Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The world boom in the value of gold has not translated to better lives in La Rinconada. It is
thesameinthegoldminesofCajamarcainnorthernPeru(ownedbytheU.S.giantNewmont
Mining Corporation), or in Puerto Maldonado, where anarchic mines carve into the Amazon
jungle.InCajamarca,whichhaspoured$7billionofgoldintotheglobalmarketinthelast30
years, 74 percent of the population lives in numbing poverty. In the outlying areas of Cuzco,
where Australian and U.S. companies are busily ferreting Peru's gold out into international
markets, more than half of the population earns less than $35 a month. Peruvians, in other
words, may perch on some of the world's most valuable mountains, but as the naturalist Al-
exander von Humboldt is said to have observed 200 years ago, “Peru is a beggar, sitting on a
bench of gold.”
Humboldt was quick to see—when he traveled Peru in the early 1800s—that the terrain
just south of Lake Titicaca, where the Andes make a stately march south to Potosí, held vast
reservesofgoldandsilver.Accordingtohim,MountAnaneaharboredaconsiderablestoreof
wealth,eventhoughitsmineshadlaindormantforahundredyears.Historybookstellusthat
during the 1700s the glacier atop Ananea had grown heavy with accumulated ice; eventually
itcollapsedtheSpanishminesandflushedthemwithfreezingwater,drowningalllifewithin.
Spain tried to resuscitate their operation in 1803, but the land was too difficult to govern, its
peakstoovertiginous,itscoldtoolacerating. ThewindsandsnowsofAnaneahaddonewhat
the Inca could not: they had driven the conquistadors away. But, by then, Spain had scores
of mines to satisfy its voracious lust for gold and silver. So it was that Ananea remained that
mythic titan—remote, frigid, and threaded with gold.
Nevertheless, the myth had preceded Humboldt, preceded conquistadors, proliferated with
the Inca, and had the force of immutable truth. According to local lore, a gold block the size
ofahorse'sheadandweighingmorethan100poundshadbeenfoundonMountAnanea.The
region's rivers were said to be strewn with glittering nuggets. Garcilaso de la Vega, a half-
Inca, half-Spanish chronicler who lived in the late 1500s, wrote that precisely that stretch of
Peru contained gold beyond our imagining. Chunks of coruscating rock as large as a human
head—and 24-karat pure—had rolled from cracks in the Andean stone.
It isn't surprising, given the attendant mythology, that a swarm of enterprising locals, tot-
ing little more than picks and hammers, would climb those reaches again. They began to
come in the 1960s. Senna Ochochoque's father arrived in 1980, a strapping young man with
wildly ambitious dreams and legs sturdy enough to carry them. In La Rinconada, he met
Leonor,ayoungwomanwhohadbeenbornthere15yearsearlier.Hebuiltaone-roomhouse
of rock, covered it with tin, and invited her to live there with him. They proceeded to have
fourchildren,ofwhichSennawasthethird.Strangelyenough,thatinhospitablepeakwasnot
a bad place to be during those fateful years of the '80s and early '90s. The Shining Path, the
Maoist terrorist organization intent on capsizing Peru's power structure, was slashing its way
through the countryside, killing whole villages as it went.
