by Marie Arana
But illegal miners often go where the rest of us fear to tread, and the Amazon jungle is one of those places. The impossibly high flanks of the Andes are another. Juan’s bosses staked their claim on the godforsaken peak of Mount Ananea. It is why La Rinconada’s mines alone yield as much as ten tons of gold a year—worth up to $460 million on the open market. It is why the number of inhabitants on La Rinconada’s icy, forbidding rock—less than ten thousand when Juan Ochochoque arrived twenty-five years ago—has multiplied so frantically ever since.
Today there are seventy thousand souls in that soaring aerie. More than half work the frozen tunnels of Mount Ananea, most are with families, and all are in the service of a buoyant global market. There is no legal oversight, no benevolent employer, no operational government, no water, no sewer system, no functioning police. Every year, more and more newcomers press into that lawless encampment, building huts on the near vertical cant of a dizzying promontory—harboring hope that this may be the day they strike a gleaming vein, cleave open a wall to find a fist-sized nugget. They think they’ll stay only as long as it takes to find one. There are just enough stories of random fortune to keep the insanity alive.
Peruvians call the mines at La Rinconada “informal,” a euphemism for illegal, a status without which Peru’s economy would come to a screeching halt. For fifty years now, the Peruvian government has turned a blind eye to increasingly wretched conditions in this remote community, its agents unwilling to scale the heights, brave the cold, take control. Even the Catholic Church has given up sending priests. In the interim, what was once a region of crystalline lakes and leaping fish has become a Bosch-like world that challenges credulity. The scrub is gone. The earth is turned. What you see instead, as you approach that distant glacier, is a lunar landscape, pitted with rust-pink lakes that reek of cyanide. The waterfowl that were once abundant in this corridor of the Andes are gone; no birds flap overhead, no alpaca graze on the hillsides. There is no grass in sight. The odor is overwhelming; it is the rank stench of the end of things: of chemical burn, of rot, of human excrement. Even the permafrost, the whipping winds, the driving snow cannot shield the smell. As you ascend, all about you are vast heaps of garbage, a choking ruin, and sylphlike figures picking idly through it. Closer in are teetering huts of tin and stone, leaning out at 70-degree angles, narrow alleys oozing with raw sewage, a string of humanity streaming in and out of the black holes that scar the cliffs. Along the precipitously winding road, you see hundreds of women in wide skirts scrabble up a steep escarpment to scavenge rocks that spill from the mine shafts. The children who aren’t toted in slings—the ones who are old enough to walk—shoulder their own bags of stone.
A miner lucky enough to find work once he reaches this mountain inferno labors in subzero temperatures, in the suffocating dark, wielding a primitive pick—much as his forebears did a half millennium ago. In the course of that work, he risks lung disease, toxic poisoning, asphyxiation, nerve damage. He exposes himself to glacial floods, collapsing shafts, wayward dynamite, chemical leaks. The altitude alone is punishing: at fifteen thousand feet, a human body can fall victim to pulmonary edema, blood clots, kidney failure; at eighteen thousand, injuries can be more severe. To counter them, miners chew wads of coca. Like slaves of the ancient mita, they carry pocketfuls of the leaf to curb their hunger, blunt exhaustion. If they live to work another day, they celebrate by drinking themselves into a stupor. The ore they extract—ground down, leached with mercury, purified in a blazing furnace—may make their bosses and their bosses’ bosses very rich; but for the vast majority who toil in that high circle of hell, gold is as elusive as a glittering fool’s paradise.
The system of cachorreo, used by contractors throughout the Andes, is akin to the mita that the Incas once used to shackle their conquered tribes, and then Spain used all over again to shackle the Incas. Today under cachorreo, a worker surrenders his identity card to his employer. He labors for thirty days without pay. On the thirty-first day, if he is lucky, he is allowed to mine the shaft for his personal profit. But he can take only as much as he can carry on his back. By the time a miner struggles out under his cargo of stones, grinds it, and coaxes the glittering dust free, he may find he has precious little for his efforts. Worse still, because he must sell his gold to the ramshackle, unregulated “Compro Oro!” (“I Buy Gold!”) establishments in town, it will fetch the lowest price possible. On average, a miner in La Rinconada earns $170 a month—$5 for every day of grueling labor. On average, he has more than five mouths to feed. If he has a bad month, he will earn $30. If he does very, very well, he will earn $1,000. In most cases, workers simply go up the hill, spend their hard-won cash on liquor and whores, and count themselves lucky if they make it home without a brawl. Crime and AIDS are rampant in La Rinconada. If work doesn’t kill a man, a knife or a virus will. Few miners here reach fifty.
It is hard to imagine, as we hover over the gleaming counters of jewelry stores in Paris or New York, or even Jakarta or Mumbai, that gold can take such a hallucinatory journey, that the process remains so medieval—that so little has progressed in five hundred years of human history. But if La Rinconada today is the Potosí of half a millennium ago, it is so only in the grinding misery of the mines. There are no socialites in La Rinconada; no visiting orchestras or opera singers; no Chinese Ming treasures; no tailors from London or parfumeurs from Paris; no imported delicacies; no lace-clad courtesans from Cádiz. There are only ramshackle dives and bordellos to which thousands of hoodwinked, prepubescent girls from Cuzco or Arequipa are abducted to service the addled young men who trawl La Rinconada’s nights in search of oblivion. Six dollars for an ordinary hooker; twenty for a beauty. HIV and tuberculosis are common here. Violence is the rule of law. The only gold to be seen is in bucketfuls of urine that spill from high windows onto the ubiquitous mud as it coils its way to ponds where the children wade. Or in the tiny seed of gold that will buy a thirteen-year-old virgin. Drunks stagger through the neon-lit night. Toddlers slip and fall, giggling, into the sewage. Young girls with vacant eyes stare out from dingy doorways, hoping for an easy few tricks before morning. Down the way, a brawl will produce a corpse. No one will identify the killer. By dawn, it will have been offered to El Tío, fickle lord of the mines, modern-day avatar of Ai Apaec, the fanged god of all creation.
Families like Juan Ochochoque’s, laboring for generations under the spell of gold’s promise, live in abject poverty here, barely able to eke out an evening meal. The world boom has not translated to better lives for them. It is not too different in the gold mines of Cajamarca, Peru (one of the most productive mines in the world, owned by the American giant Newmont Mining Corporation); or in Puerto Maldonado, where anarchic pit mines have mutilated the jungle; or in Mexico, for that matter, where an average miner—the highest paid in Latin America—takes home $15 a day. In Cajamarca, which has poured nearly $1.5 billion of gold into the global market in a single year, three in four residents live in numbing poverty. Today one out of five Peruvian families live on less than $1 a day. In the outlying areas of Cuzco, where Australian and American companies are busily ferreting Peru’s gold out into international markets, more than half the population earns less than $35 a month. The ordinary Latin American, in other words, may perch on some of the world’s most valuable mineral wealth, but as an Italian traveler observed more than a century ago, that fool “is a beggar, sitting on a bench of gold.”
A NEW KIND OF COLONIALISM
1900–Present
To live perpetually at the mercy of two colossuses, alienated between two forms of colonial servitude, never really to be free.
—Mario Vargas Llosa, 1996
No industry characterizes the Latin American story more vividly than mining. Since the time of the Incas, when Huayna Capac forced distant nations to surrender the “sweat of the Sun” to glorify his palaces—to the time Pizarro extorted a colossal ransom from Atahualpa before subjecting him to the garrote vil—to the fateful moment when the e
arth crashed down on Juan Ochochoque, collapsing his mine and effectively ending his life, the narrative has not altered. A thousand years later, it is the same. At the core of it is an alien hunger, a foreign craving, an outward suction. It is as if the conquest imposed by Inca, Aztec, or Spaniard had never left. The continent is still defined by external forces.
Mining may be the most vivid example, but it is not the only commerce that informs this gyre. Consider the rampant profiteering of the United Fruit Company, an American corporation that, for well over a century, controlled vast areas of land from the Caribbean to the Andes. United Fruit, championed in the 1950s by US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his CIA director brother, Allen, exploited the region’s poverty via its cheap labor, bribed government officials, dominated transportation networks, and shipped rich, profitable harvests to North America and Europe. “El Pulpo,” the locals called it. The octopus. It was ravenous, took much, and gave little. Like the colonial power that preceded it, United Fruit herded legions of workers at will, cleared forests, drained marshlands, blocked indigenous rights, suppressed labor rebellions, and bled all the profits to foreign pockets. Today that company calls itself Chiquita Brands International. Its fiercest competitor was another American outfit, Standard Fruit and Steamship, founded by Joseph Vaccaro, a Sicilian cane cutter from New Orleans whose modest investment in one ship grew into a mammoth business. Vaccaro was an all-American success story, a bootstrap wonder, but his fortunes came at a cost for Latin America. Eventually his ships were transporting coconuts, pineapples, and bananas from Honduras and other rural outposts in the Caribbean to cities around the world, making him a very rich man. But gains, like fruit, continued to be devoured abroad. That company is now Dole International.
Few newspapers reported it, but both companies, United and Standard—more alert to the rivalry between them than to the calamitous damage they were leaving behind—used brutal tactics in the countries in which they operated. Racing to put harvests on distant tables, they hired death squads, instigated coups, and caused murder and mayhem as they tamped down any semblance of protest. In 1928 the Colombian government took its cue from bosses of United Fruit and crushed a strike, massacring as many as two thousand peons, including women and children. The bloody events were recounted in Gabriel García Márquez’s powerful 1967 novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. But American companies didn’t always rely on locals to do their dirty work. In the first thirty-five years of the twentieth century, the US military invaded Latin America twenty-eight times, all in the name of “banana interests.”
Other southern resources were in demand. Chief among them, perhaps, was sugar, which Christopher Columbus had brought to Cuba when he set sail to the New World for a second time. Columbus would die consumed by his gold obsession, but less than three centuries later, the tiny sprouts he transported whimsically from the Canary Islands grew into the most important agricultural product cultivated in South America. The gargantuan global market they engendered became one of the most epochal demographic forces in world history. It was because of sugar that millions of enslaved Africans were dragooned from their homelands and transported to the Americas. And it was because of sugar that the hemisphere’s natives were relocated to climes they were constitutionally incapable of surviving. For two hundred years, Europeans made vast fortunes from Columbus’s transplanted shoots, enriching kings as well as bankers, leaving a monstrous trail of atrocities in their wake. A German traveler in the sixteenth century noted that Queen Elizabeth I had pleasant enough eyes, but her teeth were disconcertingly black, a defect common enough in the English from an excessive fondness for sugar. The sweet crystal was wanted everywhere. “White gold,” the Londoners called it. “Mother of slavery” was its name in latitudes farther south.
By the nineteenth century, more than six million tons of sugar were being produced in Latin America every year, most of it grown in Cuba or Brazil, most of it harvested in grueling conditions. Today almost two billion tons are generated annually, half of it from Latin American countries, half of which continues to enrich only the importers. As one chronicler put it more than two hundred years ago, “I do not know if sugar and coffee are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that they have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have people to cultivate them.”
Looming large in the history of extraction is the story of oil: in 1912 the London-Amsterdam powerhouse Royal Dutch Shell drilled its first commercial oil well in Venezuela. The rewarding gush should not have been surprising. Here was the country with the largest hydrocarbon reserves in the Western Hemisphere—fifth in the world in proven inventory. Seven years later, Shell bought up vast oil reserves in Mexico. What wasn’t taken by Shell in the Americas was taken soon after by Standard Oil, the brainchild of American magnate John D. Rockefeller. Oil shortages in the United States had made foreign incursions imperative, at least in Rockefeller’s eyes. Standard Oil, later part of the ExxonMobil empire, helped itself to oil in Venezuela, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina—wherever there was oil to be found. But eventually Latin Americans began to demand it for themselves: President Lázaro Cárdenas of Mexico nationalized his country’s oil wells in 1938, in response to the violent, xenophobic convulsions of the Mexican Revolution in the second decade of the twentieth century. Venezuela nationalized its fields in 1976, hoping to spur growth. Caving in to international demand several years later Venezuela nationalized them once again in 2007, under the revolutionary regime of President Hugo Chávez. Oil might have been the one commodity in all of Latin America that Latin American presidents were not willing to surrender entirely to foreign trade.
That wasn’t always the case. Coffee, cacao, cotton, rubber—all these became fair game for any businessman audacious enough to rush Latin American shores. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as the region hobbled its way out of a savage revolution and three hundred years of colonial rule, Latin America became a playground for hustlers, frauds, rapacious capitalists, and adventurers with questionable pasts, much as it had been in the days of the conquistadors. The Creoles—rich whites who had appropriated all the wealth and power left behind—encouraged them. Foreigners were welcomed eagerly, invited to do as they liked, as long as cash flowed to the Creoles’ coffers. And flow, it did.
An agitated century ensued. In the early 1900s, a number of London banks invested in high-grade rubber from the Amazon, an operation earning the equivalent of $5 billion a year even as tens of thousands of rain forest Indians were slaughtered in the process. American middlemen muscled their way into the coffee business, lording over Central American livelihoods for generations. Wall Street bankers financed bands of assassins who marauded their way through Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Honduras, forcing loans and taking over businesses. Their agents reinstated old-time slavery, setting the region back hundreds of years. Unlike the Spanish conquest and colonization, however, there were no designated sages—no Council of the Indies—to pull on their respective beards and consider the human carnage. Instigating this free-for-all with something approaching glee, US President William Taft crowed, “The day is not far distant when three Stars and Stripes at three equidistant points will mark our territory: one at the North Pole, another at the Panama Canal, and the third at the South Pole. The whole hemisphere will be ours, in fact, as, by virtue of our superiority of race, it already is ours morally.” He was only repeating what Thomas Jefferson had proposed one hundred years before.
As years wore on—as American businessmen took over land, ports, customshouses, treasuries, governments—and natives began to question those tactics and rebel, marines were sent in “to protect the lives and interests of US citizens.” In most cases, a creeping Communism was given as the reason why: as the Machiavellian argument went, the United States was not going to stand by and allow foreign interventions—real or ideological—to threaten its God-giv
en dominion. Didn’t the Monroe Doctrine, the venerable old 1823 declaration, which stated that “any portion of this hemisphere” is part and parcel of the American ambit, make this clear enough? As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is famously reputed to have proclaimed about Rafael Trujillo, the ruthless military strongman who ruled the Dominican Republic in one of the bloodiest eras of Latin American history, “I know he is an SOB, but at least he is our SOB.” Indeed, the northern leviathan was willing to unleash considerable martial might to prove it was in charge. One highly decorated US Marine, a major general who had served in Latin America, reflected:
I spent thirty-three years and four months in active service as a member of our country’s most agile military force—the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from a second lieutenant to major general. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . . I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank to collect revenues. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics. . . . I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests. I helped make Honduras “right” for American fruit companies. During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotion. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
The British, for all their rapacity in colonial matters, were not as overtly political or military about interventions. As one historian explains: they didn’t have to be. England kept a tight rein on the Latin American purse. British diplomats made sure that commercial treaties favored London banks. They pandered to the white oligarchy, encouraged the expansion of large haciendas, favored control by a handful of rich, powerful families, and perpetuated the ongoing grind of racial discrimination. London bankers carried out the bulk of Latin American trade in Europe; they became virtual treasurers to their governments. In the end, it was London’s banking district that managed affairs, undermined the region’s independence, cranked up national debts, and made countries entirely reliant on British speculators. If Latin American commodities were being sucked dry by American bosses, its fiscal assets were being siphoned away by English financiers.
