Peru: A PBS investigation shows informal miners contributing to mercury poisoning
“In Peru, Gold Rush Leads to Mercury Contamination Concerns,” focuses on the extreme mining situations in the Peruvian rain forest region of Madre de Dios. (Video Capture: PBS/Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting)
By SANDRO MAIRATA
Channel: Latin American Affairs
Long before cuisine became the ultimate Peruvian obsession, there was mining. Gold mining. Back in pre-Inca times, craftsmen learned the secrets that shaped a nation’s current fixation towards gold – and perhaps its current bipolar mining disorder.
“Peru is a mining country” (El Perú es un país minero) is a message reinforced by mining companies’ strategists (I used to be one of them, for a four-month period in 2006) that has become as tricky and poisonous as mercury itself.
Mercury is the liquid metal by which informal miners in the rain forests of Madre de Dios (eastern Perú) extract gold from river shores, worsening an environmental catastrophe whose effects on the devastated landscapes are easily spotted, but whose long-term impacts on locals remain a ghostly threat.
But how is it possible that in northeastern Cajamarca, people are defending themselves against formal mining companies, choosing instead to preserve their natural environment and original water resources, when for some neighboring towns - for example, La Pampa - mining is what matters most to the local population?
“Natives from the Amazonian jungle don’t do mining, they’re not interested in it,” Carol Burga a geographer and long time friend told me.
She spent four years living with several indigenous communities from the rain forest, helping to map their territories so they could get official titles of property. This way, the natives could defend themselves in Peruvian courts against mining or oil companies that would otherwise start works in their lands without consultation.
The rain forest miners are a bunch of mostly desperate adventurers from the neighboring regions of Junín, Cusco, Apurímac, and Puno, the areas that embrace informal mining. The lack of state authority has allowed them to extract minerals with no regulations on their methods.
When President Ollanta Humala sent the national police to shut down their dragas (small extracting points), destroying more than 110 of them, some 5,000 informal miners took the roads and rejected the state’s presence with violent demonstrations.
As divisive as Peruvian passions may appear, they can also be enormously unexpected. In 2005, Canadian-based Manhattan Minerals Corp. announced they were retracting from their projected gold operation in Tambogrande, a small town in the northwestern coast. Tambogrande is the most important producer of Peruvian lime, the vital ingredient for ceviche and pisco sours, and is also located on one of the largest gold deposits in the country – and perhaps the world. But when faced with choosing between gold and limes, 93,95% of the locals chose limes.
A new PBS NewsHour feature, “In Peru, Gold Rush Leads to Mercury Contamination Concerns,” explores the urgent nature of the Madre de Dios situation. Still, solutions remain unclear.
The PBS video can be seen here.
