Unpunished Destruction

This article by Manuel Gonzalez first appeared in the June 22, 2025 edition of Sin Embargo.

[Note: Equinox Gold indefinitely suspended its Los Filos mine in Guerrero, Mexico on April 1, 2025 when the company let lapse its land use and social cooperation agreements with the community of Carrizalillo. The company had been trying to pressure the community of Carrizalillo in Guerrero, Mexico into accepting austere cuts to their land use and social cooperation agreements as a condition for continued investment in the Los Filos mine.

Since 2008, the ejido’s arable and grazing lands have been almost entirely occupied by the open pit and underground gold mine. The community’s health clinic and soccer field are roughly 500 metres from the mine’s cyanide heap leach pad.]

The Carrizalillo community claims the Canadian mining company Equinox Gold exploited their region for more than two decades, earning millions in profits from the gold. Now, with the closure of the Los Filos complex, it has left nothing but desolation, severe pollution, and economic and health consequences.

This is a well-known story, but no less important. It involves a Canadian mining company that exploits communities’ lands relentlessly; in this case in Guerrero, Mexico, leaving only desolation, devastated areas, disease, and extreme pollution behind after attempting to squeeze more from the town of Carrizalillo. Its intention is to renege on its end of the bargain, including remediation, compensation, and even less so the basic requirements of the law. This is Equinox Golden Corp.

On April 1, the company announced it had indefinitely suspended operations at its Los Filos mine in Guerrero following the expiration of its land access agreement with the Carrizalillo community, after failing to reach an agreement with two other communities. “Long-term agreements with the three local communities are essential to providing the economic and investment conditions necessary for continued operations,” it said in a statement.

Among its plans this year was the proposed construction of a new 10,000-ton-per-day carbon-in-leach processing plant to increase gold recovery from ore. Equinox Gold stated that it reached consensus on the terms of the work expansion agreement in January, and subsequently ratified and signed new long-term agreements with the communities of Mezcala and Xochipala. “To date, Carrizalillo has not signed a new long-term agreement with the Company. Equinox Gold has not included production from the Los Filos mine in its 2025 production forecast,” it concluded.

The Los Filos mining complex in the state of Guerrero comprised three open-pit mines: Los Filos, Guadalupe, and Bermejal, as well as underground mines. It had 30 exploitation and exploration concessions in active mining areas totaling 10,433 hectares in the municipality of Eduardo Neri, Guerrero.

Ore from all deposits is processed by heap leach recovery, a hydrometallurgical technique of extracting metals by passing a solution through a heap of ore.

Los Filos began commercial production in 2008, was acquired by Leagold in 2017, and subsequently by Equinox Gold in March 2020 through the Leagold Transaction. However, under other company names, this complex has been developed by Canadian companies since 2000, and over half a century continuously.

After Exploitation, Abandonment

Los Filos’s closure legally must be accompanied by a process in which the company that exploited this region, as well as its communities, addresses the mine’s main impacts, especially those related to water pollution, land destruction, and fair compensation for the use of the area. However, the Carrizalillo community’s complains of total neglect.

Since its closure, the Canadian company’s left serious environmental damage, resulting in health and economic impacts for the nearly 200 families living there who depended on the development.

The Carrizalillo Agrarian Roundtable stated in a statement from late May that Greg Smith, CEO of Equinox Gold, sent two representatives, Armando Fausto Ortega and Hugo Vergara, to negotiate the contract update “in a frank process of imposition,” with proposals to reduce the payment for the land by 90 percent, compared to the contract that expired in April.

“They offered us a total amount for the social agreement to be divided equally between Carrizalillo, Mezcala, and Xochipala, where approximately 8,000 people live, which, strictly speaking, is less than Mr. Greg Smith’s opulent annual income,” the Board stated.

“It’s false to believe that the development of mining activity substantially improves the living conditions of the population. It’s false to think that the population of a community, just because they have mining income, can achieve the ‘satisfaction’ of no longer wearing sandals because they say they can now buy shoes. That’s absurd,” he noted.

Furthermore, in response to statements made by Guerrero Governor Evelyn Salgado at the 2025 Mining Forum, where she stated that “mining only makes sense if its development is shared with communities,” and where she called for “a vision of economic, social, and environmental co-responsibility” to achieve a modern, sustainable economy that engages with communities, the Carrizalillo Agrarian Roundtable responded with its own experience.

“How can we make mining meaningful only if its development is shared with communities, when since 2007, the first thing we stopped having was a healthy environment? Air, water, and soil—all laced with toxic heavy metals that already circulate within our bodies, causing hundreds of forms of damage, many of them irreparable,” the Roundtable denounced.

“Mining companies are extremely far from taking responsibility for the environmental and health damage they cause, so much so that they exert enormous pressure on [elected deputies] to ensure that these issues are always left thin, insufficient, or excluded from the law,” he added.

Furthermore, they accused Equinox Gold of having, since 2019, “failed to comply with the water issue, among other issues that always lead us to confrontations over our demands.” “They flout the laws and invent indefinite suspensions, which should be a major warning to the state and to you as Governor, because without rent and without the return of our rehabilitated lands for farming, it means that Equinox Gold is threatening the lives of all the inhabitants of Carrizalillo. Therefore, the company’s actions are more about shared misfortune than shared prosperity,” the group stated.

Resistance to Equinox Gold

This week marks two months since a peaceful protest outside the Los Filos mining complex. The “indefinite suspension” cited by the company, the Carrizalillo Agrarian Roundtable denounced in a new statement last week, “does not exist in our regulatory framework unless the suspension is time-bound and it can be proven that the suspension is due to force majeure. As far as we understand, the failure to pay land rent is nowhere near a force majeure event.”

“It is no small matter when we state that today the Equinox Gold company, frankly and openly, is violating and infringing on all of our rights, and therefore, HAS PUT THE LIVES OF OUR POPULATION AT RISK, because by not having income or rehabilitated land for planting, we are exposed to living marginally, which we know they then want to resolve by handing out food supplies,” he stressed.

Furthermore, he questioned that Equinox Gold “cries over its low production and blames us for its productive ineffectiveness,” but has just achieved a merger with another mining company, another Canadian company, Calibre Mining, with which they aspire to become the second largest gold producer in Canada, according to their own corporate message, “which we know is no minor matter, knowing that in Mexico Canadian companies are predominant in gold extraction over the rest of the countries that are dedicated to the extraction of that metal,” said the Agrarian Roundtable.

And according to Investing, Equinox Gold’s performance in the first quarter of 2025 “was marked by record levels of gold production, with 145,000 ounces produced, the highest figure in the company’s history for a first quarter.”

In 2024, Equinox Gold reported that its Los Filos mine recorded its highest quarterly and annual production in six years, increasing from 60,521 ounces last quarter at an all-in sustaining cost of $2,521 per ounce, according to the unaudited report the Canadian company presented at an online conference.

In March, nearly 100 organizations and coalitions across Canada, including the Canadian Network for Corporate Accountability, which encompasses 30 organizations across the country, as well as 66 networks and organizations in Mexico and 31 organizations from 12 countries, sent a letter to the mining company demanding an end to the threats and pressure against negotiators from the Carrizalillo community.

Complaints and Authorities’ Response

The case of Equinox Gold’s Los Filos mine was discussed this week at President Claudia Sheinbaum’s morning press conference. When questioned about the case, the president stated that the Canadian company “has to remedy the situation; it’s part of the concession.”

“Even during the neoliberal period, environmental impacts, in the case of mining, have to do with remediation,” she said. President Sheinbaum also asked the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Semarnat) to review the case because, she insisted, “the company has to comply, it’s what we’ve always said; if they comply in Canada, why wouldn’t they comply in Mexico?” she added.

Last week, the Carrizalillo community announced that representatives from the Agrarian Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa) entered the Los Filos mine operating grounds in response to a lawsuit for environmental damage filed by farmers following the abandonment of high-risk sites since March 31.

He announced that the Canadian mining company must heed Profepa’s initial recommendations, and if it fails to do so, it will receive fines and suspensions, and for the first time, “they will see the difference between their meager indefinite suspension and their potential permanent cancellation.” The community’s Agrarian Roundtable also revealed that the company has sought to pressure them through complaints and injunctions, and even attempted to request the return of the ejidatarios’ lands for “eviction,” when the owners are the families who live there and worked at the mine.

In April, the Agrarian Attorney General’s Office (PA), headed by Víctor Suárez Carrera, expressed its broadest support for the Carrizalillo ejido “in its legitimate decision to exercise its rights over the ejido lands,” in accordance with current agrarian legislation, in response to the 67 percent reduction in rent payments for common-use areas parceled out by the multinational mining company Equinox Gold for the exploitation of the Los Filos mine.