Gold, Greed, and Terrorism

[seemslikeadream]

Echo Bay Mines aided the New People's Army (NPA), pictured here. The NPA was labeled a terrorist group by the State Department in 1996.

The Cost of Doing Business Tell Some Friends!


By Marilyn Berlin Snell

"If you harbored a terrorist, if you fed a terrorist, if you hid a terrorist, you're just as guilty as a terrorist."
— President George W. Bush, February 2002


Echo Bay Mines aided the New People's Army (NPA), pictured here. The NPA was labeled a terrorist group by the State Department in 1996.
WHEN KAPITAN INGGO WALKED THROUGH THE GATES at Echo Bay's mining operation in the Philippines, he bypassed the reception area and went round the building to the offices of the security personnel. He didn't ask directions. Inggo, one of the Philippines' ten most-wanted men, knew his way around.

Allan Laird, the newly appointed project manager at the Kingking gold and copper mine, was in a warehouse when he saw the unfamiliar man walk by. A Filipino employee told Laird that the man was a murderer who specialized in extortion and the kidnapping of businessmen for ransom. There was a one-million-peso bounty on his head.

Laird had a crisis on his hands: Two board members from Echo Bay Mines Limited — a Denver-headquartered, Canadian-chartered company — were at a nearby hotel preparing for a site visit. Laird had to head them off. He raced to the hotel and found the men having breakfast with his Denver-based supervisor. "I told them not to come down to the offices because we had a security situation — Kapitan Inggo was on the premises and we needed to get rid of him," Laird says. He thought it strange at the time that the directors reacted "with equanimity" to news that a notorious criminal was in Echo Bay's office complex.

Trained as an engineer and employed by Echo Bay for nine years, Laird had been assigned to the Kingking exploration project on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao only the month before. Prior to his arrival in August 1996, he had been informed that ore grades were low, projected development costs high, and disposal of cyanide-laced mine tailings problematic. But he did not know about Kingking's security issues. "I was sent in blind," he says. "Superiors knew what I was getting into and didn't tell me."

http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200405/terrorism/page1.asp