Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Gold

2018; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/17432197-4312892

1751-7435

Alphonso Lingis,

Environmental and Cultural Studies in Latin America and Beyond

January 13, 2012. The plane is circling down into Cajamarca, a small city in the Andes in northern Peru. We see it laid out in the hollow, a gridiron of streets from a central plaza, advancing up one side of the circle of green mountains. In the small airport a sign says Bienvenido a Cajamarca, Cuidad de Fiesta. I have arrived two weeks before Carnaval. The guidebook says that Cajamarca is the Rio de Janeiro of Peru; from all over Peru people come for carnival. But outside tourists associate Cajamarca with the place where it all started—Pizarro’s conquest. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro González landed on the coast with 168 armored and helmeted soldiers, 62 on horseback, armed with lances and steel swords, and marched up to Cajamarca, where, they learned from informants they had tortured, the Inca Atahualpa had camped with his armies. In the central Plaza of Cajamarca Pizarro ambushed and captured the Inca and slaughtered thousands of his unarmed soldiers. The Spaniards then marched on to Qosqo and the conquest of Peru.Lima and Arequipa look like twenty-first-century cities, with high-rise buildings thrusting up around the quarters preserved as historical heritage, and with glass-fronted shops, starred hotels, and restaurants in those quarters. Cajamarca has remained a colonial city. The Plaza de Armas is very big, a central fountain, trees, benches, and always people crossing or resting, with the cathedral on one side and the Jesuit church on the other. One- or two-story buildings surround the square and continue down the city streets; their stucco walls are painted in cream and ochre, and they have carved stone door frames and window frames white with dark wooden balconies. One can often look through massive doors of colonial mansions into the inner courtyards that have trees and potted plants around a circular stone fountain. I notice very few Spanish-looking people or cholos; people are small of stature with brown skin and the fine features of the Quechua population of Inca times. Almost all the older women wear many-petticoated hoop skirts, with handwoven alpaca shawls in bands of bright colors and parchment-colored leather sombreros. On every street corner there is a woman with a box on a stand packed with candies and small soft drink bottles; they are there late at night and at sunrise. In front of churches and stores handicapped and old people await alms.For the tourist, the guidebook lists only three churches to see here and two small museums. Coming from Lima, where for six months it never rains but is muddied by the garua, the cold ocean fog, and from Arequipa surrounded by desert, I am elated by Cajamarca nestled in intense green mountains, its squares ribboned with flowers, its streets washed every hour or two by a brief sunny shower. Back at the hotel I tell the desk clerk I will stay a week or so.On the sides of the streets there are channels for the water streaming down from the mountains. They remind me of the channels that carried the water to clean the city of Qosqo in Inca times. They are the only trace of the Inca city I see here. Save for one room.The central plaza in Inca times was twice as large. Down one side there is a stone entrance, with “El Cuarto del Rescate,” “The Ransom Room,” inscribed over it. Inside, on a mound of dirt, there is a room of stone walls. It is said to be the room, twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide, that the Inca Atahualpa ordered his people to fill with gold for Pizarro, ransom to spare his life. Sun disks, ritual objects, and gold plates that covered the inner walls of temples were brought here, and the Spanish melted them into ingots filling the room to a height of nine feet. Historians say the room we see was probably the room where Atahualpa was imprisoned, adjacent to the room being filled with gold.The wonder of gold. Gold was produced in supernova explosions or the collision of two neutron stars. There is gold in earth’s core, but the gold found on earth’s surface has come from asteroids shattering upon entering earth’s atmosphere. Gold is found on every continent, although in minute quantities. But 165,000 tons of gold have been collected in human history. If all the gold ever found was brought together in one place and formed into one solid cube, it would fit on board a single oil tanker.The marvel of gold. Gold is the heaviest metal, and the only yellow one. It is one of the least reactive solid chemical elements. It is found not in ore but as nuggets or grains in rocks, in veins, and in alluvial deposits. It does not oxidize in water or air; it does not corrode.Gold is the most malleable and ductile of all metals; a single gram can be beaten into a sheet of one square meter or an ounce into three hundred square feet. A piece of gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened to a sheet the size of a tennis court. An ounce of gold can be drawn into a wire fifty miles long. Gold can be made into thread and used in embroidery.Gold, the most valuable substance, the measure of value, is, Karl Marx noted, the most useless substance. Gold is so soft that from early times it was mixed with silver or copper to make coins. Its softness made it unsuitable for practical use; only in recent times have uses been found for it. It was used for dental fillings, and now its noncorrosiveness and electrical conductibility make it useful in precision electronic instruments and space equipment. Today 12 percent of the gold produced is used in electronics, medicine, and dentistry; 10 percent is kept as backup for national currencies; and 78 percent is used for jewelry.The transcendence of gold. Until these modern uses, gold was especially reserved for the gods. In Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, boys take tiny grains of gold and beat them into gold leaf, which people take to the temple and rub them on the statue of the Buddha. All over Myanmar the domes of pagodas are gilded with gold. Gold plates cover the stupa of the Shwedagon Pagoda in Yangon: more gold, it is said, than in the vaults of the Bank of England. The stupa is crowned with 5,449 diamonds and 2,317 rubies and sapphires. In Inca Peru, the walls of temples, especially temples dedicated to the sun, were covered with gold plates, such that the sun emerging from the horizon emblazoned the sanctuary.The conquistadors shipped tons of gold and also silver from Peru to Spain and to China via Manila. But they also built churches and encrusted them with gold. Upon entering the Iglesia de la Compañia in Quito, the eyes are first drawn to the high altar and then wander the walls and up the vaults high overhead that are all enchained in Mudéjar, that is, Moorish, arabesques in high relief—everywhere completely gilded in gold.The cathedral, the church of the Jesuits, of the Franciscans, of the Mercedorians—every colonial city in Peru has them. Their walls are massive, concentrations of the materiality of the world. Inside, paintings and statues tell the sacred history for the illiterate. Down the sides there are chapels with big storied paintings of biblical events, most of them in the Cuzco style, where in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries local artists blended the Italian Late Renaissance paintings that were brought over by rich bishops with the intense colors of local textiles. The cathedral of Qosqo has more than four hundred paintings, a glorified spectacle of all human encounters, attitudes, initiatives. Each altar features a primary statue, of Jesus in his redemptive agony, and saints; they are interactive, clad in embroidered and jeweled garments that are changed for their feast days. Worshippers who gaze on them on the altar are also returned to the days spent weaving these silks and embroidering them with flowers in gold and silver threads. The churches of Cajamarca are theaters for ceremonies and processions, theaters of sensuality and of the sublime.When we enter some churches, the walls and colonnaded side aisles are unadorned, and our eyes are drawn to the high altar, set before a retable that fills the whole space of the sanctuary wall with statues, carved often of Ecuadorian mahogany, in Churrigueresque style, saints and angels appearing between twisted columns, vines and flowers carved in deep relief, and everything covered in gold plate. From these carvings the gold gleams and glitters in all directions, less a biblical tableau than the front of the church opening on a region of dazzling light, a gateway to a region more sublime than all the earth.The wonder of gold.My hotel is on the Plaza de Armas; after dinner I go up to my room. Soon after I begin to hear drumming outside. I step out on the balcony, thinking it is people gathering celebrating carnival already. But the banners instead say !Conga no va! People are chanting, and after a few minutes I make out “¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no! ¡Agua sí! ¡Oro no! I go down and talk to bystanders. I learn that in the mountains above the city is the Yanacocha gold mine. The people have found that the rivers and streams and their wells are polluted with mercury. Their animals have died; children have gotten sick. The local people have demanded investigation. Now a vast expansion of the mine is projected. The federal government has given its approval. The people gathering in the Plaza de Armas will assemble tomorrow and begin a march, on foot, along the 850 kilometers to Lima to bring their protest to the government.Back in my hotel room I search the computer. The Yanacocha gold mine is an open pit mine covering 535 square miles. Opened in 1993, it is the second-largest gold mine in the world, producing over US$7 billion worth of gold to date. The Minera Yanacocha company that runs the mine is owned by Newmont Mining Corporation from Colorado, the Peruvian mining company Buenaventura, and the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation. At five separate sites, giant scoops slice the sides from mountains, loading 300,000 tons of rock a day into 250-ton trucks, each the height of a four-story building. The rock is laid out in terraces, sealed in black plastic, and injected with cyanide solution. The solution that runs off is then processed to remove the gold. This process yields an ounce of gold from each ton of rock. The mine is now producing 3 million ounces a year.The process generates by-products like mercury and arsenic. Mine waste flows into waterways that are the only source of water for several campesino communities. An investigation into the water quality in the mine area’s rivers and streams found that the mine consistently exceeds World Health Organization and Peruvian Ministry of Energy and Mines standards for a wide range of potential contaminants. On June 2, 2000, 151 kilograms of mercury were accidentally spilled along a forty-three-kilometer stretch of road while being transported by a contracted truck from Yanococha to the Pacific coast, contaminating the towns of Choropampa and San Juan. Over one thousand people directly suffered the effects of mercury poisoning.In 2010 Newmont Mining Corporation and Buenaventura launched the $4.8 billion Conga project to vastly expand the mining operations above Cajamarca. For the water the company will use for its cyanide extraction process, it would harness four mountain lakes that provide water to a hundred farming communities and the city of Cajamarca. To replace the lakes, the company proposes to create four reservoirs that would be filled by rainwater.The local population has repeatedly assembled in protests. Five people have been killed and some fifty wounded.1In July 1533, the room twenty-two feet long and seventeen feet wide was packed solid with gold wrenched from temples throughout the land, the ransom for the Inca. But Pizarro now accused Atahualpa of usurping the crown, assassinating his brother Huascar, squandering public revenues, committing idolatry and adultery, and revolting against the Spanish. Pizarro and a few of his men staged a trial. Atahualpa was sentenced to be burned at the stake as a heretic. He was horrified, since the Inca believed that burning the body prevented the soul from going on to the afterlife. Friar Vicente de Valverde intervened, saying that he would convince Pizarro to commute the sentence if Atahualpa agreed to convert to Catholicism. After Atahualpa was baptized into the Catholic faith, Pizarro ordered him to be strangled with a garrote. Following his execution, his clothes and some of his skin were burned, and his remains were given a Christian burial.Many thanks to Jim Blasi for preliminary graphic design.