Dear friends who care about our earth:

In the Valle de San Felix, the purest water in Chile runs from 2 rivers, fed
by 2 glaciers. 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 they destroy the glaciers, they will not just destroy the source of
specially pure water, but they 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 gramme 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.

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.