Poisoned city fights to save its children

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Observer/Guardian

Poisoned city fights to save its children


Families in a Peruvian valley choked by toxic gas from a smelter are taking on a US metals giant

Hugh O'Shaughnessy in La Oroya, Peru
Sunday August 12, 2007
The Observer



Children wearing masks play near the towering chimneys of Peru's La Oroya refinery and metals processing plant. Photograph: Reuters

At an altitude of 13,000ft the Andean air is clear. A plume of white smoke rises from the chimney at the La Oroya smelter, hard at work refining arsenic and metals such as lead, cadmium and copper. But today the company is not discharging any gases over this city in central Peru. 'It's a nice day, so the company won't be letting off any gases,' says Hugo Villa, a neurologist at the local hospital. 'They keep the worst emissions to overcast days or after dark.'

When the gases are released, they make this one of the most polluted places on the planet, with La Oroya ranking alongside Chernobyl for environmental devastation, according to a US think-tank, the Blacksmith Institute.

The company is a US corporation, Renco Doe Run. The gases are the product from the main smelter a mile or two down the valley. The high mountains around keep out the cleansing winds, meaning that airborne metals are concentrated in the valley. Neither humans nor nature can escape the company's outpourings of poisons. And, despite evidence that gases have been behind the premature deaths of workers and residents young and old, the business-oriented, pro-US government of President Alan Garcia is too afraid of foreign investors to do anything about it.

Now, however, the townspeople, once muted by their worries about losing their jobs with the valley's biggest employer, are turning their attention towards Ira Rennert, Renco's proprietor.




Read more: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,2147039,00.html

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Peru's President, Alan Garcia