Colla Indigenous leader criminalized for resisting Canadian mining projects in Chile
16 December 2019
Ercilia Araya is the President of Pai-Ote, a Colla Indigenous community of 60 people in the Atacama Region of Northern Chile. Since 2014, Ercilia has been criminalized and harassed for defending her community’s land rights against mining projects, and denouncing the pollution of sacred water sources in the Andes.
The ancestral territory of Pai-Ote is of great mineral wealth and includes the “Maricunga Strip”, one of the most important gold districts in the country. At least a dozen gold mining projects, most of them Canadian, are operating there.
