Cajamarca

Cajamarca is a city and a region in north west Peru and is currently featuring in the news on a daily basis, because of the protests and demonstrations going on up there against proposals for opening a new gold mine in the region. The indigenous population are totally opposed to the development and when I read about it and was told the details I was not at all surprised, in fact I would be astonished if it were not a cause for protests and demonstrations, which unfortunately due to state violence have lead to a number of deaths.

The mining company involved is the Denver USA based Newmont Mining Corp, who have been gold mining in the area for a long time. Their mine in Yanacocha, Cajamarca is said to be the biggest in Latin America and the second largest in the world, covering an area of 535 square miles. It provides Newmont with the bulk of it's profits every year, which are not insignificant.  Of course there is a Peruvian front company called Minera Yanacocha but the profits don't stay in Peru, needless to say.

They now wish to expand operations and start a new open cast gold mine, but in order to do this they propose to drain four lakes that are vital to the survival of the indigenous people. They will replace the lakes with artificial reservoirs which they will build. In return they offer 1000 jobs. It's hard to imagine anything more environmentally criminal, never mind socially criminal. Just incredible.

Needless to say the government is on the side of big business, using the jobs argument, but ignoring the huge profits extracted by Newmont from the people of Peru. They offer a thousand jobs at slave wage rates, thereby increasing their profits tenfold or more and putting nothing back into the country they rob. You don't need to be a Marxist economist to understand whats going on here. Naked exploitation.

Guess what side the Roman Catholic church is on? It's not on the side of the poor, that's for sure. The cardinal hereabouts belongs, so I'm told to Opus Dei, the fascist wing of the church, which wields a lot of power. So we can't really expect them to stand up for the poor and defend them against big business, now can we?

The processes used by Newmont to extract the gold, which involve the use of copious amounts of cyanide, are illegal practices in the USA, Europe, Argentina and many other places. The contamination over the past 20 years is huge, but will be as nothing compared to what will happen if they get the go ahead to drain these lakes.

So the basic idea is that the Cajamarcans will lose their drinking water, their water sources for cultivating their land and have it replaced with contaminated artificial water from Newmont's reservoirs, so that the profits of a foreign owned private company are hugely increased.

Of course Keiko Fujimori wants the indigenous people out of the way in an even more extreme way than does the government. The newish president, Humala, won his election last year partly due to the support he got from the indigenous people, and now he turns his back on them.

So all in all a very sad state of affairs. Not unusual in Latin America, over the course of its history since the Spaniards arrived. I will be supporting the people of Cajamarca, not that it will do them a huge amount of good, but at least a few more people will know of their struggle having read this posting. There is much more I could have said about pollution levels and corruption, but enough for now.