I agree completely. I find that extremely disconcerting. It's not only a denial of people like me and like Professor Steiner, who bring forth evidence that problematizes the operations of Canadian mining companies.
As I referred to earlier, what initially disturbed me was the enthusiasm with which the embassy, at least in my case in my experience in Guatemala City, went out of its way to delegitimize the local opposition, to make it illegitimate. The reason I find that most alarming is that resistance will not go away if you deny it. That resistance will not go away if you ignore it or delegitimize it.
I'll give you one small example. In the region around the Marlin mine, local communities began to assemble and hold community consultas, open consultations, asking, “Do we want these activities in our region?” Overwhelmingly, the response has been no. I have been the international observer for some of them, and it has been quite emotionally overwhelming to see hundreds of people turn out to say, “We do not want mining”.
What is our embassy's position on these? It is that these consultas are not legitimate because they are organized by activists, NGOs, who are manipulating the campesinos into rejecting mining. This is completely untrue, from what I've experienced, and yet there is this staunch willingness to deny, to invent any mechanism such that we don't have to pay attention to the will on the ground.
What's that going to result in? Do you think the people who get together, the thousands of people who get together and say “we don't want this”, will go away, that they will accept the Canadian government's position that they're just puppets of NGOs? They won't go away.