The Cost of Gold | Treasure of Yanacocha - Tangled
Strands in Fight Over Peru Gold Mine
By JANE PERLEZ and LOWELL BERGMAN - THE NEW YORK TIMES:
SAN CERILLO, Peru - The Rev. Marco Arana drove his beige pickup over the curves
of a dirt road 13,000 feet high in the Andes. Spread out below lay the
Yanacocha gold mine, an American-run operation of mammoth open pits and
towering heaps of cyanide-laced ore. Ahead loomed the pristine green of
untouched hills.
Then, an unmistakable sign that this land, too, may soon be devoured: Policemen
with black masks and automatic rifles guarding workers exploring ground that
the mine's owner, Newmont Mining Corporation, has
deemed the next best hope. "This is the Roman peace the company has with
the people: They put in an army and say we have peace," said Father Arana
as he surveyed the land where gold lies beneath the surface like tiny beads on
a string. Yanacocha is Newmont's prize possession,
the most productive gold mine in the world. But if history holds one lesson, it
is that where there is gold, there is conflict, and the more gold, the more
conflict.
Newmont, which has pulled more than 19 million ounces
of gold from these gently sloping Peruvian hills - over $7 billion worth -
believes that they hold several million ounces more. But where Newmont sees a new reserve of wealth - to keep Yanacocha
profitable and to stay ahead of its competitors - the local farmers and cattle
grazers see sacred mountains, cradles of the water that sustains their highland
lives. The armed guards are here because of what happened in the fall of 2004
at a nearby mountain called Cerro Quilish. For two weeks, fearing that the
company's plans to expand Yanacocha would mean Quilish's
desecration and destruction, thousands of local people laid siege to the mine. Women
and children were arrested, tear gas was thrown, the wounded hospitalized after
clashes with the police.
In the end, the world's No. 1 gold-mining company backed down. Father Arana,
who runs a local group formed to challenge the mine, helped negotiate the terms
of surrender. Newmont withdrew its drilling equipment
from Quilish - and the promised reserves from its books. Now, in large part
because of the loss of Quilish, the company says production at Yanacocha may
fall 35 percent or more in two years.
The forced retreat, a culmination of years of distrust between the peasants and
the mine, was a chastening blow for an industry in the midst of a boom. It
underscored the environmental and social costs of the technologies needed to
extract the ever-more-valuable ore from modern mines. And it showed how a
rising global backlash against those costs was forcing mining companies to
negotiate what has come to be known as "social license" if that boom
was to go on.
But the history of Yanacocha, pieced together in a six-month examination by The
New York Times and the PBS television program "FrontlineWorld,"
is also an excursion into the moral ambiguities that often attend when a
first-world company does business in a third-world land. Gold miners say they
have no choice but to go where the ore is; they cannot choose the governments
they deal with. Yanacocha shows how one company maneuvered
in a country, Peru, dominated by a secret web of power under a corrupt
autocracy. Newmont gained undisputed control of
Yanacocha in 2000 after years of back-room legal wrangling. Behind the scenes, Newmont and its adversaries - a French company and its
Australian ally - reached into the upper levels of the American, French and
Peruvian governments, employing a cast of former and active intelligence
officials, including Peru's ruthless secret police chief, Vladimiro
Montesinos.
Much of that arm-twisting has been dragged into the light, in secret recordings
by the spy chief. The tapes, apparently intended to blackmail and manipulate
Peru's powerbrokers, surfaced in 2000 and led to the downfall of Mr. Montesinos and the president he served, Alberto K. Fujimori. The tapes captured everything from plotting to
fix elections to shopping bags of money being unloaded for payoffs in Mr. Montesinos's office at the Peruvian National Intelligence
Agency.
They captured Newmont's maneuverings,
too. In one audio recording, the No. 3 Newmont
executive at the time, Lawrence T. Kurlander, is heard
offering to do a favor for Mr. Montesinos.
"Now you have a friend for life," Mr. Kurlander
tells the spy chief. "You have a friend for life also," Mr. Montesinos replies.
Last year, a Justice Department investigation into whether Newmont's
victory resulted from bribing foreign officials was dropped after the Peruvian
government failed to cooperate fully and the statute of limitations expired,
according to law enforcement officials familiar with the case. The Peruvian
government investigated the Yanacocha affair without bringing charges. Mr. Kurlander has agreed to speak out publicly about his
meeting for the first time. He says he regrets seeking out Mr. Montesinos, now in jail charged with everything from
corruption to gun running and drug trafficking. But Mr. Kurlander
and Newmont are adamant that no bribes were paid,
nothing illicit done, at least not by them or their allies.
"Everybody involved on the American side, in the American government, that
went to see him or spoke to him, asked for a level playing field," said
Mr. Kurlander, who retired in 2002. "Not a
single person asked for him to influence the outcome of the case." Newmont's senior executives declined repeated requests for
interviews for this article, though they did allow Times reporters to make an
extensive visit to the Yanacocha mine. But in a written statement, Newmont said of its legal battle for the mine, "We are
satisfied that the company complied in all respects with applicable laws."
Whatever the past environmental problems, Newmont
says Yanacocha now meets all Peruvian and international standards. And the
company says it is committed to gaining and maintaining the approval of the
community. Still, to many of the local people, the continuing struggle for
Yanacocha evokes a tale of treachery nearly any Peruvian school child can
recite.
In 1532, the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro captured the last Inca
emperor, Atahualpa, in Cajamarca, the provincial capital 28 miles from
Yanacocha. The young Inca, a god to his people, was held for months while he
scrambled to amass a ransom: enough gold to fill a room as high as his arm
could reach. He turned over his gold, expecting to be freed. But Pizarro killed
him anyway.
Living on Water
At first, people here saw possibility in the mine. Yanacocha - "black
lake" in the indigenous Quechua tongue - sits in one of the poorest
agricultural regions of Peru.
"When Yanacocha began its operations, we would only hear about how
everyone was happy," Father Arana said. "The mine was going to bring
jobs, improve roads." No one thought much, he said, about the inevitable
collisions. The collisions began almost immediately.
In the Andean peasants' universe, water is the heart of the land. The people
depend on it - for their animals, for drinking, for bathing. Community life is
organized around it. But the mine lives on water, too. The bits of gold here,
so small they are called "invisible gold," can be mined profitably
only by blasting mountains, then culling the gold with vast quantities of
cyanide diluted with similarly vast quantities of water.
It was not long before the peasants began to complain. Streams and canals were
drying up, they said. They were filled with murky sediment. The water smelled
foul.
But on the ledger books, Yanacocha was a fast success. The mine had started
with 1.3 million ounces of reserves in the ground. Within a year, it claimed
over 3 million. It was the biggest foreign investment in Peru. "Everywhere
we drilled and looked, there was gold," said Len Harris, Yanacocha's first general manager.
Dueling Companies
Celebration soon gave way to strife.
A year before, a partnership had been formed to develop the mine: Newmont; a Peruvian partner, Buenaventura; and a French
government-owned company, Bureau de Recherches Géologiques et Minières (BRGM). No
partner had a controlling interest. The World Bank's investment arm, the
International Finance Corporation, later took a 5 percent stake, hoping to
promote development in a country plagued by economic chaos and roiled by a
Maoist insurgent group, Shining Path.
With the mine expanding and the guerrilla leader captured, BRGM announced plans
to sell a large part of its increasingly valuable stake to an Australia-based
company, Normandy Poseidon. Newmont, considering the
involvement of another major mining company unacceptable, sued, arguing that
the partnership agreement gave it and Buenaventura first right of refusal on
any sale.
Twice, Peruvian courts agreed. Then, in September of 1997, the Peruvian Supreme
Court issued a startling ruling, agreeing to review a case Newmont
thought it had definitively won. Stunned and suspicious, the company called in
Mr. Kurlander. Mr. Kurlander,
then 56, had spent most of his life in government, as a prosecutor and as chief
criminal-justice adviser to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo in New York. He later moved to
corporate work and was recruited by Newmont in 1994. He
had no experience in mining, but in an industry known for its rough edges, he
became a top Newmont executive, valued for his
political contacts and easy ability to walk between the halls of government and
the corporate suite. On his arrival in Peru, Mr. Kurlander
says, he was told by Newmont's lawyers and security
chief that the French were "behaving inappropriately in the
litigation." "The mere fact that they were doing this," he said
in an interview, "was unseemly at best and corrupt at worst."
Newmont, he said, was at a distinct disadvantage: the
Foreign Corrupt Practices Act forbids American companies to pay anything of
value to a foreign official in exchange for a "result." By contrast,
in 1997, most European countries, France included, did not prohibit paying
bribes. The French ambassador to Peru at the time, Antoine Blanca, said in an
interview that no one connected to the embassy had ever offered bribes or
otherwise acted improperly. Still, what emerges from documents and interviews
with participants is a picture of three years of increasing pressure and
intimated threats by Normandy and the government of France.
In the Peruvian press, the French ambassador insinuated corruption of the
judiciary; French government emissaries suggested to Peruvian officials that
there would be consequences if Newmont was awarded
the disputed shares. Normandy recruited Patrick Maugein,
a well-connected French businessman. By phone, fax and letter, Mr. Maugein placed Newmont and
Buenaventura on notice that the dispute had become a "matter of
state"; the French, he warned, "had every intention of fighting it to
the bitter end." Mr. Maugein had ties to the
French president, Jacques Chirac, and soon Mr. Chirac wrote to President Fujimori, urging a Supreme Court review and his personal
intervention.
Mr. Maugein declined to be interviewed for this
article, but in a letter wrote that any allegations of illicit activity
"come from people who have been paid to make them."
From Lima, in the days after the Supreme Court agreed to take the case, Mr. Kurlander headed to Washington to enlist help on the
American side. By the end of October 1997, Stuart E. Eizenstat,
under secretary of state for economic affairs, wrote Peru's prime minister to
press for "a fair and impartial hearing," according to documents
released under the Freedom of Information Act. "A politically tainted
decision would adversely affect U.S. investment in Peru," he wrote
On Jan. 5, 1998, Peru's Supreme Court came back with a preliminary decision; 3
to 2 for the French, one vote shy of victory. As the Peruvians prepared to
assign two more judges to the case, Mr. Kurlander
says, he and Buenaventura's chief, Alberto Benavides, appealed to Mr. Fujimori. Soon after, Mr. Kurlander
said, the president's office sent word about the man to see.
Spy Chief's Favor Bank
Vladimiro Montesinos's
titles never matched his stature. Officially, he was "counselor"
to Mr. Fujimori and de facto head of the National
Intelligence Service. In reality, he was the second-most-powerful man in Peru -
"Rasputin, Darth Vadar, Torquemada
and Cardinal Richelieu" rolled into one, according to an American Army
intelligence report. The National Intelligence Service was also on the payroll
of the C.I.A., which gave Mr. Montesinos a million
dollars a year for his supposed help in combating the narcotics trade,
according to former C.I.A. officials who approved the payments.
This was the man Mr. Kurlander headed to see alone on
Feb. 26, 1998. While he says he knew that Mr. Montesinos
was "an extremely bad man," he maintains that the extent of the
government's corruption and human rights abuses were not well known at the
time. There was, however, one case he was aware of. Not long before, the Fujimori government had seized the television station of a
Peruvian-Israeli businessman, Baruch Ivcher, after it
began broadcasting reports tying the intelligence chief to drug trafficking and
corruption. Mr. Kurlander knew that publicity about
the case was threatening to become a headache for Peru's government. As the
secret tape rolls, Mr. Montesinos says he is aware of
Mr. Kurlander's problems and is "very glad to do
whatever I can for you."
Mr. Kurlander describes his own links to the
intelligence community and how he has enlisted "friends" - two former
C.I.A. officials - to assist him, because the French side "has been acting
quite strangely." Their conversation is interpreted by Grace Riggs, a
lawyer and former lover of the spy chief who had a child with him.
Soon Mr. Kurlander raises the Ivcher
case. Mr. Montesinos assures him that the pursuit of
Mr. Ivcher is not an anti-Semitic
"persecution," and Mr. Kurlander offers to
help by lobbying his fellow Jews in the United States and abroad. "Tell
him I going to help him with the voting," Mr. Montesinos
directs his translator. He is well aware of the "tricky practices of the
French government," he says, making a joke about "The French
Connection."
The reference, in English, gets the men laughing. Soon spy chief and executive
are pledging friendship for life. The spy chief then proceeds to discuss with
another man, who has never been identified, the lawyers and judges who may need
to be influenced. The conversation is in Spanish, which Ms. Riggs does not
translate.
Finally, she tells Mr. Kurlander that because he
helps Mr. Montesinos "without expecting anything
in return," the spy chef "wants to do the same thing for you." "I
appreciate that," Mr. Kurlander replies. "Amor con amor se paga," Mr. Montesinos
exclaims. Love is repaid with love.Still, Mr. Kurlander says, he had doubts. In the following weeks,
"nothing happened," he said. "I was very worried that we were
lost." In fact, the channel between Mr. Montesinos
and the Americans was open and bustling.
Peter Romero, then assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs,
acknowledged in an interview that he had twice called Mr. Montesinos
to show that the case was being "monitored" in Washington. "He
seemed to be a nice enough fellow," he recalled. The "compelling
reason" to get involved, he said, came from Peruvian and American Embassy
officials who confirmed the direct involvement of President Chirac and others
at the top of the French government. "We wanted to ensure that that was
neutralized," Mr. Romero said.
Two and a half years later, Mr. Romero left government and was hired by Mr. Kurlander as a consultant on Peru for Newmont,
where he remained for 18 months.
On April 14, six weeks after the Montesinos-Kurlander
meeting, the video cameras were rolling for a visit from the C.I.A. station
chief, Don Arabian. As the meeting nears its end, Mr. Montesinos
says he has been collecting information on the French attempt to influence the
case and will not let them use "extortion, blackmail and other
gangster" methods. "I'm not working with the telephones, but we will
if necessary," Mr. Montesinos says, an apparent
reference to wiretapping. "We'll sort out the technical support." The
men laugh. Mr. Arabian, who recently retired, declined a request for an
interview. On May 8, the sixth Supreme Court justice voted in favor of Newmont and
Buenaventura. With the vote deadlocked, 3-3, the court administrator appointed
a final judge, Jaime Beltrán Quiroga.
He was summoned the next day by Mr. Montesinos.
A videotape shows the justice settled on the couch as
Mr. Montesinos talks about how, as a lawyer he, too,
would normally "keep a distance" from events. But "in these
cases," he says, "one has to intervene directly." Mr. Montesinos avoids direct pressure - "as if we are
imposing on you" - but reminds the judge that the case is a matter of
national interest: the United States is a key guarantor of coming deliberations
over Peru's border conflict with Ecuador. There is no discussion of payoffs,
but the spy chief does question the judge about his professional ambitions. The
men reminisce. "Well, doctor, you have a friend here," Judge Beltrán says.
"My dear, Jaime, then, a pleasure to see you, brother," Mr. Montesinos replies, assuring his guest that he will soon be
transferred to Peru's Constitutional Court.
Judge Beltrán's vote was announced two weeks later: Newmont and Buenaventura were awarded BRGM's
share - at the purchase price set in 1993: $109.7 million.
When the final transfer was negotiated a year later, the stake was valued at
more than five times that. Today Mr. Kurlander says
that whatever his reservations at the time about meeting Mr. Montesinos, he went ahead because nearly everyone told him,
"If the French were to be stopped, he was the only one in Peru who would
dare to do it." The transcript is "terribly unfair," Mr. Kurlander says, and leaves out a number of his statements
that all he wanted was a "level playing field."
Mr. Kurlander's name has been attached to the meeting
and his reputation harmed, he says, though he insists the meeting was no
secret. He says his Newmont superiors and his
partners in the Benavides family were thoroughly briefed. "It was my
government who recommended - strongly - that we speak with him," Mr. Kurlander said at his home outside Denver. "Tell me
what my option is at that point. Do I lay down and just fold, fold up and go
home? Or do I fight for what I think is right and fair and just?" In an
interview at his Lima offices, Mr. Benavides, now Buenaventura's chief
executive, insisted, "We didn't know what Mr. Kurlander
was doing," and added that he did not learn about the Montesinos
meeting until the tape was made public several years later.
The Mercury Spill
At Yanacocha, year after year, the mine's geologists had kept striking gold. And
with every ton of earth sifted, it became ever clearer that the mine had not
just ripped up the landscape; it had remade the social architecture, too. There
were growing class divisions, between the many campesinos
who had received well-paying jobs - Yanacocha would eventually employ as many
as 2,200 people, two-thirds locals, full time, and up to 6,000 on shorter-term
contracts - and the tens of thousands more who had not. People migrating to the
region in pursuit of work brought overcrowding and rising crime. In June 2000,
a truck contracted to carry canisters of mercury, a byproduct
of mining, spilled 330 pounds of the poisonous metal over 25 miles of road
around Choropampa, 53 miles from the mine.
The villagers believed that the mercury was mixed with gold. They scooped it
up. Some took it home to cook on their stoves. A World Bank report later said
the mine delayed reporting the accident to the national authorities and
initially played down its seriousness to the bank. In the end, the Peruvian
government fined the mine $500,000; the company says it has paid $18 million
more. A class-action suit has been filed against Newmont
in Denver, charging that more than 1,000 people were harmed, some for life. The
extent of that damage has been in dispute from the start. Even so, the spill
left deep psychic scars. It became common mythology that mercury had killed
newborn babies and caused cancer and other diseases, Dante Vera, a former
Peruvian Interior Ministry official hired in 2004 as an adviser to Newmont, wrote in a report to company executives. At Newmont, it was becoming increasingly clear that the social
turmoil was a business problem. The spill, Mr. Kurlander
said in a speech a year later, "served as a wake-up call for us." Soon,
he was headed back to Peru, to lead an environmental audit of the mine.
Newmont kept the audit's results within the company,
never acknowledging them publicly - either to its shareholders or to the local
people. Mr. Kurlander found "a high level of
mistrust" of the mine. But the 44 findings of Mr. Kurlander's
audit, which was given to The Times, also confirmed many of the villagers'
specific complaints: that fish were disappearing and that lakes, streams and
canals were being contaminated, at least one with cyanide. One stream, Quebrada Honda, had 13 fish per kilometer
in 1997, but none by 2000, the audit said. Thousand of tons of rock not
processed for gold recovery were generating dangerous acidic runoffs.
In a letter after the audit, Mr. Kurlander says that
as the mine expanded, "we eliminated many environmental safeguards that
were in the construction and environmental management plans." In all, he
wrote to Newmont's new chief executive, Wayne Murdy, the findings were so serious that they could jeopardize
the mine's continued operation and leave senior executives subject to
"criminal prosecution and imprisonment."
Mr. Kurlander's tough words came on the heels of
another memo to Mr. Murdy about the spill: On Jan.
18, 2001, Mr. Kurlander recommended that all the top
executives, including himself and his boss, take cuts in their bonuses, of 50
to 100 percent, and that the punishment be made public. Mr. Kurlander
singled out the company's environmental team, saying that despite public
pledges, Newmont had failed to adhere to American
environmental standards. To his disappointment, Mr. Kurlander
said, some bonuses were indeed reduced, but without public notice and much more
modestly than he had recommended. In a letter to Mr. Kurlander
three years later, Mr. Murdy said the company had
learned from the accident and the audit. Newmont, he
said, spent $100 million to fix the environmental problems, including $50
million for a water-treatment plant and $20 million on two dams to prevent
sediment from clogging streams and canals. Mercury is now shipped inside
triple-sealed, stainless-steel containers and escorted by a convoy of cars. To
Mr. Kurlander, the spill showed the folly of a
company ignoring the people, particularly the people most set against the mine.
In a memo, he warned that with the mine sunk so low in the peasants' esteem, Newmont would never be able to mine Quilish.
"We have come to this because we have been in denial," he wrote. "We
have not heeded the voices of those most intimate with our mine - those who
live and work nearby." It was less than a year after the audit that he
retired.
The Peasants Protest
The protests began not long after people began seeing the drilling machines up
on the cone-shaped hill above Cajamarca.
Quilish had long been on Newmont's drawing boards.
Last year, Newmont mined three million ounces at
Yanacocha, its most profitable single source of gold. But the more it pulls
from the ground, the more it must replace to remain No. 1.
Back in 2000, the local government had passed an ordinance declaring Quilish
and its watershed a protected natural reserve. But Newmont
had persuaded a Peruvian court that it had the right to mine because it had
acquired the concession years before. In August 2004, the machines moved in.
To many people, that was the final betrayal, said Mr. Vera, the former Newmont consultant. He quit this summer, saying his advice
had been ignored.
On Sept. 2, deploying boulders, vehicles, anything they could find, hundreds of
campesinos blockaded the narrow mountain road that
runs from Cajamarca to the mine.
Several hundred armed officers, including 150 special operations police
officers from Lima, were sent in to guard the mine.
The first day was the most violent; protesters were arrested, many of them
women and old people, according to Father Arana's
colleague, Jorge Camacho. At times during the siege, the police used tear gas. One
man was shot in the leg. The company kept the gold coming out of Yanacocha, but
only by helicoptering the workers in. On Sept. 15,
there was a regionwide strike, with street
demonstrations in Cajamarca. The message, on one of the blizzard of placards in
town, was: "Listen Yanacocha. Cajamarca is to be respected."
The protests were organized by the peasants themselves, Mr. Camacho and others
say. But the 43-year-old Father Arana, son of teachers from Cajamarca, had been
nurturing the movement for many years, even before he founded his group,
Grufides, in the late 1990's. (These days, it receives financial assistance
from Oxfam.)
The campesinos call him Father Marco, and he is a
devoted adherent of liberation theology and its doctrine of social activism for
the poor. He is not the easiest of men. Last spring, he met Newmont's
chief, Mr. Murdy, on the sidelines of the company's
annual general meeting in Denver. As the priest recalls it, Mr. Murdy tried to be conciliatory, saying he lived by his
mother's motto: "We are given one mouth but two ears to listen with."
Father Marco says he rebuffed the overture, replying, "In the Bible, there
is a saying about some people have eyes that don't see and ears that don't
hear." As the siege ran on at Yanacocha, the priest became a key
negotiator between Newmont, the peasants and the
Ministry of Mines. It was not long after the demonstrations in Cajamarca that
the company surrendered. The machines came down from Quilish. At Newmont's request, the ministry withdrew its permit, too. What
remains up on the mountain is a symbolic wall of mud and straw that the campesinos built to keep the miners at bay.
Standing down at Quilish, with its 3.8 million ounces of reserves, has only
intensified the need for new reserves. "The pressure feels like you're
laying track and knowing there's a locomotive right behind you," said the
mine's exploration manager, Lewis Teal. So Newmont is
looking elsewhere, in the highlands near San Cerillo,
where the jade-green lagoons and peaty grasses act as a store of water for the
peasants below. Many people there worry about the effects of a new mine. Which
is why, after Quilish, Newmont is paying for the
Peruvian police units protecting the drilling team, said the mine's manager,
Brant Hinze. Even so, Mr. Hinze
said, leaving Quilish was the right thing to do. "The thing that the
company did - both Newmont and Buenaventura - is
listen to the communities, and they said this is something we want you to stay
away from," he said. Newmont's Peruvian partner,
Mr. Benavides, argued that exploration of Quilish had not been abandoned,
simply suspended.
"We have the concession, and we have the land," he said. He added:
"I do not understand what social license means. I expect a license from
the authorities, from the minister of mines. I expect a license from the
regional government. I don't expect a license from the whole community." Still,
the idea of social license is at the heart of the agreement that ended the
siege: If Newmont hopes ever to mine Quilish, it
first must win the community's consent.
Company Social Work
So to promote Yanacocha's well-being and expansion,
Mr. Hinze has become the kind of mine manager he
never imagined being. He says he had asked for the job running Yanacocha
because of its sheer scale - "it's big, it's profitable," is how he
puts it. Fifty years old, silver-haired and steely eyed, 6 foot 3 and 255
pounds, he is a man of scale himself. His idea of recreation, he says, is
riding his Harley or swimming with hammerhead sharks. Now, he says, he spends
70 to 80 percent of his working time on social issues. On a recent day, he ate
roasted guinea pig at a lunch with a peasant group. A few days later, he
attended a ceremony celebrating a gift of $500,000 for a new road around San Cerillo.
"Modern mining can coexist with cattle, agriculture and tourism," he
told one gathering. "Today we begin a new history for communities around
here." Newmont says that it paid $180 million in
taxes to Peru's government last year, and that under a new law, half was
returned to the Cajamarca region. But to its frustration, the company says, the
local government has largely been unable to use the money to benefit the people
- and most of the people here remain achingly poor. So the company, albeit
ambivalently, has become something of a surrogate government. It is
contributing money for schools and clinics and building some small water
treatment plants in the villages. In all, the company says it will spend nearly
$20 million this year on social programs. Water remains a divisive issue:
Father Arana and his allies argue that a new, every-three-weeks testing
protocol is insufficiently independent. The peasants continue to complain.
But company and local officials say there have been no environmental accidents
at Yanacocha in more than two years, and the mine says it manages its water to
ensure there is enough for the community. But the biggest issue is the one
looming over every modern industrial gold mine: What happens when the ore that
lured the miners here is gone? Over 13 years, Newmont
has moved mountains for gold - 30 tons of rock and earth for every ounce. By
the time it is through, the company will have dug up a billion tons of earth. Much
of it will be laced with acids and heavy metals.
Three years ago, after Newmont acknowledged that
36,700 fish were missing from a river contaminated by the mine, the World Bank
hired an American geochemist, Ann Maest, to study the
streams and canals flowing from the mine. In the short term, she concluded, the
water was safe for human use. But long term, she said in an interview, the
company's own tests show that all the components are in place for the huge
piles of rock to leak acids that will pollute surface and groundwater.
The only preventive, she said, would be "perpetual treatment." Mr. Hinze, who was recently appointed head of Newmont's North American operations, insists that the
company's plan for closing the mine will take care of long-term treatment and
cleanup. "We plan on being here a very long time," he said.
Newmont has yet to put aside money for long-term
treatment, though it says it will comply with a Peruvian government requirement
due to take effect in 2007. But to pay for cleanups, the company needs to keep
profits high. To keep profits high, it needs to keep finding and mining more
gold. Yet increasingly, the unmovable reality is that to keep mining more gold,
it has to make peace with the people who will be here long after the miners
leave. Mr. Hinze and Newmont
insist that that can - in fact, must - be done, even if some people may never
be won over. "There will always be a level of mistrust," he said. "Unfortunately,
we can't please everyone."
Mr. Vera, the former Newmont consultant, is not so
confident. He says he sometimes thinks that the clash between the mine and the
peasants is so fundamental as to be beyond even the best intentions. "Mining
negatively affects the Andean cosmic vision of the unity of nature," he
said. "The conflict cannot be settled with money. Mining generates
resentments that are difficult to heal."
Marlena Telvick
and Natasha Del Toro contributed reporting for this article.
Quelle: The
New York Times, October 25, 2005