Business
Haiti: Gold Rush – but will it benefit the people?
Although the law in Haiti states that all subsoil resources belong to “the Haitian nation”, so far the nation has been kept in the dark about the digging and testing going on in the north of the country.
Dieuseul Anglade, a well-respected geologist who headed the state mining agency for most of the past 20 years, was recently fired. Was it because he has consistently championed tougher laws and better deals for the state, and for the people of Haiti?
“Minerals are part of the public domain of the state,” the 62-year-old Anglade told HGW a month before he was removed from his post.
The geologist said that if tougher laws and better contracts with the mining companies are not written, it would be better to “leave the minerals underground.”
Another major player in the gold game, Canadian company – Eurasian Minerals – has a different opinion of who should exploit Haiti’s riches.
Eurasian Minerals and its’ subsidiaries in Haiti, are poised to mine on the very same ground where Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards once forced the indigenous peoples of Haiti to dig for gold.
Within 40 years of the famed 1492 landing, hard labor in the mines, murder and European diseases reduced the population from perhaps 300,000 to about 600.
