Mining, Migration and the ‘Search for a Better Life’

Miguel stood up with a sigh, reluctant but duty-bound, soon offering his hand. It was late, and we had not yet completed tilling the chacras (agricultural plots), a task which had pulled all the able bodies of Ccanccayllo out of their beds earlier that morning. Our moment of rest was over; the barrels of chicha (fermented maize drink) that we had lugged uphill were now empty and the women had stopped singing: signs that revelry must make way once more for the final push of the plough. The rains were approaching. The earth had to be prepared for sowing.

Ccanccayllo, one of the 18 ‘affected communities’Footnote ¹⁷ that encircle the Las Bambas copper project, located in the eastern province (Cotabambas) of Apurímac, had become my adopted home in the region. In the months prior to my afternoon with Miguel I had eagerly conducted formal interviews with knowledgeable elders, attempting to ascertain a social and historical footing from which to interpret changes caused by the encroachment of industrial mining. These authoritative figures paid little heed to the direction of my culturally specific inquiries: they elided the topics of apus (mountain spirits) and animate landscapes, brave cattle rustlersFootnote ¹⁸ and communal reciprocity, and instead turned to themes of historical marginalisation. For them, Cotabambas was best understood neither through prisms of identity or livelihood but in terms of neglect: a smattering of villages which had suffered decades of drought and endemic poverty, without electrification, running water or basic sanitation. It was, in their words, a region ‘forgotten’ (olvidado) by government investment, concerns and initiatives.Footnote ¹⁹ The past tense of the description suggested that the mine had the potential for, or at the very least elicited the expectation of, inclusion in the dynamics of national development.

On this particular afternoon, recognising that the hours of daylight were dwindling, we divided up into small groups to turn the soil of the remaining plots. Miguel, an affable young man I had developed rapport with, led me away to a field on the northern fringes of land assigned for cultivation. The moment provided a natural opportunity to open up my research to voices and histories beyond formal interviews and gatekeepers.

We worked in tandem; he churning the earth in straight and narrow furrows with precise movements of his foot plough, while I dropped seed potatoes into the drills at measured intervals. As we moved quickly to complete the sowing, Miguel began to speak openly about his life:

I replenished the pouch of potatoes fastened around my waist, and as we shifted east to begin the final drill, I asked him to continue.

Miguel smiled as I began to jot furiously in my notebook. He helped seed the earth, covering for my productive lapses, and then continued to speak as we strolled down the hill towards the community truck.

Crossing a stream and unloading our sacks and tools onto the flatbed, Miguel concluded his history, ‘That's life.’

Miguel's narrative was not only informative and interesting but ordinary. Indeed, as I spoke with more and more individuals from Ccanccayllo and neighbouring communities, I slowly discovered that contemporary demographics surrounding the Las Bambas copper mine were configured by recent migration trends. The community of Ccanccayllo had more than quintupled since 2010; a dozen inhabitants had grown to almost 80 in number. The populations of other affected communities, such as Huacullo and Pampahuara, had swelled into the hundreds. The migratory boom was legible, to the trained eye, within the physical layout of communities. Historically, casas antiguas (lit. ‘ancient houses’) were dispersed throughout the hillside, usually as solitary structures, occasionally, and despite extensive deforestation, falling under the shade of a few trees. Following the great returns to communities throughout the province, the construction of houses became concentrated in designated neighbourhoods, known locally as ‘plazas’. Retornantes (‘returners’) was the colloquial name given to the deluge of migrants from the city. It was at times an ambiguous term, given that many individuals were not even born in the region, but they were said to be returning to the land of their parents. Furthermore, some of the elders I initially approached as cultural custodians had only recently returned themselves, having left the region decades earlier following the droughts and poverty so central to their historical recollections. All in all, their life histories drew attention to the fact that huge shifts in migration were convulsing the region.

Most importantly, though, these migratory trends were almost uniformly animated by desires to progress in life. Much like Miguel's, the lives of individuals, within both Ccanccayllo and the neighbouring communities I increasingly visited, were couched in terms of a ‘search for the better life’. As was evidenced by this oft-repeated phrase, which saturated the life histories that I compiled in the region, the project of improving the conditions of one's life was paramount. Scholars working throughout Peru and Latin America have elsewhere noted the motivating convictions of ‘getting ahead’, ‘advancing’ and ‘improving oneself’ as central to the lives of Andean peoples.Footnote ²⁰ The progressive phraseology used in these various locales has roots in historical poverty and economic marginalisation. However, aspirations for improvement, as noted by Krista Van Vleet, are equally entangled with rigid class, racial and symbolic hierarchies in Peru: cultural frameworks that work to construct the rural Andes as backward.Footnote ²¹ Thus, the search for the better life in Cotabambas, I would argue, fits within a broader tradition of climbing the steep inequalities of Peruvian society: a project, fundamentally, of social mobility.

Significantly, this search for the better life had once been exclusively associated with the city, where standards of education and opportunities for employment were deemed more plentiful; where the trappings of social advancement were more easily attainable.Footnote ²² However, following Peru's mining boom, certain forgotten corners of the country became nodes of corporate interest and subject to grand promises. Indeed, beginning in 2004, after the original sale of the Las Bambas concession to Xstrata Copper,Footnote ²³ Cotabambas became not only highly publicised and promoted within the national media, but overrun by recurring waves of ‘officialdom’. Years of exploratory drilling by geologists and technicians coincided with the encroachment of corporate and government social teams which travelled through the province disseminating promises of investment, modernity and progress tied to the impending commencement of the mine.Footnote ²⁴ These social teams, in many ways, can be seen as the foot soldiers of ‘expectation’Footnote ²⁵ or of what, more recently, Gisa Weszkalnys has referred to as the ‘affective resonance’ that resource extraction comes to hold for local populations.Footnote ²⁶ Their nebulous promises of advancement found counterpoints in a region whose residents and diaspora were equally concerned with historical neglect and development. Thus, as mineral optimism began to saturate this highland corner of Apurímac, it became little wonder that so many individuals such as Miguel had returned ‘because of the mine’, believing in the potential it might hold for the better life they sought.Footnote ²⁷

With the central power of social mobility emerging as a dominant rationale for life projects, the questions of what the ‘better life’ might constitute, and how the Las Bambas mine might provide it, began to bear down upon me. How exactly might the capacious promises of, and desires for, progress – those offered by the mine and held by communities – intersect? I invited a trusted informant, Óscar, then vice-president of Ccanccayllo, to a popular cantina in the boomtown of Challhuahuacho as a first step.Footnote ²⁸ He was a retornante, born and raised in Abancay, spending his youth in the streets of Cusco and Lima, before migrating back to Cotabambas (the province of his parents) following the announcement of the Las Bambas copper mine. On this particular day, the cantina's afternoon hum conducive to conversation, I asked what he wished for from life – where he saw himself and what it was he believed would sustain him and his family. ‘Will you remain in Ccanccayllo?’ Óscar shook his head emphatically, stifling a chuckle, handing me the glass he had just emptied.

‘I want to open a clothing store’, adding words to gesture. ‘Sell shoes, hats, shirts. Brand name stuff. Nike; Adidas. I've always wanted to open a store in the city. I've never had the money. Not yet, anyway.’

‘In the city? Which city? Here in Challhuahuacho?’, I pushed further.

‘No, not here. I have a family to return to. Either Abancay or Lima.’Footnote ²⁹

‘Where might this opportunity come from?’ My question came across as laughable. ‘The mine, of course!’

As we waited for the delivery of the next beer bottle, I was forced to privately consider the spectre of incongruence: the tentative and fragile gulf that separated aspirational futures and the contemporary moment. The search for the better life throughout Cotabambas depended on the finer details of modern extraction's arrival in this forgotten region: its development precepts, tax dollars and industrial methods. How corporate policy and production came to relate to desires for social mobility over time – following the project's ideational beginnings – became pertinent to understanding the realities and futures of a once forgotten region. Emerging incongruences between image and reality, between hope and practicality, if not properly negotiated, had the potential to undermine mineral optimism and foster the emergence of contestation and conflict.

‘Modern Mining’, Professionalisation and Chamba

Throughout late 2016 and into 2017, outside the rhythms of the agricultural cycle, a certain vibrancy continued in Ccanccayllo due to the ongoing construction of a new school. It was the first major project to flow from mineral tax payments. From January of 2016, dozens of primary schools began to be built in the communities of Cotabambas, endowed in accordance with the logic of ‘social responsibility’ (i.e. infrastructural investment). During the morning of those early months, the men of Ccanccayllo emerged from their homes after breakfast, latched on to the end of wheelbarrows and concrete trowels, and continued, piecemeal, to erect the community's first development project.

One afternoon I stepped into the adobe home of Gustavo. He and his wife had recently migrated to the community from Cusco and Abancay and had reached an agreement with the contractors in charge of the school project, according to which they would provide meals for the specialist labourers (electricians, plumbers, etc.) recruited from beyond the province. Sitting on a wooden bench, I began to peel potatoes with Gustavo and his wife Sofía. At our side huge pots of water gurgled over a propane fire.

‘No hay chamba’, Gustavo declared, almost under his breath. It was not the first time I had heard him utter the phrase. It was he, after all, with whom I had shovelled sheep manure a few months previously. Yet, as we sat there near the school construction site, sheathed by the echoes of hammers and only metres away from churning cement mixers, I found myself deeply confused. ‘I will have to return to Lima soon and look for work’, he added.

At the time, I did not have the cultural confidence to challenge what appeared to be cognitive dissonance. Yet, it was an issue my research could not ignore. The assertion of there not being work reverberated throughout the region, trailing me from community to community. As I arrived in Huacullo, Marqqueca, Urucancha and Sachapuna to speak with friends and acquaintances, they bemoaned the absence of work, often with the ongoing construction of a school behind them; dry cement still on their hands. It became apparent that, in some manner, the extension of community projects both disrupted and highlighted local notions of labour.

Answers began to surface through an excavation of the region's recent past. The comuneros of Cotabambas pointed me towards a previous epoch, one in which the province began to be transformed by the initiation of the Las Bambas project. In 2012, just one year after the government approved the copper mine's EIA and the mine was formally authorised,Footnote ³⁰ major flows of return migration intensified to the region and, importantly, the construction phase of the project began. The building boom of the time entailed a concentrator plant, a dramatic expansion of the mining camp, heavy-haul roads through the districts of Challhuahuacho and Mara towards the Cusco border, and, beginning in 2013, a massive housing complex for the relocation of Fuerabamba (a community which rested atop the main deposits of copper). Young and old alike were immediately absorbed into a burgeoning bricks-and-mortar economy, driven by construction firms which had won contracts to meet the infrastructure needs of the mine. Memories retold in my presence painted Cotabambas as a dynamic province during these years, filled with retornantes and other transient migrants, cement bags and gravel mounds. My interlocutors, beyond expounding the sheer scale and sophistication of these work programmes, spoke in nostalgic tones about elements of labour quality: corporate transportation, catered meals, ‘modern’ equipment, hourly wages, and, most often, work uniforms emblazoned with the logo of a (any) firm. Indeed, nearly all of my friends in the region who had been employed by construction contractors during the building boom retained and displayed Facebook photos ‘on the job’ which highlighted the presence of heavy machinery and the fluorescent jackets of company attire. Tied to this construction phase was the extension of corporate technical programmes to affected communities. The comuneros of Ccanccayllo and beyond participated in training workshops, organised by sectors of trade: electrical, welding, heavy machinery training, etc. Though they often laughed and teased each other about test results, there seemed to exist a general belief that these workshops were neither performative nor illusory; that they seemed to map out a desirable trajectory worthy of our consideration.

During fieldwork and the compilation of life histories, the term ‘professional’ continuously crept into conversations – whether describing men's search for employment, or women's efforts to educate their children. As an idea identified by social scientists working in the southern highlands of Peru, it remains without clear conceptual boundaries.Footnote ³¹ According to Paul Gelles, to become a professional is associated with escaping marginalisation and achieving social status by obtaining ‘steady salaries in “respectable jobs”’.Footnote ³² In this regard, and much like social mobility, professionalisation does not simply connote material or economic advancement, but the cultural clout imbricated with particular forms of work (i.e. skills, attire, etc.). Within the specific context of contemporary Cotabambas, I would argue, as the building boom consumed the province, experiences with contractors – sprinkled with trappings of prestige – engendered a previously elusive desire for formal labour among young men. Participation in technical training, furthermore, worked to specify the better life that extraction could promise: creating anticipation for social mobility via professional employment in the industrial production of copper.

However, by 2016, construction of the mine and its operational infrastructure were completed and building contracts had expired. Training workshops ended, and immense labour reserves began to build up within the communities. A new programme was initiated in which affected communities would be offered temporary, ephemeral and drastically reduced work contracts inside the mine's perimeters: one or two persons per community for only a few months per year.Footnote ³³ To supplement the dramatic change in work patterns, an advance of the ‘canon minero’ (a corporate tax payment scheme for mineral extraction) was agreed which attempted to kick-start the cycle of community development projects. By 2017, as wheelbarrows and rudimentary cement mixers gave the appearance of dynamic community activity, within the Las Bambas mine proper only 8.4 per cent of the production workforce comprised comuneros from Cotabambas.Footnote ³⁴

These outcomes reflected a structural shift in contemporary mining within Latin America and its attendant development outcomes. In Peru specifically, the promotion of foreign investment in extraction, following the turn of the millennium, was often couched within the rubric of ‘modern mining’: ‘new’ practices based on scientific leaps – mining that now ‘relied on chemical processes, powerful machinery, and sophisticated laboratories’.Footnote ³⁵ Though the national shift towards large-scale industrial mining projects had begun in the 1950s in the deserts of southern Peru,Footnote ³⁶ open pits themselves did not flourish in the Andes until after the country's neoliberal turn during the 1990s. The emergence of modern mining was hailed by government and industry officials, primarily, as a countervailing campaign against the legacies of pollution increasingly associated with extraction.

Yet, beyond environmental concerns, labour relations too were changing with the onset of modern industrial methods. While employment at Peru's expanding sites of operation were becoming less dangerous, more highly skilled and better compensated, mining capitalism now required less manpower.Footnote ³⁷ This fundamental reality of new mega-projects revealed a dramatic historical turning point, one in which technological advancements and mechanisation rendered the rural Andean body surplus to the processes of pulling minerals out of the ground.Footnote ³⁸ As open pits replaced antiquated tunnels – mountains devoured rather than pilfered – large swathes of an expectant and mobile labour force were becoming idle and marginal. Ironically, as mining became more professionalised, it offered fewer direct opportunities for professionalisation. Rather than be incorporated into the prestigious technical workforce of the coalface, local populations would instead be recipients of low-skilled and short-term infrastructure projects funded via corporate tax payments and funnelled through regional and municipal governments.Footnote ³⁹

It is here that the complaint ‘No hay chamba’ begins to become perceptible and significant. Gustavo and other comuneros throughout Cotabambas were bemoaning the absence of a particular kind of work that accompanied the maturation of the Las Bambas frontier from the project's initial ideational optimism, through the early construction boom and onwards to exploitation and production. Where once migratory returns to the region seemed to be legitimated by the promises of formal employment and professional clout, the onset of production expelled huge segments of the populations from the dynamic core of extraction, to look on from the margins amidst the intermittent extension of development projects. This point, I would argue, is a central element of emerging incongruences that fester in the peripheries of contemporary mining in the highlands of Apurímac.

The challenge becomes to interpret and further investigate this decoupling of social mobility from formal employment. While the technological advancements of contemporary extraction in Peru make local populations superfluous to modern mining,Footnote ⁴⁰ the search for the better life remains, placing new demands on local communities and individuals alike. Where once mineral production depended upon indigenous labour, industrialisation leaves desires for social mobility to seek out alternative avenues for progress. While classical ethnographies of resource exploitation in Latin America investigated the local consequences of capitalist exploitation,Footnote ⁴¹ the industrial techniques of modern mining force scholars to explore the lived experience of a capitalist endeavour uninterested in exploiting local labour.Footnote ⁴² How these emerging incongruences between expectation and reality are traversed leads into the questions that follow: what alternatives exist for comuneros in the absence of professional chamba? What new strategies for social mobility can be found for aspiring communities beyond the open pit of industrial production?

Hustling and Informality in Challhuahuacho

With the rain and mud that coated the empty chemical containers, the footing was treacherous. I walked atop their slick plastic tops in constant fear of falling. Víctor moved with much more assurance, counting the containers as he hopped from one to another, inspecting their quality for re-sale. He shouted at us when he arrived at the end of the stacked vessels, verifying Ernesto's original total of 42.

We were in the yard of their cousin Julio's business, one of a minority of ‘winners’ on the Las Bambas frontier. As an individual married to a Fuerabambina, Julio had negotiated special treatment through preferential corporate contracting and ran a business supplying the mine with industrial chemicals required for mineral processing.Footnote ⁴³ Constant pestering from Víctor and Ernesto regarding the absence of work in Ccanccayllo had raised his concern, putting him on the look-out for opportunities to offer his cousins. He had heard that the used containers – measuring a cubic metre – that were returned to his yard could be re-sold in Cusco for 150 Peruvian soles (US$40) per unit. Víctor and Ernesto leapt at the prospect, borrowing a large flatbed truck from their cousin and requesting my help.

We took rough measurements of the truck's cargo space and began the arduous task of moving the containers from the muddy floor of the yard onto the flatbed. Fingers and feet were painfully jammed trying to fit the awkward and misshapen merchandise into the space allotted. There were few considerations of health and safety as the acrid chemical fumes which leaked out from the open tops of the containers burned our throats and seared our eyes. After two hours, we had been able to stack and secure some 24 plastic vessels for the overnight journey to Cusco. The remaining containers would have to wait until Ernesto and Víctor returned. Behind agitated and blood-shot glares, they thanked me before running off into the night in search of a driver.

As alluded to above, the de-professionalisation of expectations that accompanied the onset of industrial production did not mark an end to desires for social advancement. Rather, the maturation of the mining zone demanded further ‘navigation’ by individuals in search of the better life.Footnote ⁴⁴ By the beginning of 2017, the school in Ccanccayllo had been completed. Though it had been a short-term, low-skilled development project lacking the prestige and formality comuneros longed for, it had, at the very least, provided a daily stipend. The extent of the production shift in extraction and the completion of the school was captured forcefully by las casas con candados (padlocked houses). Those comuneros who retained strong connections with ‘the city’ bolted their doors in the neighbourhood and returned to the urban margins, ostensibly until something changed (the commencement of the next development project; alterations to work rotas, etc.). Those who remained in Cotabambas during this liminal period began to orient their daily lives more and more towards the boomtown of Challhuahuacho. The town, built to service the mine, held the alluring possibility of informal labour which seemed to compare favourably to the increasing isolation and lethargy of the peasant community. However, as many of my friends and acquaintances would come to learn, income-generating activities – even in the boomtown – were fleeting and sparse. The marginal relations between corporate extraction and its social peripheries revealed a disjointed circulation of economic dividends between mine and region, presenting new challenges in the search for social mobility.

Ernesto and Víctor – those with whom I had stacked the used chemical vessels – were two of my closest friends from Ccanccayllo, who, having few connections in the neighbourhood of Lima where they were born, ‘stayed on’ in Cotabambas, moving into Challhuahuacho. Their rented room was fortuitously located across the street from my own accommodation and I often stopped by after my morning coffee, hoping to follow them into the informal economy of the mining town – to sniff out fleeting opportunities for daily labour. On certain days Víctor's phone would ring and we would scamper off to help unload bricks at the construction site of a guest house or restaurant that had come late to the boom of Challhuahuacho. On other days we might stop by at a friend's woodworking shop to retrieve lumber or to deliver finished products to buyers around town. The chemical container endeavour was the most recent exploit, interrupting weeks of inactivity, and provided the brothers with a windfall payment that was unusual for their informal activity. Normally, we would toil for between 20 minutes and a couple of hours before being handed ten, 20 or 50 soles. Some would be stowed away for paying the rent or sent to Celestino (their father) in Ccanccayllo. The rest would cover the day's lunch and, if we felt like celebrating, a beer or two that evening.

For those who stayed in the region, without jobs or families to facilitate returns to the city, the struggle had become that of eking out a living on the margins of a saturated service economy that proved less and less fruitful as the mining zone matured. Ernesto and Víctor's insecure and informal grind reverberated in equal measure throughout the community, and petered out just as quickly. Suyai had drawn upon familial ties in Tambobamba – a neighbouring district – to obtain piecemeal work in the transportation of sheep to abattoirs. Quenti, one of the few individuals from Ccanccayllo with a car, had become an occasional taxi driver around Challhuahuacho. Other community members – in particular women whose husbands could not find manual labour – focused on the Sunday market in town, arriving early to display produce from their fields in Ccanccayllo or more ‘exotic’ fruit and vegetables obtained through networks of relatives that extended beyond the high altitude of Cotabambas. Sales were limited, especially given that the large restaurants of Challhuahuacho's service economy were frequently subject to inspection, and thus imported the majority of their produce from big certified farms in Arequipa. Those beyond the absorption capacity of even the informal economy were forced to eat into the meagre savings which they had put away during the construction boom. A few retornantes had gone so far as to sell off familial property and assets in the city to tide themselves over.

All of these informal endeavours, to essential but varying degrees, depended on connections of trust and support beyond the individual family. Yet the social capital of individuals, groups and communities living along the mine's margins seemed only and always to stretch into further rings of limitation. These dynamics were especially harsh for many of the young men who had spent their youth in the city, where informal earnings depended only on learned cunning and a degree of effort. Many of my friends and interlocutors complained how much easier it was to make a buck in the city: shining shoes, selling soft drinks along main thoroughfares, running through stalled traffic at busy intersections with snacks. It was not ideal, and far removed from professional desires, but the opportunity to peddle and hawk was always available – a comparative nostalgia which might have seemed laughable years ago during expectant returns to Cotabambas. In many ways, their complaints raised questions about the unique challenges of economic marginalisation particular to extractive investment, and, furthermore, about the prospects of alternative forms of ‘informality’ that might emerge.

Informal livelihoods, as an academic concern for Peruvian and Latin American social scientists, are nothing new. As rural–urban migration gave rise to debates of marginality during the mid-twentieth century, diverse theoretical orientations and critiques of social exclusion continued to understand informality as a way of cushioning unequal outcomes: a fail-safe in the absence of full employment.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet understandings of informal livelihoods across Latin America have consistently resulted from studies of cities: a bias towards an urban dynamism not wholly appropriate to the rural mining zone. Indeed, as identified by my informants in their reflections on city hustling, the relations between corporate capitalism and its margins, following the maturation of the frontier, did not foster the more ‘traditional’ informal economy they had become accustomed to during their youth. This is neither unique nor, perhaps, overly surprising. Anthropologists working on contemporary extraction throughout the Global South have elucidated the desire and efforts of corporations to increasingly insulate themselves and their profits. In Appel's words, extractive industries work not only to pull resources out of the ground, but to ‘disentangle the production of profit from the place in which it happens to find itself’.Footnote ⁴⁶ These efforts at insulation involve minimising commitments and connections to the social margins of operations. Consequently, the new ‘company towns’ of rural extraction zones, as James Ferguson argues, have become dependent on imported skills and machinery, where transient contractors fly in and out with their salaries, ‘hopping over’ entire regions in the process.Footnote ⁴⁷ As production becomes more detached from locales, fewer and fewer economic linkages are made with the communities that come to host these industrial projects, further exacerbating development incongruences.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the case of the Las Bambas mine, the few local–corporate connections were largely limited to a select group of hoteliers and restaurateurs in Challhuahuacho who had negotiated special treatment when they sold land to the mine. This limited and wholly service-based economy – which also imported products, produce and labour – offered few financial pickings for industrious and ambitious individuals like Ernesto and Víctor. In order to sustain hope for social mobility, they and others would have to get creative: become less concentrated on boomtown hustling and instead cultivate informal economies that were unique to the rural mining zone they were navigating. This shift in focus would entail probing the soft underbelly of industrial mining in search of opportunities where corporate insulation and enclosure were more difficult to achieve.

Artisanal Mining on the Las Bambas Frontier

It was mid-morning, many months after my arrival in Cotabambas. I was walking along a mountain face that overlooked a hamlet of Huancarama, an affected community to the east of the mine along the main transportation corridor where copper concentrate was funnelled through the province towards Cusco and then south to the coast, carried by a convoy of transfer trucks. Below music blared from a transistor radio as women dropped carefully chosen potatoes into the drills of a recently tilled chacra. I was with Francisco, who was chatting to me about his adolescence in Arequipa and Lima, when we came upon a cavernous hole in the face of the mountain: a mine shaft (see Fig. 1). We stopped and Francisco soon led me into the opening. There were ropes, empty beer bottles and discarded helmets and picks. Various tubes were hooked up to a water pump used to empty the shaft during the rainy season. Large timber poles ran between its rock walls.

Figure 1. Artisanal mine in Cotabambas.

Source: Author.

Popular history dates such tunnels to the era of Spanish colonialism. Francisco claimed coerced locals would lead colonial agents to mountains and hills known to contain gold and silver, which were subsequently looted and left abandoned. ‘But’, Francisco stated with a grin, ‘they didn't take the copper!’ He bent down to pick up small bluish-green stones. Here, in Huancarama, the picks, helmets and beer bottles confirmed that Francisco and others had been re-entering the abandoned tunnels; indeed, digging their own in search of colonial leftovers.Footnote ⁴⁹ As he allowed the chipped stone to sift through his fingers and fall to the ground, he proclaimed ‘Todos estos cerros están mineralizados’ (‘All these hills contain minerals’, lit. ‘are mineralised’).

It was a phrase that I had grown accustomed to hearing: a prominent if also opaque expression within the local lexicon of Las Bambas’ margins. Friends and interlocutors throughout the region were fond of pointing out that ‘mineralised mountains’ (cerros mineralizados) stretched throughout the province and beyond. Given the near-uniform appearance of these hills to my foreign gaze, I had initially understood the phrase as a broad metaphor that recognised the importance the region was coming to hold within Peru: rumours and potential stirrings of more corporate interventions on the horizon. However, on this particular day in Huancarama, claims of ‘mineralised mountains’ were granted a concrete and tangible weight. Copper was not only an abstract commodity for global consumption, a variable or factor to be pulled through the algorithm of extractive development policy, but an object and material that could not be neatly quarantined by government and corporation in tandem. The vast veins of potential wealth that stretched for miles below these mountains spilled beyond the legal and technical capacity of formal intervention, tempting communities and individuals who planted potatoes in the soil above and now traversed the frustrating maturation of the region's mining economy.

These encroaching realisations were granted further significance by the trucks parked near the main plaza below the mountain on which we stood. Investors from the neighbouring department of Arequipa, with experience working in various informal mines throughout southern Peru, had arrived that afternoon following an invitation by community members who wished to expand production in the tunnels I had just observed. The investment team now waited for an audience on the doorstep of Huancarama's president. Following our descent from the mountain, and the slow trickle of other comuneros from their fields and houses, I listened attentively as the artisanal investors delivered their pitch: labour divisions, tool provision, expertise and profit-sharing. The community appeared both appreciative and curious, interrogating further specifics through a round of questions, before agreeing to have a decision on a potential partnership in the coming weeks. The investors, buoyed by the affirmative reception they had received, carried on after handshakes to a scheduled appointment within another community further west.

Historically speaking, informal mining is not without precedent in eastern Apurímac. Further afield, in the province of Grau, artisanal activity had been carried out for decades by locals in and around the municipality of Progreso (following the discontinuation of formal exploitation at Ccochasayhuas).Footnote ⁵⁰ Over time, the small-scale projects of Grau fostered an incipient transportation network between the region and copper-processing plants along the coast. Adventurous entrepreneurs with enough capital to purchase a truck traversed the dangerous highland roads of Progresso to buy sacks of minerals from communities boring into the hills. However, despite this historical precedent, lasting connections did not spill over into the province of Cotabambas, where formal large-scale mining projects did not yet exist.

This all began to change, however, following the re-migration to the region as the Las Bambas mine passed through its various stages of development. Not only were expectation and optimism beginning to saturate a once forgotten region, but large and youthful labour reserves were building up, enticing investors from neighbouring regions to engage communities on the prospects of establishing artisanal mines. The potential of these projects was fostered in no small part by the example of the community of Huayquipa. The concession of Las Bambas stretched underneath its land, including a large vein from one of the mega-project's major mineral deposits. With the influx of retornantes to the community, investors soon followed, and a nascent informal economy burgeoned into a prosperous precedent known throughout the region. Indeed, I discovered that my close friend Óscar had worked the informal mines of Huayquipa years ago. Returning from Lima at the behest of his father, he used family connections to gain a position in one of the many new laborales (labour groups). John and Renán, two other comuneros from Ccanccayllo, arrived from Abancay in 2010 and 2011 to work in the artisanal mines of Huayquipa prior to the construction of the Las Bambas mine. Eventually, after rigid rules for the absorption of retornantes were drawn up by affected communities, John, Renán and Óscar all settled in Ccanccayllo, taking their experiences with them. On certain evenings, having finished hours of communal labour in Ccanccayllo and rewarding ourselves with a few beers, Renán would speak openly about the money he had amassed in those early years working in the informal copper trade. And even though only a smattering of comuneros in the community worked in the mines of Huayquipa, its legend spread. Casual conversations sought to probe the accrued wealth of the neighbouring community: ‘Every comunero [in Huayquipa] has three new trucks!’, Víctor declared one day as we sat around the recently dug holes of the community's reforestation project, drinking Inca Cola. Diego followed his lead: ‘They are millionaires. Ccanccayllo needs to find investors.’ When Ccanccayllo might find the financial connections and expertise to follow in Huayquipa's footsteps was a simmering question as lives lurched through the incongruences of mining development, deprofessionalised futures and the slow evaporation of hustling opportunities in Challhuahuacho.

In time, I discovered that my adopted community had attempted, many years ago, prior to the construction boom and training programmes, to start its own artisanal mining scheme. To date, neither Ccanccayllo nor any other community in the province had been overly successful in replicating the artisanal economy of Huayquipa. Yet, increasingly, the topic began to infuse everyday conversation across the provincial frontier: discussions in cantinas amongst drinking parties moved from condemning critiques of endemic corruption to the prospects of investors; cross-communal dialogue on the outskirts of local festivals and anniversary celebrations included the whispers of tentative agreements, labour-group formation and contact sharing.

Furthermore, and as my encounter in Huancarama had affirmed, these projects and desires on the margins of the extractive zone were granted further weight by an increase in roving investors, travelling throughout the region in their 4 x 4 trucks, engaging frustrated communities and (re)stoking the potential that the ‘mineralised mountains’ still held for the better life. In Ccanccayllo artisanal investors gained a semi-regular presence on the outskirts of community meetings, waiting near the plaza for their invitation to engage the audience. The expectant financiers would step forward, present their investment plan, citing their credentials and experience in small-scale mining ventures in other parts of the country (primarily Arequipa or Puno), and the proposed dividends they would collect as a fee for their expertise and labour. As the number of prospective suitors was whittled down and samples of copper from the hills above the village plaza were sent off for testing, the fortnightly community meetings became dominated by debates and decisions between comuneros on the finer points of a project inching closer to activation: plot assignment on the mountain, mandatory workdays, profit sharing across families, etc.

These emergent collaborations began to reveal and probe the possibilities which remained despite the maturation of the mining zone in eastern Apurímac. If the labour systems and residues of corporate investment had thus far failed to relate to communities in ways they desired, the navigation of the frontier opportunity continued apace. Through this process, copper itself – the original source of local transformation – was identified for its unruly potential: a resource that could not be fully enclosed by corporate or government interests; a material that spilled beyond the open pit of Las Bambas, running into the hills which mechanised extraction had not yet reached. Minerals, thus, became an outlet for surplus labour; a source of rural informality for individuals tentatively folded into global commodity chains, who continued to live, toil and aspire amongst the mountains constituting their riches. In this regard, Cotabamban communities can be seen to fit within a wider phenomenon of artisanal mining carried out by populations beyond the carrying capacity of formal economies throughout Latin America and the Global South. Scholars such as Andrea Marston, Gavin Hilson and Negar Behzadi have drawn attention to the role minerals have come to play for contemporary rural locales and, in particular, the importance of artisanal mining in cushioning precarious livelihoods.Footnote ⁵¹ This article, while in agreement with these claims, moves on to tease out the specific tensions and stresses created by community mining ventures in the shadow of corporate ownership; to investigate how artisanal and industrial extraction came to relate to one another in Cotabambas. It is an avenue of exploration in which the distinctions between the formal and informal begin to blur and the prospects for conflict or compromise become consequential.

Community Copper and Corporate Compromise

On a cool evening in September 2017, I joined an eager caravan of Ccanccayllanos along a crude road recently dug into the side of Chucruni mountain. We were off to work in the community's recently re-invigorated artisanal mines. By chance it was dark when we arrived at the make-shift camp (various small bungalows constructed from eucalyptus poles and plastic tarps). We were served soup by a young cook hired from the neighbouring district of Mara. We soon donned helmets and head lamps and braved the cold, hiking up a worn footpath before reaching the mine's entrance and assuming our positions. Óscar descended beneath a wooden platform by rope with the perforista (driller).Footnote ⁵² His father and brother-in-law weighed down a steel crank and pulley with sandbags. I grabbed the wheelbarrow before lowering down various tools to Óscar and his partner below. The work soon commenced in Fordist fashion. Rocks were chipped and chunked from the deposit below, piled into the rubber basket, and pulleyed to the platform above, where the contents were spilled into the wheelbarrow. I would then push the cart along a short path to the mouth of the mine, where the debris would be dumped. When all the loose stones were pulled to the surface, sticks of dynamite were carefully placed and detonated. The process would resume anew with breaks taken to chew coca, smoke cigarettes, sip caña and sort through the mounds of rock in search of verdant nuggets. Those rocks considered to have enough copper content were placed into large plastic sacks and stacked out of the way where they would some day be collected by buyers. We carried on until nearly midnight before laying out mattresses in the camp bungalows and retiring for the night.

The community divided itself into eight different labour groups that mapped onto family lines. Over the course of the few months that marked the end of my fieldwork, I divided my own toil between various groups, hoping not to alienate any family. Each group was assigned its own mining site – 20 to 50 metres separating each one – and was charged with securing its own investors and connections (either through the artisanal groups that passed through the community or by phone calls placed to friends and associates outside the region). Therefore there existed disparate levels of production on the hill. Óscar's labour group had quickly procured the support of an artisanal mining team from Cusco which, beyond providing labour and expertise, supplied them with equipment that ranged from strong wooden planks and steel cables to sophisticated drills used to burrow into the rock face for the planting of dynamite. At the other end of the spectrum was the labour group of Ernesto, Víctor, their father Celestino and a few uncles. During the weeks in which I worked with them before the arrival of the rainy season, they had not yet been able to procure much financial or logistical support and were resigned to extracting copper by pick and hand, a much slower and more laborious process.

The entire community was involved in the process, young and old alike, male and female, individuals born in the community and those from the city. Women and girls carried out the gendered domestic work that supported the labour of men, whether in the camps themselves or below in the houses. Elders, some stooped by decades of agricultural and urban labour, hauled large stones from the rock face towards the sacking area, passing their grandsons along the way. Younger cosmopolitan retornantes, born in the cities, lowered their heads in respect when coca leaves and caña were taken by the wind or poured on the ground as offerings to Pachamama (‘Earth Mother’). The spectrums of gender and age, urban and rural upbringing, were washed away amongst a communal hope to see lives in dynamic motion.

While I participated and documented the emergence of artisanal mining in my adopted community, I was ambivalent – caught between the excitement that daily life was once again injected with purpose and activity, and concerns over issues of legality.Footnote ⁵³ Perhaps my greatest fear was the consequences for friends and communities should the National Police, tasked with enforcing law, or indeed MMG, the legal proprietor of the subterranean minerals, discover the extent of informal copper mining currently under way. As I listened to cantina conversations citing the process of formalising small-scale mining that was currently taking place in the country, I did my best to correct narratives: to point out that the formalisation policy now accepted by the government was aimed at artisanal mines that did not overlap with other formal concessions.Footnote ⁵⁴ These debates invariably fizzled out without agreement, lost between my legal preoccupations and the moral convictions of comuneros eager to legitimate their claims to the region's mineral-rich mountains.

To my relief, these fears, increasingly, seemed unjustified. Chucruni mountain, where the majority of the village's artisanal mines at the time were located, formed an immense backdrop to the community. The mounds of rocks and tarped camps became visible indicators of informal labour to anyone who raised their head while in the community's plaza or along the public road on the southern limits of Ccanccayllo. Both the road and the plaza were frequented by MMG relacionistas (community relations workers) passing through affected communities to check on development projects and to field concerns and questions. During the final months of my stay in Ccanccayllo, while anxiously eavesdropping on encounters between corporate employees and community members, I overheard uncontentious conversations on the progress of informal mining obvious to all.

Following this realisation – that artisanal mining was neither a taboo subject, nor something to be hidden from corporate employees – I took advantage of an impromptu meeting one afternoon in Challhuahuacho with an MMG relacionista. Amongst the idle chit-chat that accompanied the majority of our interactions, I abruptly and candidly asked him about the proliferation of artisanal mining amongst affected communities on the western reaches of the district and, more specifically, about the corporation's position in regard to the process of informal extraction. César, the relacionista, did not hesitate when he talked about realities and politics I was already familiar with: ‘Listen, communities are frustrated. Demanding work and projects – money. The presence of artisanal mining is something we can accept given these challenges.’ The frankness of his response revealed a policy of tacit complicity; a release valve for the structural exclusion produced by mining investment's maturation.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is a point worthy of discussion.

In her analysis of off-shore oil production in Equatorial Guinea, Appel argues that the fantasy of extractive capitalism is ‘frictionless profit’.Footnote ⁵⁶ As stated by Appel, for those in industrial management there is a shared desire for ‘spaces where the production of profit can flow, evading or minimizing contestation’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet, in the absence of a desert ideal – or an ocean oil platform – corporate desire must bend and adjust to the realities of regions where resources co-mingle with local populations. Profit, in these instances, must negotiate the path of least resistance, or what might be called ‘low-friction flows’. To a degree, CSR measures or royalty and tax payments to municipal governments work in service of this paradigm. However, amongst extractive locales where historical marginalisation has fostered notions of social mobility and desires for professionalisation that ‘gifts’ cannot readily appease, corporate techniques for minimising contestation must remain flexible to the agency and projects of affected communities over time. It is a negotiation, in the case of the Las Bambas project, that blurs the boundaries between licit and illicit economies: a compromise, I would argue, that fosters the emergence of ‘complementary’ relations between the formal and informal poles of labour and production.

Indeed, amongst the peripheries of the Las Bambas copper mine in southern Peru, the contradictions of modern mining, from initiation to production, create not only tension and disillusionment amongst affected communities, but alternative projects of betterment. As comuneros navigate the frustrating realities of extraction's maturation, desire for social becoming must seek out informal avenues of reprieve. MMG, as the corporate proprietor of the mineral concession, implicitly accepts the presence of artisanal tunnels throughout the region, recognising the incendiary nature of the mine's margins and the threat that permanent superfluity poses to the profit flow of mining capitalism. Corporate policy, rather than contest ownership over minerals, folds artisanal mining into its strategic engagement with local communities. The result is a bifurcated yet complementary system of extraction: tunnels and pits, modern and ancient, formal and informal, resolving – to a degree and at least momentarily – the incongruences of corporate-led development amongst aspirational communities and individuals.

This is in no way to suggest that complementarity is a sealed equilibrium of harmony or a permanent and stable form of homeostasis. Despite the popular claim that ‘all mountains’ in the region are ‘mineralised’, the most successful artisanal ventures during my fieldwork were largely confined to the western perimeter of the Las Bambas concession (where mineral concentration was richest). Paros (strikes or protests) were evoked and debated by certain communities and road blockades festered throughout the region as the grand promises and pitfalls of corporate investment were continuously navigated and negotiated. Yet, I would argue, informal mining ventures have provided one particular outlet for the frustrating frictions of social mobility and (de)professional transitions: emergent and temporary breaks to the potential combustibility of extractive development's contradictions and challenges over time.

It was little wonder, then, during my final months of fieldwork in Cotabambas, while I attempted to hitch-hike back to Challhuahuacho, that I consistently encountered out-of-town copper buyers traversing the road towards Abancay, pestering lonely travellers such as myself in the hopes of discovering which communities had minerals for sale. As emergent middlemen, they climbed the beaten tracks to Ccanccayllo, Sonccoccocha, Pichihua and Pincachuacho in search of booty to re-sell at artisanal processing plants along the Peruvian coast. The proliferation of these buyers and investors meant that these once quiet roads of eastern Apurímac were no longer dominated or monopolised by the corporate vehicles of MMG, checking in on the various project ‘gifts’ of responsible social investment. Indeed, this tapestry of traffic constituted the disparate poles of informal and formal economies that sustained the region and highlighted the emergent complementary functioning of mining capitalism throughout the Las Bambas copper zone.