At Caballo Blanco, each ton of ore would produce half an ounce of gold, so mountains of cyanide-treated tailings would quickly rise around the pit and the wastewater ponds. According to the Diario de Xalapa, another local newspaper, leaching out the gold would require 1.12 million cubic meters of water per year, depleting the aquifer on which rural farming communities depend.

An even greater danger might come from Mexico’s only nuclear power plant, Laguna Verde, less than ten miles away. The ore would be broken loose from the earth by virtually continuous explosions, using up to five tons of explosives a day. This section of Veracruz is geologically part of a volcanic region that includes some of Mexico’s most famous dormant volcanoes, including Orizaba, less than a hundred miles away, and the Cofre de Perote, which is even closer.

People from the towns closest to the mine, Actopan and Alto Lucero, said they’d been threatened to get them to sell their land to Goldcorp. Beatriz Torrez Beristain, an activist with the Veracruz Assembly and Initiative in Defense of the Environment (LA VIDA, in its Spanish acronym) reported to La Jornada Veracruz that in a public hearing on the project “they told us they were afraid, that they’d been intimidated and felt forced to sell their land. There is definitely intimidation here, and they’re criminalizing social and environmental protest.”

Goldcorp promised jobs, and said the environment would be restored after the gold and metals had been extracted. “But we know that this can’t be,” Torres Beristian told reporter Fernando Carmona. “It’s impossible to restore an ecosystem that has been so damaged. You can cut down a tree and plant another, but you’ll never restore the complex ecological chain, with its many trees, birds and water.”