Mac Margolis, Columnist

Guatemala Mines a Mother Lode of Trouble

A bitter fight over a silver mine points to the pitfalls of Latin America's new resource nationalism.

March 1, 2018 at 12:00 PM UTC

Corrected

March 2, 2018 at 5:10 PM UTC

Mac Margolis is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”

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Source: AFP/Getty Images

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Although it’s small and mostly poor, Guatemala sits on a heap of treasure. Last year, it ranked as the world’s 15th-largest producer of silver, a nest egg that could yield economic growth and taxes and royalties, helping to hoist millions from misery.

So why is the Escobal silver mine, one of the world’s largest, idle? In 2014, when the Canadian-owned Tahoe Resources Inc. started production, corporate touts projected a two-decade bonanza. Now they’re facing a shuttered mine, protesters, and a lode of legal troubles.