Rinconada, Peru is a poison trap lined with gold

Gold is a metal that is often associated with wealth and power. People do not, however, often think about what methods are used to mine gold.

For a community of 30,000 to 40,000 in La Rinconada, Peru, the very methods and lifestyles they use to harvest gold causesconcerning environmental and social conditions.

According to the Telegraph, ambitious people move to La Rinconada for the chance to get lucky and discover a vein of gold big enough to make them rich. Richard Arpita Uchiri, a miner at La Riconada since 2010, said, “The luck of finding a good quantity of gold, the luck of finding a hidden vein. This is the motivation for all of us who are working here.” Miners in La Riconada work for a company for up to 30 days at a time and afterward are allowed to mine for themselves for a week and keep any gold that they find.

Miners can, however, cause their bodies permanent harm by working in the mines. The dust particles from the mines can lead to silicosis, a respiratory disease that causes scarring and leaves its victims fighting for breath. The silicosis from working in the mines is the cause of 50% to 60% of deaths from workers. Uchiri said “Not even the personal protective equipment can protect you against this dust…That’s why so many of us chew coca leaves: not only does it help with the altitude, it also works as a filter. You see it when you spit it out: it comes out black. That’s the dust of the mine.”

Women are not allowed in the mines, so they spend most of the day looking for tiny portions of gold in whatever the miners do not process. While searching the rubble of the site, the women face extreme cold, poor back posture and the risk of deadly landslides.

The people of La Rinconata who do not work in the mines also have to deal with the hazardous effects of the mines and the natural landscape on their everyday lives.

According to the Telegraph, the roads leading up to La Rinconada are filled with decades of accumulated waste that puts off a constant rotting aroma for the residents to live and work in. Because of the excessive amount of trash, the land has become filled with impurities and is swarmed with seagulls and vultures.

La Rinconada is located 5285 meters above sea level and extremely cold. There is no plumbing or running water, so in order to survive, the residents must use chamber pots and melt snow for water. Because the residents must resort to chamber pots, the streets that were already haunted by the fields of trash nearby, must also give off their own aroma of human waste. The altitude at which the people of La Rinconada live also causes them to have discolored lips and fingers from an accumulation of red blood cells to accommodate for the lack of oxygen.

The waste from the residents of La Rinconada also soaks its way into the nearby streams and groundwater, polluting the water with enough harmful bacteria to give locals severe diarrhea. The polluted water can even spread to towns and villages down the mountain and harm them as well.

According to the Telegraph, one part of the mining process in La Rinconada is the use of mercury to accelerate the isolation of gold, but the chemical is extremely toxic and can severely damage people’s nervous systems. Mercury has made its way into the local water systems and even causes acid rain. The laws governing how much mercury the miners can use are poorly regulated, and smugglers import tens of thousands of dollars' worth of mercury.

Mercury has even leeched its way into the water systems of local farmers, which can make the pH of the water reach four and a half, which is the same pH as most tomatoes. Pure drinking water, which can be found flowing from the river that enters La Rinconada, is measured at a pH of eight. The discrepancy of the pH of the water alongside various impurities including mercury, lead, arsenic and manganese leads to many of the local farmer’s stock dying.

According to Felix Suasca Suasca, a local leader in La Rinconada, “The fauna and the flora have disappeared, you can only find a swamp of faeces and heavy metals for around 30 kilometres.”

The quality of life in La Rinconada is heartbreakingly miserable. The thought that 40,000 people would have to live in a place with acid water, a terrible stench, freezing temperatures and the threat of death at a moment's notice by several afflictions caused by your daily environment is shattering. The people who live in La Rinconada and the neighboring towns suffer at the hands of the very mining operations that people move there for. The community of La Rinconada, especially with newer developments in gold mining, deserves a better life.