Monkeys around the Mine

Wednesday morning also saw half a dozen men from our group travel by van to see monkeys in a reserve west of town and the edge of the property of a nearby abandoned nickel mine. This brief trip gave us both relaxed time with some men from the area and a chance to see in person evidence of the area’s economic and ecological contradictions.
A number of us had viewed with concern the YouTube video clip of the Guatemalan authorities removing from the nickel mine property a community of long-term squatters and destroying their homes.
We didn’t get to see the exact the area video depicted. On the way to the reserve, however, we saw the abandoned housing once occupied by mine company workers. The company had exhausted the supply of affordable-to-mine nickel and then shut down operations there.
But the price of nickel has been rising recently, and the company—apparently aided by Guatemalan authorities — has reclaimed its property and has been exploring it for new possible mining sites.
We drive past armed guards and first walked around through the woods watching monkeys in the trees and a huge ant colony bigger than anything I’d seen up in a tree before.
On the way we walked past the house of a finca (plantation) owner as nice as any of our houses in Louisville (no dirt floors) and a fish farm-type pond.
Amazingly, we were then able to walk briefly onto the mining company’s land. What awaited us was one of the strangest sights of our trip.
From the finca owner’s house we had already seen the top of the nickel processing plant peering out above the tree line (we could later see this letter during our Lake Izabal boat ride). Through the fence gate we saw a long, gigantic airstrip whose runway stretched in the direction of the processing plant for as far as the eye could see.
We stood out for several minutes talking on the airstrip (we saw no planes) with no sombra (shade) and got a little too much sun. Woozy from the sun, we let our imaginations run wild as we speculated what the airstrip might be for.
The scene seemed so odd that it made some of us feel like we were in the middle of the scene of a John LeCarre spy novel. Could the nickel mine now be a front for a secret CIA prison? Or a secret base for SPECTRE, the villainous world-conquest organization that James Bond battles in his early movies?
The whole scene pointed to economic and ecological incongruities: The beautiful monkey preserve on the edge of the nickel company land, with its potential for surface mining (on the edge of the mountain the overlooked the mine) and perhaps even mountaintop removal (which some of us had seen in June month in person in Eastern Kentucky).
The sumptuous finca owner’s house, in comparison with the extremely rugged houses we had seen — and tried to improve — in El Estor.
Perhaps most incongruous was the fact that there were connections between the men with us and both of the sites we visited. (It turns out that was probably why we had been able to get by the armed guards.)
Gerardo Pop, pastor of the church we spent the most time at, had told us a story earlier that morning about how he had confronted a finca owner and his family, apparently about their maltreatment of their workers.
Pastor Pop and the family had then developed a relationship, and it was this family’s house we circled on the way to see the monkeys.
Luis, a lay leader at Pastor Pop’s church, it turns out, was also one of the locals who was working with the nickel mine company.
Luis even told us that, if one of us were very ill, we might be able to arrange for a private plane to pick us up on the airstrip and fly us back to the United States.
So we wondered about the justice of the nice house in comparison with the others we had seen or the wisdom of exploring for nickel and constructing an airstrip right next to the monkey preserve.
Yet those we visited had connections with all of this.

Perry Chang