Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  The twenty-first century has brought changes. Credit that to a growing awareness among the Latin American upper class that the continent has never been truly its own; and among the lower classes that bosses have been too far away to allow them to address their grievances. As one shrewd nineteenth-century Chilean statesman put it, “For the Americans of the north, the only Americans are themselves.” Such is the deeply held opinion in the other America, even though for almost two hundred years now, that opinion is held with a grudge bordering on adulation. El Imperio, they call the United States—The Empire—home of the legendary, villainous Darth Vader, ruler of a distant star. Where does the money go? El Imperio, they say with a nod and a shrug. Who foments the coups and the revolutions? El Imperio, of course. Who maintains the status quo? El Imperio, if that’s what El Imperio wants. And so on.

  If factories have been slow to come to this part of the world, it is because, after having been forbidden manufacture by Spain for three hundred years, newly independent republics found themselves beholden to foreign corporations that systematically discouraged development for a century and a half more. Gradually, over the course of the past eighty years, the Americas of the South have tried to cut their own path, nationalize businesses, switch axes of power, and make alliances with Asia, perfectly aware that businessmen in faraway places can be as emasculating as Spanish viceroys on the ground. Like Spain, with its punishing repartimiento de mercancía—the colonial system that forced Indians to buy goods they didn’t need in exchange for metals Spain craved—foreign entities that wrest natural resources from Latin America expect to sell their own goods there in return. Indeed, today a staggering 40 percent of all US exports go to Latin America. It is a market that generates millions of North American jobs.

  This can make for a fierce sense of entitlement. When the United States has done business in Latin America—Anaconda Copper in Chile, for instance, or the Drummond Company’s coal operations in Colombia—it is because it expects exclusivity and complete control. For many years, American companies brooked no competition from locals nor any challenge to their jurisdiction. In 1973 Chile’s threat to nationalize Anaconda Copper was sufficient rationale for President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to sanction the bombing of Chile’s presidential palace, oust Salvador Allende, and pave the way for the installation of military strongman Augusto Pinochet. Forty years later, facing resistance by Colombian workers in American mining enterprises, President Barack Obama announced he would send “brigade commanders with hands-on counterinsurgency experience” to subdue dissenters. There have been many such examples of US military intervention in the Americas in the past half century, from Mexico to Paraguay.

  But, along the way, by virtue of public outrage, El Imperio curbed its zeal. It had to. In 2012, the same year that President Obama threatened a US military corrective in Colombia, Latin American leaders at the Summit of the Americas in Cartagena united to challenge America’s profile in the region. They called for Washington to lift its Cuban embargo, imposed back in 1958, arguing that it had been far too damaging to the hemisphere, and “to do more to combat drug use on its own turf” rather than send arms and “advisors” to fight drug lords in theirs—a strategy that has failed spectacularly. By then, Latin America was eagerly seeking to expand economic ties with China, India, the Middle East—regions that did business without demanding political tit for tat. Taking their own reins, they decided to determine their economic future for themselves. In 2015, while attending a conference with Cuba’s president Raúl Castro in Panama City, President Obama responded by striking a very different note. He offered something of an apology, saying: “The days in which our agenda in this hemisphere presumed that the United States could meddle with impunity, those days are past.”

  All the same, in at least one respect, Latin America remains caught in an age-old wheelwork. Its romance with metal hunger continues, as if it can’t quite let go of the fever that has held it fast since Columbus set foot on the Bahamas. Brazil, one of the largest producers of iron ore, for instance, ships most of its metal abroad. The lion’s share goes to China, even though China is the world’s number one producer of iron (leagues ahead of Brazil) and even though Brazil loses money in the bargain. The romance extends, too, to the old colonial practice of letting someone else wear the big hat and pocket the profits. Peru may be one of the world’s top ten producers of gold, but the overwhelming majority of its mines are not owned by Peruvians. They are owned, managed, and operated by corporations in China, Canada, the United States, Brazil, England, Mexico, or Australia; and most of what Peruvian hands rout from the Andes or the Amazon is sent to glitter on another side of the globe. Indeed, Asia now consumes most of the gold that is gouged from the bowels of the planet. Metal imperialism—not terribly different from that practiced in the sixteenth century—still prevails in the copper mines of Chile, the coal mines of Colombia, the diamond fields of Brazil, the silver quarries of Mexico, even as profits are funneled away to London, Beijing, Zurich, Melbourne, Toronto, Johannesburg, or Butte, Montana. As President Danilo Medina of the Dominican Republic pointed out a few years ago: for every $100 of gold it rips from the Dominican countryside, Barrick Gold Corporation—whose owners reside in Canada—will receive $97 of the profits and the Dominican people, $3. For him at least, “That is simply unacceptable.”

  Perhaps the fact that almost half of Colombia is managed by multinational mining companies, or that Mexican mines are dominated by Canadians, is not so troubling if you believe in exuberant markets and the triumphs of global consumerism, but what the boom leaves behind in Latin America is devastating: rampant pollution, a wanton destruction of the rain forest, toxic rivers and lakes, rising morbidity and mortality levels, an epidemic of child labor, ongoing poverty, and a ravished landscape. Few places expose the dark side of the global economy more starkly than the illegal mines that are multiplying today in Latin America, but even the legal ones have proven ruinous. For every simple gold ring that goes out into the world, 250 tons of rock must move, a toxic pound of mercury will spill into the environment, and countless lives—biological and botanical—will struggle with the consequences. It doesn’t take a social scientist or a chemist to walk through that wasteland and reckon the costs.

  CAJAMARCA

  2011

  Gold is chemically inert. . . . its radiance is forever. In Cairo, a tooth bridge made of gold 4,500 years ago is good to go in your mouth today.

  —Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold

  In 2006, as the post-9/11 economy rumbled into being, gold prices soared. The trend reflected a new global skittishness: hoarding was on the rise, and gold was the preferred investment. The irony is that every niche of the gargantuan gold industry that made substantive profits in that first bullish decade of 2000—from Tiffany’s flagship store on Fifth Avenue to the mom-and-pop shops of Mumbai—owes global terrorism a debt of gratitude for its rising profits. After the sobering events of 9/11, when three hijacked airplanes plunged into the hearts of Wall Street and the Pentagon, and the dollar began to lose ground, gold began its meteoric upward spiral. Everyone seemed to want it, especially in the form of jewelry, and especially in countries whose populations were clawing their way toward the middle class: India and China accounted for the highest demand for gold, their surging numbers driving the prices ever skyward. One ounce of gold, which sold on the global market for $271 on September 11, 2001, sold for $1,920 a decade later, a whopping increase of 700 percent. That boom prompted an equivalent explosion in the population crowding into illegal mining grounds. From bangles to bullion, and from Bern to Beijing, precious metals were seen as the best insurance against a nervous age.

  Ironically, the frenzy reached the valley where—480 years before—Pizarro had once held Atahualpa hostage for much the same reason. But for all the metal the conquistador demanded, and for all the gold and silver Atahualpa had hauled to him from the four corners of the Tahuantinsuyu, it turned out that th
e greatest reserve the Inca held was right underfoot. The valley of Cajamarca, that high, windswept stretch of land where so much colonial history had been written, was harboring some of the richest deposits of gold in the world. The largest gold operation in all South America—the US-owned Yanacocha mine—was busily turning rock to reach it.

  That spring, villagers who inhabited the area around Yanacocha decided to block the roads and declare war on the company’s toxic and predatory practices. The corporation that owned Yanacocha, Newmont Mining, had just announced a mammoth new project a few miles away, not far from the very fields where the Inca had seen freedom for the last time. They called it Conga, and it stood to be more colossal, more prolific than any gold mine Latin America had ever known. Denver executives estimated it would bring them a billion dollars a year in gold and a half billion in copper.

  The residents of Cajamarca wanted none of it. A bloody stand-off between them and the mine’s armed security forces followed. Five protesters were killed. But Conga began to be built anyway.

  A few years later, in 2011, a humble subsistence farmer named Máxima Acuña de Chaupe refused to be evicted from her farm, a little patch of ground that lay inconveniently within the parameters of Conga’s blueprints. One frigid morning, her property was overrun by armed police: she was beaten unconscious, her mud shack destroyed, her family injured. The assault was disavowed by Newmont and the Peruvian government, but it had been bold, brutal, unequivocally captured on a cellphone and was enough to radicalize the mine workers, who soon called a strike against the American giant. Their complaints were loud and clear: they had been laboring in wretched conditions. The people of Cajamarca were among the poorest citizens of Peru. Not only had Newmont appropriated the land of their ancestors, it had provoked the battery of a defenseless grandmother, ravaged the environment, and endangered their children with toxic substances that spilled into their rivers day and night.

  Not long before, a German scientist had confirmed that the once-sparkling lakes of Cajamarca had been dangerously contaminated with cyanide; two million Peruvians inhabiting that lush, fertile valley were now at risk for chemical poisoning. But there was more than environmental despoliation at issue. There was the question of rank exploitation. Once the Peruvian gold was excavated, processed, and shipped abroad, Peru stood to retain only 15 percent of Newmont’s gargantuan profits. Moreover, in a year in which Newmont carved three million ounces of gold from those heights (worth $3.7 billion), more than half the residents were living on $100 a month.

  The protesters in Cajamarca were so outraged by the seeming injustice of this—and Peruvians around the country expressed such immediate sympathy—that troops in riot gear were called out to contain what officials in Lima feared was a larger threat to the Peruvian economy. On July 4, 2013, the leader of the protest, a Catholic priest, was taken by force from a bench in a public park, arrested, and roughed up before he was let go. President Ollanta Humala, who had won the presidency on a socialist vote, now said with unequivocal free-market conviction that Conga would continue, albeit with closer government oversight. Peru’s mineral boom, in other words, was sacrosanct, not to be disrupted. Gold trumped water, money quashed justice, and world markets took precedence over the rural poor.

  Remarkably, the opposite proved true. Máxima Acuña prevailed, at least for a little while. The diminutive Peruvian invited protesters onto her contested land, spoke out whenever asked, and refused to back down against the American Goliath. Eventually she attracted the attention of a number of international organizations that were all too happy to trumpet Newmont’s human and environmental depredations: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the Organization of American States, Amnesty International. Newmont was forced to halt all progress at Conga. Caught in suspended animation for five more years, the company finally decided in April 2016 to walk away from the project. The locals celebrated, Máxima Acuña was given a prestigious international prize, and a New York journalist dubbed her “the badass grandma” who had challenged big mining. But even as Newmont announced it would abandon Conga, its executives in Denver were busily working toward expanding their mines at Yanacocha, an alternate deliverance, promising sales of nearly $1 billion a year for at least five years. A few months later, a band of hit men broke into Máxima Acuña’s home and gave her and her husband another thrashing.

  LA RINCONADA

  2002

  We would not say Jesus, Mary, Joseph, nor make the sign of the cross, because the place belonged to Tío, the devil.

  —Andean miner, 1972

  Leonor Gonzáles could be Máxima Acuña’s sister for the way the two speak, the Quechua inflections they share, their tiny statures, their essential fortitude, the fierce principles of family and hard work that characterize the indigenous women of the Andes. But there are differences. Leonor lives and works in a remote aerie, high up in the mountains, where only illegal miners go. Máxima lives just outside the historic city of Cajamarca, indigenous South America’s losing ground, the very place where worlds once collided, where white won against brown and locals still answer to outsiders.

  There are other, more observable differences in these women. Although they were born in the same year, Leonor looks to be twice Máxima’s age: her skin is disfigured by a relentless sun, raw from the glacial winds. She is missing teeth. Her hands, unlike Máxima’s, do not dance when she talks. They are gnarled, stiff—the hands of someone who scrabbles up cliffs, hunting through rock spills. They lie in her lap like broken relics. Her eyes, once a sparkling onyx, have turned milky gray. Leonor has spent her life as a pallaquera, a sifter of discarded stone; Máxima is a farmer. For all the beatings Máxima has suffered at the mercy of hired thugs, her eyes are bright, her movements graceful, her smile pleasing. Life itself, on the other hand, has left an all-too-visible scar on Leonor. Its ravages mar her face, just as mines pock the face of the towering peak they call Sleeping Beauty.

  From the day she was born in a tin shack on the flank of that mountain, Leonor’s life has never been free of troubles, but it was tolerable enough when her husband, Juan Ochochoque, was alive. At least they could shoulder the burdens of hardship together. Somehow, between the pittance Juan earned in the soul-crushing system of cachorreo and the rare moments when Leonor would crack open a stone to find a tiny miracle inside, they eked out enough soles to feed them and their four children. They were poor—bone poor, always poor—but, in the fortress of that small stone hut, they were whole. They sang.

  All of that changed one snowy morning in 2002. Juan had been breaking rock in a far corridor of the mountain, tirelessly scouting its veins, when a colossal chunk of glacier broke off far above, crashed down the slope, and collapsed the shaft where he was working. His son Jhon, eleven years old, was in the mine at the time, helping to drag out the gravel. Juan never did describe the horror in all its detail to Leonor, but she could imagine it: The slam of ice. The rock on rock. The sudden black. And then the choking dust, the chemical stink, invading every millimeter of his lungs, stinging his eyes. The only thing Jhon remembers of that fateful moment is the sound of his father’s squawks as the man tried, frantically, to find the boy—scrabbling toward him on his knees, pushing through the debris, calling for him with a voice he himself hardly recognized.

  The two managed to claw their way out of the shattered hole. They thanked El Tío for the deliverance, but they were never the same after that. Juan could not walk, could not breathe. The chemical fumes had seared his lungs. It took three men to carry him down. They met Leonor running up the path the other way. She had heard the terrifying detonation, the rumble of rock shooting through the perforated mountain like some diabolical roulette. She had seen the thick cloud of dust hanging ominously over the mine’s entrance, flicking its black tail into the frigid sky. Leonor looked about desperately for her son and—after a heart-stopping moment—found him trailing after his father, dazed, unaided, miraculously unharmed. But he had emerged from that calamity with a sickness
the Indians call susto: a fear that forever grips the soul, a panic that will not go away.

  As days wore on, the children could see that a shadow had fallen over their father. Juan was suffering a very manifest physical deterioration. He had always marched out before dawn, tramping through ice and mud to hammer away at the mine’s recesses. Now his legs had ballooned to three times their size. He was off balance, confused, in agony. His arms grew weak. His joints ached, his hands shook; he could scarcely bend his knees. He couldn’t shuffle more than a few yards, much less climb to the mine. Before long, he began to have seizures; and then came the constant, bone-rattling cough. He made his way through La Rinconada holding on to walls, gasping for air.

  In the course of a fleeting moment, Juan Ochochoque had become a marginal citizen. He now joined the women, the children, the maimed, and the dispossessed—those relegated to distaff roles in a full-blooded macho society. He was too sick to do women’s work: quimbaleteo, for instance, a practice that dates to the Incas, in which a person stands on a boulder and rocks back and forth, grinding the ore to a fine sand and coaxing the silver out with mercury. Or pallaqueo, Leonor’s work, in which a woman scales the escarpments, scavenging whatever promising bits spill from the mines, and stuffing them into a rucksack. Nor could he do even the simplest work: the chichiqueo, which requires a woman or child to stoop over a standing pool of chemically tainted water for hours, picking through gravel for whatever shines. These were impossible tasks in his condition. But he had to do something: there were children to raise, six mouths to feed. Within weeks, he decided to cook for a living. Hunched over an ethyl-alcohol burner on the bare earth of his hut, he produced pot after pot of soups and stews. At noon, he sent his family into the streets to sell them. At night, he drank whatever alcohol was left, hoping to dull the humiliation.