Members of the Cajamarca Máxima Acuña community, known for their resistance to eviction from their land promoted by mining company Yanacocha, have just received the Goldman Sachs Award, the world’s most important environmental award. This year Akunya was recognized as one of the six environmental heroes on Earth, along with activists and fighters from Tanzania, Cambodia, Slovakia, Puerto Rico and the United States.
The awards, which will be presented this Monday afternoon at the San Francisco Opera House (USA), honor those who have led an exceptional fight for the conservation of natural resources. The grandmother’s public story sparked international outrage after she was harassed by private security guards and the police themselves, who agreed to keep the mining company safe.
Chronicler Joseph Zarate accompanies Lady Akuna to her land to learn more about her history. Shortly thereafter, he published this shocking portrait, which asked the key question: “Is a nation’s gold worth more than a family’s land and water?”
One January morning in 2015, like a lumberjack, Maxima Akunya Atalaya tapped the rocks on the mountain with the skill and precision of a lumberjack to lay the foundation of a house. Akunya was less than 5 feet tall, but he carried a stone twice his own weight and slaughtered a 100-kilogram ram in a matter of minutes. When she visited the city of Cajamarca, the capital of Peru’s northern highlands, where she lived, she was afraid of being run over by a car, but was able to collide with moving excavators to protect the land she lived on, the only land with plenty of water for her crops. She never learned to read or write, but since 2011 she has been preventing a gold miner from kicking her out of the house. For farmers, human rights and environmentalists, Maxima Acuña is a model of courage and resilience. She is the stubborn and selfish farmer of a country whose progress depends on the exploitation of her natural resources. Or, even worse, a woman who wants to cash in on a millionaire company.
“I was told that there is a lot of gold under my land and lagoons,” Maxima Akuna said in her high voice. That’s why they want me to get out of here.
The lagoon was called blue, but now it looks gray. Here, in the mountains of Cajamarca, at an altitude of more than four thousand meters above sea level, thick fog envelops everything, dissolving the outlines of things. There was no singing of birds, no tall trees, no blue sky, no flowers around, because almost everything was frozen to death from almost zero cold wind. Everything except roses and dahlias, which Maxima Akunya embroidered on the collar of her shirt. He said that the house he now lives in, made of clay, stone and corrugated iron, was about to collapse due to the rain. He needs to build a new house, although he doesn’t know if he can. Behind the fog, a few meters from her house, is the Blue Lagoon, where Maxima fished for trout a few years ago with her husband and four children. The peasant woman fears that the Yanacocha mining company will take away the land she lives on and turn the Blue Lagoon into a repository for some 500 million tons of toxic waste that will be drained from the new mine.
story. Find out about this fighter’s case, which touched the international community, here. Video: Goldman Sachs Environment.
Yanacocha means “Black Lagoon” in Quechua. It is also the name of a lagoon that ceased to exist in the early 1990s to make way for an open pit gold mine, which at its height was considered the largest and most profitable gold mine in the world. Beneath the lagoon in Selendin, the province where Maxima Akuna and her family live, lies gold. To extract it, the mining company Yanacocha has developed a project called Conga, which, according to economists and politicians, will bring Peru to the first world: more investment will come, which means more jobs, modern schools and hospitals, luxury restaurants, a new chain of hotels, skyscrapers and, as the President of Peru, Ollanta Humala, said, maybe even the metropolitan metro. But for that to happen, Yanacocha said, the lagoon, more than a kilometer south of Maxim’s house, would need to be drained and turned into a quarry. It would later use the other two lagoons for waste storage. The Blue Lagoon is one of them. If that happens, the farmer explained, she could lose everything her family has: almost 25 hectares of land covered with ichu and other spring pastures. Pines and queñuales that provide firewood. Potatoes, ollucos and beans from their own farm. Most importantly, water for his family, his five sheep and four cows. Unlike neighbors who sold the land to the company, the Chaupe-Acuña family is the only one still living close to the mining project’s future area: the heart of Konga. They said they would never leave.
[pull_quote_center]—We live here, and we were kidnapped,” Maxima Akunya said the night I met her, stirring firewood to heat up a pot of soup[/pull_quote_center]
- Some members of the community say they don’t have jobs because of me. This mine isn’t working because I’m here. What I’ve done? Will I let them take my land and water?
One morning in 2010, Maxima woke up with a tingling sensation in her stomach. She had an ovarian infection that left her unable to walk. Her children rented a horse and took her to their grandmother’s dacha in a village eight hours away so she could recover. One of his uncles will stay to take care of his farm. Three months later, when she recovered, she and her family returned home to find that the landscape had changed a little: the old dirt and rock road that crossed part of her property had been reduced to a wide, flat road. Their uncle told them that some workers from Yanacocha had come here with bulldozers. The farmer went to the company’s office on the outskirts of Cajamarca to complain. She held out for several days until an engineer took her in. She showed him the certificate of ownership.
“This land belongs to the mine,” he said, glancing at the document. The Sorochuko community sold it many years ago. Doesn’t he know?
The farmers were surprised and angry, some questions. If she bought this bag from her husband’s uncle in 1994, how could it be true? What if she kept other people’s cows and milked them for years to save money? She paid two bulls, nearly a hundred dollars each, to get the land. How could Yanacocha be the owner of the Tracadero Grande property if she had a document that said otherwise? On the same day, the company’s engineer fired her from the office without answering.
[quote_left]Maxima Akunya says she plucked up her courage during the first skirmish with Yanacocha when she saw the police beating her family[/quote_left]
Six months later, in May 2011, a few days before her 41st birthday, Maxima Acuna went out early to knit a wool blanket for her at a neighbor’s house. When he returned, he found that his hut had been reduced to ashes. Their guinea pig pen was thrown out. The potato farm was destroyed. Stones collected by her husband Jaime Schoup for the construction of the house are scattered. The next day, Maxima Acuna convicted Yanacocha, but filed a lawsuit due to lack of evidence. The Chaupe-Acuñas built a makeshift shack. They tried to move on until August 2011 arrived. Maxima Acuna and her family talk about what Yanacocha did to them earlier in the month, a series of abuses they fear will happen again.
On Monday, August 8, a policeman approached the barracks and kicked the cauldron over which breakfast was being prepared. He warned them that they must leave the battlefield. they are not.
On Tuesday the 9th, several policemen and security guards from the mining company confiscated all their belongings, unzipped the shed and set it on fire.
On Wednesday, the 10th, the family spent the night outdoors in the pastures of Pampa. They cover themselves with itchu to protect themselves from the cold.
high. Maxima Acuna lives at an altitude of 4000 meters above sea level. It took a four-hour wagon ride from Cajamarca through valleys, hills and precipices to get to his house.
On Thursday the 11th, a hundred police officers in helmets, protective shields, batons and shotguns went to deport them. They came with an excavator. Maxima Acuna’s youngest daughter, Gilda Chaupe, knelt in front of the car to prevent her from entering the field. While some policemen tried to separate her, others beat her mother and brother. The sergeant hit Gilda in the back of the head with a shotgun butt, knocking her unconscious, and the frightened squad backed away. The eldest daughter, Isidora Shoup, recorded the rest of the scene on her phone’s camera. A video that runs for several minutes can be seen on YouTube of his mother screaming and his sister falling unconscious to the ground. Yanacocha engineers watch from afar, next to their truck. The police in line are about to leave. The meteorologists said it was the coldest day of the year in Cajamarca. Chaupe-Acuñas spent the night outside in minus seven degrees.
The mining company has repeatedly denied the allegations to judges and reporters. They demand proof. Maxima Akunya has only medical certificates and photographs confirming the bruises left on her arms and knees. On the same day, the police wrote a bill accusing the family of attacking eight non-commissioned officers with sticks, stones and a machete, while admitting that they had no right to deport them without permission from the prosecutor’s office.
“Have you heard that the lagoon is for sale?” Maxima Akunya asked, holding a heavy stone in her hand, “or that the river has been sold, the spring has been sold and banned?”
Maxima Acuña’s struggle gained supporters in Peru and abroad after her case was covered by the media, but also had doubters and enemies. For Yanacocha, she is a usurper of the land. To the thousands of farmers and environmental activists in Cajamarca, she was the Lady of the Blue Lagoon, who started calling her when her rebellion gained notoriety. The old parable of David versus Goliath has become inevitable: the words of a peasant woman versus the most powerful gold miner in Latin America. But in reality, everyone is at risk: the Maxima Acuña case collides with a different vision of what we call progress.
[quote_right] Before becoming a wrestling icon, she was nervous speaking in front of the authorities. He hardly learned to defend himself in front of the judge [/ quote_right]
Aside from the steel pan she uses for cooking and the platinum prosthetics she shows off when she smiles, Maxima Acuña has no other valuable metal objects. No ring, no bracelet, no necklace. No fantasy, no precious metal. It was difficult for him to understand people’s fascination with gold. No other mineral seduces or confuses the human imagination more than the metallic flash of the chemical symbol Au. Looking back at any book of world history, it is enough to be convinced that the desire to own it gave rise to wars and conquests, strengthened empires and razed mountains and forests to the ground. Gold is with us today, from dentures to components for mobile phones and laptops, from coins and trophies to gold bars in bank vaults. Gold is not vital to any living being. Most importantly, it feeds our vanity and our illusions about safety: about 60% of the gold mined in the world ends up in jewelry. Thirty percent is used as financial support. Its main advantages – lack of rust, does not tarnish, does not deteriorate over time – make it one of the most desirable metals. The problem is that there is less and less gold left.
From childhood, we imagined that gold was mined in tons and hundreds of trucks were transporting it to bank vaults in the form of ingots, but in fact it was a scarce metal. If we could collect and melt down all the gold we’ve ever had, it would barely be enough for two Olympic swimming pools. However, one ounce of gold—enough to make an engagement ring—requires about forty tons of mud, enough to fill thirty moving trucks. The richest deposits on Earth are depleted, making it difficult to find new veins. Almost all the ore to be mined – the third basin – is buried under the desert mountains and lagoons. The landscape left behind by mining is a stark contrast: while the holes left by mining companies in the ground are so large that they can be seen from space, the extracted particles are so small that up to two hundred can fit on a needle. One of the last gold reserves in the world is located under the hills and lagoons of Cajamarca, the northern highlands of Peru, where the Yanacocha mining company has been operating since the late 20th century.
[quote_left]The Conga project will be a lifesaver for businessmen: milestones before and after[/quote_left]
Peru is the largest gold exporter in Latin America and the sixth largest in the world after China, Australia and the United States. This is partly due to the country’s gold reserves and investments from multinational corporations such as Denver giant Newmont Corp., arguably the richest mining company on the planet, owning more than half of Yanacocha. In one day, Yanacocha dug up about 500,000 tons of earth and stones, equivalent to the weight of 500 Boeing 747s. The entire mountain range disappeared within a few weeks. As of the end of 2014, an ounce of gold was worth about $1,200. To extract the amount needed to make earrings, about 20 tons of waste is produced with traces of chemicals and heavy metals. There’s a reason this waste is toxic: cyanide must be poured onto disturbed soil in order to extract the metal. Cyanide is a deadly poison. An amount the size of a grain of rice is enough to kill a human, and a millionth of a gram dissolved in a liter of water can kill dozens of fish in a river. Yanacocha Mining Company insists on storing cyanide inside the mine and disposing of it in accordance with the highest safety standards. Many residents of Cajamarca do not believe that these chemical processes are so pure. To prove that their fears were not absurd or anti-mining, they told the story of Valgar York, a mining province where two rivers were red and no one else was swimming. Or in San Andrés de Negritos, where the lagoon supplying the population with water was polluted by charred oil spilled from a mine. Or in the city of Choro Pampa, a mercury truck accidentally spilled poison, poisoning hundreds of families. As an economic activity, certain types of mining are inevitable and essential to our lives. However, even the most technologically advanced and least environmentally damaging mining industry around the world is considered dirty. For Yanacocha, who already has experience in Peru, cleaning up his misconception about the environment can be as difficult as resurrecting a trout from a polluted lake.
The community’s failure worries mining investors, but not as much as the possibility of their profits being cut. According to Yanacocha, only four years of gold remained in his active mines. The Conga project, which makes up almost a quarter of Lima’s area, will allow business to continue. Yanacocha explained that he would have to drain four lagoons, but he would build four reservoirs that would be fed by rainwater. According to his environmental impact study, this is enough to provide 40,000 people with drinking water from rivers drawn from these sources. The mining company will mine gold for 19 years, but has promised to hire about 10,000 people and invest nearly $5 billion, bringing more tax revenue to the country. This is your offer. Entrepreneurs will receive more dividends and Peru will have more money to invest in jobs and employment. A promise of prosperity for all.
[quote_box_right]Some say that Maxima Akunya’s story was used by anti-miners against the development of the country[/quote_box_right]
But just as politicians and opinion leaders support the project on economic grounds, there are engineers and environmentalists who oppose it on public health grounds. Water management experts such as Robert Moran of the University of Texas and Peter Koenig, a former World Bank staffer, explain that the twenty lagoons and six hundred springs that exist in the Konga project area form an interconnected water supply system. The circulatory system, formed over millions of years, feeds the rivers and irrigates the meadows. Experts explain that the destruction of the four lagoons will forever affect the entire complex. Unlike the rest of the Andes, in the northern highlands of Peru, where Maxima Acuna lives, no amount of glaciers can provide enough water for its inhabitants. The lagoons of these mountains are natural reservoirs. The black soil and grass act like a long sponge, absorbing rain and moisture from the fog. From here springs and rivers were born. Over 80% of Peru’s water is used for agriculture. In the Central Basin of Cajamarca, according to a 2010 Ministry of Agriculture report, mining used almost half of the water used by the region’s population in one year. Today, thousands of farmers and ranchers are worried that gold mining will pollute their only source of water.
In Cajamarca and two other provinces participating in the project, the walls of some streets are covered with graffiti: “Konga no va”, “Water yes, gold no”. 2012 was the busiest year for Yanacocha protests, with pollster Apoyo announcing that eight out of 10 Kahamakan residents opposed the project. In Lima, where Peru’s political decisions are made, prosperity gives the illusion that the country will continue to line its pockets with money. But this is only possible if Konga leaves. Otherwise, some opinion leaders warn, disaster will follow. “If the Konga doesn’t go, it’s like kicking yourself in the foot,” [1] Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, a former economics minister who is a presidential candidate, will run against Keiko Fujimori in the second round of the June 2016 general election. , he wrote in the article, “Among entrepreneurs, the Conga project will be a lifesaver: milestones before and after.” For farmers like Maxima Acuna, it also marked a turning point in their history: if they lost their main wealth, their lives would never be the same again. Some say that anti-mining groups opposed to the development of the country took advantage of the story of Maxima Acuña. However, local news has long clouded the optimism of those who want to invest at any cost: according to the Office of the Ombudsman, as of February 2015, an average of seven out of ten social conflicts in Peru were caused by mining. Over the past three years, every fourth Kahamakan has lost his job. Officially Cajamarca is the most gold-mining, but the poorest region of the country.
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Post time: Aug-22-2022