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Barrick Gold’s massive mine in Peru has sped up community development, including schools and a hospital. So why are so many locals still jobless and poor?
QUIRUVILCA, PERU—Towering atop a pedestal in the main square, a golden statue of a miner with his headlamp and jackhammer gleams in the morning sun, a monument to the mineral wealth on which this town was built.
The Quiruvilca mine opened almost 100 years ago, and its blackened wooden structures still loom on the mountainside above the rooftops. But a century of mining copper, silver, zinc and gold brought little development to this remote settlement, nestled in a steep valley more than 4,000 metres up in the Peruvian Andes. The roads weren’t paved; many people didn’t have electricity.
Nine years ago, another mine opened, operated by Toronto-based Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold mining company. It has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in taxes and royalties and the new-found wealth is visible everywhere. The local government has brought power to virtually everyone in town and is now hooking up remote villages. Through an infrastructure-for-taxes program, Barrick has constructed roads, a police college, a hospital and a school. A new highway has cut travel time to the coast from eight hours to 3.5.
But physical infrastructure is the low-hanging fruit of development. While everyone benefits from the new highway, not everyone can get work at the mine; unemployment and poverty remain endemic.
“I have to recognize that economically, (Barrick is) here and they allowed us to do projects. They allowed us to bring electricity to many communities,” Mayor Walter Diaz Ramos says. “But the job opportunities, which are a direct benefit to the families, they’re insufficient.”
Making the jump from roads to jobs has proven difficult, and prompted people here to ask whether mining can bring lasting prosperity.
In an effort to prove that Canadian mining companies can bring more than just a few jobs to the countries where they dig, the Canadian government has launched a series of international development pilot projects in mining communities. In Quiruvilca, it has funded a partnership between the charity World Vision and Barrick to develop the economy, but the small-scale jobs created — micro-entrepreneurs, they’re called — fall short of the economic activity needed to sustain the town long term.
The curse of the boom town remains on everyone’s mind. As Ramos said: “Without mining, we wouldn’t exist.”
It has been four years since Cirilo Paredes worked in the shafts, but he still looks like a miner.
He spent 22 years as a tunnel builder and his deep-set eyes and creased skin testify to a life of hardships underground: long shifts in tight quarters with little light for low pay.
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