Letter from Peru

APRIL 20, 2015 ISSUE

Tears of the Sun

The gold rush at the top of the world.
By William Finnegan

The mines at La Rinconada, a bitter-cold, mercury-

contaminated pueblo clinging to the glaciered
mountainside, are artisanal: small, unregulated, and
grossly unsafe. To stave o disaster, the miners propitiate
the mountain deities with tiny liquor bottles.
Photographs by Moises Saman / Magnum

F
rom almost anywhere in La Rinconada, you look
up and you see her: La Bella Durmiente, Sleeping
Beauty, an enormous glacier beetling above the town. Look, there are her eyes, her face, her
arm, her hip, there, Josmell Ilasaca said, his hand drawing and caressing the glaciers snowy
features against a deep-blue sky. We were standing at the precipice of a trail, known as the
Second Compuerta, that tumbles into a narrow valley north of town. Yes, now I could see the
feminine outline, a mile long, possibly two. It was magni cent. And when the snow melts,
exposing more rock, I said, the glacier turns into a skinny old hag called Awicha.

Ilasaca gave me a look, slightly surprised, unimpressed. He grunted something that I took to
be Quechua, or Aymara, for Where the hell did you hear that?

Id heard it from a sociologist in Puno, down on the Peruvian altiplano. Really, I was just
trying to buy time. I was out of breath, and the steep trail below us was full of miners,
descending and ascending. I doubted my ability to join the trac ow and keep updown
slippery rocks, through icy mud, between frozen piles of garbage. But the gold mines I had
said I wanted to see were all down this trail, in the valley between town and glacier.

Vamos, Ilasaca said. He set o, hands in pockets.

La Rinconada, population roughly fty thousand, is a ramshackle pueblo clinging to a

mountainside at the end of a long, bad road in southeastern Peru. The town is seventeen
thousand feet above sea levelthe highest-elevation human settlement in the world. (The
next highest is in Tibet.) Above it rises the Cordillera Apolobamba, an ice-capped Andean
range that runs southeast into Bolivia. The Incas mined gold in these mountains, as did
many people before them, and the Spanish after them. Gold-bearing quartz veinsquijo, in
Quechuawere rst exposed by Pleistocene glaciation, and signs of ancient hard-rock gold
mining have been revealed by the retreat of the glaciers.

When I rst came to work here, this was all ice and snow, Ilasaca said. We had reached the
bottom of the Compuerta, I was sucking wind, and he was indicating the south wall of the
upper valley, which is now bare rock pierced by mine shafts and pocked by slopes of scree. In
fty years, all this may be gone, too. He meant La Bella Durmiente, and the whole network
of tropical glaciers above it.
Ilasaca, who is thirty, was twelve when he began working in the mines, alongside his father.
Like almost everyone in La Rinconada, they came from somewhere elsein their case,
Azngaro, an altiplano farm town to the southwest. When the price of gold is high, people
ock to La Rinconada from every corner of Peru and beyond. Between 2001 and 2012, the
world gold price increased sixfold, and the towns population boomed with it. Both have
dropped slightly in the past two or three years, but the town still zzes with gold fever and
the constant churn of new arrivals determined to try their luckif not in the mines, then in
the gaudy constellation of businesses that service the tens of thousands of miners.

Many mining towns are company towns. La Rinconada is the opposite. Nearly all the mines
and miners here are informal, a term that critics consider a euphemism for illegal. Ilasaca
prefers artisanal. The mines, whatever you call them, are small, numerous, unregulated, and,
as a rule, grossly unsafe. Most dont pay salaries, let alone bene ts, but run on an ancient
labor system called cachorreo. This system is usually described as thirty days of unpaid work
followed by a single frantic day in which workers get to keep whatever gold they can haul out
for themselves. I found so many variants of the scheme, howeverand so many miners
passionately attached to their variantthat the traditional description of cachorreo seems to
me inadequate. Its a lottery, but, because of pilfering, it runs every day, not once a month.

This way. I followed Ilasaca past many tiny huts of shiny corrugated tindirt- oored
worker housing in a bare-bones encampment known as Barrio Ritipata. The dark mouths of
mines now hove into view, in all sizes and states of dilapidation. Some were big enough to
drive a truck into, with guard shacks and fat electrical cables and compressed-air hoses.
Others were smaller than I am, crumbling, trash-strewn. All looked forbidding. One had a
few multicolored balloons strung across it. Carnaval, Ilasaca said. He pointed out, above us,
the blue mouth of a shaft in the lowest wall of the glacier. They dug through fty metres of
ice before they hit rock, he said.

Clouds and mist had swallowed La Bella Durmiente. The sky began to spit little snow
pellets. From where we stood, thick black hoses ran like wiring up across a snow eld, snaking
in the distance over makeshift supports. The hoses carried water from the glacier down to La
Rinconada. Like nearly everything here, they were a private, unregulated business. Some,
Ilasaca said, went to wells high enough on the glacier that the water they carried was clean.
Others didnt go high enough, and their water was contaminated with mercury. Mercury is
the main element used to process gold in La Rinconada. The ground, air, water, and snow in
town, along with pretty much anything immediately downstream, are all said to be
contaminated. Mercury poisoning can aect the central nervous system, causing tremors,
excitability, insomnia, and a grim range of psychotic reactions. Crime and violence in La
Rinconada are often attributed, on no medical basis, to mercury poisoning.

You still want to go inside a mine?

I did.

Just once Id like to be accepted for who Im not.

Ilasaca studied the possibilities. His face was boyish, small-featured, serious. Given the
weather, he was lightly dressedsweatpants, sneakers, a toee-colored sweater, a blue Nike
watch cap. The miners trudging past us all wore mamelucos (black thermal coveralls with
re ective stripes); many had on ski masks. One group greeted Ilasaca. They called him Chino
Chinaman. Its a common nickname in Peru, given to practically anyone with an
epicanthic fold to his eyes. Ilasaca and I had met in a gold buyers shop. He had brought in a
nugget the size of a thumbnail. We watched the shop owner burn o the mercury in a gas-
red oven, the toxic vapors running up a chimney and into a busy lane outside the shop. We
joked about politicsPeru has elections in 2016, and the parties are already campaigning. I
liked the way Ilasacas face changed when he was amused. His jaw seemed to widen in a big
sneaky smile. If circumstances warranted, he had a great bark of a laugh. I was full of
questions about how one came to own a gold nugget in La Rinconada, and so Ilasaca, having
pocketed forty-odd dollars for his, had led me out to the Second Compuerta.

We made our way downslope, to an abandoned mine. The tunnel entrance was twenty feet
wide, maybe ten feet high. Ilasaca produced two hard hats and a miners lamp from a
backpack, and we headed in. I used to work in here, he said. Theres enough oxygen, from
old shafts that go to the surface. He gestured toward the depths of the mountain. As the
tunnel narrowed, the air got musty and the darkness, within fty yards of the entrance, was
absolute. Ilasaca was careful to light my way. He showed me mineralized veins in the walls,
glittering between rough slabs of black Ordovician slate. When the quijo angled upward, he
said, so would the tunnel, and it did. This had all been dug with hand tools and dynamite, he
said. Maybe two metres a day. Back then, the lamps had been carbide, he said, burning
acetylene gas. These nice bright electric headlamps we had, with battery packs that attached
to your belt, were relatively new. He stopped to listen to my breathing, which was getting
ragged. The tunnel ceiling had been dropping, obliging me to crouch. My thighs were
burning from the eort. I was O.K., I said, just altitude weary. More coca, Ilasaca said. I had
bought coca leaves that morning, from an old woman on the street in La Rinconada.
Everybody here chewed them, I was told, to stave o exhaustion and hunger. I stued a wad
in my cheek. The leaves were sti and bitter. Ilasaca also took a wad. The quartz vein in the
tunnel wall turned downward, the tunnel followed it, and at a certain depth we found our
progress halted by an icy-looking pond. Ilasaca studied the vein, tapping it with his
ngertips. I wondered what he saw in its ssures and glints.

On the hike back to the surface, he pointed out a little shrine I had missed. Tucked under an
overhang were two upright black rocksthey looked like primitive tombstones, and they
were wreathed with frayed rope, dead owers, rotting fabric. Awicha, Ilasaca said, pointing
to one. The other: Chinchilico. Mountain deities. These were gods who could keep a miner
safefrom cave-ins, from asphyxiation. Gods who could lead a true believer to gold. Piled
around the stones were liquor bottles, old candles, a dusty Carnival mask, a dank mound of
unreadable pleas and oerings. La Rinconada had many brujos, soothsayers who advised
miners on what prayers and payments they could make to the mountain gods to help them
nd gold and come home alive. The desperation of the miners felt suocatingly close in
here.

T
he Peruvian government has been trying to formalize small-scale mining for at least a
decade. In La Rinconada, I met old-timers who remember the Army, sent in by the
authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori, coming to rout the miners in the early
nineteen-nineties. That obviously didnt work. Fujimori, who is now in prison, was primarily
interested in attracting foreign investment for large-scale mining. Minerals are Perus leading
export, mining its main source of foreign exchange. Most of the big multinationals, including
Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Glencore, and Barrick Gold, have operations in Peru, extracting
copper, gold, silver, zinc. Nobody knows the true size of the illegal-mining sector, but the
Peruvian mining researcher Miguel Santillana calculates that there are roughly four hundred
thousand informal gold miners today. Although Peru is among the worlds leading producers
of cocaine, black-market gold has reportedly surpassed it as the countrys biggest illegal
export.

Recently, with new laws and a wave of raids, the government has been cracking down on
informal gold mining. The raids have been concentrated not on hard-rock mines in the
mountains, however, but on alluvial operations in the rivers and rain forest of the Amazon
Basinonly a hundred miles north of La Rinconada, but another universe. The river mining
in the lowlands has escalated from low-impact panning to extraction by large machinery,
including dredges, pumps, and bulldozers, and it is devastating tens of thousands of acres,
attracting the attention of national and international environmentalists. There is little
evidence that the raids are discouraging illegal mining. In La Rinconada, I found tepid
support for la formalizacin, or, at least, for some of its features, such as improved mine safety,
but a general view that its implementation is unlikely. The Peruvian state has almost no
presence in the town. A shopkeeper near the Compuerta told me, with a shrug, If
government inspectors came up here and ordered a mine closed, the inspectors would leave
by nightfall, and the next day the mine would be open again.

La Rinconada residents deplore the states absence. Theyve protested en masse, blocking
highways in the altiplano, and demanded that the government start providing basic services.
Electricity came, nally, in 2002. Theyre still waiting for clean water, a sewage system,
garbage collection, a hospital. But their political leverage is limited. Most residents, if theyre
registered to vote, are registered in their home towns, not in La Rinconada. Besides that,
hardly anyone seems to pay taxes. Most of the gold that comes out of the mountain goes
straight onto the black market. Nobody knows how many mines there are, or what they
produce, or how many people really live in La Rinconada. Politically, then, its a stando
leaving intact an operatically harsh, hard-to-measure, oxygen-deprived experiment in frontier
capitalism, social dislocation, raw exploitation, and millenarian endurance.

Certainly almost none of the money being made shows up in the towns housing stock. I kept
expecting to stumble on a successful miners new house or a night-club owners comfortable,
heated apartment. That would not happen, I kept hearing, and indeed it didnt. Every penny
goes back either into mining, people said, or down the mountain to more livable towns and
cities. Juliaca, a busy commercial center on the altiplano, is the nearest big city to La
Rinconada, and it owes much of its prosperity, from all accounts, to the gold mines.
Successful miners have nice houses there. I saw a street-dance troupe in Juliaca celebrating
the relationship. The dancers were dressed as miners, in coveralls and hard hats and steel-
toed boots, and they were rhythmically swinging small sledgehammersmartillosagainst
chisels known in the mines as cuas, while a brass orchestra rocked the avenida. My unheated
hotel room in La Rinconada overlooked a muddy corner where long-distance minibuses
arrived and departed, and all night long the touts shouted, Juliaca! Juliaca! Juliaca!

Josmell Ilasaca began mining at twelve. The mine is a

killer, he said. A doctor told me Ive spent too many years
here already.

Miners send money to their families. Thats the

primary cash ow. Its the reason Josmell Ilasaca, like
many thousands of others, is in La Rinconada
because there is more to be made here, they believe,
than elsewhere in Peru, which has seen economic
growth in recent years but still has a rural poverty rate
close to fty per cent. La Rinconada has no bank, but it
has many storefront fund-transfer agencies, which
Ilasaca uses to send money to his mother, in Azngaro,
and to his daughter, who is three and lives with her
mother in a town, farther west, called Abancay. What
is hard about the cachorreo is its uncertainty, he told me. Its not like a salary. You dont
know what youre going to make, or when. You need luck. La suerte is everything here.

We were eating dinner in a tiny, freezing second- oor restaurant in La Rinconada. I was
having the Cuban platerice and a hot dog and a fried bananaand hot, sweet yerba-mat
tea. Ilasaca, just o work, was eating more heartily, but I, after a sobering encounter with
alpaca-tripe soup, had stopped simply following the dining lead of whomever I was with in
La Rinconada.

I asked about his best day in the mines.

Eight thousand dollars in a month, he told me, proudly but quietly.

His best day?

He calculated a moment. About three thousand, he said. The price was high then.

So had he found a single great chunk of gold, or a rare mass of akes, on his one day a
month of working for himself ?

Ilasaca shook his head. No. It was an ordinary day. He had pocketed a likely-looking rock,
taken it to a traditional mill known as a quimbalete, and come away with a nugget that turned
out to contain nearly a hundred grams of goldmore than three ounces.

Did the mineowner not claim the gold as his own?

Ilasaca shook his head. The owner didnt know about it. He probably heard about it later, but
he could hardly begrudge one of his best workers his stroke of luck. Es mi suerte.

I had heard similar things from other miners, and from a gold-shop owner who seemed
nonplussed that I assumed he saw his customers only once a month. No, they came in when
they found something, he said, which was often several times a week. Miners put good-
looking rocks in their pockets every day. That was a part of the cachorreo that you didnt read
about. Some people called it huachacait was simply understood, among indigenous Andean
miners, as a type of natural right. If you found it in the mountain, particularly after payments
to Awicha or Chinchilico or a Quechua spirit called Apu, it was yours.

On the payment day of your cachorreounder Ilasacas present contract, this comes once
every twenty- ve daysyou were allowed to haul fty-kilogram sacks of rock out of the
mine on your back, as many as you could carry. These were the same yellow sacks that miners
carried out of the earth every day, all day, except on payment day the rock didnt go onto the
contractors lode but straight to a mill, as the property of the miner. The rest of the month,
the miner could discreetly carry out a sack, perhaps, at the end of a shift. Certainly a
promising rock or two. That was itbut it was not unimportant. When cachorreo was
threatened as part of the governments formalization proposals, miners poured into the
streets in the thousands. This reform was out of the question. Mining for a miserable
Peruvian salary was unthinkable. Without la suerte in the equation, the job was not worth
doing.

I asked Ilasaca if he made payments to Awicha.

Of course, he said. Nothing extravagant. Just tragos of liquorhe meant little airline bottles
of booze that are sold from stands along the paths to the mines. Without paying something,
Ilasaca said, you could expect nothing. I had heard of miners making extravagant oerings to
the mountain godsblood sacri cesbut Ilasaca said he knew nothing about that. Maybe it
happened in the old days. A lot had changed even since he rst came to La Rinconada.
Electricity, high-pressure power tools. You rarely, if ever, saw children in the mines now. We
were little goblins, he said, his wide grin sneaking across his face. Little Chinchilicos. He
laughed. Chinchilico is usually depicted as a short, grouchy fellow who accosts miners deep
in the earth, demanding liquor and cigarettes. People call him the owner of the gold. He
likes to punch terri ed miners in the face.

At times, Ilasaca sounded nostalgic for the days of child labor. He worked during his school
vacations, three months a year, until he nished high school and moved full time to La
Rinconada. He remembers watching outdoor screenings of Rambo with his dad. Now
everybody has their own TV, he said.

A TV on the wall in the restaurant was playing a game show. Every TV in town seemed to
play this same game show at all hours. Ripped young men in wifebeaters and equally bu
young women in bikinis grappled with softball questions (What is the capital of Russia?)
and physical challenges and celebrated their triumphs with high ves and passionate kisses
among pus of bright-pink smoke. Miners in the ice-cold, no-frills eateries of La Rinconada
would look up from steaming bowls of goat soup to watch the revelry. I wondered what they
saw. The young people on TV were nearly all white. I had yet to see a white person in La
Rinconada.
Ilasacas father left La Rinconada eight years ago. But he worked too long, Ilasaca said. His
health was destroyed. He looked at me evenly. The mine is a killer.

W
here the rough dirt road from the lowlands enters La Rinconada, a rudimentary
health clinicone of the governments very few local outpostssits between a
graveyard and a row of undertakers. A ponytailed young doctor named Fredy Rios was
running the clinic when I stopped by. He didnt have a working X-ray machine, which was
bad, he said, because he saw a lot of broken arms from accidents in the mines. It was bad, too,
because X-rays help diagnose lung diseases, such as silicosis, which is associated with gold
mining. (Quartz veins are rich with silica.)

According to Rios, mine accidentscaused by explosives, ceiling collapses, asphyxiation

kill about thirty people a year in La Rinconada. (Three had died in a collapse a few weeks
before I got to town.) Seventy more die from shootings, stabbings, stranglingsthe results
of bar ghts and robberies, mainly. Martn Ccari, an undertaker from across the street, told
me that some mine deaths could be blamed on slow response to cave-ins and other accidents.
There were no emergency services in La Rinconada, and injured miners often died en route
to help. Ccari could bury people locallynot in the cemetery behind the clinic, which was
now full, but in a new eld, outside town. He could also arrange the transfer of bodies to the
miners home towns.

I have more underneath.

The mine kills both quickly and slowly. There was one working X-ray machine in town. It
was in a private clinic, attached to a well-stocked pharmacy. The doctor there, Nestor
Condori, told me that he sees plenty of silicosis, which grows both more readily and faster at
high altitude than elsewhere. Living at very high altitude raises ones hemoglobin level, and
many residents of La Rinconada develop polycythemiaelevated red-blood-cell production,
described by Condori as dense bloodwhich interacts badly with silicosis, frequently
causing, for instance, pulmonary brosis, a potentially fatal condition. Silicosis is also
associated with tuberculosis. The only real treatment for polycythemia, Condori said,
involves moving to sea level, which he often recommends, to little eect, to his patients in La
Rinconada.

Rios, at the public clinic, said that he saw an unusual number of urinary infections in women,
which he attributed to the absence of a sewage system. At home, people improvise chamber
pots, and the town has an abundance of public lavatories, but these are actually private,
charging customers a small fee, and theyre never pleasant to enter. (They empty directly into
simple pits or seemingly, in some cases, into the next alley.) Men routinely relieve themselves
in the streets. Women who are out working or running errands, and not near home, also try
to avoid the public lavatories but are more modest. According to Rios, they often pee only
once a day, which accounts, he thought, for the high rate of infections. The only reason that
the towns appalling sanitary situation doesnt cause an epidemic of gastrointestinal infections
and parasites is the brutal year-round cold, he said. (In the summer month of February, when
I visited, it snowed nine days in a row.) Frozen bacteria is harmless. Contaminated drinking
water, either piped down from a lower part of the glacier or trucked in from polluted local
lakes, causes a raft of intestinal and other problems, but nothing, apparently, like the public-
health catastrophe that warmer weather would wreak.

Rios gave me the rst persuasive explanation I heard for why no buildings in La Rinconada
(except certain night clubs) are heated. It would require too much energy, he said. The local
electricity supply is limited, and the mines and the new generation of machine-powered gold
mills need most of the available energy. The towns residents, he said, are happy to splice into
any passing cablethe rats nest of wiring above every alley illustrates how it is that everyone
has cable TV even though virtually nobody pays for it. But the industrial consumers of
electricity construct their lines of sterner stu, and no one tampers with them. This made far
more sense than arguments I had heard that passing too often from cold to warm
environments causes arthritis. I still thought propane space heaters or charcoal- red braziers
should be a priority in any household that could aord them. But I am a wimp compared
with any man, woman, or child living in La Rinconada.

Professionally, Rios struck me as frustrated by his posting. Not only was he underequipped
but, despite all the violence and workplace toxicity of the mines, there was, for a fully trained
physician, not much interesting medicine to practice. A few explosives injuries, perhaps, or
collapsed-ceiling injuries. The truth was, most people in La Rinconada were ercely healthy.
Nobody with heart problems moved here. When miners respiratory problems surfaced, they
could no longer work and left town. There was one fascinating aspect of the populace,
medically speaking: the extremely high hemoglobin levels of all full-time residents. Rios
wanted to do an epidemiological study of this phenomenon and its implications. There was
no comparable community, no other place on Earth where such a study could be done. But
he could not interest potential funders. All the well-known high-altitude experts, he noted,
with some bitterness, live at elevations below four thousand metres. La Rinconada is above
ve thousand. Rios was at the clinic on a one-year contract, which was nearly up. His
eagerness to move on was palpable.

The national police have a small post in La Rinconada. Its another sign, besides the clinic,
that the Peruvian government knows the town exists. Its ocers all seem to be, like Rios, on
short-term postings from faraway homes. They have four-wheel-drive trucks, automatic
ri es, smart uniforms. I went on foot patrol, on a frigid evening, with a group of eight or ten
ocers. The commander pointed out the sprawling, packed-full cemetery behind the clinic.
That, he told me, was where they buried the corpses that no one claimed, their names
unknown. This was patently false. I had seen the cemetery in daylightit was crammed with
headstones bearing the usual inscriptions and information. I had even passed by with a
former miner whose grandfather was buried there. Why would the police commander
subscribe to this Dodge City factoid that one glance at the graveyard in daytime would
disprove?
There was more. A young ocer from a lowland city told me, half an hour later, that the
muddy alleys we were patrolling were so dangerous that nobody dared walk there except in
large groups like ours. The next person we met was a woman of about thirty, carrying
luggage in the opposite direction. We squeezed past her, exchanging good evenings. Yes, her
suitcase was heavy, she said ruefully. I asked the young ocer why she was alone on this
perilous pathway. He said that she obviously had deep Christian faith. They put all their
trust in God, he said. He was not joking.

The most dangerous places in La Rinconada, the commander told me, were the night clubs.
That seemed likely true. They were dens of prostitution, human tracking, robbery, and
murder, he said, and many of the prostitutes were minors. I had read several reports making
the same points about the towns night clubs and brothels, and had seen Peruvian TV-news
shows that investigated the local sex trade with hidden cameras. The police commander did
not mention any eorts to combat the crimes he described, and our patrol route gave an
exceptionally wide berth to the couple of blocks where La Rinconadas notorious cantinas are
concentrated.

I tried to check out the clubs myself. They were very dark, very loud, and full of drunken
miners blowing hard-earned money, with feral bouncers and d.j.s and, clustered around gas
heaters, groups of bare-limbed, miserable-looking young women. Nobody would talk to me. I
had read that a Rabelaisian writer from Juliaca, known as R. Abelardo Checca, had holed up
happily in the night clubs and brothels of La Rinconada, and was planning to write a book
of short stories in the style of Charles Bukowski about the degradation and vitality he found
there. I decided to wait for the book.

Im getting subtle hints of what the Fed might do.

W
omen are barred from the mines in La Rinconada. The reason normally given is
that men are stronger, and the work does require incredible physical strength, but
there is a long history of gender discrimination both in mining and in Peru, and a wealth of
related superstition about bad luck and women and mines. Women mine gold in La
Rinconada, but they do it as pallaqueras, combing through discarded scrap rock for gold
akes outside the mines proper. The pallaqueras nd far less gold, generally, than the miners
inside at the rockface, but I saw them on the mountain, sometimes with small children, every
day. They wore hard hats, knee-high rubber boots, and huge amounts of clothing against the
cold and snow and windnot the store-bought mamelucos that the men wear but great
jumbles of skirts, vests, sweaters, trousers, improvised balaclavas, striped traditional blankets
known as llicllas, dust masks, aprons, work gloves. The harshness of the weather they work in
the bitter glacial wind and high-mountain sunwas inscribed on the cheeks of many of
the women, and some of the children, in the dark blooms of frostbite scars.

I asked a pallaquera of indeterminate age about her family. We were on the mountain, and
she never stopped smashing small rocks with a martillo, sorting chips and pebbles into piles,
and tossing an occasional shard into a big yellow sack. Four kids, she said, seven grandkids, a
husband retired with bad lungsthat was why she was out here! He was sitting at home!
She laughed lightly. Did she make payments to Awicha? Of course! Only a fool would be
out here doing nothing to increase ones chances of good luck. She gave a splash of rum to
Awicha, then drank the rest of the bottle herself, for warmth. In Quechua, gold is sometimes
called tears of the sun.

Josmell Ilasaca has a serious girlfriend, Veronica, who lives in Azngaro, but, he told me, she
was thinking about moving to La Rinconada to work as a pallaquera. I was amazed. Veronica
was twenty-two. She had been raised in Cuzco. She had nished high school. She had a
decent job in a casino in Juliaca. I had seen her in a photographshe looked nice, and
frostbite would not become her. Ilasaca said I didnt understand. Yes, they wanted to live
together, and that was part of why she wanted to come. But she also wanted to try her luck.
Gold fever could strike anybody, and you shouldnt begrudge someone a ing with her suerte.

Even as Ilasaca insisted on the primacy of luck, he didnt strike me as a gambler. Luck just
didnt seem to be his personal guiding light. He was more hardheaded than that. Had he
always wanted to be a gold miner?

No way, he said. He started only because his father was mining. When I was sixteen, I didnt
want to go back to the mine, he said. I had been going since I was twelve. It was so sad.
There was so much suering. It was so cold. I did a police course instead that year. I passed
the course. I wanted to be a policeman. But then they tested my eyes, and I was nearsighted,
so the police wouldnt take me. So I went back to the mine.

At eighteen, he began working full time for his uncle Hugo, who was a contractor in La
Rinconada. I worked for my uncle for three and a half years, he said. I did almost every
job. Mechanic, perforator, cleanup. We never found any gold. It was a crew of thirty. It was
very dicult. We had no luck. My uncle paid me just enough to live. I nally had to leave.

And yet Ilasaca had a hero, a model: a miner named Percy Torres, who was also from
Azngaro. Percy Torres was an orphan, just a poor Quechua boy, when he rst came to La
Rinconadadisplaced, like many people at the time, by violence in the countryside. But
Percy Torres was unusually intelligent, patient, hardworking. He studied the mountain until
he knew it better than any geologist, any mining engineer. People said that he had too much
luck, that he found too much gold, that he must have made a pact with the Devil. There
were many stories about Percy Torres. His wife, people said, woke up one night and saw his
horns and tail. But Percy Torres, Ilasaca told me, reinvested every cent he made. He put it all
back into the mountain, and when the price of gold fell he was in trouble. Still, he kept
going, kept exploring the mountain, kept digging, and eventually he went over the ridge, into
the next valley to the east, and the price of gold rose again.
Ilasaca took me on a hike, over the ridge above La Rinconada. In the next valley, under the
rst glacier east of La Bella Durmiente, was a large modern mine. It had big sheds, parking
lots full of trucks and heavy equipment, its own mill, its own access road. On one of the
roofs, painted in huge white letters, was written TITANthe name of Percy Torress
company.

P
ercy Torres died in 2011. He was forty-six. Not everyone believed he was dead. Was it
really cancer? At least half a dozen people in La Rinconada joked to me that Percy
Torres was now in hell, making good on his part of his deal with Satan. In any event, his
eldest son, Ivn, took over Titn. Then, in late 2012, Ivn Torres was killed, in a robbery on
the road just a few miles down the mountain from La Rinconada. He was twenty-eight. His
driver and his bodyguard were also murdered. The police later said that three hundred
kilograms of gold was stolen in the robberymore than ten million dollars worth. Ivn
Torres, they suggested, had been killed, in eect, by la informalidad. Even though he was the
head of one of Perus larger corporations, he was still doing business outlaw-style
personally carrying millions in gold rather than paying taxes. The crime had clearly been an
inside job: somebody at Titn alerting some real outlaws.

The next heir, or heiress, to the fortune was Ivns younger sister, Roco, who quickly bought
a large ranch in Spain, known for its ghting bulls, and is said to have left the family
business to professional managers.

O.K., class, next well pound out the dough until that
ungrateful, self-centered son of a bitch realizes hes not the
center of the world, and maybe, just maybe, he doesnt
deserve an attractive, well-educated woman with a
wonderful sense of humor.

Some of the Percy Torres saga is public record, but most of it, including his formative years
in La Rinconada, is oral history. One sunny afternoon, I got a phone call from Ilasaca. He
sounded excited. He insisted that I come and meet him right away, in a barrio up the hill
from my hotel. I found him sitting with an older man, known as Cario, on plastic chairs in
the middle of a muddy track. They were sharing a large bottle of something called Inca Kola.
Cario, Ilasaca said, was a contractor who had been working in La Rinconada since 1970.
He pronounced the date wonderingly, as if it were 1870an impossibly long career. Carios
longevity in the mines was, in fact, a rarity. Certainly nobody working underground, which
contractors try to avoid, could last so long. But Cario seemed unimpressed with himself,
and with pretty much everything else. He was taciturn and dismissive, and seemed to speak
at all only because Ilasaca kept peppering him with questions about long-closed local mines
and concessions and partnerships. His memory was impeccable. Yes, he recalled exactly when
Percy Torres showed up, a green kid from Azngaro, and where he worked, and who nanced
what, and who burned his partners with a fake geological report on which mineral deposit
when.
I need paper, Ilasaca said. These are facts, not myths.

I loaned him a pen and a notebook, and he lled pages with obscure information. I
understood none of it.

The sunshineand a temperature now well above freezingwas rousing a mighty stench
from the mud. I tried holding Inca Kola in my mouth to neutralize visions of bacterial
apocalypse. Even its disinfectant avor was no help. Until that afternoon, I had found it
funny that La Rinconada residents (male) often seemed to make a point of urinating where
someone dared to post a sign forbidding it. The same thing happened with garbage. A
warning spray-painted on a building near my hotel threatened rubbish-dumpers with
massacre, and the trash heap rising beneath it was at least ten feet high. I thought these
rude communal gestures expressed the anarchic solidarity of the town. But none of it seemed
amusing now.

Cario ended his conversation with Ilasaca with an oath that echoed my thoughts: Chino, I
hope the gold price falls and the mines close and we all move to towns where we dont have
to live like animals!

Ilasaca and I repaired to a tiny storefront bar to drink beer. He was thrilled with all he had
learned about the early business dealings of his hero. It wasnt that he dreamed of being the
next Percy Torres. He didnt have that sort of talentor luck. He just admired Percys
canniness and persistence, his great rise in the world, his courage and independence.

But I have to get out of the mine, Ilasaca said. A doctor told me Ive spent too many years
here already. The altitude changes your blood. It damages your brain. The dust and smoke in
the mine destroy your lungs. Living up here is bad for relationships. Four or ve more years,
thats all I need. The mine I work in now is good. Theres gold. I just need to save enough to
capitalize a business.

Ilasaca had tried to live with his former girlfriend in her home town, Abancay, after their
daughter was born. It didnt work, he said, on any level. He found jobsin construction, as a
driverbut the pay was hopelessly low. In Peru, you have to own something, he said.
Thats why we risk our lives in the mine. So we can help our families and then have decent
lives after we nish with the mine.

I
got permission, not through Ilasaca, to enter the mine where he works. Mario
Ayamamani, the owner of the concession, escorted me to the rockface. The days
dynamiting and high-pressure drilling had been completed hours before, so the air inside the
mine was relatively free of smoke and dust. Still, I gladly used a half-mask respirator
someone handed me, and took hits of medical oxygen from a cannister I had brought from
Juliaca, and chewed coca.

At the rockface, miners were pounding away at walls loosened by drilling and blasting, using
long sharpened steel rods in a vicious upward-jabbing motion. When chunks of rock fell o
the face, the miners attacked them with martillos. Then they studied the smaller chunks in
the light from their headlamps, quickly grading them into ore that would go to the mill
those chunks went into a lthy yellow sackand dross that went on piles that were being
shovelled, by other miners, into wheelbarrows bound for the tailings pile outside. The pace
was frightening. The sheer tness of these men digging for gold by hand three miles above
sea level was remarkable. When one of the yellow sacks was full, it weighed more than a
hundred pounds, and a miner carried it out to the mill on his back.

We were not particularly deep inside the mountainI had heard that some mines at La
Rinconada were three miles deep, with innumerable branches in every direction. This was
probably only a few hundred yards, but I found the trip back and forth torturous. The ceiling
got so low that I nearly had to crawl at one stage, and it kept knocking o my hard hat. And
I wasnt carrying a hundred pounds of rock on my back. During one of these dicult
passages, I heard a familiar voice. Hola, William. It was Ilasaca. He must have come from
one of the branches I was trying not to blunder into. He was working vigilancia, he said,
which involved patrolling. His manner with me was cool, strange, watchful. Perhaps he didnt
like seeing me in his workplace, in the party of his employer, although I had heard him speak
highly of Ayamamani. He disappeared almost as suddenly as he had appeared.

Ayamamani comes from a prominent local mining family. He owns other mines, in other
parts of Peru, and lives in Juliaca. He gave me a detailed description, in his oce in La
Rinconada, of some of the mountains mineralogical featuresits two long, erratic, gold-
bearing bands, its gold-rich vertical faults. We washed our hands together in ice-cold water
after our visit to the rockface. He kept his coca, I noticed, in a lovely leather purse, which he
unfolded ceremonially before he oered leaves to visitors. He didnt seem to have a trace of
the desperation that makes La Rinconada run so hot.

G
old fever makes more sense after a visit to an artisanal gold mine. Poverty remains the
rst and fundamental goad. But the raw investment of time, eort, hearts blood, and
personal risk poured into a search through mountains of useless, infuriating rock for tiny
ecks of precious metal might leave anyone obsessed. The swagger of miners, in their hard
hats and work boots and bulked-out, narrow-waisted mamelucos, through the streets of La
Rinconada makes more sense, too, after you see the work they do.

The demand side of gold fever is almost the opposite story. The enormous new Chinese
middle class drives much of the growing world market for gold jewelry. Indians are also
buying signi cantly more gold each year. Jewelry accounts, altogether, for three-quarters of
the global market for newly mined gold. The remainder goes to industry and to investors in
bars and coins.

I put in a skylight and its made a world of dierence.

OCTOBER 17, 2010

In La Rinconada, dozens of gold-buying shops connect small producers with these faraway
consumers. I asked a young gold buyer about his business, and he was so forthcoming that I
shouldnt mention his real name. Call him Jhonny. Hes had his shop for ten years. Jhonny
buys gold according to a price set twice a day in London and New Yorkhe has an app on
his phone to help him stay current. His primary buyers, who are in Bolivia (he also has
clients, he says, in Brazil), want all the gold he can deliver. They pay Jhonny ten per cent
more than he pays the miners who bring him akes and nuggets, and they insist that he
make his deliveries by hand on Mondays.

And so he closes the shop most Sundays at 3 P.M. He melts all the gold he has bought that
week into cup-shaped cakes of dornearly pure gold. A weeks take can range from half a
kilogram to fourteen. Then he catches a minibus down to Juliaca, where, in a house quietly
tted out as a factory, he combines all the gold cakes into one-kilogram or half-kilogram
bullion bars. He sleeps for a few hours and then, at dawn, packs the bullion into long,
purpose-built vertical pockets in a bulbous down- lled coat.

Jhonny showed me the coat. It was cleverly designed.

He catches an early-morning bus to La Paz, a few hours ride. The tricky part is the border
crossing, of course. He has had many nervous moments, he said, but the border there is
lightly controlled, and he has never been searched. His clients prefer Peruvian gold, which,
according to Jhonny, is known for its high quality. For two kilos, he receives, at current prices,
about seven thousand dollars more than hes laid out for it. He covers his costshis shop, his
equipment, his little factory in Juliacaand usually makes a good pro t. He is home by
evening. His wife, whom I met, sells homemade corn cakesall organic, Jhonny told me
enthusiasticallyin the lane outside his shop. She sits on a stoop in the snow next to her pot
of cakes, wearing traditional Quechua clothing, including the bowler hat and a bright lliclla,
in which their infant son, on the day I met her, was wrapped and sleeping.

Jhonny was warm and polite to the miners who brought him their gold. He gave them lime-
avored cupcakes to pass the time while he processed and weighed the gold. Two miners
started swilling beer, drinking up their payday before they had even received it, and Jhonny
kept them supplied and happyhe even drank with themwhile he worked. There are at
least fty shops like his in La Rinconada. Local ocials must nd a way to take a bite out of
them, but the only tax Jhonny would admit to paying was a small annual fee for his business
license.

A
ccording to a British group called the Fairtrade Foundation, there are sixteen million
artisanal and small-scale gold miners working today. A hundred million people
worldwide rely on some form of small-scale mining. These numbers have been rising rapidly
in recent years. Artisanal gold miners are in a strange position. They account for ten per cent
of annual world gold production but ninety per cent of jobs in the gold industry. Large-scale,
mechanized, modern gold mines are vastly more ecient. They are also safer for workers.
They just dont provide many jobs.

Nearly everyone I asked in La Rinconada believes that the governments formalization

program is ultimately intended to clear the way for multinationals and other big mining
companies to replace informal miners. The big miners pay taxes, for a start. Whether any
multinational would actually want to build a large-scale operation in La Rinconada seems to
me an open question, though. Its remote. The mountains mineralogy is complex and
uncertain. Tens of thousands of tough and stubborn miners are already dug in there, pursuing
their Percy Torres dreams.
An assumption that large-scale mechanized mining is less environmentally destructive than
unregulated small-scale mining, incidentally, would be unfounded. Around the world, big
mining companies, including multinationals, have been responsible for some of the worst
environmental disasters associated with extraction. Open-pit gold mining, as performed by
some of the biggest mining companies, can require the removal of two hundred and fty
tons of rock and orethats ve hundred thousand poundsto nd a single ounce of gold.

I
lost track of Ilasaca. He got paid on cachorreo day and seemed to go on a bender. His
phone was turned o. When I saw him in town, he was not sober. His face had a woeful,
befuddled look. He still sauntered down steep, icy paths with his hands in his pockets, not
missing a step. But his incisiveness, his sneaky smile, were absent. Then, one morning, I saw
him climbing into a minibus outside my hotel. I asked where he was going. Azngaro, he
muttered. His mother was ill.

While he was away, I went to see a brujo who billed himself as La Maravillathe Marvel.
He had slicked-back hair and a blanket safety-pinned around his considerable waist. He
lived in a tiny room on a busy, very muddy track. On the wall above his table were a cruci x
and an old-fashioned naked-lady calendar. He threw the coca leaves for me. Oh, he said. Ai-
yi-yi. The rst thing he saw in the leaves was doubt. I should banish doubt. He threw more
leaves. Ah. I had an interest in the mountain, he saw, a connection, a future with the
mountain. (He may have thought I was a potential investor.) He saw success. Yes, success. He
directed my attention to a leaf pointing upward. That was success. But I would have to work,
and I would have to pay. Apu needed to be paid. Chinchilico needed to be paid. I should
prepare a ceremony.

A ceremony?

Yes. I should nd a young vicua (a relative of the llama), and slit its throat, and pull out its
heart, and oer it to Apu. I must have looked doubtful, or as if I didnt have the stones to kill
a vicua and pull out its heart. Yes, we should meet at midnight, La Maravilla and I, on the
new moon, which happened to be this week, on the hill behind La Rinconada. To make sure
I understood, he pointed through his doorway at a hill. It was bristling with cell-phone
towers. Yes, that one. We would throw the vicuas blood toward the mountain. That would
do the trick. We should nd a mutually convenient night.

He threw the leaves again. Oh, look at that. He pointed to a mass of leaves, then scared me
by bellowing, Hay oro! (Theres gold!) Plenty of gold, plenty of money. It would be right
in front of me wherever I started working. I just needed to dig. I would be able to follow the
vein of gold, the quijo, wherever it went, through the mountain. I just needed to have faith.

I had to leave. We agreed to stay in touch about a good night to do the ceremony.

Im sorry, ladies, was this man bothering you?

JANUARY 19, 2009
Ilasaca had said that blood sacri ces, if they ever happened, were a thing of the past. But La
Maravillas prescription made me wonder. I had interviewed a barrio police chiefan
unarmed constable and ex-miner who seemed to know more than the national police about
La Rinconada. He had talked about speci c troublemakers. They wear miners clothes to
confuse the population. But the constable had also startled me by con rming a lurid, much
repeated rumorthat children had been kidnapped and oered as blood sacri ces to the
mountain gods. Yes, it happens, he said.

Had they ever found a body?

No, he admitted. But that was only because the oerings were made deep in the mountain,
in a branch of the mine where the person making the payment worked, and where no one
else ever went. Did I have any idea how deep some of the mines went?

I
left La Rinconada at dawn, squeezed in the back row of a crowded minibus, bumping
down the mountain. The trashed, poisoned mine country gave way slowly to hills with
actual grass on them. Then there were small farms, cattle, trees. Sunshine with some warmth
to it. People not bundled against the cold. The world was ooding with color. And oxygen. I
found it a bit overwhelming. We drove alongside a river. There were trout in this river, the
man next to me said. I felt like screaming with joy. Everybody in the van seemed giddy.
There was chattering, laughter. Political symbols and slogans were on every barn wall.
SOMOS KEIKO. (We are Keiko.) Keiko is Fujimoris daughter, who is now a contender
for President. Somebody made a joke about El Chinothats Alberto Fujimoris nickname
rising from the dead, and the van rippled with laughter. Keiko once said that if she became
President she would not hesitate to release her father from jail. Near Azngaro, the man next
to me pointed out a splendid hacienda set between green hills. That belonged to Percy
Torres, he said. And thesehe pointed to some huge black bullswere Percys toros bravos.

Ilasaca picked me up in the plaza. He looked younger, smaller, more relaxed. His mother was
ne, he said. We ate lunch at his placea comfortable, working-class row housewith
Veronica, his girlfriend. Then we sat under an umbrella in his back yard. Veronica said that
she had reconsidered the idea of becoming a pallaquera. It just sounded too physically
punishing. We toasted her good sense. Veronica seemed lively, worldly. She had a great sleepy
smile. She clipped Ilasacas ngernails while we talked. I said that Azngaro looked
delightful, which was an understatement. Ilasaca gave a little grin of home-town pride. He
actually owned a lot in another town, he said, where he planned to build a house when he
had the money. I just want to live someplace healthy, he said quietly. Either there or here.
Or Cuzco, Veronica said. That was her home town.

Or Cuzco.

We watched a video: Veronica, Ilasaca, and his mother dancing at a New Years party in
Azngaro, with a troupe from his barrio. They looked incredible. In the video, Ilasaca was
wearing a brilliant full-length yellow poncho, swinging a silver baton, dancing in a deep,
ecstatic rhythm.

We took a walk through town. Fruit-sellers in the market greeted Ilasaca: Chino! He and
Veronica were discussing their evening plans intently. Every hour was important. In the
morning, he had to catch a minibus to La Rinconada.

William Finnegan has been a contributor to The New Yorker since 1984 and a sta writer since
1987.

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