Dante’s Inferno is not the only Hell.
There are also others.
Raise your hand who, in this room, is over 28 years old.
If we were now in 2010,
in the indigenous communities of Canaan de Cachiyaku and Nuevo Sucre,
in the Peruvian Amazon,
all of you who raised your hand would now be dead.
Because life expectancy in these two communities
it is precisely 28 years.
Because precisely Dante’s Inferno is not the only Hell,
and on Earth sometimes Hell can present itself in various ways.
One of those is like that.
Here we are in Cerro de Pasco, in the heart of the Peruvian Andes.
At 4,500 meters of altitude,
80,000 people live around this gash in the earth’s crust,
from which several times they were extracted
any kind of non-human resources.
Let’s talk about
– at the beginning silver was extracted; then copper; then lead; zinc;
now gold and silver.
Even the property has changed hands several times:
at the beginning it was an American enterprise;
then it was sold to a Canadian company;
then it was nationalized;
then it was sold at a ridiculous price to the President’s cousin.
And now, the company that runs this mine
it is an anonymous company
which is owned by an administration company
which is owned by a fund
which is owned by a trust based in the British Virgin Islands.
So, at the end of the fair,
nobody knows who is the owner of this chasm
that adorns the life, every day, of 80,000 people.
And you will wonder how I ended up there.
Well, 12 years ago I found myself in my dark forest
when at a conference, a bit like here,
I met a Guatemalan activist
who was talking about the impact on the environment and on human rights
of gold mines in his country.
He had a – a very strong exposure, he touched you right inside.
But he had no data, he had no concrete evidence.
I, like a good nerd scientist,
at the end of the conference I approached her and said:
“Beautiful everything you said, strong.
But without data, without numbers, I can easily contradict you. “
And she said to me: “Well, you speak well.
But we scientists do not work for us. “
They are afraid to work for us,
because then every other possibility is precluded.
And I said, all right, I’ll be the first one.
And two months later I was on a plane
with a one-way ticket to Guatemala.
And so this activist – his name is Magalì –
it was my Charon who carried me beyond the ocean
to know then the hell of mining.
Once you reach the other side of the Atlantic,
the other side of the Acheron,
I too had to find myself a bit of my Virgil.
My Virgil introduces us today with this beautiful smiling face.
His name is Berta Caceres,
an indigenous Lenca activist from Honduras,
which has been defending indigenous lands for over 20 years
from the exploitation of mining, oil and oil palm companies
and hydroelectric plants.
Goldman Prize, who is a bit of the Nobel prize for environmentalism, in 2015.
It was she who introduced me to the inferno of the extractive model.
And today I will take you to this hell.
Let’s start from the first group, the outermost one,
that is a bit ‘the group, we could say, the displaced
because that mine, like all mines,
it needs explosions to destroy the Earth.
And those explosions, then, also destroy the houses.
If you walk to Cerro de Pasco, or any other mining town,
you seem to be walking in an earthquake or bombed city.
Instead they are simply
the constant explosions of the mining company.
But that’s little, that’s nothing compared to the amount of land
which is used to make room for those mines.
Have you seen that chasm?
The volume is twice Monte Titano, nearby.
For those who are not from here,
Monte Titano is where it has its “headquarters”, in quotes, San Marino.
Twice that volume.
And of all that is extracted there, for every ton of rock,
it is a gram that is taken away.
Those beautiful veins of gold that you see in the movies?
In fact, they are seen in the movies.
Today they are finished, they are finished by that day.
Today gold and silver are in traces, dispersed within rock.
So, for every ton of rock that is extracted,
one gram is processed.
999 pounds and 999 grams are garbage.
Every year the Cerro de Pasco mine produces more garbage
of all the cities of the United States put together.
And this garbage must be put somewhere:
at the beginning they completely filled two lakes.
Then they filled an entire valley, the basin of a river.
Then there was no more space, and they started to put it everywhere.
There are mountains of debris everywhere, and if you’re in Cerro de Pasco
your children will find themselves playing football
surrounded by mining debris.
The second group, descending more into the bowels of the Earth,
more in the bowels of Hell,
it’s that of the workers.
The shifts are 12 hours: from 8 to 8.
There are only two shifts, from 8 to 20 and from 8 to 8,
for 21 days in a row.
Then 4 days of rest, then start again:
12 hours a day for 21 days in a row.
In the heat of the tunnels, out in the cold.
There is a law, in Peru,
which was promoted by the President, or dictator, of Peru, of the time,
Alberto Fujimori, now in prison for violation of human rights
– the same who then sold the mine to his cousin –
promoted this law
so any company with less than 300 workers, in Peru,
it can not be unionized.
In Cerro de Pasco there are 3400 workers, divided into 14 sub-enterprises,
each with less than 300 workers.
The next group we could define it a bit ‘the cyanide group,
the circle of chemical leaching that is this process, in fact
– as this gold is so lost in the rock
that you have to spray it with those watering cans you see there,
which spray a mixture of water and cyanide
that percolates in the rock and rips gold from the rock,
and then bring it into solution.
Sodium cyanide is the exact same substance
which was used in Nazi gas chambers.
Among other things, it produces the exact same company.
Today, however, he sells it to mining companies.
In the liquid phase: it was then used in the gaseous phase.
There is a school in Honduras, which is 82 meters from these watering cans.
When it blows, you can smell the bitter almonds.
Those of you who read “If this is a man” know what it means.
The next group, inevitably, is that of polluted water.
Because we from this gold, from this water with cyanide,
we make gold and silver,
because it’s what we need, that costs, that has a value!
Arsenic, aluminum, lead have no value,
so we unload them in the river, like this.
In Cerro de Pasco, the mining company uses the equivalent in water
of 80,000 Olympic pools, every day.
In homes, the water comes one hour a week:
from 8.10am to 8.30am, Monday, Wednesday and Saturday.
When it does not arrive you are forced to go and get it elsewhere,
maybe here.
And if you follow the advice of the doctor,
that is, drink 2 liters of water a day – every day, this water here –
after 45 days you will have drunk this amount of aluminum.
Eight of these cans, each year, end up in your body.
It is obvious that, according to a recent study,
100% of the population of Cerro de Pasco
should be hospitalized urgently
due to the presence of metals in their blood.
The problem is that 80,000 people
rely on a hospital of 124 beds,
surrounded by mining waste.
A hospital where there is nothing:
a month ago, to do the analysis,
we had to bring latex gloves from Lima.
Because then, at the end of the fair,
that chasm that produces 60 million dollars in earnings every year
there in Cerro de Pasco leaves nothing:
Cerro de Pasco is one of the poorest cities in all of Peru.
And since you can not cure yourself, as you get sick,
the next group,
as we descend into the bowels of this hell,
it is that of those who die.
Lidia was eight years old
when we took this picture, in 2009.
As lead settles on bones instead of calcium,
and therefore prevents calcium from settling, and makes it fragile,
in just eight years he had almost twenty fractures in his legs,
and he could not even walk anymore.
Two years ago she died.
It is obvious that this does not go down to the people who live there.
And they are looking for alternative ways,
then there are clearly groups that organize themselves, who protest,
who try to negotiate, to have their rights respected;
but the response of companies, of the Government, very often is violent.
And therefore, a little like Virgil
could not accompany Dante in the last rounds of Hell,
not even Berta will be able to accompany us in our last days.
Because just under a year ago, March 3, 2016,
Berta was killed.
At night, two assassins entered his home
and they fired three shots in the dark.
They did not even have the courage to look her in the eye.
Without Berta, however, we continue.
We descend into the bowels of hell; let’s go see him, Lucifer.
And Lucifer looks like this.
Why all this…
… it happens for this.
It happens to give us that golden ring,
low price;
it happens to give us the silver earrings we gave,
again at low cost;
it happens to give us cheap cobalt,
so that the phones can cost less than 100 euros.
It happens to have the coltan,
which is that mineral that allows us to have such thin phones.
Because if they are half a centimeter taller, we do not like them.
However, a bit like Dante,
we too finally went out to see the stars again.
Among the stars, today, there is one called Source International.
It is an organization that takes care of defending these populations
from what’s happening,
and I’ll tell you with what we did in Cerro de Pasco.
A month ago, on January 17, after eight years of battle,
we got that the city of Cerro de Pasco
was declared in an environmental emergency.
So there was a negotiating table
between the company, the Government and the community.
Now imagine this table:
a horseshoe, very narrow and long.
At the head of the table was the Minister of Health of Peru,
with two of his advisors;
on the left there were all the councilors of the enterprise and of the Government.
There were 17 senior officials among university professors, Rectors,
department managers, directors of large research centers.
They came from all over the world:
from Pakistan; from Brasil; many from the United States;
from England; Germany.
They were all there, well dressed, with their simultaneous translators
because they spoke who English, who other languages.
Here were the representatives of the community: a group of pastors,
many of them natives who did not even speak Spanish,
and they had traveled at night on the bus to go down to Lima.
And I was there with them, representing Source International.
But the nice thing is that these 17 great teachers do not …
– none of them had ever been to Cerro de Pasco.
None of them had something concrete in their hands.
Nobody had data, none of them had numbers,
something scientific to be asserted.
We had it: we were collecting data for nine years,
we had an infinite amount of scientific knowledge.
We had an infinite amount of data, of reality, of cases we had studied.
The result?
On 3 February, Peru’s environmental tax office
ordered the mining company to restore the environmental liabilities,
exactly as we had asked us at that negotiating table.
Now you remember the two indigenous communities of Canaan de Cachiyaku and Nuevo Sucre,
where life expectancy was 28 years in 2010?
Now I would like them to raise their hands
all those who are between 28 and 36 years old.
Because … you will not be many,
but that, in eight years, thanks to our intervention,
life expectancy in Canaan and Nuevo Sucre has grown eight years.
So … you’re not many,
but all those who have their hands up now
if we were in Canaan and Nuevo Sucre
they would be alive thanks to Source International.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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