A pyrrhic victory? An Ecuadorian town grapples with a divisive mine closure

Rio Blanco, Ecuador – 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. A court had sided with local activists and ordered the gold-and-silver mine to suspend its operations.

But nearly seven years later, the adjacent settlement, also called Rio Blanco, struggles to contend with the mine’s legacy and the divisions its closure has sown among residents.

Eloy Alfaro, an expert in mining conflicts and reconciliation, first visited Rio Blanco in 2018 as a professor at the University of Cuenca. 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.