Armando Cruz & Cesar Uco
Since August 5, Peru’s southern region of Arequipa has been gripped by a region-wide strike and mass protests against the government granting a license to initiate the construction of two open-pit mines in the La Joya desert region. The mining project, which is located in Cocachacra, in Arequipa’s Islay province, is commonly known as “Tia Maria.”
Unions and community organizations have called for an indefinite strike beginning today, August 22, against the project. On Tuesday, protesters and police clashed once again in the Matarani district, the site of Peru’s second largest port through which much of the country’s mining and agricultural exports flow.
The company behind the Tia Maria project is Southern Copper (SC). It is a subsidiary of Grupo Mexico, Mexico’s biggest mining company, which has been widely criticized for damaging the Mexican environment through the dumping of mining wastes, toxic spills and other activities which are obviously not confined to Mexico. In Peru and elsewhere, when mine tailings are not openly dumped into rivers and the sea, they are pumped into reservoirs behind dams that are precariously built and tend to collapse, as was tragically seen in the 2015 Mariana dam disaster that killed 19 people in Brazil.
The Tia Maria project was first announced in 2003, but it was not until 2009 that SC produced an Environmental Impact Study (EIS). An EIS is a mandatory investigation into the potential environmental impact on an area by an enterprise that exploits it. By law, no mining project can begin development without the Ministry of Mines and Energy (MINEM) approving an EIS presented by a company, assuring that its project will not harm the environment or any human activity related to it.
The local population of farmers and agricultural workers in Cocachacra’s Tambo Valley depend upon the local Tambo river for their products which they export to other regions, and even as far as Bolivia. They were concerned about the consequences of the project, such as the dust raised by the giant explosions needed to open the pits and the use of the water from the Tambo river, and its pollution.
In order to give SC’s EIS some credibility, the MINEM sent it to be reviewed by the United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS), expecting it to be approved by this body and thus obtaining political cover for providing the construction license to SC.
The UNOPS, however, said exactly the opposite of what the MINEM and SC had wanted. In its review, it found the EIS elaborated by SC raised concern primarily over the use of the Tambo river water, but also about the possible use of dangerous mercury in the operations. The MINEM abruptly ended the contract with the UN, and no other EIS from Peru has been presented to UNOPS since.
UNOPS’ inconvenient review deepened the distrust of the Islay people toward the Tia Maria project, but behind their opposition also lay well-known environmental devastation produced by mining in other regions of Peru. A clear example is the region of Cajamarca where the national Buenaventura Corporation drained entire lagoons in order to turn them into open-pit mines, altering for the worse the lives of thousands of people. After nearly two decades of extractive mining operations, Cajamarca remains one of the poorest provinces in Peru.
The region of Arequipa also has a history of militancy and opposition to diktats coming from the capital, Lima, with a massive uprising there in 1956 leading to the downfall of the US-backed dictator Manuel Odria, who had brutally oppressed and jailed members of the bourgeois nationalist APRA movement.
In April 2011, protests and strikes were called by the Council of Tambo Workers (Junta de usuarios del Tambo) and the Tambo Valley Defense Front (Frente de Defensa del Valle del Tambo)—two grassroots organizations representing farmers, agricultural workers and small businesses concerned by Tia Maria that have no official links to Peru’s political parties or unions. Their main demand was the complete cancellation of the project. The “nationalist” government of President Ollanta Humala sent militarized police to repress the demonstrators, resulting in a toll of three dead. Eventually, the government had no choice but to suspend the project.
In 2013, SC announced a new EIS on which they tackled the water supply problem by announcing the construction of a desalination plant that would use water from the Pacific Ocean instead of the Tambo River for the project. This new EIS was approved by the MINEM and protests once again erupted in 2015 opposing the project and demanding its cancellation. Once again, the MINEM retreated and suspended the project.
Then, in July of this year, with SC’s EIS facing expiration in less than a month, the government decided to grant the construction license for the Tia Maria project. Aware that this meant another confrontation with the Tambo inhabitants, SC declared that it would open a “dialogue” with the community before the real construction begins.
Once again Tambo’s grassroots organizations called for a region-wide strike on August 5, while sending an appeal to the government. This time they were joined by Arequipa’s regional president Elmer Caceres and other local authorities who appealed directly to President Martin Vizcarra to intervene and cancel Tia Maria’s construction.
Thousands of people aligned with 30 regional organizations joined the strike on August 5. There were frequent confrontations with the police, and workers continuously blocked the South Pan-American highway and the streets of Arequipa’s capital city, affecting commerce and economic activity.
Most importantly, workers blocked the Matarani port, prompting commercial ships to turn back and preventing the export of minerals from the Las Bambas mine, in Apurimac, against which the local population also fought. Militarized police where sent to evict strikers from the port.
Three days later, on August 8, the Mining Council—a MINEM body that receives appeals from the states and resolves them—announced the suspension, not of the project itself, but only of the construction license, for 120 days. In its decision it noted the “existing risk of the loss of human lives besides the already experienced economic losses.”
The Mining Council will take this time to review the appeals presented by Arequipa’s local authorities and decide whether or not to renew the license. Meanwhile the strike continued—mainly in the Tambo Valley region—although its intensity decreased.
Then on August 10, the corporate media ran stories revealing a closed-door conversation held between Vizcarra and Arequipa’s local authorities—including the regional president Caceres—on July 24. An unnamed participant in the conversation had secretly recorded it and leaked it to the press.
In the conversation, Vizcarra tells the local authorities that the government could agree to the license’s suspension in order to maintain the dialogue roundtable, but that he could not immediately announce the cancellation because he needed an “argument” for it. He feigned sympathy for Tia Maria’s opponents.
The corporate media and opposition congressmen reacted furiously to the leaked tapes, charging a “capitulation” to the “anti-mining extremists,” and saying Vizcarra had betrayed not only the “entrepreneur class” but the people by negotiating in secret and sending policemen to suppress the protests when he had already taken a decision beforehand about how to deal with the issue.
While Vizcarra is more cautious about how to deal with the Tia Maria conflict than his presidential predecessors, this in no way means that he has rejected the project. Similarly, the local authorities in Arequipa, who speak for the regional bourgeoisie, are just as concerned as the central government over the economic losses caused by the strike.
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