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Pre-script: (http://www.hoax-slayer.com/pascua-lama-petition.html) and it is appears to be sad but true.

Dear Friends: In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed by 2 glaciers. Water is a most precious resource, and wars will be fought for it. Indigenous farmers use the water, there is no unemployment, and they provide the second largest source of income for the area.

Under the glaciers has been found a huge deposit of gold, silver and other minerals. To get at these, it would be necessary to break, to
destroy the glaciers - something never conceived of in the history of the world - and to make 2 huge holes, each as big as a whole mountain, one for extraction and one for the mine's rubbish tip. The project is called PASCUA
LAMA.

The company is called Barrick Gold. The operation is planned by a multi-national company, one of whose members is George Bush Senior. The Chilean Government has approved the project to start this year, 2006.

The only reason it hasn't started yet is because the farmers have got a temporary stay of execution. If the glaciers are destroyed, the company will not just destroy the source of especially pure water, but it will permanently contaminate the 2 rivers so they will never again be fit for human or animal consumption because of the use of cyanide and sulphuric acid in the extraction process.

Every last gram of gold will go abroad to the
multinational company and not one will be left with the people whose land it is. They will only be left with the poisoned water and the resulting
illnesses. The farmers have been fighting a long time for their land, but have been forbidden to make a TV appeal by a ban from the Ministry of the Interior.

Their only hope now of putting brakes on this project is to get help from international justice. The world must know what is happening
in Chile. The only place to start changing the world is from here. We ask you to circulate
this message amongst your friends in the following way.

Please copy this text, paste it into a new email adding your signature and send it to everyone in your address book. Please, will the 100th person to receive and sign the petition, send it to [email protected] to be forwarded to the
Chilean Government.

"No to Pascua Lama Open-cast mine in the Andean Cordillera on the Chilean-Argentine frontier. We ask the Chilean Government not to authorize the Pascua Lama project to protect the whole of 3
glaciers, the purity of the water of the San Felix Valley and El Transito, the quality of the agricultural land of the region of Atacama, the quality of life of the Diaguita people and of the whole population of the region."

Signature, City, Country and please google the subject to find out more info for yourself....to find out how else you can get involved.

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Like many mining ventures, Barrick's efforts at Pascua-Lama, which straddles Chile's border with Argentina, have been controversial.

Environmentalists have bristled over plans to move literally mountains of ice to access the coveted deposits. But what sets the Barrick dispute apart from most mining battles is its thorny, if unlikely, dispute with [Rodolfo] Villar.

Villar acquired the mining rights to the area in 1996 after a former rights-holder let the claim lapse. He owned them for a year before Barrick approached him with a purchase offer.

"My lawyer was my friend for a long time," Villar said from his hometown of Copiapo, Chile. "I drove down to Santiago to his office and he opened the contract to the last page and said sign here. I trusted him."

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Under the contract, as Villar found later to his dismay, he was to be paid $20 by Barrick for the rights.

Turns out his lawyer sold a smaller parcel of land to Barrick for $650,000 on the very same day.

Villar got himself a new lawyer, Montealegre, who got a court to rescind the contract.

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"There's no way to get trucks to the mine without going through Villar's concession, and there's nowhere to put waste rock without having that land," Montealegre said, motioning to maps showing the disputed territory. "We had first asked Barrick for $1 million to settle this, but after the court decision, we wouldn't take less than $300 million."

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Debates Room, 2nd floor

An evening with Sergio Campusano, Chief of the Pueblo Diaguita Huascoaltinos, indigenous people of Chile and additional speakers from Guatamala and Honduras also resisting environmental devastation and human rights violations at the hands of Canadian gold mining corporations on their lands.

In a rare visit to Canada, Sergio Campusano -- an eloquent speaker on the subject of indigenous resistance to industrial development -- will share the struggle of his people against Canadian gold, uranium and copper extraction industries on ancestral lands.

There will be special mention of the infamous Pascua Lama mine, which threatens the water supply for 100,000 farmers at the drought-ravaged border of Chile and Argentina.

The Diaguita community has pressed charges against the Chilean State for its complicity with these corporations, including a notice to appeal before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Their fight is not only for survival and human rights, but also to preserve the living systems of the Earth, which they regard as sacred.

Community leaders from Guatamala and Honduras, in Toronto for the Goldcorp AGM, will also share their struggles to protect the land against open-pit industrial mining.

This event is the final evening in a two week long series of events focused on international indigenous resistance to indigenous resistance to Canadian corporations Barrick Gold and Goldcorp.