Transformation of Campesinos Livelihood Strategies in the Peruvian Region of Cajamarca as a Consequence of Newmont’s Transnational Gold Mining Activities (Yanacocha Goldmine): Social Movements and an Actor-Oriented Contribution to Sustainable Development.
By Jonas R. Lambrigger, Centre for Development and Environment, Institute of Geography, University of Berne, July 2007

Introduction
Under Alberto Fujimori’s administration in the 1990s, Peru experienced an enormous neoliberal political and economic transformation. The Peruvian state and economy were restructured according to neoliberal principles in order to attract foreign direct investment. The mining sector was considered to be the key element in future development opportunities. While the Peruvian economy has been growing gradually during the last 15 years, human development, viewed in an international context, has deteriorated. The same phenomenon can be observed in the Cajamarca department, where the world’s second largest gold mine, Yanacocha, is located. The Yanacocha gold mine is an open pit mining enterprise 15-20 km north of the city of Cajamarca in the centre of the watersheds of three important rivers: the Jequetepeque, the Llaucano and the Cajamarca. So-called “modern mining” is supposed to have a minimum of impacts and contamination. In reality, however, Yanacocha’s operations, which are located at altitudes between 3500 and 4200 m and require tremendous quantities of land, have led to a displacement of numerous campesinos (peasants) into other campesino communities or into the city of Cajamarca. Besides the scarcity of land, access to the natural resource water has been further limited and water quality has declined. This has led to numerous conflicts between the local (campesino) population and the Yanacocha gold mine. The most prominent conflicts over water involved the mobilization of 50 000 persons against Yanacocha’s planned exploration of the sacred mountain Quilish in 2004 and the assassination of a peasant in Combayo by police forces during peasant protests in August 2006 against the construction of Yanacocha’s Río Azufre dam. This investigation focuses on the transformation of livelihood strategies of peasant (campesino) families in the area affected by the Yanacocha Gold Mine who had to migrate into the city of Cajamarca. Semistructured interviews, PRA tools, group discussions, gatherings with local people and peasants, digital photography, and different applications of geographical information systems (Arc GIS) were used.

Results
Socioeconomic trends
The globalization of Peru’s economy through transnational mining operations is evident in Cajamarca in terms of socioeconomic trends such as uncontrolled spatial and demographic urban growth, an increase in environmental diseases like cancer and lung diseases, increased prostitution, motorized traffic, delinquency, and air pollution. Additionally, in the Valley of Cajamarca, great social segregation is evident in the emergence of new private educational institutions, spatial dichotomization in high- and low-quality (pueblos jóvenes) residential zones, and construction of the “El Quinde Shopping Plaza” shopping mall consisting of stores with international prices for people with high incomes. Very few people get much benefit from the increased dynamics of the local economy, while the majority must cope with negative trends related to the Yanacocha Gold Mine’s activities. Determining the direct influence of mining activities on these trends is difficult, but there is a very high probability that the mining company is an important factor.

Change of livelihood strategies of campesino migrant families
The nine campesino families who participated in this investigation in the countryside all depended principally on the use of the natural resources water and land. They lived from cattle-breeding, agriculture and dairy farming, depending on the elevation. Social networks such as family and community networks and the “ronda campesina” were important networks in which they were embedded. The subsistence economy was the predominant source of support for most of the campesino households. The families investigated were divided into three categories according to the moment of migration: A, B and C. Families in categories A and B migrated into the city of Cajamarca between 1992 and 1997, and families in category C between 2000 and 2004.
Families in categories A and B were mostly forced and/or pressured by the Yanacocha gold mine to sell their land at a price of 100 to 1500 Peruvian Soles (approx. 51 to 560 USD). The pressure to sell the land was very often accompanied by empty promises by the mining company. In the rural context, all the households were economically well balanced. Most families in categories A and B depend on incomes as day labourers in construction work, street vending in the informal sector, and sometimes renting rooms in their own house (if they own a home). Very often they are unable to cover the economic costs of daily life. In order to keep the daily costs of urban life low, and to retain their campesino identity, the families often engage in urban farming (breeding of small animals such as guinea pics, chickens and rabbits, growing vegetables and medical plants). Nevertheless all these families estimated that their quality of life has decreased since their migration from the countryside into the urban context of Cajamarca. This has led to the formation of a group of landless campesinos who are trying to retrieve their land from the mining company and who constitute one of numerous actors in the “social movement of Cajamarca”.
Families in category C migrated between four and eleven years later than those in categories A and B. In contrast to the first two categories, families in category C already had experience with the treacherous land acquisitions of the Yanacocha Gold Mine. Additionally, these families were much more aware of their civil rights as Peruvian citizens than those who sold their land in the 1990s. Therefore, they could draw on experience with earlier land purchases in their negotations with the company and demand higher prices. They not only requested higher prices but very often refused to sell all their land in order to keep their connection to the rural context. As a result of land prices ranging between 4850 and 8300 NS/ha (approx. 1400 to 2400 US$/ha) and the previous experience of campesino families, the families in category C bought more land and cattle elsewhere in other rural areas in order to avoid losing the link to agricultural activities in the countryside. Maintaining a link to agricultural activities, despite the fact that there are no economic reasons for doing so, can only be understood in terms of maintaining a campesino identity. All of these families were not only able to enforce their multistrategies related to the use of natural resources, but also those not directly related to the use of natural resources, such as the establishment of microenterprise (very often with structural problems due to dependency on the Yanacocha Gold Mine), the renting of rooms and apartments, or wage labour in the mining company itself. None of these families has had economic problems up to now. Their quality of life in the urban context, by their own estimate, has increased slightly to considerably. Despite the fact that families in category C consider water shortage and pollution related to mining activities as a problem, none of them has so far joined the “social movement of Cajamarca”.

Social Movements
The “social movement of Cajamarca” represents a process of diffuse collective action in terms of time and space that integrates different actors who do not pursue the same aims or have the same visions, but whose visions share some important common elements that give the movement its coherence.
The origins of the movement are to be found on the one hand in the treacherous land purchases of the Yanacocha mining company in the areas of Mount Quilish and Combayo and, on the other hand, in the emergence of illnesses in sheep which, according to local peasants, were caused by exploration activities carried out by the Yanacocha mining company.
At the end of the 1990s the perception of the rural population that mining activities represented a danger for agriculture continued to grow. This led to various protest marches against the mining company organized by the Rondas Campesinas.
Various negative developments related to the activities of the Yanacocha company (for example, the mercury spill in Choropampa in 2000 and the massive death of trout on different occasions) brought forth new, predominantly urban actors such as ECOVIDA, GRUFIDES and the FRENTE, who began to play important roles in developing new visions of relations between state-society-transnational mining companies and exploitation of natural resources.

Conclusion
How can the mining activities of the Yanacocha Gold Mine contribute to sustainable development? Despite the fact that transnational mining companies together with the national economic oligarchy initiated a discourse on so-called “new” or “modern” mining as a sustainable activity due to new technologies that apply cyanide leaching in “closed circuits”, mining activities are as great a source of pollution as the “old” activities or even moreso, due to their greater scale and for geochemical reasons. Mining activities are never sustainable, as they leave behind contamination that affects ecosystems for centuries. Mining activities in Peru are not sustainable because of the lack of adequate political and socioeconomic structures that would permit most people in society to participate in the macroeconomic growth related indirectly and directly to mining. Numerous economic activities that depend on the mining sector or that have been dynamized by this sector are no longer sustainable structurally after the cessation of mining activities in the region.
The presence of strong and influential social movements is essential within the economic and socio-political system of Peru, which has not yet integrated the majority of its (peasant) population and has not yet been able to set up institutional and democratic platforms to articulate the interests of the most vulnerable (under the current government, existing platforms are increasingly closed and protests are brutally repressed by police and military forces). These movements aim to modify the exclusionary system and attempt to rearticulate relations between the state, society and transnational mining companies which replaced the weak Peruvian state and now perform functions and duties of the state. This is important in order to avoid far-reaching (armed) conflicts in the future.

Contact addresses of local partner:
Grufides
Jr. Dos de Mayo # 1172
Cajamarca Ciudad, Peru
Tel: 005176342082
Patricia Rojas:
e-Mails: p_rojas_caro@hotmail.com or info@grufides.org
Homepage: http://www.grufides.org

Contact address in Switzerland:
Jonas R. Lambrigger
Heckenweg 59
3007 Bern
Tel: 0041 (0) 31 534 52 15
e- Mail: globebiker1@yahoo.com
jonas.lambrigger@cde.unibe.ch

 

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