BORN IN A VILLAGE on Peru’s lofty altiplano, Sucasaire first traveled here in 1995, at age 17, in search of a job. Since then, he has left several times, once to try his luck at a coffee farm in Peru’s northeast. Ultimately, he decided La
Rinconada was the least bad option, despite the harsh conditions. “This is a forgotten town,” he says. “The government doesn’t care about us at all. They only think about their own interests. We have to find a way to survive on our own.”
Sucasaire is a member of the Aymara, an Indigenous group living in Peru, Bolivia, and northern Chile. Because his ancestors lived on the altiplano for many generations, he is likely to carry genetic traits that help him live at high
altitudes. But evolution had not prepared Sucasaire for life in La Rinconada. In initial testing, his scores on seven telltale symptoms, combined with lofty hemoglobin levels, indicated CMS, and he agreed to enroll in the study. For several
days, he had to return to the center for testing that often lasted hours.
In one experiment, Sucasaire inhaled a minuscule amount of carbon monoxide, a toxic gas that binds to hemoglobin, to measure the total amount of hemoglobin in his blood. In another, he patiently lay on his right side while Stéphane
Doutreleau, a French cardiologist, studied his heart with echocardiography.
One evening, Sucasaire came in for a sleep study conducted by Perger. She taped electrodes to his chest to record his heart rate and fitted him with a movement tracker to monitor his breathing and detect any episodes of sleep apnea, a common
occurrence during hypoxia. Wires led to a small recorder strapped to his wrist. On the tip of his left index finger, she clamped a small blue device to monitor oxygen saturation in his blood. Then Perger sent him home. She acknowledged it
wasn’t the most comfortable way to spend the night, but Sucasaire said he would sleep “con los angelitos”—with the little angels.
He lives a 10-minute walk from the lab, down muddy streets and trails. The one-room house he shares with three adult relatives is a windowless shack of corrugated metal that he bought 7 years ago, one of thousands of similar homes strewn
across the mountainside. A niece was cooking dinner on a portable gas burner. Although it was summer, beds were piled with blankets; the house has no heating, and snow fell the night before. “We just cover ourselves very well,” Sucasaire
said. For a bathroom, the family uses a foul-smelling public facility nearby. They must buy their drinking water, and it is far too expensive, Sucasaire said.
He works at a mine a 20-minute walk from town. Vast mountains of trash, packed in small plastic bags, line the trail to the entrance. Outsiders are not allowed in, he said.
Many Peruvian mines are operated by large international companies, but gold mining in La Rinconada is “informal,” or illegal. Sucasaire works 5 or 6 hours a day; it’s such back-breaking work that more is physically impossible, he said. He
worries about the mine dust, humidity, and carbon monoxide. “Some of my colleagues have died at a young age—50, 48, 45,” he said. Fatalities from explosions and tunnel collapses are common. “There is no safety mechanism in place,” says César
Ipenza, a Lima-based environmental lawyer. “That’s why there are accidents all the time.”
Most mine owners don’t pay their workers a salary; instead, one or more days every month they allow a miner to take home all the ore he can carry in 50-kilogram sacks and to keep any gold it holds. (Some miners also pilfer extra ore.) That
system, called cachorreo, turns life into a giant lottery; Ipenza calls it a “form of slavery.” Some miners “get a good amount of gold,” Sucasaire said, “and some leave town.” They are a minority. Usually, miners glean just enough to get by.
But sometimes almost nothing is there.
Source: Science Mag