The high Andes must be one of the most inhospitable places on earth. There's precious little oxygen, and the temperature never rises much above freezing. So why is there a town in this unlikely spot? For 500 years the promise of gold has lured people to Rinconada - first the Incas and then the Spanish. Prospectors still endure the hardship of altitude and weather in the hope of striking lucky in the state-owned gold mine. But instead of El Dorado, they find a hell hole. Five and a half kilometres above sea level, Rinconada is the highest shantytown in the world where 20,000 inhabitants survive the freezing conditions in squalor - without sewers, piped water, or the rule of law. Today it's a hide-out for the truly desperate and for those on the run from the authorities. The excrement and rubbish from 20,000 people have been piling up for decades. Snow melt washes sewage, and pollution from the mines, into the Rio Carabaya which ends up in Lake Titicaca. It means the drinking water for over a million people is threatened by Rinconada. Earth Report visits this town of broken dreams, to find out to reduce the environmental threat from Peru's small-scale gold mines.
At five and a half kilometres above sea level in the Peruvian Andes, there's precious little oxygen and the temperature rarely climbs much above freezing. It regularly dips to minus 25 degrees centrigrade. So why is there a town in this unlikely spot? For 500 years the promise of gold has lured people to Rinconada - first the Incas and then the Spanish. This week's Earth report comes from the highest rubbish tip on the planet.
Three Barriers
Three barriers seal this settlement of 20,000 souls from the rest of the world. The first is the intense cold, a perpetual winter where it's always below zero. Daytime temperatures are minus 15° Celsius and at night it drops to minus 25°. The second barrier is the lack of oxygen. At 5,400 metres you get only 30 per cent of the oxygen at sea level. The third barrier belongs to the police. The official world stops two kilometres outside Rinconada. Any semblance of the rule of law ends just here.
Héctor Quintana Quiroga, is the local Police Commissioner: "As you can see, the climate here is very difficult, it's really cold and the clothes that are supplied by the police are just not suitable for these temperatures. So, one way or another, we have to put up with this climate and do our best to find some warm clothes by ourselves. In August 1999 or 2000, a huge gust of wind blew off the roof of the police station and, ever since, water leaks into all the rooms. We have to put up with these conditions, we really don't have the choice because, unfortunately, we have to obey orders. The administration sends us here and, one way or another, we have to get on with it. "
Raising and lowering the barrier constitutes the main work of the police. Besides, what else could five policemen do, badly equipped and with no vehicle, faced with the 20,000 inhabitants of Rinconada?
Rinconada is the highest shantytown in the world: 20,000 people surviving in a town; with no piped water, no sewers, no toilets, and no heating. Over the last 500 years Rinconada has been a place of broken dreams. The Incas were the first to arrive, then the Spanish. Today it's a hide-out for the truly desperate and for those on the run from the law. Here there is no state, no laws; only a set of unspoken rules unique to Rinconada.The whole town is aflicted by gold fever. Under the glacier and in the mountains, the gold is found in thin seams, which makes it very difficult to extract. It can't be done by machines, only by men crawling through the darkness. The profits to be had, are as slender as the seams themselves.
Cruel Lottery
The mountain and all its resources belong to the State of Peru, which rents it out to a mining company, the Corporación Minera Ananea. The company sub-contracts to some 300 small contractors who, with a limited surface area, are only able to excavate a few mine shafts. The miners are hired according to the 'cachorreo', a verbal contract by which the miners work for free for the contractors for a month. After 30 days of unpaid work, the miners are allowed to work the mine for their own profit for a single day. It's a cruel lottery. If the seam is good, the miners can survive the following month, perhaps even save a bit. But, if the seam is poor, the miners have to borrow or go without some of their food. For 95% of the people living here the average income is between 40 and 100 US dollars a month. Everybody here dreams of one day finding a 500 gram nugget, even a kilo. Everyone talks about it but it never happens.
Polluting Titicaca
In the town the smell is unbearable. There is no water, no toilets, no sewers - just an open trench in the middle of the main road where the rubbish and excrement is deposited in the open air. The trench can only absorb a tiny proportion of all the rubbish, the majority is dumped between the houses or in the immediaate surroundings of the town. The excrement and rubbish from 20,000 people have been piling up day after day, around the houses for dozens of years. Disease is commonplace, especially among children. Snow piles up on the heaps of rubbish and excrement. When the snow melts, it forms polluted streams which run into the lake and river at the outfall of the glacier. In days gone by, the lake was considered a source of pure water. Today it carries the pollution from Rinconada downstream. The Rinconada mine pollutes the Rio Carabaya which, after travelling 250 km, flows into Lake Titicaca. One million two hundred thousand people live in the Puno district and are exposed to the contaminated water. The drinking water reserves of hundreds of thousands of people are currently threatened by Rinconada. The authorities seem to think that small-scale mines only cause local pollution. In fact, small-scale mines are having an impact on the ecosystem of the entire country. The small-scale mines throughout Peru release 100 tons of mercury each year, 80 in liquid form and 20 in gas. According to the group CYTED most of the main rivers in the south of Peru are contaminated by mercury. As yet, there is no official record of contamination levels.
Dedicated Doctor
Assisted by two nurses and a midwife, Hernán Ventura Chambilla is the only doctor in Rinconada. "The population of Rinconada is, without a doubt, the urban population living at the highest altitude in the world. I don't think there exists another place anywhere in the world where there is such a large number of people working down a mine and living on a glacier around that mine, at 18,000 feet above sea level. Unfortunately, this population lives in the middle of its own excrement and rubbish. It's incredible, but everything is dumped anywhere at all, out in the open. We are aware of the problems that this causes and have tried to clean up the town. We've also tried to advise the population about the questions of hygiene and waste disposal but these people, they don't have the financial means to apply even the most basic sanitary measures. It's sad to say but they don't even have the necessary money to build a dump."
This small medical team treats over a thousand patients a month."Most of the children under five in Rinconada suffer from lung infections and diarrhoea. You don't have to look very far to work out the reasons for these illnesses: the altitude, the climate and the polluted environment these children live in are the causes. But thanks to God, the town is covered with snow nearly all year round and the cold slows down the spread of epidemics."
Economic Hardship
At the end of the 1980s Peru experienced the mother of economic crises. In the five years between 1984 and 1989, inflation reached 7 million per cent! The recovery has been painfully slow. Qualifications are no guarantee of a job. Even Dr. Chambilla says that if he left there'd be 50 young doctors who'd want to take his place. Larger families can't support themselves on subsistence farming which is the reason why 20,000 people are prepared to endure the squalor of life in Rinconada.
Miner, Rodolfo Nina Choque, is one of them: "I came to Rinconada in 1998. I used to come here before, when I was younger, during the holidays when I was still at school. I've been here permanently since 1998. Why did I come here? Well, you only have to look at what's happening in our country to understand. There are so many problems. We study, get qualifications and become good professionals and then, at the end of the day, there's no work there's only unemployment. So, the only way to find work is to come here, to the mine. Nobody asks anything of you here, you don't have to be a professional to work here. I learnt the job by copying the miners who have been here for a long time. Here, you learn from the others, sharing their knowledge and following their footsteps. Yes, of course the work here is very hard, very tiring. It's a job for strong men, the hard ones, we say here. We all want to make a bit of money, that's why we come to Rinconada, but nobody wants to spend the rest of their life down a mine. God willing, we'll find enough gold and be able to leave and do something else, open a little shop or find another job - a job less difficult, less tiring. "
Sacrifice in the Mine
When the miners can work for themselves and finally earn a bit of money, in accordance with the 'cachorreo', they have to produce a minimum of 5 to 10 grams of gold in order to survive the following month. Rodolfo Nina's day starts at six in the morning with the walk up to the mine. It will take him an hour. When he gets to the mine the overseer hands out the coca leaves. Chewing them numbs the body - there could be no mining without it. An offering to the mine itself is made before going down the shaft, a few coca leaves slid under a stone, so that the yield is generous. Food or a bottle of alcohol could also be given as offerings. A belief dating back to Inca times claims that leaving a human brain to rot inside the mine causes a chemical reaction which makes gold come to the surface of the rocks. This belief still has its followers in Rinconada, and the last human sacrifice recorded by the Police Commissioner dates back to March 2003.
Dangerous Life
Dynamite is used to blast the tunnels. There's no remote-controlled electronic ignition here. The fuse is lit and the miners run as fast and as far as possible. Accidents are inevitable.
Rodolfo Nina Choque: "When there's an accident and we see our friends die in the mine, it's a terribly sad moment. But it's part of a miner's life, too. It's a dangerous life and when we leave our families we never know whether or not we'll make it back home and see them again. We think about that often."
Gold and Quicksilver
The ore that is extracted from the seam is crushed to powder. This is the preparation for the next stage, during which the gold is separated from the rock. The gold is separated from the ore using a 'quimbalete' - a big circular stone used like a grindstone. Water is poured into the bowl of the quimbalete, followed by mercury. The powdered ore, containing gold, is added to the water. As a result of the to and fro motion of the stone, the gold fixes itself to the mercury, while the rock powder stays in the water. With each movement of the quimbalete, a little water is discarded - water that is contaminated with mercury. Eventually the mercury will find its way into the mountain ecosystem. Although as much mercury as possible is salvaged, it is estimated that for every tonne of ore, 500 grams of mercury escape to further contaminate the environment. And human health is directly effected too.
The mixture is poured through a piece of material to separate the gold and the mercury, by pressing the mercury through the cloth to the outside. At the end, a mixture of gold and mercury is obtained: approximately 2 grams of mercury for every gram of gold. The last step as far as the miners are concerned is sell the gold and mercury mixture. Miners will be looking for the best price possible from the town's gold merchants.
Mercury Poisoning
The mixture of gold and mercury is heated by the merchant. A blowlamp is used to evaporate the mercury, leaving only gold, pure this time, at the bottom of the saucer. The gram of gold is worth 35 soles, about 10 dollars. It's now midday and it has taken 6 hours to produce and sell this little gram of gold. Each month, every miner has to produce 10 times this amount in order to survive, with only one day to do it. For each gram of gold, 2 grams of mercury evaporate into the atmosphere. The gases come out through chimneys, directly onto the roofs of the houses. In contact with cold air, the mercury condenses and is deposited in a radius of a few feet around the chimneys. Between 2 and 3 tons of gold a year are produced at Rinconada, releasing 4 to 6 tons of mercury into the air, which settles on the roofs and in the houses. As there's no drinking water system in Rinconada, the inhabitants collect the melting snow from their roofs and use it for their personal consumption. In this way, mercury is ingested directly by the miners and their families. Mercury attacks the nervous system; it makes the victim more aggressive, leading to serious problems in limbs and internal organs. It may be one reason for the appalling levels of domestic violence in Rinconada.
No Legal Status
The contractors say life is little better for them than it is for the miners. According to them, the government doesn't acknowledge the existence of small-scale mines. In fact, neither the miners nor the contractors have any kind of legal existence. They receive no government aid, are not entitled to social security and are not allowed to borrow money for investment.
Reynold Dagoberto Apaza, is a Contractor: "The contractors, or should I say, the small-time contractors, are given no consideration whatsoever by the government. We're treated like labourers and that hasn't changed since colonial times. They give us absolutely no chance, no means to be able to become real entrepreneurs. At the moment there are about 300 contractors. Out of those 300, there must be about 4 or 5 who are doing fairly well. The majority of us, let's say 284 contractors, live in a situation of extreme poverty. We've next to nothing at all. Let me tell you, a mine requires a huge investment, you have to put in a lot of money. You have to. Quite honestly, we have no faith as far as the government is concerned. All we get is promises. Sometimes, we get a visit from members of congress or leaders from Lima. They make us promises and then they leave, but they never keep their promises. We stay here, abandoned by everybody. So, that's the way things are. "
Throughout Peru there are roughly 40,000 miners working in small-scale mines. They extract twenty-two and a half tonnes of gold a year, around a quarter of Peru's total gold production. It earns the country around US$200 million in foreign currency. A nation-wide campaign is now under way, led by NGOs such as the GAMA Project, to get the authorities to give legal status to the small-scale mines - and to take measures to control pollution, and ensure the basics of human well-being.
Doctor Chambilla: "If only it were possible to provide this population with a water treatment centre and distribution network, and to also have drains, a waste disposal centre and a rubbish collection service. With all that, I'm sure that we could reduce the number of illnesses here. "
Rodolfo Choque: "The road should be tarred to make transport easier and waste less time. That would improve trade and commerce and would help us to increase our income. Now that would change our lives."
Reynold Dagoberto Apaza: "We are surrounded by gold and, yet, we only just manage to survive. We are beggars locked in a bank full of gold. We need machinery, explosives and other things. We really need these things. But what do they give us? Nothing. We are forgotten. "
