Monday, October 15, 2007

The Children of Lead

In honor of Blog Action Day and in keeping with my theme about Peru over the last couple of days, I bring you a short documentary about the situation of the people of La Oroya, Peru. Due to the copper smelting plant owned by Mr. Ira Rennert (the billionaire who also owns Hummer), the town, populated by 35,000 people, was identified in 2006 as one of the ten most polluted places in the world.



For more on this situation, visit Intercontinental Cry.

3 comments:

  1. Brother Don chiming in.

    I share the grief our family brought those of Peru and Liberia, Nanc, and I have always been curious about the place I was born and lived. I liked the documentary and am impressed with your research skills. When I have done this in the past I didn't seem to get this kind of stuff.

    Things I have really paid attention to over the years are:
    Operation Condor. What some call the "First war on Terror"
    The parasitic nature of the relationship between "fighting evil doers" and graft and corruption. i.e., Fujimoro and Bush.
    And how about 60 years of fighting "communism" and the whole continent is still tiltiing to the "left".

    Thanks for the name (Ashanika)

    Don

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Don, thanks for taking a look. I'm sad to say that a huge part of my time on this was taken up just finding where we were on a map. That's how much I've avoided it all...I didn't even know where we were!! It all made me so mad that I let my Spanish language skills die when we moved back to the US.

    And yeah, for those of you who might visit, Don is my brother, who was born while we lived in Peru. I asked him to take a look at this material because he's always had more of an open and curious attitude about this history.

    ReplyDelete
  3. One more thing Don, I got curious about how many other countries might be implementing "Truth and Reconciliation" commissions, (I had only heard about the one in S. Africa) so I checked that out online as well. From what I found, Liberia is in the process of starting one...interesting.

    ReplyDelete

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