‘Mining for gold above the highest-known inhabited settlement in the world’

Jennifer Wells, writing for the Toronto Star, looks at the allure and the dangers that mining is bringing to the poor in Peru.

The work is gruelling and dangerous. Ruben Aliaga speaks of rock falls and of the “death gas” in the shafts. He calls it antimonio. It is the toxic gases the men fear the most. A shopkeeper recounts the demise of two young men last year. They were not using ventilators. They collapsed in the shaft. The shafts run hundreds of metres deep.

Inside the mine, three young men take a break on a rock ledge. Their breath forms ghostly grey vapours in the air. When they are quiet, their heads dip toward the ground, the light of their lamps casting a downward glow. And all that is heard is the drip, drip, drip of the glacial waters. Tomorrow they will work for themselves.

Read on.