Many of these former workers end up migrating to Nazca, Arequipa or Lima. The side effect of this forced migration is population decline: the population of San Juan de Marcona has dropped from 25,000 to 14,000 inhabitants in less than two decades. Those who do decide to stay despite all the difficulties have nowhere to go. Shougang refuses to sell, hand over or release land, despite the fact that they technically only own the minerals contained in the soil and not the land itself. As a result, the only alternative for workers excluded from the company is the Ruta del Sol, the Route of Sun, a shantytown on the concession’s land that has grown from strength to strength on the basis of collective desperation and battles with the police. Dozens of families struggle to make ends meet on this rocky wasteland next to the cemetery under the watchful eye of police officers on Shougang’s payroll. With their own hands they manage to build themselves something more or less like a home, with just enough space for a bed, a small stove and their belongings. Oblivious to the poverty all around them, children play with toy cars made of bits of wood and wire in the doorways of their houses, which are really little more than hovels with cement walls covered in pages from sports magazines and roofs made of asbestos and corrugated iron; miserable rat holes without floors, electricity or running water.
It is a quite different picture in the town’s only residential area, which is home to the fifty or so Chinese employees who manage the local workers at Shougang Hierro Peru. They live in the original houses built back in the days of the Marcona Mining Company—houses with gardens, sea views and the general air of a middle-class American suburb. Although they have grown slightly shabby after all this time, the houses still bear the marks of the era when San Juan was in fact an oasis in the middle of a desert. Back then, the American mining company paid for the education of the miners’ children and ran a hospital with American doctors which the older members of the community remember as “one of the best in Latin America.” These were days when the Marcona Mining Company was considered—in stark contrast with its present Chinese owners—to be a model mining company. Now, nothing is left but the memory of better days.
Things have got so bad that the Chinese managers rarely leave their homes. “You only see them every now and then. It’s a small town and we all know each other here. They could easily end up getting into trouble,” Purizaca explains. We have to ring the bell several times before anybody opens the door of the house belonging to Fan Fu Li, one of Shougang’s senior managers. The door is opened by a sleepy-looking Chinese employee in a white vest. Like an animal sensing danger, he immediately puts his guard up and defends himself against our questions with a foolproof barrier: he is polite but distant, infinitely patient and ready to roll with the punches if necessary. But most of all, his lips are sealed. “The boss isn’t here and I don’t know when he’ll be back. I don’t know anything about what happens here,” he repeats, time and time again. Protecting himself by stonewalling, this junior Shougang official is not about to give anything away. The exact same story would later be repeated in Beijing, when Shougang rejected all our requests for an interview.31
This is a familiar situation for any journalist working in China and one which we came up against many times throughout our investigation into the “Chinese world.” Whether out of distrust or self-defense, the Chinese tend to make it clear that a foreigner is not “one of us.” However, all this suspicion vanishes into thin air if the foreigner happens to be guaranteed by a respected compatriot. Especially in Chinese communities far from the motherland, the art of guanxi makes all the difference. In Africa, for example, the mere fact of being accompanied by an adventure-loving young Chinese friend opened the doors to all the major Chinese infrastructure projects. Our intrepid friend was not with us in Marcona, but that was not the only problem. With emotions running high in the community as a result of the highly troubled workplace situation, the Chinese officials have opted for a policy of silence. They do not say a word, for example, about the 2007 riots that ended with Shougang’s head office going up in flames. Javier Muñante, director of one of the community’s two trade unions, provides us with a revealing piece of information: “We’ve been on strike every year for the last five years.” The signs of this conflict are clearly visible around town, with buildings dotted with graffiti denouncing the company.
It is time for the change of shift at Shougang Hierro Peru and lines of buses can be seen carrying miners home. Through the windows of the buses, the miners’ faces are dark with iron ore and they are still wearing their red or green helmets. They look weary and the expression in their eyes is proud yet sad. They have been fighting for twenty years against a company which marked the beginning of its operations in the country by firing 1,500 workers. Nowadays, over half of the company’s 3,938 workers—most of whom were previously employed as full-time staff—are either on temporary agency contracts or are sub-contracted, allowing Shougang to save around 40 percent on labor costs with every new worker it hires. The only miners with decent salaries are those who were already on the payroll when Shougang bought the mine.
This discrimination in pay, which can lead to two employees with the same amount of experience and skills earning dramatically different salaries, involves offering an average daily wage of $14, while the Peruvian mining sector pays almost double that amount.32 On top of this, the workers also complain of arbitrary dismissals, poor working conditions and hostility towards union members. In the union headquarters, several miners volunteer to air their grievances on the condition that they remain anonymous; the company’s reprisal against two fellow workers who vented their anger in the New York Times is still fresh in their memories.33 Pedro is one of these volunteers. He has been working in the mine for thirty-three years, in charge of calculating how many explosives are needed for each blast. He works up to ten hours a day, six days a week, in exchange for a monthly wage of just 2,200 nuevos soles, which is around $792.34 “It’s barely enough to live on. Isn’t this exploitation?” he asks, faced with the difficulty of sustaining a wife and four children on these meager wages.
As might be expected, these precarious working conditions also extend into the area of safety. The use of insufficient and out-of-date equipment leads to ten accidents in the mine every month. Furthermore, 30 percent of Shougang’s miners suffer from lung diseases associated with exposure to mineral dust—or pneumoconiosis—while many more experience varying degrees of deafness.35 “By the time we retire, we have less than five years left to live,” one of the miners at the union headquarters assured us. “The number of accidents is an outrage. The company is only interested in producing iron ore,” one of his colleagues added. Meanwhile, Shougang’s production level and income are growing year on year. This model of pushing for maximum production with a complete disregard for any kind of knock-on effects has formed the basis of the “Chinese miracle” over recent decades and has led to the creation of one of the most unequal societies in the world.36 This same model is now being faithfully reproduced in San Juan de Marcona. A similar situation can be seen in China’s other mining investments in Peru, where it is a key player: just eight Chinese companies control 295 mining concessions in Peru.37
To complete the image of the perfect disaster, Shougang’s activities in Peru are also having a toxic effect on the environment. Although the dumping of unprocessed residues into the sea and other harmful practices were inherited from the previous North American concession company and therefore cannot be attributed to Shougang alone, the fact is that the Chinese company has shown very little interest in protecting the environment. Shougang is considered one of the nineteen most polluting companies in China,38 while in Peru the company’s outrageous treatment of the environment has been penalized several times. However, this has not prevented the marine life in the water close to the mine installation from being pushed to the edge of extinction. “There are hardly any shoals of fish left in the area,” says Santiago Rubio, president of the fishing community of San Juan de Marcona.
/> The traditional local fishing industry provides a livelihood for 600 families, the only group in the area that is not dependent on the mine. When we meet him in his home, Rubio explains that in order to catch the kind of white fish used in ceviche, the fishermen have to sail further and further away from the bay and “spend eight hours each day diving under water to catch 14 kilos of fish.” For this work they manage to earn just 40 nuevos soles, or $14 per day. On San Nicolás beach, Rubio slips on a battered-looking wetsuit, dives into the water without any breathing apparatus and emerges from the bottom of the sea with his hands full of sparkling black sand flecked with shining gold particles. “Heavy metals,” he explains. The waves break against the shore, dragging a reddish residue with them. The smell of poison fills a beach that has been stained ocher in color by iron ore deposits. A few hundred meters from the beach, a pipe drains away the toxic residues of the mining process into an enormous ditch.
Shougang Hierro Peru supplies the group’s other companies with the raw materials needed to make steel, which are extracted from this forgotten corner of the Ica desert.39 Furthermore, the area’s privileged geography provides the company with a natural deep-water port where the raw materials can be loaded—just two hours after being extracted from the ground—onto boats heading to China, thereby carrying away the benefits of an added value industry for the motherland. The message is perfectly clear: the ends justify the means. The victims and the damage are left in the gutter, thanks to the silent complicity of the Lima government, which is quick to defend this new Chinese “Messiah” who is always ready to pour money into Peru’s extractive industries.
Against this background, the “great lady of steel,” as Shougang is known in China, has plenty of leeway to deal with the long-term costs of an on-going conflict situation. In fact, despite the events described here, the company has no scruples when it comes to bragging about its contribution to development in Peru.40 However, none of this changes the fact that the mining community is filled with a constant climate of confrontation. “The majority of people here feel a lot of anger towards the Chinese,” warns one of the dispossessed workers living in the Ruta del Sol slum. He says it with the desperation of a man who knows he cannot win, but without any sign of the anti-Chinese sentiment common in many other places. The feeling shared by Marcona’s inhabitants is not xenophobia, but rather a profound sense of disappointment towards the supposed Chinese “friend” who promised so much and has only let them down.
After two decades of fighting against a company that tramples on their rights on a daily basis, the battle seems to have been lost. The fact is that Shougang is not just any normal company: it is a Chinese state-owned company. This may not seem overly important to anyone unfamiliar with the inner workings of the Chinese political-economic system, whether in Marcona or elsewhere in the world. However, what we are really seeing here is the long shadow of the all-powerful Chinese state. The fact that China’s strategic national objectives and the needs of these companies are generally interchangeable and complementary gives state-owned companies—in this case Shougang—a clear sense of immunity that allows them to commit all kinds of excesses. This is particularly true when, as in the case of San Juan de Marcona, the authorities in the host country make no attempt to put an end to the abuse, contributing greatly to the vulnerability of the affected communities. What is more, China’s lack of any kind of civil society, independent media or opposition parties provides the regime’s companies with a considerable degree of security. Under these circumstances, who is going to stand in Shougang’s head offices in Beijing and hold the company to account? Even more importantly, who is going to rein in China’s reckless behavior outside its own borders?
THE PITFALLS OF THE
“CONTRACT OF THE CENTURY” BETWEEN CONGO AND CHINA
If Marcona seemed like a remote place, crossing the border between Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) through the Angolan province of Cabinda is in another league altogether. This is a hostile place, isolated and wild, a classic no-go zone where Africa can easily show its darker side. The airplane landed at about seven in the morning at the airport in Cabinda, a city that shares its name with the oil-rich province where it is located. After a short taxi ride, we reach the military-controlled border crossing. “It’s Sunday. It’s closed,” two soldiers on the Angolan side bark at us, leaning on their regulation Kalashnikovs. Things were getting complicated at one of Africa’s most troubled borders of recent years.41
After several hours of stubbornly waiting, we finally get our hands on the Angolan exit stamp and step across the border towards a rundown hut flying the blue, red and yellow national flag of the DRC. Suddenly, three Congolese soldiers dressed in sandals and civilian shorts snap out of their Sunday lethargy and, dodging the mess of empty beer bottles they have just finished drinking, promise to help us “even though the post is closed on Sundays.” The border’s extreme isolation clearly makes them feel untouchable and they quickly make us the targets of their somewhat dubious intentions. One of them is chewing khat, the so-called “African drug,” and bombards us with questions about the beauty and voluptuousness of our wives. Another of them makes a note of our visas and defiantly makes us recite every last word written in them: a strange mixture of interrogation and simple curiosity.
Suddenly, things take a turn for the worse: they want to know whether we’re carrying “espionage material.” They say they have to inspect the contents of our bags, which happen to be full of cameras, hard disks and laptops—not very easy to explain away considering that we are there on tourist visas and are supposedly “celebrating”—in a place where nobody would dare to celebrate anything—Spain’s World Cup victory in South Africa. Fortunately, luck is on our side. A less than thorough inspection allows us to dodge the bullet and face up to the soldiers’ final whim: the payment of a “crossing fee.” Three hours later, after a lot of explaining, false smiles, pleading and footballing talk—as well as parting with $100—they let us go. With our nerves decidedly on edge at the thought of what might have happened but didn’t, we enter the DRC, a country ten times the size of the United Kingdom and the scene of the most savage Western colonial barbarity on the continent.
A rickety fifteen-year-old Toyota 4×4 drives us at full speed towards Muanda through a fierce-looking landscape and along 27 kilometers of sandy roads with very little traffic and hardly any signs of life. Only a battered-looking abandoned tank breaks the monotony, as well as a couple of drivers repairing the punctured tires on their ancient vehicles. The wild, intense, majestic landscape brings to mind the descriptions written by the Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in The Shadow of the Sun, his unparalleled chronicle of decolonization in Africa. We are eventually stopped at a makeshift security control in a village in the middle of nowhere, where an angry-looking soldier collects what is clearly an illegal toll fee. Soon after this we arrive in Muanda, a small town with unpaved streets littered with rubbish and a total disregard for the law. It is one of those places where the police are much more dangerous than the bad guys, as we had the chance to find out for ourselves. One particularly aggressive plain-clothes policeman literally kidnapped us without showing us any kind of identification, and held us illegally for several hours before the Spanish consulate rescued us from his money-grabbing grasp.
It does not take us long to realize that there are no laws, state, certainty or security of any kind in this remote corner of the DRC. It takes us around twelve hours to travel the 400 kilometers to Kinshasa along the N1 road, which runs parallel to the railway built by the British explorer Henry Morton Stanley in order to open up trade towards the sea, as this stretch of the Congo River is impossible to navigate. Every encounter with another vehicle puts our lives at risk, as we can tell from the lines of wrecked cars sleeping the sleep of the just in the ditches at the side of the road. Ancient lorries come out of nowhere, dazzling drivers with their beaming headlights and forcing them to perform a skilled balancing act on the
narrow road to avoid either falling into a hole or ending up under the lorry. Whenever we pass through a town or village, where the chaotic traffic forces us to slow down, hordes of children, vendors and thieves swarm around the vehicle to beg, sell fruit or simply rob the passengers. That is the DRC: a constant movement along a knife edge, a continuous risk that at any moment things could go off the rails or explode in your hands. It is a place where tragedy lurks around every corner.
China has arrived triumphantly into this chaotic scene in recent years. Beijing has chosen one of the poorest, most underdeveloped and corrupt countries in the world as a partner in the biggest and most ambitious contract of all the many agreements it has signed in Africa to date.42 On the basis of the contract signed in 2008, China will take on responsibility for building the infrastructure essential for the DRC’s development in exchange for permission to exploit the country’s immense reserves of copper and cobalt for the next three decades.43 As part of the deal, the Chinese state will contribute millions of dollars in funding44 as well as the experience and technology provided by two of its biggest state-owned companies and, no doubt, a good part of the workforce45 needed to build and repair thousands of kilometers of roads, streets, bridges, railways, airports and dams, as well as constructing dozens of hospitals, universities and low-cost housing.46 Beijing will also provide money and expertise to modernize the mining infrastructure required to exploit the fabulous reserves of copper and cobalt in the Katanga province on the border with Zambia, in the heart of Africa’s so-called “Copperbelt.”
China's Silent Army Page 13
