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PHOTOGRAPHS BY CÉDRIC GERBEHAYE
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By Debra Adams Simmons, HISTORY Executive Editor
A sleepy settlement in the Peruvian Andes—the highest-altitude town in the world—has morphed into a sprawling, dangerous toxic center of gold mining over the past two decades.
If anything could change La Rinconada for the better, it may be an international effort to clean up the worst practices of gold mining for certification of its riches to sale. The stakes are high. In the thin air and biting cold of snowcapped Mount Ananea sit metal shacks packed around jerry-built mine entrances and a refuse-choked lake. At 16,732 feet above sea level, 30,000 to 50,000 people jostle in a smelly space without garbage collection or a sewer system, Barbara Fraser and Hildegard Willer report in the July edition of National Geographic.
Toxic mercury gas poisons many, including the women who scavenge through piles of waste rock outside the mine entrances (pictured above), searching for gold-bearing chunks. Cyanide is used in mining the gold in the tunnels.
The hope is that, for major buyers to take this gold, it will have to meet higher mining standards and be able to be traced to the source. That might improve the life of miners like Antonio Yana Yana (below left), who is already suffering from lung problems, or Fidel Eliseo Mestas Mendoza, who chews on coca leaves to get him through the shift.
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