Aura Minerals, a Toronto-based mining company, is seeking to dig up and move a 200 year old cemetery near La Unión, Copán, Honduras. The community of Azacualpa has countless loved ones currently buried in this valued site, with the most recent burial just earlier this year. Aura Minerals says that they cannot continue mining for gold without exhuming and relocating the bodies. 

Aura Minerals has been using every tool in the book to collaborate with the local police and military in forcing the community into allowing their family members to be exhumed and relocated, including violently evicting protesters, putting the cemetery under military occupation, using bribes and false promises, subjecting the community to drone surveillance, charging local leaders with ‘illicit protest’, and declaring the cemetery to be a safety hazard. Despite all of this, the community continues to resist these coercive pressures through blockades, negotiations, and community referenda. Many worry that a relocation of the cemetery could happen any day unless more action is taken.

Just this month, the company and the Honduran Government, Army and Police pressured the Azacualpa Environmental Committee into signing a so-called “Act of Conciliation”, in the presence of:

• Hector Leonel Ayala, Minister of the Interior, Human Rights, Justice and Decentralization;
• Abel Contreras, Departmental Governor of Copan;
• Coronel Mario Edgardo Padilla, Commander of the 120th Infantry Brigade;
• National Police Commissioner Henry Amilcar Márquez Quintero;

who were brought in to intimidate members of the community into signing an agreement to allow for the destruction of the cemetery, without prior consultation with the community. Click here for more information about what happened during this coercive “negotiation”.

The community of Azacualpa needs our help to put pressure on Aura Minerals here at home. Help us tell this Canadian company: Azacualpa has the right to rest in peace!

For more information: http://mininginjustice.org/current-projects/aura-minerals/