On Thursday, the Shuar Arutam, an Indigenous people living in the Ecuadorian Amazon, filed a complaint against the Solaris Resources company before the British Columbia Securities Commission.
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The complainants specify that the company has not provided information to shareholders regarding Warintza, a copper-gold mining project that overlaps with the Shuar Arutam territory.
This legal action comes just days before the world's biggest mining conference, the annual trade show of the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) to be held March 3-6 in Toronto. In the past, Solaris Resources has used this forum to showcase its “Warintza model” of community engagement as a “best practice.”
In reality, however, the Vancouver-based company has been pushing its mining plans despite the continuous explicit rejection of the Warintza Project by the Shuar Arutam People.
The text reads, "According to Global Forest Watch, between Nov. 29 and Dec. 6, 2023, over 69,000 deforestation alerts were registered in Ecuador. Between 2021 and 2023, legal and illegal miners deforested 257 hectares in the Shuar Arutam people's territory."
“The company has been disclosing partial information regarding its relationships with Indigenous communities opposing the project, and fails in its obligation to regularly disclose Ecuador’s political and legal risks that may impede mining activities,” the NGO Amazon Watch explained.
Currently, the Shuar Arutam People are the legal representative body of 47 communities with collective land title and ancestral possession of 232,500 hectares in the Condor Mountain Range, where the Canadian copper-gold project is located.
“The Shuar Arutam people have rejected the Warintza project for many years. Despite this, the company insists on promoting the project by dividing the communities and trying to reach agreements with other Indigenous organizations,” Indigenous leader Jaime Palomino said.
For over two decades, the Shuar Arutam People have expressed their opposition to extractive megaprojects in their territory. In 2019, for instance, they launched the international campaign called “The Shuar Have Already Decided: No Mining!”
In that same year, however, Solaris Resources took a first step in implementing the Warintza Project after acquiring Lowell Mineral Exploration, a company that was expelled by the Shuar Arutam People in 2006.