As our van climbs the winding road that leads to the Kimsakocha Andean lagoons in Cuenca, in the southern Ecuadorian province of Azuay, the vegetation changes. The pine trees are becoming scarcer, the graminoids proliferate and the mist takes over the landscape.
At the wheel is Yaku Sacha Pérez Guartambel, a well-known lawyer, politician, and environmental leader from Cuenca who has been fighting for decades to protect water and preserve these places from extractivism. Yaku, as he is known, has been imprisoned several times for his activism against mining and gained notoriety as an Indigenous candidate for the presidency in the 2021 elections, only narrowly losing to now-president Guillermo Lasso in the first round.
At the exit of a bend, as if a predator in wait for a prey to pass, the palisade of a “mining dissemination centre” appears like an apparition: it belongs to Dundee Precious Metals (DPM), the Canadian company that took over the Loma Larga project from another Canadian company INV Metals in July 2021. The project, according to the DPM press release, has the potential to “produce an annual average of approximately 200,000 ounces of gold in its first five years”. Its production life is “estimated at approximately 170,000 ounces of gold per year at an attractive all-in sustaining cost”. In addition to gold, a report by consulting firm AX Legal on mining in Ecuador in 2023 shows DPM expects the Loma Larga project to produce 794,561 ounces of silver and 5.1 million pounds (Mlb) of copper annually, over an estimated mine life of 12 years.
