This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
Above the clouds in the Peruvian Andes there is a town named La Rinconada. It holds the title of being the highest year-round settlement in the world. At one point swelling to 30,000 people, the population has dwindled some now near 12,000. The weather is cold and the oxygen is thin. It’s incredible what humans are able to tolerate to survive. Existing there is dangerous, but that’s where the problems start.
A brief disclaimer before going further...
I want to be careful to not confuse poverty problems with systemic problems. Despite the gold in the hills, La Rinconada is a poor town. One documentary suggests people end up here because that’s the only option left for them. When talking about people in poverty, it’s easy to fall into a trap of drive-by poverty tourism and say “What a mess! Can you believe people live like this?!” but this is people’s lives and I want to be respectful of that. What I want to highlight below are the systems and power structures that create this environment.
La Rinconada’s entire economy centers around extracting gold from Mount Ananea. Being so far away from the nearest municipality, the unregulated mining corporations (legal and illegal) are the defacto government. Workers toil under the cachorreo system, mining for 30 days straight without pay and then one day a month they get claim to as much ore as they can haul out on their person. Some prefer this deal, some get assigned to mine empty veins and make no money that month. Women –who aren’t allowed to work in the mines because of a belief they’d curse the mine– must sift and scavenge in the washes of waste rock or near the toxic cyanide and mercury contaminated tailing pools for discarded ore. It’s uncertain work in hazardous conditions. It takes around two to eight metric tons of ore to produce one ring.
La Rinconada is a lawless city. A small police station exists, but they are overrun by the illegal mining corporations and the gangs. In the mines and on dark streets, murders and robberies are a common occurrence. No banks, so people carry all their cash and gold making for easy marks. The gangs traffick humans from Peru, Bolivia, and Columbia then forced them (including minors) into prostitution. It’s generally considered not a safe place. An even harsher reality for those living there permanently.
As expected with limited government services, the water in La Rinconada is not safe to drink and unmanaged waste fills the streets and alleyways. But despite all the challenges it’s still a town where people live. There is a school and there are kids playing soccer in the streets. Women sell wares in shops and offer street meats, cocoa leaves, and warm soup to hungry miners. Grass growing in concrete type of shit. A human spirit.
While the struggle to survive at the top of the world is real for the people of La Rinconada, the town is for me an allegory of what life is like under a libertarian corporatocracy; where unregulated corporations profit from unfair worker wages, where women get cast to the fringes of society, and where organized crime rules the streets. If I described La Rinconada to you under the guise of a mining colony on the Moon, you’d tell me to ease off on the dystopian sci-fi shit. But this is what’s happening on Earth –today– in the town closest to the Moon. It’s possible that this is what mining towns have always been like, but all I see is the invisible hand of unfettered Capitalism and the true cost of gilded ballroom walls.
This content originally appeared on daverupert.com and was authored by daverupert.com
daverupert.com | Sciencx (2025-11-13T16:35:00+00:00) La Rinconada, Peru. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/13/la-rinconada-peru/
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