Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Limaelite,sucheasyfamiliaritywithVallejo'spoems.Ihadbeenchargedbyafilmcompany,
theDocumentaryGroup,withthetaskoffindingaPeruviangirlinapoorcommunity:achild
whose story might be documented by the award-winning American director Richard Rob-
bins in a movie about poverty around the world. His advance film party had shot videos of
younggirlsintheAmazonjungle,ofgirlsintheicyreachesofLaRinconadaandCerroLun-
ar. Senna was not particularly photogenic. She was shy in front of the camera. Hunched and
incommunicative,shedidn'tseemlikeagoodcandidateforafeaturefilm.Butwhenshestar-
ted to speak, when she pulled Vallejo's words from the air to describe her pain—“There are
blows in life, so powerful”—a flame seemed to grow within her. I was riveted. “Blows like
God's fury—like a riptide of human suffering rammed into a single soul . . . I don't know.”
Social science now tells us that if we can take indigent girls between the ages of 10 and 14
and give them a basic education, we can change the fabric of an entire community. If we can
capture them in that fleeting window, great social advances can be achieved. Give enough
young girls an education and per capita income will go up; infant mortality will go down;
the rate of economic growth will increase; the rate of HIV/AIDS infection will fall. Child
marriages will be less common; child labor, too. Better farming practices will be put into
place, which means better nutrition will follow, and overall family health in that community
will climb. Educated girls, as former World Bank official Barbara Herz has written, tend to
insist that their children be educated. And when a nation has smaller, healthier, better-edu-
catedfamilies,economicproductivityshootsup,environmental pressuresease,andeveryone
is better-off. As Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard University president, put it: “Educat-
inggirlsmaybethesinglehighestreturninvestmentavailableinthedevelopingworld.”Why
is that? Well, you can make all the interpretations you like; you can posit the gendered argu-
ments; but the numbers do not lie.
The irony in all this is that young girls like Senna are hardly valued in La Rinconada. The
girlsandwomenofthatharsh,remoteminingtownmaywellbethecommunity'smostprom-
ising resource, but the overwhelmingly male culture of the mountain leaves little choice for
a young adolescent female but to follow her mother to the cliff and perpetuate a cycle of ig-
norance and poverty.
Allthesame,therearesignsthattheoverallbusinessofgoldmininginPerumaybefacing
significant corrections. In 2006, residents of villages near the largest gold-mining operation
in all of South America, the U.S.-owned Newmont Mining Corporation's Yanacocha Pro-
ject, just outside the historic city of Cajamarca, blocked the roads and declared that they had
had enough of the company's toxic and predatory practices. A bloody standoff between the
mine's armed security forces and the residents of Cajamarca followed. Five protesters were
killed. By the end of 2011, the mineworkers were radicalized; they called a strike against
Newmont's new Minas Conga Project. Their complaints were loud and clear: the workers
