Catholics line up against mining operations in Peru

On a rainy morning in August, dozens of men and women crowded into the tiny church in the farming community of El Carmen de la Frontera, in the mountains of northern Peru. Foremost among their worries was a mining company prospecting for copper high in the cloud forest near the border with Ecuador.

The farmers feared that the mine would cut off water supplies to their crops, or affect the certification of the shade-grown organic coffee that they grow for export. A month later, they voted overwhelmingly against allowing mining in their district.

As international metals prices rise, the Andes have become a prime target for investment by foreign companies. Communities often fight back, fearing that open-pit mines will pollute their water and land.

In many places, church workers are on the front line in efforts to stem environmental destruction. That makes them targets of both corporations and government officials eager to cash in on the bonanza.

In Chulucanas diocese in northern Peru, Bishop Daniel Turley, a Chicago-born Augustinian missionary, found himself on the firing line for defending the right of farmers to speak out about mining.

Protests over a planned open-pit mine in an area reputed to have a rich deposit of copper and molybdenum claimed two lives in 2004, and emotions were running high as three districts prepared for a non-binding referendum on mining that was held Sept. 16. Members of the diocesan Justice and Peace Commission visited villages, not telling people how to vote, but explaining how the referendum would work and encouraging residents to participate.

"As bishop, I stand for dialogue, not violence, but I am afraid there may be violence," Turley told NCR a month before the vote.

Shortly before the referendum, Turley received threatening telephone calls that led the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops to send a letter to its Peruvian counterpart, expressing concern. The balloting was peaceful, however, as voters overwhelmingly opposed the proposed mining district, which community leaders are afraid would foul the headwaters of several rivers in a fragile Cloud forest ecosystem.

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Theirs will probably not be the last word, however. With copper prices so high that there is a brisk black market in the country for stolen telephone cables, Garcia's government will almost certainly continue to court the $1.44 billion Rio Blanco project proposed by Monterrico Metals, a London-based company that recently sold an 80-percent stake to the Chinese-owned Zijin consortium.

If built, the mine would be one of the "world's 20 largest copper mines. It would join other large-scale mining operations in Peru owned by companies such as Denver-based Newmont Mining Corp., Toronto-based Barrick Gold Corp. and Switzerland's Xstrata.

Government officials say that mining, which has largely driven Peru's economic growth in recent years, is crucial to the country's development, and companies are often eligible for large tax breaks. Critics, meanwhile, point out that the remote Andean highlands where most mines are located continue to have the country's highest poverty rates.

Peru's bishops are not united on environmental issues, but Turley, Jesuit Archbishop Pedro Barreto of Huancayo in the central highlands, and Dominican Bishop Francisco Gonzalez of Puerto Maldonado in the Amazon basin in southeastern Peru have taken an increasingly public stand on industries that they say have little regard for the health and welfare of surrounding communities.

In Barreto's archdiocese, church workers have been threatened for their efforts to pressure Doe Run Peru, a subsidiary of the U.S.-based Renco Group, to clean up pollution from a smelter that has caused extensive lead poisoning among residents, especially children, in La Oroya, one of the 10 most polluted places on the planet, according to the Blacksmith Institute of New York.

In some cases, dialogue groups have been set up to help break impasses between mining companies and communities, but results have been mixed. Efforts at dialogue about the problem of the smelter in La Oroya have not brought the results that activists had hoped. But Barreto is hopeful that the broad-based coalition that has formed to clean up the Mantaro River valley will succeed because it is led by civic groups, rather than government agencies.

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More recently, talks about the Majaz mine near Huancabamba broke down when the government refused the local mayor's request that the Sept. 16 referendum be one of the points on the agenda.

Barreto arranged for a study by the St. Louis University School of Public Health, which found that most of the children in the neighborhood nearest the La Oroya smelter had high levels of lead, cadmium and other metals in their blood.

The archdiocese is spearheading a project to clean up the Mantaro River, which runs through Huancayo and La Oroya. The project involves community-based monitoring of air, water and soil samples.