|
Like
many of his Inca ancestors, Juan Apaza is possessed by gold......
 Descending
into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, the
44-year-old miner stuffs a wad of coca leaves into his mouth to brace
himself for the inevitable hunger and fatigue. For 30 days each month
Apaza toils, without pay, deep inside this mine dug down under a
glacier above the world's highest town, La Rinconada. For 30 days he
faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow
miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold
that the world demands. Apaza does all this, without pay, so that he
can make it to today, the 31st day, when he and his fellow miners are
given a single shift, four hours or maybe a little more, to haul out
and keep as much rock as their weary shoulders can bear. Under the
ancient lottery system that still prevails in the high Andes, known as
the cachorreo, this is what passes for a paycheck: a sack of rocks that
may contain a small fortune in gold or, far more often, very little at
all.
Apaza is still waiting for a stroke of luck. "Maybe today will be the
big one," he says, flashing a smile that reveals a single gold tooth.
To improve his odds, the miner has already made his "payment to the
Earth": a bottle of pisco, the local liquor, placed near the mouth of
the mine; a few coca leaves slipped under a rock; and, several months
back, a rooster sacrificed by a shaman on the sacred mountaintop. Now,
heading into the tunnel, he mumbles a prayer in his native Quechua
language to the deity who rules the mountain and all the gold within.
She is our Sleeping Beauty," says Apaza, nodding toward a sinuous curve
in the snowfield high above the mine. "Without her blessing we would
never find any gold. We might not make it out of here alive."
It isn't El Dorado, exactly. But for more than 500 years the glittering
seams trapped beneath the glacial ice here, three miles above sea
level, have drawn people to this place in Peru. Among the first were
the Inca, who saw the perpetually lustrous metal as the "sweat of the
sun"; then the Spanish, whose lust for gold and silver spurred the
conquest of the New World. But it is only now, as the price of gold
soars—it has risen 235 percent in the past eight years—that 30,000
people have flocked to La Rinconada, turning a lonely prospectors' camp
into a squalid shantytown on top of the world. Fueled by luck and
desperation, sinking in its own toxic waste and lawlessness, this
no-man's-land now teems with dreamers and schemers anxious to strike it
rich, even if it means destroying their environment—and themselves—in
the process.
The scene may sound almost medieval, but La Rinconada is one of the
frontiers of a thoroughly modern phenomenon: a 21st-century gold rush.
No single element has tantalized and tormented the human imagination
more than the shimmering metal known by the chemical symbol Au. For
thousands of years the desire to possess gold has driven people to
extremes, fueling wars and conquests, girding empires and currencies,
leveling mountains and forests. Gold is not vital to human existence;
it has, in fact, relatively few practical uses. Yet its chief
virtues—its unusual density and malleability along with its
imperishable shine—have made it one of the world's most coveted
commodities, a transcendent symbol of beauty, wealth, and immortality.
From pharaohs (who insisted on being buried in what they called the
"flesh of the gods") to the forty-niners (whose mad rush for the mother
lode built the American West) to the financiers (who, following Sir
Isaac Newton's advice, made it the bedrock of the global economy):
Nearly every society through the ages has invested gold with an almost
mythological power.
Humankind's feverish attachment to gold shouldn't have survived the
modern world. Few cultures still believe that gold can give eternal
life, and every country in the world—the United States was last, in
1971—has done away with the gold standard, which John Maynard Keynes
famously derided as "a barbarous relic." But gold's luster not only
endures; fueled by global uncertainty, it grows stronger. The price of
gold, which stood at $271 an ounce on September 10, 2001, hit $1,023 in
March 2008, and it may surpass that threshold again. Aside from
extravagance, gold is also reprising its role as a safe haven in
perilous times. Gold's recent surge, sparked in part by the terrorist
attack on 9/11, has been amplified by the slide of the U.S. dollar and
jitters over a looming global recession. In 2007 demand outstripped
mine production by 59 percent. "Gold has always had this kind of
magic," says Peter L. Bernstein, author of The Power of Gold. "But it's
never been clear if we have gold—or gold has us."
da National Geographic Magazine.
By Brook Larmer
Photograph by Randy Olson
|
