Whether you approach it socially or technically, to lawyer Mirtha Vásquez and engineer Reinaldo Rodríguez it is beyond dispute that the Conga mining plan in its present form is absolutely irresponsible and must not be carried out. Putting gold before water, the implementation of the project will have a huge and irreversible social and ecological impact. These two Peruvian guest speakers came to Belgium for a 2-week tour of lectures, informative evenings, lobby meetings and workshops. They spoke of their personal experiences and investigations concerning the expansion of the Yanacocha gold mining project in Cajamarca, northern Peru: the Conga project. In order to give you an idea of the present state of the project and of our guest speakers’ argumentation, ‘GOUD:EERLIJK?’ has summarized the different views on the current conflict.
See http://goudeerlijk.be/2013/05/stranger-than-fiction-the-conga-mining-project/.
Conga is operated by Newmont, a US company with British investment: among investors in Newmont are UK-based Blackrock World Mining Trust and AXA Investment Managers UK. See http://moneytometal.org/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&button=&search=newmont.