“To be honest, I'm not happy with the work. The discomfort, the pollution, no one could be happy with that. But necessity makes us do it. As parents, we have no choice. We're sentenced to it.”—Pedro Córdova, Metal Worker
REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK: Jon Miller
I spent five years in Peru, and passed through La Oroya more than a dozen times. And each time I wondered: What on earth would it be like to live and work here?
La Oroya is the quintessential company town. Almost everyone depends on the giant multi-metal smelter and refinery that sprawls across the valley floor. It doesn't just dominate La Oroya visually, aurally, and olfactorily, but also economically, politically, and emotionally. That makes most Oroyans tolerant of conditions that elsewhere might lead to open rebellion.
On cold mornings, exhaust from the smelter sits like fog on the hills where the poorest people live. Recent studies show that 99 percent of the children under seven in the neighborhood nearest the smelter have blood lead levels higher than those considered acceptable by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Other studies have found dangerously high levels of cadmium, arsenic, sulfur dioxide, and other contaminants in La Oroya's air and soil.
Still, the people of La Oroya can be fiercely defensive of their town. It took me several days to find a worker willing to talk openly about conditions there. Pedro Córdova, a mechanic who suffers from pneumoconiosis, an incurable ailment related to Black Lung Disease, had been diagnosed just a few weeks before I met him in the furniture shop his wife, Rosabel, runs out of the ground floor of their house. He was angry.
“I've been sentenced to death, and I'm not going to wait until I die to get what I deserve from the company,” he said. He wants the smelter's owner, Missouri-based Doe Run, to buy the concrete house he built a stone's throw from the smelter, so he and his family can move someplace else. continued »
