In a small city in the Andes Mountains, a father
takes his 3-year-old daughter to the doctor. She’s sluggish and
behaving strangely. “Something’s not right,” he thinks.
He’s shocked, but not surprised, when he hears
the news: His child has a blood lead level of 58 micrograms per deciliter,
more than five times the recommended limit set by the World Health
Organization. The father confronts the suspected source — his
employer. They offer him two thousand soles — roughly $700 — to keep quiet. Defeated,
the father takes the money for his daughter’s medical bills and
returns home to his family.
Stories such as these travel between La Oroya, Peru,
and Springfield and between the Dominican sisters in each city who have
stepped forward to share them on behalf of those silenced by Doe Run Peru,
the company whose metal smelter is accused of spewing lead and other
life-threatening toxins into the soil, water, and air for the past decade. According to a recent Saint Louis University study,
more than 97 percent of the children in La Oroya have higher-than-normal
levels of lead in their blood, often between 50 and 70 micrograms per
deciliter. Levels above 10 micrograms are considered unsafe.
“Intertwined through all of this are the
stories of the children of La Oroya and their illnesses, and that tugs at
anyone’s heart,” says Sister Rose Marie Riley, prioress general
of the Dominican Sisters of Springfield, “and for every one of those
children there is a mother holding that child, saying, ‘What can I
do?’ No family should have to be suffering that.”
The Dominican Sisters of Springfield have served in
La Oroya for more than 40 years alongside natives of the city. In 2005,
Springfield’s Dominican sisters joined Friends of La Oroya — an
international organization initiated in Peru — and have since
participated in a three-city delegation calling for an end to the lead
poisoning and pollution.
“It was an issue that our sisters in Peru have
been talking about and living with with the people for many years,”
Sister Rose Marie says, “and so, in my position of leadership, a big
part of it is walking with our sisters — wherever they are —
which also means walking with their people.”
Sister Mila Díaz Solano understands the plight
of the La Oroyans. A native of La Oroya, she lived in the shadow of the
smelter’s belching smokestacks. Sister Mila recently returned to visit her family,
still living in her childhood home, and again felt the invisible weight
that burdens her people.
“When I am in La Oroya, I can feel the carbon
monoxide,” she says while visiting Springfield on retreat.
“It’s very hard to breathe.”
Doe Run Peru — an affiliate of the St.
Louis-based Doe Run Resources Corp. — has run the La Oroya
metallurgical complex since purchasing the smelter from the Peruvian
government in 1997. Since then, the company reported recently, emissions of
particulate matter and heavy metals, including lead, from the main stack of
the smelter have fallen within government-set limits.
“There was a neglect on environmental issues by
the company and Peruvian state-owned enterprise,” says Victor
Andrés Belaúnde, manager of institutional affairs for Doe Run
Peru. “We took over the facility in 1997, and for the first time in
La Oroya we started to implement a number of environmental procedures to
radically improve performance.”
But a new report from LABOR, a Peruvian nonprofit
group, asserts that Doe Run’s data are incorrect. Instead, the
organization says, its air-monitoring stations show that none of the
company’s emissions is within government-set limits and that
concentrations of arsenic and sulfur dioxide continue to increase.
Health officials say that exposure to toxic metals
damages the nervous and reproductive systems and the kidneys. It leads to
high blood pressure and anemia and interferes with metabolism of calcium
and vitamin D. High levels of lead are especially harmful to young children
and fetuses, causing learning disabilities, behavioral problems, mental
retardation, convulsions, coma, and even death.
Sister Mila moved away from the smelter city and its
adverse conditions, but, she says, she cannot demand that her mother and
brothers do the same. Like many others in La Oroya, her family does not
want to leave a lifetime of memories behind.
“When I talk with my brother,” Sister
Mila says, “he says, ‘This is our house; we built it together
with Dad — I don’t want to leave.’ ”
Others stay in La Oroya because they have no choice;
their livelihoods depend on their employment with Doe Run. Because Peru is
impoverished, explains Sister Mila, finding jobs is often difficult, even
for college graduates. When large companies such as Doe Run offer work, the
desperate need to support spouses and children often overrides health
concerns.
“The workers know the level of contamination;
they know they are making themselves sick, but they have families and they
need that job,” Sister Mila says. “It is very hard to say
something against the company, because if they lose that job they
don’t have anything to survive.”
Sister Adele Human also once lived in La Oroya, but
now she resides in Lima. Like many of her Dominican sisters, she became
committed to fighting for change after seeing too much sickness and death.
Sister Adele says that many children are riddled with cancer and that she
was shocked to hear that five women living in the same area each gave birth
to a stillborn baby.
“The people at Doe Run would say, ‘It is
connected but not connected to us,’ ” Sister Adele says.
Many sisters say that Doe Run uses intimidation to
keep La Oroyans from looking more closely at these connections. The company
has threatened to close its doors and move elsewhere if its practices are
questioned. Because the town’s survival depends on the smelter, they say, many residents
pretend that the harmful health effects don’t exist.
“If you don’t believe there is a
problem,” Sister Adele says, “you don’t believe there
needs to be a cleanup.”
The Dominican Sisters of Springfield and of La Oroya
joined forces in June with this mission in mind: to publicize the problem
and to call on Doe Run to clean up its smelter.
As part of the first interfaith delegation,
comprising Catholic, Jewish, and Presbyterian leaders, the sisters met with
executives from Doe Run Peru in Lima and then traveled to St. Louis and New
York to discuss the need for corporate responsibility to Doe Run’s
affiliate company and its parent company, Renco. Other activist groups have attempted to use
environmental or scientific tactics to plead with Doe Run, but this
delegation called attention to ethical questions concerning the smelter.
They asked that Renco’s chief executive, Ira Rennert — a devout
Orthodox Jew and philanthropist — apply the same ethical principles
by which he lives his personal life to the situation at the smelter and in
La Oroya.
Sister Beth Murphy, a Springfield Dominican who,
along with Sister Rose Marie, represented the congregation in St. Louis,
says that Rennert could turn his “biggest public-relations
nightmare” around if he would only agree to reduce emissions.
“He would be a hero in the environmental
movement and would set the standards for mines not only in Peru but all
over the world,” Murphy says. “It is puzzling to us why he
wouldn’t want to do that.”
Murphy and the Dominican sisters want to make it
clear that their mission is not to shut Doe Run Peru down but instead to
call on the company’s officials to improve the health of ailing
children, provide a cleaner environment for their families, and ensure
medical attention for those in need.
“This not about closing down the
smelter,” Murphy says. “This is not what we’re asking
for. We believe jobs and good health can coexist in La Oroya.”
Sister Adele says that she feels that these messages
were heard in Lima, where she represented the Dominican congregation.
Delegates were provided with booklets detailing Doe Run Peru’s
environmental actions and statistics of decreasing emissions, she says, and
the meeting was cordial. She calls it a big step in the right direction.
“I think if they will take the time to sit
around and listen and know the worries and questions that other people
have,” Sister Adele says, “there can be progress
made.”
The Dominican sisters visiting the American cities
were not as well received. Sister Mila represented the sisters in New York
City, where Rennert rejected the delegation. The success of the operation,
says Sister Mila, instead came from the delegates’ opportunity to
speak with journalists about La Oroya and its people.
Doe Run officials also refused to meet with the St.
Louis delegation, but the Springfield Dominicans say that they were
grateful for the chance to stand with their Peruvian sisters, especially
during a visit to Doe Run’s smelter in Herculaneum, Mo., south of St.
Louis.
Murphy says that the delegates from Peru looked
around, amazed, by the presence of grass and absence of black smoke. They
were impressed, she says, because conditions in severely lead-polluted
Herculaneum are so much better than those in La Oroya.
The Springfield Dominicans also saw the delegation as
an opportunity to learn from their Peruvian counterparts.
“It’s just been a wonderful benefit for
me to get to know them and to see, in a different way, what they’re
dealing with every day in their ministry in Peru,” Murphy says.
“That has been true not just for me but, ultimately, that’s a
good thing for our community north and south.”
Despite the protests of the Dominicans and other
activist groups, Belaúnde holds that Doe Run Peru has been
working to clean up the toxins left by the smelter’s previous owners.
He that says in early 2007 Doe Run Peru decided to increase its investment
in environmental programs from $107 million to $250 million to help improve
the health of La Oroya’s children and pregnant mothers.
“The health issues of La Oroya are very
complex,” Belaúnde says. “There is a facility that has
been working here for 85 years, and during the first 75 years they followed
no environmental procedures. We as a company are doing more than our fair
part of what has to be done.”
Doe Run Peru also provided $1 million to the Ministry
of Health to create a program to address children’s excessive blood
lead levels. This program tracks the blood lead levels of affected children
and pregnant mothers and buses children daily to a daycare facility, 10
miles outside La Oroya, where they receive nutritional and health
assistance.
It is a model program that has already been
successful in reducing blood lead levels, says Belaúnde. He admits that more work needs to be done, though,
and the Dominicans agree.
“Doe Run is not responsible for all of the
damage that has been done in the past and what they inherited,”
Murphy says, “but they are certainly responsible for remediating the
situation — they do have some responsibility to try to help the
people of La Oroya.”
The Dominican Sisters of Springfield will continue to
spread awareness on the local and national levels, Murphy says, to let Doe
Run know that people are watching. She hopes that eventually Doe Run Peru
will find a way to reduce the emissions as Doe Run did for the U.S.
smelter.
“There is a kind of environmental apartheid we
practice, so if our lead and other metals can be smelted in a place where
people are poor and don’t have the power to fight the companies,
it’s OK,” she says, “but it’s not. Those families
have the same hopes and dreams for their children as we have for ours here
in Springfield.”
Contact Amanda Robert at arobert@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2007.
