IKN

It’s been nearly two months, but this Tweet still makes me laugh every time I think of it. Only a utter moron or somebody with a hidden agenda would reasonably call Ecuador above Chile or Peru as a place to go mining and, in the next couple of months, this lying toerag hired by a lump of protoplasm to pump his unpermittable copper project gets to find out the hard way:

This from The IKN Weakly IKN630, published two days ago:

A photo opportunity for Yaku Pérez last week as his party presented a law project to Ecuador’s Congress that, if passed would ban metals mining in all its phases, from initial exploration to eventual production, from the entire country. Here’s a translation from this (4): “The ex-candidate for President, Yaku Pérez, in the name of (aforementioned) social groups, delivered the document to the Vice-President of the National Assembly, Virgilio Saquisela, and demanded that it be moved into law in order to detain extractive activities that have ruined lands, invaded territories, split communities and polluted the environment.”

The fractured nature of Ecuador’s new Congress (see right for a brief visual reminder) means neither government nor opposition will get everything they ever want on hot button issues, this is a case in point. However, with the Yaku Perez Pachakutik party currently holding the presidency of Congress, that party also get to set the agenda, which means this bill won’t die in committee room. The issue is not the spectre of a blanket ban on mining in Ecuador, that’s unlikely to happen and, even if voted up by Congress, would be vetoed by President Lasso. The problem is that anything from this bill that gets out of committee, no matter how watered down, will be bad news for mining in Ecuador. Yaku Pérez has shown himself very adept at using the legal system in Ecuador to press his anti-mining case, this law project is another example so the next time you hear the Ecuador mining sector downplay the threat of the new law (WoodMac was very active in media channels last week), be clear the whole industry is worried about this development and will watch its passage like a hawk.