Activists expelled a gold-and-silver mine company from Rio Blanco after a court ordered operations suspended in 2018. The former mining camp now lies in ruins with shattered china, hollowed kitchens, an abandoned tunnel and charred diesel-station remains. The adjacent hamlet struggles with environmental, economic and social legacies from extraction. Closure produced deep divisions among neighbours, fueling violence, murders and suicides and fracturing community ties. Renewed national pushes to expand mining raise concerns about repeating harms and the difficulty of rebuilding social cohesion and livelihoods once extraction ends without reconciliation or recovery plans.
Today, the Rio Blanco mining camp in south-central Ecuador lies in ruins. Shattered china litters the ground not far from a hollowed-out kitchen with no walls left standing. An abandoned mine tunnel as wide as a house stands on a hillside, overlooking the charred remains of a diesel station. In 2018, environmentalists hailed Rio Blanco's closure as a landmark win for conservation.
He saw firsthand the aftermath of the mine's departure. "The community was broken, fractured," Alfaro told Al Jazeera. "Since then, there have been murders. There have been suicides. They have been completely torn apart." Now, with recently re-elected President Daniel Noboa seeking to expand mining in Ecuador, critics are looking to sites like Rio Blanco to understand the risks and what life might look like after the extraction process ends.
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