• The ugly American The ugly American By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – January 21, 2005 About 475 years ago, Francisco Pizzaro and a small group of Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru. They destroyed the Inca empire – then the
• The ugly American
The ugly American
By the St. Louis Post-Dispatch – January 21, 2005
About 475 years ago, Francisco Pizzaro and a small group of Spanish conquistadors arrived in Peru. They destroyed the Inca empire – then the largest and most advanced in the Western Hemisphere – and seized its gold and silver.
That was then.
This is now: About 18,000 children live in La Oroya, Peru. Virtually every one of them is lead poisoned, independent researchers concluded two years ago. About 28 percent were so severely poisoned that they should have been hospitalized immediately.
The source of that lead poisoning is a giant metal smelter in the town. Since 1997, it has been owned by Doe Run Resources Group of Maryland Heights. That’s the same company that owns the smelter in Herculaneum, Mo. Coincidentally, tests conducted during 2001 found 28 percent of the children living around the Herculaneum smelter were lead poisoned, although they didn’t require hospitalization.
The Peruvian smelter polluted long before it was purchased by Doe Run. But when Doe Run bought the La Oroya smelter in 1997, it agreed to an environmental cleanup plan. In return, it got permission to exceed Peruvian pollution standards for 10 years. The former Peruvian official who negotiated the deal later went to work for Doe Run.
About three-quarters of the cleanup plan – the most expensive part – has yet to be accomplished. Doe Run already had renegotiated the agreement twice to buy itself more time when, last month, smelter workers went on strike.
The striking workers took the company’s side. They were upset that the national government was taking what they viewed as a hard line with the American firm. Doe Run was warning the workers and the government that unless it got a five-year extension, it would close the smelter. It said its finances were so bad it couldn’t pay for the cleanup sooner. Doe Run used that same argument to gain extra time to comply with emission standards in Herculaneum.
The company’s threat to close its La Oroya smelter was characterized by Hunter Farrell, an American Presbyterian missionary working in Peru, as “economic blackmail.” The smelter employs 3,500 people, a good chunk of the local work force. If it closed, they would have no work.
The strike lasted two days. It left “two dead and many wounded,” Mr. Farrell wrote to U.S. supporters. In the end, Doe Run can get at least three extra years, with a possible one-year extension, to complete the cleanup. The company already has spent $33 million cleaning up the area, but it still has $134 million worth of work to do. The extension calls for Doe Run to post the equivalent of 20 percent of the $134 million as a guarantee, a requirement company President Jeffrey Zelms called “counterproductive.”
The Roman Catholic Bishop of La Oroya recently asked St. Louis University to visit the town to assess possible contamination in workers’ homes. If Doe Run is sincerely concerned about its workers’ welfare, it should support that testing, tell its workers they won’t lose their jobs for having their homes tested for contamination, and immediately act on the results.
Since Doe Run bought its Peruvian smelter, the prices of lead, copper and gold – the metals refined there – have increased by 66 percent, 74 percent and 76 percent respectively. Somewhere, Francisco Pizzaro is smiling.
