made dangerous by security guards, they have created an archive of five years of monthly samples from three rivers and several wells. Their work has been complemented by quick visit-research by teams from Euro-America and by Guatemalan government ministries, and is used in scientific reports tracking mining effects.³³

While such outsider reports emphasize that Goldcorp scientists have been forthcoming with their material, the company has also produced geographical and temporal limits that affect what can be measured. First, as Teresa found, non-company access to water sources is curtailed, and even the government has had trouble sampling the tailings impoundment (and when they have, have not made their findings public). Second, the company’s environmental impact statement, which did not identify any potential negative effects of the mine, has been criticized on many fronts, beginning with the baseline, which included only two springs, no groundwater or aquifer tests, and no hydrological connections. This, and the fact that some of the baseline water sources have now gone dry, makes changes over time difficult to prove. Third, it included essentially no geochemical information on acid leaching potential. (Also called filtration, this occurs when large-scale earth disturbances expose rock to air and water, allowing arsenic, mercury and other toxic metals to drain into soil and water.³⁴ ) A study by E-tech found that “in 2006 the tailings impoundment already exceeded guidelines for cyanide (3X), copper (10X), and mercury (20X) while arsenic and sulfate concentrations were growing in ground wells.” They also noted, however, that the monitoring network was so sparse that neither source nor potential down gradient receptors are known.³⁵

Uncertainty, as Michelle Murphy suggests about toxic environments more generally, dogs every effort to count.³⁶ Even guidelines, like so many apparently precise numbers, are not as clear-cut as they might appear. For example, there are no surface or groundwater quality standards at all in Guatemala. The World Health Organization standards limit arsenic to 50up/L to be considered safe, yet Van Wauw considers this terribly weak, arguing that cancer-mortality risk is 1 in 100 at that concentration.³⁷ WHO is currently studying implementation of a lower limit.³⁸ When the Canadians running the mine are at home, they can rest assured their water tests within Canada’s (and the US EPA’s) limit of 10up/L—and of course, they drink only bottled water in Guatemala. However one study found a well downstream of the mine showing 261up/L levels.³⁹ The National Academy of Science found that “arsenic in drinking water causes bladder, lung, and skin cancer, and may cause kidney and liver cancer […] harms the central and peripheral nervous systems, as well as heart and blood vessels, and causes serious skin and hair problems. It also may cause birth defects and reproductive problems.”⁴⁰ But WHO says, “although there is a substantial database on the association between both internal and skin cancers and the consumption of arsenic in drinking-water, there remains considerable uncertainty over the actual risks at low concentration.”⁴¹ Similarly, copper is associated with DNA mutations, nervous system damage, leukemia, nausea, headaches, skin rashes, and loss of hair,⁴² but the word “uncertain” appears in four of the five concluding paragraphs in WHO’s guidelines for copper in drinking water.⁴³

These numbers come from the best practices of laboratory-based toxicology, which developed the threshold limit value (TLV) through both scientific observation and mathematical manipulation. (I spent a semester auditing a course on this, but Murphy explains it so well I rely on her here.) For each substance, scientists use animal tests to develop the dose response curve, administering enough high concentrations of metals or chemicals to induce significant health effects. Then they mathematically extrapolate downward for lower concentrations to predict the concentration at which no health effects would be provoked. This concentration is then divided by 100 for an extra margin of safety and (as much of this work was done for US industry) guidelines are developed based on adult male workers’ exposure, calculated at 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.⁴⁴ As I understand it, the number is taken to point to something real in the world, but it is a calculation rather than a representation of an actual observation. Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong. But, as Murphy points out, it is meant to measure very particular things, wrought from highly controlled circumstances, and based in administering a single thing, say, arsenic alone, rather than a tasty cocktail of arsenic, cadmium, chromium, lead, manganese, mercury, nickel, selenium, thallium, zinc, with a pinch of cyanide (all found near the mine), administered in low doses from conception on.

What is made perceptible by these numbers and procedures are levels in water, and in the human body, regular/replicable and specific responses, via the signature physiological reactions to each chemical.⁴⁵ Air, soil, sediment, and food are not being tested at all, so there is no way to measure their role in human exposure. WHO and EPA standards emerge from calculations based on men at work, which assume a particular, adult, male, adequately-nutritioned body that for two-thirds of each day “escapes” exposure. In Agel, near the mine, bodies may be old, young, reproductive—and are certainly chronically malnourished. And lifeways are rather different. For peasants whose homes, fields, pastures, and drinking supplies intimately border the mine, there’s no “escape” except to the pesticide-drenched coffee plantations during harvest season. As Murphy says, ubiquitous, “low-level and mixed exposures became de facto uncertain phenomenon.”⁴⁶

It’s hard to actually see (or otherwise sense) arsenic and copper, and they are hard to measure in ways that clearly show significance (even if you are very sick it’s difficult to show it’s their fault).⁴⁷ It’s also hard to see neural damage, gene mutations, or the seedlings of cancers that may not express for years. I have seen skin rashes borne by people in Agel and San José Ixcaniche, but even activists are very careful to note causal uncertainty: Madre Selva says “these effects might be related to contaminated water […] as in Honduras and Peru. Scientific studies are needed on the effects of mining on human health.”⁴⁸ As consulta participants noted, children are the most affected. However, the researchers who came to do just this kind of a study didn’t have IRB approval to test kids (they did find elevated blood levels of arsenic, copper, zinc and urinary mercury in adults, although within US reference levels).⁴⁹ And then there’s the purposeful production of uncertainty, as people clam up when COPAE comes to investigate symptoms of exposure.

Nonhuman life forms are also affected, as residents attribute increases in unexplained animal deaths to the mine. Two summers ago Hermana Maudilia showed me cellphone pictures of dead cows next to a stream, “that’s the baby,” she said. “Poor thing, it died right there from drinking. Its mother made it part way up the hill before she died too.” But causality is hard to prove.⁵⁰ Then there are the groves of avocado trees that have just dried up—“there’s no fruit, we are using them for firewood,” said a woman—and other crops that aren’t producing like they used to. Some people are sure it’s all the water the mine is stealthily pumping (“They use up to 250,000 liters an hour. That’s how much a family would use in 22 years!”) “It’s MOSCAMED,” said a woman at the Sipakapa development meeting. “They are spraying poisons to destroy our crops so we have to sell our land to the mine.” The Mediterranean fruit fly eradication system entails aerial spraying and “scientists” poking around on people’s land to count flies, and has increased in intensity as CAFTA goes into effect. But an elder gentleman told me, “It’s a disease killing the trees. It has nothing to do with the mine!”

This uncertainty of cause (mine-created poisoning) and effect (skin rashes, illnesses, loss of productive resources and animal and plant companions)—rather than the uncertainties in measure itself—was pressed by Goldcorp and the Guatemalan state in their responses to the IAHRC ruling. In December 2011, the court reversed itself,⁵¹ withdrawing its demand for mine closure as a precautionary measure. It simply encouraged the government to ensure access to safe water.

30. Michelle Murphy, Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty, (Durham: Duke UP, 2006): 121. [↩]
31. Poovey 1998: xxv, xi, 27. [↩]
32. Although even then there were enough errors to move Goldcorp to switch labs several times. See E-Tech International, Evaluation of Predicted and Actual Water Quality Conditions at the Marlin Mine, Guatemala (E-Tech International, 2010): 39. Available at
    http://www.etechinternational.org/082010guatemala/final/MarlinReport_Final_English_0811.pdf. Accessed 9 Jan. 2013. [↩]
33. E-Tech 2010: 73 notes that their detection limits were generally too high for metals and arsenic, a problem both Goldcorp and the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN) share. [↩]
34. This occurs through oxidation and the labors of bacteria and archaea, often called extremophiles, which are encouraged by the access to water and oxygen provided by mountaintop removal and the cyanide-leaching process. In addition to releasing toxins, acid drainage transforms the pH of water, disrupting stream ecosystems. E-tech says, “Testing should have included, at a minimum, whole rock chemistry, acid-base accounting, short-term leach testing, long-term kinetic testing, and mineralogic analysis. This type of information is crucial for developing effective waste rock and tailings management plans.” Before hearing my first Madre Selva presentation on mining I’d never heard of this, but it echoes other knowledge about treatment of the earth. Merchant 1992: 43 describes “Renaissance” images of “the earth as a living organism and nurturing mother [that] served as a cultural constraint restricting the actions of human beings. One does not readily […] dig into her entrails for gold […] As long as the earth was conceptualized as alive and sensitive, it could be considered a breach of human ethical behavior to carry out destructive acts against it.” It turns out that stripping her literally unleashes destructive powers. Perhaps it’s no longer considered “unethical” but it’s certainly not very pragmatic. [↩]
35. E-Tech 2010: 77. [↩]
36. Murphy 2006. [↩]
37. Van Wauw 2010: 2. [↩]
38. WHO (World Health Organization), “Arsenic in Drinking Water: Background document for development of WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality,” (Geneva: WHO Press, 2011). [↩]
39. Van de Wauw et.al. 2010: 3. [↩]
40. National Academy of Sciences “Arsenic in Drinking Water 2001 Update” National Academies Press; Van de Wauw 2010: 2). [↩]
41. WHO 2011: 10. [↩]
42. Madre Selva, “Minería y efectos a la salud,” photocopied hand-out (Guatemala: n.d.). [↩]
43. WHO (World Health Organization) “Copper in Drinking-water: Background document for development of WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality,” (Geneva: WHO Press, 2004): 17-18. [↩]
44. Murphy 2006: 89-90. [↩]
45. David Servan-Schreiber says that WHO only lists about 900 chemicals tested for carcinogenicity, “a tiny proportion of over 100,000 substances released by industry since 1940, at a rate of several million tons a year [of which] only one has been recognized as noncarcinogenic.” Anticancer, A New Way of Life, (New York: Viking, 2009): 83, emphasis in the original. [↩]
46. Murphy 2006: 92. [↩]
47. Remember how well and how long the tobacco companies kept the relation between errant molecule “A (nicotine) released at moment B causing symptom x, y, and z” from counting? How they threw “the very reality of exposures into question”? Murphy 2006: 92. [↩]
48. Madre Selva n.d. [↩]
49. Niladri Basu and Howard Hu, Toxic Metals and Indigeous Peoples Near the Marlin Min in Western Guatemala: Potential Exposures and Impacts on Health, (New York: Physicians for Human Rights, 2010). This is after four years of production, but leaching continues indefinitely. Studies in Spain show people still affected by mines dating from Roman, and even Phoenician times. Zarsky and Stanley 2011: 32. [↩]
50. Elizabeth Royte, “What the Frack is in Our Food?” The Nation, 17 Dec. 2012, 295.25: 12 documents the same losses and uncertainty around fracking in North Dakota. “The death toll is insignificant when measured against the nation’s livestock population […] but environmental advocates believe these animals constitute an early warning.” [↩]
51. As it had done earlier that year on its ruling that Brazil halt construction of the Belo Monte dam, apparently under threat that Brazil would revoke its funding. [↩]