A new gold rush is sweeping through Latin America with devastating consequences, ravaging tropical forests and dumping toxic chemicals as illegal miners fight against big international projects.
With international market prices for metals high, informal “wildcat” mining has been on the rise in recent years in countries like Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, itself one of the largest producers of silver, copper and gold.
Mining investments in those countries are expected to reach some $300 billion in 2020, according to the Inter-American Mining Society.
But over 160 mining conflicts have erupted across the region amid growing opposition from locals against projects they consider a threat to the environment, the Observatory of Mining Conflicts in Latin America says.
During the past decade, the price of gold went from $270 to between $1,600-1,800 per ounce, as people rushed to convert their cash into the precious metal seen as a safe investment during the global economic crisis.
And the price of copper is at an all-time high thanks to China’s insatiable appetite for it.
Unlicensed mining, especially for gold, has already killed hundreds of people and devastated thousands of hectares (acres) in the Amazon forest, where miners have set up camps that destroy everything in their path.
To extract each ounce of gold, it takes two or three ounces of mercury, which fouls waterways after being poured into rivers from the mining sites. In their search for water, the miners raze tropical forestsusing bulldozers.
The phenomenon has also sown disaster among the local population, with thousands of men, women and children exploited and living in squalid camps with no schools or health centers.
In Peru, an estimated 110,000 to 150,000 people work in illegal mines, while a thousand children are sexually exploited in brothels known locally as “prostibars” in the southeastern province of Madre de Dios, according to Save The Children.
The practice is particularly widespread in the improvised mining camps, where fortune-hunter try to make a living from the illegal exploitation of precious metals.
“There are dozens of prostibars, filled with hundreds of girls who were told they would make a lot of money,” said Teresa Carpio, director of Save the Children in Peru.
“It’s total exploitation of a human being. Living conditions are appalling and all human values are perverted.”
Indigenous and black communities have long used child workers for gold mining. And an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 children currently work in small-scale mining in Colombia, according to Alliance for Responsible Mining (ARM) data.
In Madre de Dios, one of the poorest regions of Peru, about 18 tonnes of gold are produced per year, while some 20,000 hectares (49,400 acres) of tropical forest are destroyed.
Thousands of people in Colombia have started exploiting abandoned mines in the northwestern department of Antioquia and Choco. In Bolivia, about 10,000 people make a living off the illegal mining of gold in extreme conditions, ARM says.
The growing thirst for mineral resources makes Latin America one of the most attractive regions for investment, set to dominate world production of precious metals by 2020.
Today, Latin America accounts for 45 percent of global copper production, 50 percent of silver and 20 percent of gold.
When I’m meeting with women and girls in prostitution in my own country as well as some countries of Europe, Africa and here in India, I’ve always asked what they would like for their daughter. So far, the answers have not included prostitution.
That’s especially striking given the profound differences in their lives, from Manhattan call girls to women in the brothel line-ups of Sonagachi; from women in the counties around Las Vegas, the only places in the US where prostitution is legal, to bar girls from the villages of Ghana and the scheduled castes in Bihar where women are consigned to prostitution by birth. Indeed, the same seems to be true of prostituted males who serve male clients.
The truth seems to be that the invasion of the human body by another person – whether empowered by money or violence or authority — is de-humanising in itself. Yes, there are many other jobs in which people are exploited, but prostitution is the only one that by definition crosses boundary of our skin and invades our most central sense of self. I know this is a subject that needs much more exploring, but I want to indicate it in shorthand because I think it’s the source of the misunderstanding in these two letters in response to a lecture I gave at Jawaharlal Nehru University on April 2.
I did not say — nor do I think, as Shohini Ghosh supposes — that sex trafficking and prostitution are “synonymous.” Though both are created by the same customers who want unequal sex, they represent crucial differences in a woman’s ability to escape or control her own life. However, I would not equate prostitution with domestic work, as she does. That ignores the damage and trauma of the body invasion that is intrinsic to the former and should never be part of the latter. Also I don’t think “consenting adults” is practical answer to structural inequality. Even sexual harassment law requires that sexual attention be “welcome,” not just “consensual.” It recognizes that consent can be coerced.
In addition, Kumkum Roy criticizes me for not using the term “sex worker.” I know this term is common in AIDS policy and academia, but it turned out to be dangerous in real life. For instance, in places as disparate as Germany and Nevada in the US, government used the idea that prostitution is “a job like any other” to withhold welfare and unemployment benefits from women who failed to try it. Only protests by women’s movements ended this form of procurement. As a popular term, I notice that prostituted girls and women say “survival sex,” as more descriptive as well as a breach of human rights.
Finally, I devoutly wish that unions had improved conditions in brothels, kept children out of prostitution and lessened disease and violence, as they promised to do, but in fact, there has been a huge increase in trafficking, girls in prostitution have become younger and younger, and there is no independent evidence of lowering rates of AIDS. What the idea of unions has done is to enhance the ability of the sex industry to attract millions of dollars from the Gates Foundation for the distribution on condoms, despite the fact that customers often pay more for sex without condoms, and it has created a big new source of income for brothel owners, pimps and traffickers who are called “peer educators,” I understand that that the traffic of women and girls into Sonagachi has greatly increased.
But there is good news. The old polarization into legalization and criminalization is giving way to a more practical, woman-centered and successful Third Way: De-criminalize the prostituted persons, offer them meaningful choices, prosecute traffickers, pimps and all who sell the bodies of others, and also penalize the customers who create the market while educating them about its tragic human consequences.
Those are turning out to be goals on which many people work together.
The U.N. crime-fighting office said Tuesday that 2.4 million people across the globe are victims of human trafficking at any one time, and 80 percent of them are being exploited as sexual slaves.
Yuri Fedotov, the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, told a daylong General Assembly meeting on trafficking that 17 percent are trafficked to perform forced labor, including in homes and sweat shops.
He said $32 billion is being earned every year by unscrupulous criminals running human trafficking networks, and two out of every three victims are women.
Fighting these criminals “is a challenge of extraordinary proportions,” Fedotov said.
“At any one time, 2.4 million people suffer the misery of this humiliating and degrading crime,” he said.
According to Fedotov’s Vienna-based office, only one out of 100 victims of trafficking is ever rescued.
Fedotov called for coordinated local, regional and international responses that balance “progressive and proactive law enforcement” with actions that combat “the market forces driving human trafficking in many destination countries.”
Michelle Bachelet, who heads the new U.N. agency promoting women’s rights and gender equality called UN Women, said “it’s difficult to think of a crime more hideous and shocking than human trafficking. Yet, it is one of the fastest growing and lucrative crimes.”
Actress Mira Sorvino, the U.N. goodwill ambassador against human trafficking, told the meeting that “modern day slavery is bested only by the illegal drug trade for profitability,” but very little money and political will is being spent to combat trafficking.
“Transnational organized crime groups are adding humans to their product lists,” she said. “Satellites reveal the same routes moving them as arms and drugs.”
Sorvino said there is a lack of strong legislation and police training to combat trafficking. Even in the United States “only 10 percent of police stations have any protocol to deal with trafficking,” she said.
M. Cherif Bassiouni, an emeritus law professor at DePaul University in Chicago, said to applause that “there is no human rights subject on which governments have said so much but done so little.”
Laws in most of the world criminalize prostitutes and other victims of trafficking but almost never criminalize the perpetrators “without whom that crime could not be performed,” he said.
Bassiouni said the figure of 2.4 million people trafficked at any time is not reflective of the overall problem because “at the end of 10 years you will have a significantly larger number who have gone through the experience.”
He urged a global reassessment of “who is a victim and who is a criminal” and called for criminalizing not only those on the demand side using trafficked women, children and men, but all those in the chain of supplying trafficking victims.
The acquittal by Brazil’s Supreme Court of a man accused of raping three 12-year-old girls on the basis that they were allegedly “sex-workers” is an outrageous affront to the most basic human rights and it has no place in Brazil today, said Amnesty International.
The decision confirmed earlier rulings by state-level courts in Sao Paulo, where the original report was filed. The defence claimed the three girls were “sex workers” and therefore had consented.
Under Brazil’s 2009 Penal Code, sexual intercourse with an individual under 14 years of age is criminalised under any circumstance.
“Rape is never the fault of the victim. This shocking ruling effectively gives a green light to rapists and if it prevails could dissuade other survivors of sexual abuse from reporting these crimes,” said Atila Roque, Executive Director at Amnesty International in Brazil.
“It is of extreme concern that the protections provided by Brazil’s legislation in cases such as these have not been implemented.
“Amnesty International welcomes the news that the government is calling for the case to be appealed. Brazilian justice must ensure the full protection of victims of this heinous crime and that those responsible are brought to justice. Rape is a grave human rights violation in all circumstances.”
Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova explores the dark underworld of sex trafficking in Eastern Europe in a 2009 multimedia series, a prelude to THE PRICE OF SEX documentary.
