Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
up like an army of ants. It is brutal, exhausting work and, in it, a body suffers a pounding
battery—no less from the weight of rocks than from the relentless cold, which can dip to −4
degreesFahrenheit.ThewomenofLaRinconadaareoldbythetimetheyare20.Chancesare
they have lost their teeth. Before girlhood is out, their faces are cooked by sun, parched by
wind; their hands have turned the color of cured meat; their fingers are humped and gnarled.
You can feel the toll of the
pallaqueo
when you see Senna look up and cringe at the bright,
blue sky. She squints at a camera flash, shades her eyes. Her black eyes have turned a milky
gray.
AccordingtotheUnitedNations, morethan18million children between 10and14areen-
gaged in hard labor in Latin America. Most are “informal” workers like Senna—underpaid,
overworked, and grossly undercounted. More than 2 million are in Peru, which accounts for
the highest ratio of child laborers in all of Latin America. To put it more plainly: one out
of every four Peruvian children works regularly, and does so in physically dangerous condi-
tions. Perhaps because of ignorance, certainly because of necessity, parents whose children
workalongsidetheminLaRinconadafindnothingwrongwiththispractice.Theyarerepeat-
ing an age-old cycle. Their children accompany them to work just as they once accompanied
their parents. When a young mother enters a mine with a baby strapped to her back, she does
not know that the dynamite fumes and chemical vapors can do lasting damage to her infant's
brain; ditto for the mother whose child pours mercury into the mix while she grinds away on
the
quimbaleteo;
dittoforthefatherwhowadesintoacyanidepondsidebysidewithhisson.
No government official has come around to explain the long-term effects: blindness, brain
damage,nervedamage,lungdisease,lumbardeterioration, intestinal failure,earlydeath.Ac-
cording to the Institute of Health and Work in Peru, more than 70 percent of all children and
adolescents inLa Rinconada sufferchronic malnutrition; as many as 95percent exhibit some
form of nervous impairment. But even if the parents of these children were lined up and giv-
en this tragic news, they might have no choice but to keep them working anyway. How else
could they afford to eat? How else to keep warm? How else to buy the tools to work another
day?
Aware that to tamper with this fragile system of survival would be to undermine the poor
population's ability to subsist, the Peruvian government has been slow to outlaw child labor.
Peru was one of the last Latin American countries to ratify the United Nations convention
thatprohibitedchildrenundertheageof14fromworking(ILO/UN#138).Evenso,although
Peru finally signed that document in May 2001, the mining boom that immediately followed
made it difficult to enforce the law. To do so would mean Peru would have to pull 50,000
children from the nation's work force. And that is a very hard thing to do when business is
booming and a country's growth rate is among the highest in the world.
Few places expose the dark side of the global economy more starkly than the lawless
25-acre cesspool of La Rinconada. For every gold ring that goes out into the world, 250 tons
