But there were more pressing questions to be asked. An environmentalist by advocacy and an engineer by trade, he wanted to know what chemicals the company would use and what their impact would be on the community and its surroundings.
"So, I started asking technical questions. The first thing I asked was, are you going to use a mercury process or a cyanide process? The initial reaction I got was silence," he said.
Company officials later told him they would be using cyanide to process ores into gold. When pressed on how they planned to dispose of the toxic waste after, "it was silence again."
Guevara pointed out, "When it comes to pure cyanide, the volume of a grain of rice is enough to kill a person. And yet, you would have to bring in tons and tons of cyanide into the mining area."
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