Salta prevented trucks carrying hazardous waste from Veladero at night – 26/04/2019

Sometimes you have to leave the backpack in a locker or dog outside attached to a pole. Similarly (but on the verge of resembling a scene of the Three Stooges), this is what happened to the drivers of the five trucks in charge of the road. Transfer of nearly 100 tonnes of mercury from the Veladero Mine, San Juan, Valparaiso, Chile. They were tired, they needed to sleep and, as the main authority responsible for the environment in Salta, forbade them to spend the night with their trucks in that province, they decided to park the vehicles on the other side of the border, in a place in Jujuy (Los Robles), and go back to sleep in Salta.

It happened Thursday night. But the dialogue between the Salta government and the Secretary of the Environment and Sustainable Development of the nation – led by Sergio Bergman – began to get tense on Wednesday when Graciela Pinal de Cid, Minister of Production, Labor and Sustainability of Salta, heard that 100 tons of mercury would be trucked into their province, and that nobody from the national sphere had warned him. His discomfort was condensed in the last sentence he said to Clarin, in a telephone conversation: "Federalism declaimed, but not filled"

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A few minutes before, the official had examined the origin of the conflict with her national counterparts: "I receive a call from the University of Tucumán in which they ask me if we know trucks carrying hazardous waste that had to pbad through Tucumán , Salta and Jujuy. . We have had no communication about it. Therefore, on Thursday morning, we call to ask Nation for details. They sent us some of the documentation stating that they had a special security operation and that the transport of this hazardous waste was guaranteed. "

Pinal de Cid admitted that "it is true that when transport is inter-jurisdictional, it crosses several provinces, It is up to Nation to grant permission for this transport. But they must put the provinces in communication to alert them of this situation ".

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Although everything seemed to have been resolved in Thursday's rushed dialogue, no one had spoken overnight. "On Thursday, they called me from the transport company to tell me if they could spend the night at General Güemes (50 km from the capital, Salta). I told them not to, who had not asked for the night; only the request of not that the Nation grants ", detailed Pinal de Cid.

Prior to the request on the province's refusal to stay overnight, Juan Trebino, Under Secretary for Control and Reconfiguration of the Environmental Control and Monitoring Area of ​​the Secretariat for the Environment and Climate Change sustainable development, felt that "it is something impressive".

"Whoever authorizes the transfer of hazardous waste on national roads is the National Secretariat of the Environment through a transport manifest.This document specifies who is the producer, who carries out the transport and what is the destination of this cargo. This document is activated by us for all hazardous waste in Argentina when they move from one province to another, "he said.

"The province of Salta does not intervene in this process", Stressed the manager, and questioned:" Do you think it makes sense that a province refuses to sleep on the side or at a gas station to someone? Is it constitutional?"

However, Salteño, from the Ministry of the Environment, pointed out that "they requested the telephone authorization to spend the night, the same day, without any document or report on it". could not be allowed"The tension has become stronger, the lack of communication between different areas of management, typically Argentine …

Trebino criticized the actions of Salta and lowered the tone to worry about the operation, which in those hours 100 tons of mercury from Veladero, the sanjuanina mine operated by Barrick Gold and Shandong Gold, to the Chilean port of Valparaíso. We expect that they will cross the border on Saturday morning. From Chile, a specialized transport company will transport this waste to Belgium, before shipping it to Switzerland, so that Batrec can proceed with a treatment that will improve the materials destined for final disposal in Germany: "Hundreds of procedures In addition to being the first of this magnitude under the Minamata Agreement, it is a routine procedure; it is not extraordinary"

He added that "communications" had been sent to "Prefecture, Civil Defense, the SINAGIR (NdR .: National System of Integrated Risk Management and Civil Protection), the Ministry of Security … all national agencies have been warned and attentive to any eventuality.The procedure and transport have been carried out in absolute accordance with what the law establishes"

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Although SINAGIR has confirmed Clarin who warned of this transfer to the Civil Defense of the province, communications with the government of Salta would have been lacking. Minister Pinal de Cid emphasized that "not to warn was a complete lack of consideration with regard to the provincial authorities"

In this regard, Trebino reiterated that "such transfers occur all the time and they never told us what to warn", but he acknowledged: "With Monday's newspaper, we should perhaps have been warned. We never imagined that the jurisdiction would generate discomfort. "