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Unearthing Conflict
Corporate Mining, Activism, and Expertise in Peru
By Fabiana Li Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7586-9
CHAPTER 1
TOXIC LEGACIES, NASCENT ACTIVISM
In 2006, the smelter town of La Oroya, located in Peru's Central Highlands, was named one of the world's top ten most polluted places by the Blacksmith Institute, a nonprofit environmental group based in New York. This dubious distinction placed La Oroya alongside Chernobyl and other toxic sites around the globe, capturing the attention (and indignation) of Peruvians and people around the world. This increased attention on La Oroya coincided with the emergence of conflicts around mining activity in various parts of the country and contributed to discussions about pollution and health that would shape national debates around mining activity. News stories of La Oroya's "children of lead" —their blood poisoned by the constant exposure to the smelter's toxic emissions—proliferated in the national and international media, yet the problems that these stories captured were not new. The smelter in La Oroya had been operating since the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation built it in 1922, and residents had been living with the toxic emissions spewed from its chimneys for nearly a century.
The smelter town of La Oroya, a 174-kilometer (108-mile) ascent into the mountains from the capital city of Lima, is located in a deep gorge where the Mantaro and Yauli Rivers meet. La Oroya is at the junction of the principal highways that connect the coast with the Central Highland and Amazonian regions. Travelers must pass it on the way to other destinations, but few have reason to linger in this cold industrial town 3,700 meters above sea level. Clearly visible from the main highway (which is also La Oroya's principal street), the metallurgical complex is made up of smelters and refineries that transform polymetallic ores into ten metals (copper, zinc, silver, lead, indium, bismuth, gold, selenium, tellurium, and antimony) and nine by-products. The smelting facilities are a throwback to another era, but when it was constructed, it boasted the most sophisticated technology of any smelter in the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the metallurgical complex was a testament to industrial development in the region, employment opportunities, and a growing economy spurred by mining activity—and for some Peruvians, this image of progress did not fade with time.
By the end of the 1990s, however, La Oroya began to carry another set of associations: pollution, lead poisoning, underdevelopment, and a population condemned to life in one of the country's most degraded environments. In 1997, during the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, the smelter was privatized and transferred from the state-owned Centromin to the U.S.-based Doe Run Company. Activism in La Oroya slowly burgeoned as a small group of residents, NGOs, and international supporters denounced the pollution. A series of studies and published reports provided the evidence needed to draw attention to the problems, particularly the impact of lead on children and pregnant women. One of the earliest was a study presented by the Peruvian Ministry of Health's Environmental Health Division (DIGESA 1999), which showed that 99 percent of children have blood lead levels that exceed the limits recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO).
As the problems began to receive increasing attention from the media, many smelter workers and other residents organized marches and rallies in support of Doe Run. Even some of those living directly across from the smelter, who were most exposed to the toxic emissions, opposed the suggestion made by some organizations that they should be relocated to the outskirts of the city. They feared that complaints about the pollution would put their livelihoods and the metallurgical industry at risk. In La Oroya's volatile and contradictory politics, local residents threw stones at visiting scientists conducting a study on lead pollution (Mellado 2005), and local activists faced the harassment and threats of Doe Run supporters.
In this chapter, La Oroya and the Central Highlands serve as a lens through which to analyze past and present practices and discourses related to mining activity and pollution in Peru, as well as the changing dynamics of resource conflicts over the country's long engagement with the extractive industry. Starting with the story of the Oroya smelter and the Cerro de Pasco Corporation, I examine how the smelter's toxic emissions—though present from the moment the smelter began to operate—took different forms at various points in time, and evoked different responses from the companies operating the smelter and from the local population.
Pollution in La Oroya came to matter (socially, economically, politically, and materially) through historically specific practices. These practices include corporate programs that monitored the health of workers and focused on controlling risks in the workplace; scientific studies that began to measure toxicity beyond the smelter and its effects on the population at large; and local and international environmental advocacy. These various forms of knowledge made pollution at times perceptible and at others invisible, in ways that both encouraged and restricted political action. In my analysis, pollutants are not indisputable "matters of fact," or objects that exist independently as elements of "nature," to be measured and controlled by scientists and engineers. Instead, I suggest that pollution must be treated not as a single object to be analyzed from different perspectives, but as multiple in and of itself (Mol 2002). The existence of pollution is dependent on the particular practices that bring it into being. Rather than something detected through objective study and analysis, it is best seen as an effect of relations, or a set of associations within a collective of people, technologies, and the "things" of nature. Acknowledging the multiplicity of an object like "pollution" allows us to see the changes in the collectives that bring it into being, and the continuous work that is required to stabilize its shifting identity.
The new visibility of pollution enabled alliances that involved a wide range of participants, from lead particles that made their way to the fields of agriculturalists in the valley, to American scientists conducting a health study facilitated by the region's Catholic archbishop. Pollution's uncontainable effects transformed what had generally been considered a problem of La Oroya into an issue that affected an entire watershed, valley, and region. In response, Doe Run collaborated with government institutions and community groups to implement a series of health and environmental programs that invoked a sense of shared responsibility for the problems of La Oroya. The events taking place in La Oroya reverberated beyond the region and are illustrative of the dynamics taking shape in other communities affected by the mining industry. By the late 1990s, the increased visibility of pollution and its effects on air, soil, water, and bodies inspired social activism in other parts of the country, enabled different ways of understanding the impacts of mining activity, and contributed to new forms of organization. Nascent forms of activism that focused on health and the environment, along with corporate strategies emphasizing community participation and environmental stewardship, contributed to a climate of polarization. In this chapter, I examine changes in corporate practices and activism over time in order to elucidate when (and for whom) pollution matters and when it does not—in other words, the contingent nature of its local, national, and international significance.
City of Smoke and Chimneys
Valle estrecho en profundas gargantas,
con amor te llamamos así,
ciudad de humos y de chimineas,
el sustento de nuestra nación.
Narrow valley in deep gorges,
With love we call you thus,
City of smoke and chimneys,
The sustenance of our nation.
—VERSE FROM HYMN OF LA OROYA
A sweet aroma. These were the words Alfonso used to talk about the air in La Oroya. They are not the words that come to my mind to describe the smell of sulfur dioxide that (along with lead and other toxic substances) came out of the smelter chimney. The burning sensation that gripped my throat and made me cough as I stepped outside in the mornings is the memory that comes to my mind. But perhaps one needs to have spent a lifetime living in La Oroya and working in the smelter, like Alfonso, to notice the subtle changes in the air's smell and taste.
For Alfonso, the smelter and its towering chimneys were simply part of the landscape, like the brownish waters of the Mantaro River and the glistening white rock of the mountains surrounding the town, the result of years of exposure to the smelter's emissions and acid rain. I had heard from other residents who grew up in La Oroya or had lived there most of their lives that they learned to tolerate the noxious clouds that sometimes hovered above the town, and the smell of minerals that permeated the air. They shut their doors and windows when the smoke was at its worst, got used to the itching in their eyes and throats, and carried a handkerchief to cover their faces when the gases became intolerable. Things were much worse before Doe Run, Alfonso insisted, when the air filled with white flakes that "rained down like dandruff—and nobody said a thing."
We sat in the living room of the small apartment he shared with his wife, Josefina, who was active in the Asociación de Promotoras de Salud, a community health group sponsored by Doe Run that brought together the wives of smelter workers, and whose members had gained a reputation for being some of Doe Run's staunchest supporters. The middle-aged couple lived in Marcavalle, a neighborhood known as the "New Oroya," made up of multicolored apartment blocks that were home to those smelter workers fortunate enough to qualify for company housing based on a point system. Built in the 1970s, the apartments were not luxurious by any means but provided the comforts of an urban life unlike that of a peasant community or the now demolished workers' camps: cement construction, modern furniture and amenities, and a small landscaped garden outside every block. In sharp contrast to Old Oroya, with its dilapidated houses built precariously on the sloping mountain directly across from the metallurgical complex, New Oroya was further removed from the smelter's emissions.
Thinking that I might be a reporter, Alfonso and Josefina were initially hesitant to talk to me because they resented the spate of recent articles in the media painting a negative picture of Doe Run and the situation in La Oroya, but their reticence soon gave way to an eagerness to tell me their side of the story. What they wanted me to see was that all the recent talk about health-threatening pollution in La Oroya was simply hype and misinformation. It was not that the pollution has gotten worse in recent years, Alfonso explained. It was just that the recent switch from petroleum to gas to run the smelter had changed the air, giving it a sweet aroma. Sure, La Oroya is polluted, he conceded; but what place isn't?
Echoing the statements commonly made by company officials and their supporters, Alfonso blamed NGOs, journalists, and other outsiders for instilling fear and distrust in people. He felt they were out of touch with the reality of La Oroya, and that if I wanted to understand that reality, I had to know the history of mining in the region. What Alfonso wanted me to understand was La Oroya's reason for being: the town came into existence alongside the smelter and the Cerro de Pasco Corporation, the mining company that dominated the regional economy at the turn of the twentieth century. For Alfonso, a look at the past would also reveal what he called "new paradigms" that accompanied each stage of the smelter's history, which brought changes in corporate practices and to the lives of workers and their families. Heeding Alfonso's words, I will begin with the smelter's history, which is also the story of the Cerro de Pasco Corporation.
A Century of Mining
Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a group of North American engineers arrived in the Central Highlands to conduct mineral exploration and found silver deposits and immense reserves of copper at Cerro de Pasco. In 1901, a New York mining syndicate formed by investors in the United States bought approximately 80 percent of the mining concessions in Cerro de Pasco and the surrounding region, and in 1915, the investment company incorporated as the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. Although the company changed its name at various times to reflect the changing nature of its production and corporate structure, I will refer to it as the Cerro de Pasco Corporation (CPC), the name by which it was known during most of its years of operation, or simply as "the company" (la compañia), as it was called by locals. For decades after it was established, the CPC would be the most influential company in the industry, since it owned the richest mines in Peru and monopolized the smelting and refinery of minerals (it owned all three refineries in the country, and two of the four smelters).
As the CPC began its operations in the difficult terrain of the Andean mountain range, transportation posed the biggest challenge, since moving large quantities of unprocessed ore around the highlands was expensive. Copper, in particular, was more bulky and less valuable than silver and needed to be smelted to reduce its weight and make its extraction profitable. Although the company already operated a smelter in Tinyahuarco, near Cerro de Pasco, the construction of a central smelter would allow for expanded production while minimizing freight and fuel costs. La Oroya provided an ideal site for the project: flattish land, a river for water use and waste disposal, a supply of labor from nearby communities, and room to accommodate the workers.
Before the construction of the smelter, La Oroya was already well integrated into the national and international economy, a consequence of the arrival of the railway in 1893. Building the railway required a large labor force that included many Chinese workers, attesting to the difficulty of recruiting local people into the industrial labor force. Around this time, the community of San Jeronimo de La Oroya was made up of some 150 adults; most of them were peasant farmers and shepherds, and a smaller number were engaged in mining and trading. It was also an area where migrants (many from communities in the Mantaro valley) had settled during the first half of the nineteenth century, drawn by the nearby mines and opportunities for raising sheep and cattle. The expansion of the railway stimulated mining and agriculture and turned La Oroya into an important commercial center from which ores and agricultural products were shipped. The influx of workers also opened up opportunities for those who were able to set up businesses, build houses and shops, or rent and sell land for development. The consequences of these early developments are reflected in modern-day La Oroya: in the chaotic bustle of activity in its markets; in the constant flow of freight trains and the nonstop traffic along the highway that runs through the town; and in a population made up of migrants who, at various points in time, settled here to take advantage of the newest opportunities that the town had to offer.
Construction of the smelter began in 1919, with the labor of two thousand men who were nearly all hired under a system of enganche, by which laborers were paid in advance and then worked off their debts in thirty- to ninety-day periods. Some scholars (e.g., Bonilla 1974; DeWind 1987; Laite 1981) have noted the initial reluctance of campesinos to work in the mines. They suggest that their economic independence, based on their integration into a subsistence agricultural economy and communal ties, made wage labor unappealing and made it necessary for the company to initially rely on enganche to draw people to mining work.
According to historian Florencia Mallon (1983), the enganche system became expensive and increasingly less attractive for the company, since it had to advance large amounts of money to the enganchadores (who received a commission), and always ran the risk of workers leaving before paying off their debts (the runaway rate was 50 percent). The construction of the Oroya smelter was a key factor in changing this pattern of labor recruitment and seasonal migration; indeed, it was central to the reorganization of the mining industry in the central highlands. The smelter became the "technological hub of the company's entire operation, reorganizing the flow of mineral and metals and imparting a new rhythm and rationale to the extraction process" (Mallon 1983:223). With the centralization and modernization of the company, increased production at the mines, and the full-time operation of the Oroya smelter, the seasonal and unstable nature of the enganche system no longer met the company's labor demands. The company required a more permanent and skilled labor force and began to hire workers directly and offer a higher wage.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unearthing Conflict by Fabiana Li. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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