Welcome to hell: The Peruvian mining city of #La_Rinconada — RT Op-ed
▻https://www.rt.com/op-ed/454486-la-rinconada-hell-mining-peru
Magestic approach to La Rinconadsa - through garbage
© Andre Vltchek
While the West attacks Venezuela, a country that improved the lives of many of its citizens, it overlooks horrors that are taking place in Peru and other ‘pro-market’ countries in Latin America.
La Rinconada, which lies at over 5km above sea level, is the highest settlement in the world; a gold mining town, a concentration of misery, a community of about 50,000 inhabitants, many of whom have been poisoned by mercury. A place where countless women and children get regularly raped, where law and order collapsed quite some time ago, where young girls are sent to garbage dumps in order to ‘recycle’ terribly smelling waste, and where almost all the men work in beastly conditions, trying to save at least some money, but where most of them simply ruin their health, barely managing to stay alive.
I decided to travel to La Rinconada precisely during these days when the socialist Venezuela is fighting for its survival. I drove there as the European elites in Bolivia were trying to smear the enormously popular and successful President of Bolivia, Evo Morales, while the elections were approaching.
As in so many places in the turbo-capitalist and pro-Western Peru, La Rinconada is like a tremendous warning: this is how Venezuela and Bolivia used to be before Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales. This is where Washington wants the entire Latin America to return to. Like those monstrous and hopeless slums surrounding Lima, La Rinconada should be a call to arms.
Nature is nothing to gold diggers
© Andre Vltchek
Aluminium hell
© Andre Vltchek