The discord between those for and against the company festers in La Oroya’s labyrinthine streets, packed with stands selling foods like seasoned guinea pig and bars catering to the plant’s workers, who largely move here from other parts of Peru and earn salaries that dwarf those of other residents.
Insults and threats are common. Some workers at the plant recently paraded an effigy of Archbishop Pedro Barreto, an outspoken critic of the company’s environmental record, burning it at the culmination of their protest.
“When insults don’t work, the company resorts to intimidation, and when that fails, to blackmail, which is what it’s doing now by saying it will shut the plant unless it gets an extension for its cleanup,” said Pedro Cordova, 50, a production mechanic at the smelter who is suing the company over health claims related to a lung ailment.
Environmental activists in La Oroya said they saw parallels between Doe Run Peru’s strategies here and those employed elsewhere by Renco, Rennert’s holding company. Even as his fortune remained intact, they contend, some Renco companies in the US faced complaints over environmental contamination and went into bankruptcy earlier this decade.
Through a spokesman in New York, Rennert declined to be interviewed, and Renco would say only that it was in talks aimed at “reaching a viable solution.”
Doe Run Peru claims that it has “dramatically reduced” the toxic emissions at the smelter since buying it from Peru’s government in 1997, leading to “a radical improvement in environmental conditions.”
Still, researchers contend Doe Run Peru has misled officials by using 1997, the year it took control of the smelter, as a point of comparison for pollution levels, since contamination climbed that year. “Doe Run Peru has overseen an absolute increase in contamination in La Oroya,” said Corey Laplante, who researched La Oroya at the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law in Lima.
Despite being pressed by workers here to find a solution, officials in Lima last week said they had concerns about taking over or intervening in the company, pointing to legal battles that could arise from taking some control of a foreign-owned asset.
News reports that Renco had tried this month to buy the Swedish automaker Saab, led angry residents here to ask why Doe Run Peru could not complete its cleanup or prevent a shutdown of the smelter at a time when metal prices have begun to climb again. Nearly everyone here wants the smelter to remain open and for the cleanup to proceed. But with Peru forging closer ties to the US through its new trade deal with Washington, some here question the benefits of such a pact.
“It’s like we’re pawns in a game,” said Rosa Amaro, 52, a leader of an environmental group here. “What I still fail to understand is why we are exposed to the risks of an American investment,” she added, “but not to the environmental protections enjoyed by the citizens of the United States.”
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