Trump Organization strips protections from Pecos watershed

The Black Hills of South Dakota and Wyoming are hardly the only public lands plundered by foreign companies under cover of the General Mining Law of 1872 enacted to settle Civil War debt and rob Indigenous peoples of their homes and human rights. 

Until it closed in 1939 the Tererro Mine in the headwaters of the Pecos River took gold, lead and other metals then left piles of toxic waste rock in their place. After major flooding in 1991 when sulfuric acid, aluminum and zinc swept into the river miner Freeport-McMoRan was held responsible for the deaths of some 100,000 Rio Grande cutthroat trout and for the subsequent decades of acid mine drainage. 

Despite opposition from Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham and Senator Martin Heinrich during the first Trump term in 2019 an American subsidiary of Australian company New World Cobalt, was granted twenty federal permits to drill test holes into the Sangre de Cristo mountain range on the Santa Fe National Forest in the Jones Hill area north of Pecos, New Mexico.

Federal officials announced the Upper Pecos Watershed, thousands of acres of forest service and public lands, will reopen next month for potential mining and geothermal extraction projects. “The Trump administration is putting foreign mining corporations and oil and gas interests ahead of New Mexico families, our water, our public lands, and our sacred tribal sites,” said U.S. Representative Teresa Leger Fernández during a press conference. [Feds quash lawmakers’ effort to prevent new mining operations in Upper Pecos Watershed]