Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas told his weekly press conference June 9 his country should “go to international justice mechanisms” if bilateral talks between El Salvador and Guatemala fail to prevent Vancouver-based GoldCorp from going ahead with the Cerro Blanco mine, which is already extracting gold bearing ore as part of an advanced exploration project.

Escobar believes the Canadian mine will inevitably contaminate Lake Guija, which feeds the Lempa River, El Salvador’s main source of drinking water.

Since 2008 El Salvador has suspended all hard rock mining in the tiny country. Since taking on El Salvador’s most senior Church post in February, Escobar has spoken out frequently in support of a permanent ban on metal mining.

Escobar made his call for international help with a cross-border mining dispute just as Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced a tentative step toward regulating the conduct of Canada’s mining companies abroad. On his way to G8 meetings, which host British Prime Minister David Cameron has dedicated to the theme of transparency, Harper said his government would spend the next two years working up new regulations requiring Canadian mining, oil and gas companies to report all payments to foreign governments and government officials.

“We put great emphasis in Canada on corporate social responsibility and through our various foreign aid programs we have assisted transparency in the extractive sector around the world,” Harper said in a meeting in London, June 12.

Sixty per cent of the world’s publicly listed mining and exploration companies are listed on Canadian stock exchanges and half the world’s mining is conducted by Canadian companies.

The United States and Hong Kong already have laws which require disclosure of payments to governments around the world.

So far Canada’s response to concerns about how to hold Canadian mining firms accountable for conduct outside the country has been notably weak, said Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace executive director Michael Casey. The Extractive Industry Corporate Social Responsibility Counsellor, set up in 2009 in response to a joint industry-NGO report, is “a bit of a toothless tiger,” Casey said.

“As of right now, the track record of that thing is not very good, anyway,” he said.

“It could be yet another in this almost formulaic situation where you’ve got these problems we’ve been working on for years and years still at play,” said Casey of the Cerro Blanco mine in Guatemala.

This fall Development and Peace returns to campaigning on mining and environmental issues after a year dedicated to foreign aid policy.

Development and Peace has for years been supporting communities caught in the middle of controversies over Canadian-owned or Canadian-run mines. GoldCorp, the world’s third largest gold miner, has often been the Canadian company involved in these disputes.

GoldCorp representatives did not return phone calls and emails from The Catholic Register.

Problems with water and pollution are very serious in Central America, where local peasants find themselves trying to raise crops in a water-stressed environment.

“It’s time for countries in Central America to advance water co-operation,” said Ian Thomson, Kairos co-ordinator for ecological justice through corporate accountability. “Threats to water are a concern to the Church. Those threats don’t stop at the border and those concerns don’t stop at the border.”

While Escobar is urging international arbitration in a dispute over a Canadian mine in Guatemala, another Canadian mining company is taking the government of El Salvador to an international tribunal because the Central American country has refused to issue it a mining licence.

Pacific Rim has spent $77 million exploring a 144-square kilometre area and has narrowed it down to a 12.75-square-kilometre area where the company believes it can recover 1.4 million ounces of gold. Vancouver-based Pacific Rim claims it invested in its El Dorado mine under one set of rules and then faced new rules when it came time to actually open the mine. It has taken the government of El Salvador to the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes, an affiliate of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

While free trade agreements such as the Dominican Republic– Central America Free Trade Agreement hold countries accountable to trade rules, ways to hold companies accountable are few and far between, said Thomson.

“Accountability on the part of companies is about much more than paying their taxes. Companies must be accountable for their labour practices, their environmental impacts, impacts they may have on human rights,” he said.

Canada should be doing more to watch over and reign in companies operating in small, weak, developing nations, according to Thomson.

“We do need to establish some minimum acceptable standards for Canadian mining companies when they operate internationally. This (reporting payments to governments) is a step in the right direction. Kairos would like to see something more broad, more robust than this announcement. But this is an acknowledgement by the government that mandatory standards are possible.”