In the wake of the New York Times’ April front-page story on Hudbay Minerals’ alleged human rights abuses in Guatemala that triggered calls for national mining reform, Arizona investigative journalist John Dougherty presents his unflinching exposé on Hudbay’s worldwide operations in the documentary “Flin Flon Flim Flam”.
In September 2014, Mr. Dougherty traveled to Guatemala where he interviewed the same victims and survivors that appear in the Times story. Hudbay stands accused in a Toronto civil trial of a series of atrocities that left a prominent Mayan community leader hacked and shot to death, 11 women alleging they were gang raped by mine security personnel and a young father paralyzed from a shooting during a community protest.
Two months later, Mr. Dougherty was at Hudbay’s Constancia Mine in Peru soon after demonstrators were beaten and teargased by police during a community protest. The film also documents Hudbay’s long history of environmental contamination in Flin Flon and its clashes with a First Nation. In Arizona, Hudbay plans to build a massive open-pit copper mine in a “Sky Island” with a dozen endangered species, including the only known wild jaguar in the U.S.