In 1533, the Inca emperor Atahualpa was captured by Spanish conquistadores led by Pizarro at the Battle of Cajamarca. To secure his release, the Spanish demanded that the Inca people fill two rooms with silver and one with gold. Atahualpa's subjects traveled to the four corners of the empire to extract the precious metals. A group gathered in the Bombón plateau region, extracting vast quantities of silver to bring before Pizarro and his men. The three rooms were filled with gold and silver. Pizarro killed Atahualpa anyway. Today, the city of Cerro de Pasco stands on the Bombón plateau—a place where history repeats the same story: the systematic plunder of a people, their resources, their land. A community deceived and oppressed by false promises. Nine hours of winding roads from Lima, this "development" first wore the face of the conquistadores, who enslaved the indigenous population and stripped away gold and silver for over four centuries. Then, in the early twentieth century, it took the shape of a major American multinational: the Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation. They launched industrial mining operations and opened El Tajo—literally "the cut"—an open-pit mine that, over the following fifty years, consumed the central plaza, the colonial church, the marketplace, and 12,000 homes.
The mine was nationalized in the 1960s, then privatized again in 1998 under the dictator Alberto Fujimori. With annual profits of $60 million guaranteed at the time, an auction was held with a base price of exactly that amount. For $60 million and one dollar, a mining company founded just two weeks earlier—Volcan—won the bid. El Tajo kept growing, swallowing two more churches, the hospital, three schools, and another 8,000 homes. The city swelled to over 80,000 inhabitants, crushed beneath a monster that continued devouring houses, poisoning air and water, producing tons of gold, silver, copper, lead, and nickel. Vast quantities of metal, transported directly by rail to the port of Lima and exported abroad. Nothing extracted from Cerro de Pasco's earth remained in Peru—exactly as in the days of Atahualpa.
Today Cerro de Pasco is the second-poorest provincial capital in all of Peru. The crater has reached unimaginable proportions. El Tajo stretches two kilometers long, one and a half kilometers wide, and nearly a thousand meters deep—a colossal mountain turned inside out. "For every ton of rock extracted, just over a gram is processed and 999,999 kilograms become waste," explains Flaviano Bianchini, director of the NGO Source International, which has worked in the city for over a decade. "Over the years, these waste piles have accumulated everywhere. First they literally filled two lakes—waters now more acidic than car battery acid. Then they saturated the city itself, eventually surrounding even the hospital with mining waste. In summer, toxic dust clouds rise from these rocks. In winter, rainwater percolates through the piles and seeps into the groundwater, contaminating it with heavy metals that then spread throughout the entire ecosystem." The final destination of these metals—deeply harmful to human health—is the bodies of Cerro's children, women, and men. They accumulate in their lungs. They damage their organs.
Over the years, Source International has collected thousands of samples. Without "proof"—scientific analysis—it is impossible to assert even the most basic rights of these people, despite the overwhelming daily evidence. "We have analyzed the blood and hair of more than 400 children, and if WHO standards were applied, all 400 would need emergency hospitalization due to heavy metals in their bodies," Bianchini reports. Many of them fall ill from diseases directly linked to this contamination. The city has more than 90 cases of childhood leukemia among 60,000 residents. The global average should be about 80 per million." Flaviano remembers the eyes and names of every victim of Cerro's catastrophe, and for them he continues to fight.
"Gerardo was only five years old when he lost his battle to the monster of leukemia. At the time of diagnosis, his blood had lead levels fifteen times higher than the WHO safety threshold. At four, he had been hospitalized at the hospital del niño in Lima, but by then his condition was already beyond recovery." It was a tragedy that drove his mother to chain herself to the gates of the Prime Minister's palace alongside other women. Days later, police arrived. In the clashes that followed, Gerardo himself was beaten with batons, fracturing three ribs. From that day forward his condition deteriorated irreversibly. But no one was held accountable for this atrocity. No one was ever charged. Today the boy rests in the cemetery at Paragsha, in the upper part of Cerro de Pasco.
"Walking through the cemetery is haunting," Flaviano continues, describing Source International's work to defend communities harmed by pollution and human rights violations caused by large extractive industries. "The dates of birth on the tombstones are more concrete proof than any statistic showing childhood mortality in Cerro de Pasco is four times the national average. We have been working here for over ten years. Now we are trying to bring this case to the highest international institutions. The high infant mortality, the incidence of leukemia and tumors, and the widespread learning problems affecting the entire population are the result of serious and massive human rights violations and must be treated as such by the world's highest authorities." Since 2016, over-exploitation of the mine, coupled with financial crisis, has slowed operations. The workforce has shrunk from 6,000 at peak production to 400. In 2018, Volcan—by then enlarged and controlling six mines and a port—was acquired by Glencore, the world's largest mining company, headquartered in Switzerland.
But nothing has changed in Cerro de Pasco. No remediation work is underway. Pollution and disease continue to devastate the community. Since 2020, Glencore has been negotiating to sell the individual Cerro de Pasco mine for $30 million to a mining company created specifically for the purpose, Cerro de Pasco Resources—though that company has struggled to secure the necessary funds. Still, "it hardly matters whose company owns the mine for the people of Cerro," Bianchini concludes. "If nothing changes, they will continue to die, regardless of whether they are exploited by Pizarro or Glencore."