At more than 5,000 meters of altitude, resisting the cold and lack of oxygen, about 70,000 people survive chasing the dream of gold. It is in “La Rinconada”, located in the “Nevado de Ananea” in the Peruvian Andes and considered the highest city in the world, where men and women were coming for decades improvising a city of houses made of zinc amid perpetual snows.
At more than 5,000 meters of altitude, resisting the cold and lack of oxygen, about 70,000 people survive chasing the dream of gold. It is in “La Rinconada”, located in the “Nevado de Ananea” in the Peruvian Andes and considered the highest city in the world, where men and women were coming for decades improvising a city of houses made of zinc amid perpetual snows.
In La Rinconada the streets are always covered with mud. It is a swamp composed of snowmelt, the water from the sinks, drains and mercury from mining tailings; as well as the dregs of the population that are thrown into the street just like that: and finally, trash covering everything. There is no potable water, no sewer, no heating, and of course there is no waste treatment, which makes the village a large spillway. The lack of services, except for the transport and mobile telephony, makes La Rinconada an unviable village. Prostitution, killings and disappearances are the order of the day. The lack of police makes La Rinconada a lawless city, where most events remain unsolved and where the visitor who plans to travel here is advised to inform himself about the situation at the Juliaca’s police station.
Between the 70’s and 80’s La Rinconada was nothing more than a small settlement, a few impoverished peasants seeking fortune in a desert of rock and ice. The gold rush, however, caused that miners, peasants, unemployed workers and traders looking for an opportunity continued arriving during decades, regardless of weather conditions, altitude and a slave-like work system. Later the economic crisis increased the flood of miners coming from all over —tripling its population in less than ten years— in search of their golden dream.
The “Corporación Minera Ananea” (Ananea Mining Corporation) holds the concession, by governmental decree, in order to exploit the mine at the “Nevado Ananea”. They, in turn, rent the exploitation of each adit, that is to say, each gallery excavated in the mountain, to about four hundred mining operators or contractors. Each contractor subcontracts miners, who are the ones working at the adit in extreme conditions, entering inside the glacier, in galleries of more than one kilometer, where oxygen is scarce and moisture soaks to the skin. To all this, we have to add the payment system, called “cachorreo”, for which they work for the contractor twenty five days for free, and five days for personal gain. In this way it is never known how much they are going to earn at the end of the month. If you are lucky you can get a few thousand soles or get to work for free that month. They can end up indebted if the days of cachorreo are bad, so they are not able to leave the city.
Women are forbidden to enter the tunnels. Miners say the mountain is very jealous and gold disappears when they enter. Thus, one can see hundreds of women, hunched, digging into the hillside amid the newly extracted waste from the mine that trucks unload. They are the “pallaqueras”, a work only performed by women, that consist in seeking, with a hammer in hand, gold remains among the stones that nobody wants. Many of these women came following their husbands in order to take care of them and to prevent they spend their few earnings at the bars, others are single mothers who came looking for a better life for their children.
Peru is the sixth gold producer in the world and the largest producer in Latin America. And although it is the sixth country with the largest gold reserves worldwide, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, the miners of La Rinconada know they are passing through and one day the mountain will no longer give them more gold and they will have to leave.