The irony is that those who inhabit poor regions live on the very ground that is fueling the Peruvian bonanza. Mining is the country’s most lucrative industry, and mining firms from Canada, Australia and the United States have been rushing to dig out precious metals. Children like Henrry are hardly better off for it. They start work as early as 5. If they attend school, they do so for only a few years and in Spanish — not Quechua or Aymara, the languages spoken at home. Caught in a cycle of ignorance, marginalized by nothing so much as geography, they live out the old 19th-century cliché that Peru is a beggar sitting on a bench of gold.
This makes for a tale not only sad but also dangerous. Peru’s most rabid insurrections took seed precisely in the rural highlands. Túpac Amaru II, an indigenous leader after whom a two-decade socialist insurgency was later named, rose up outside Cuzco in the 1700s; Rumi Maqui in Puno in 1915; the Shining Path in Ayacucho in the 1980s. Last year, the Aymara people raided the city of Puno to protest the incursion of foreign mines and the pollution of their sacred Lake Titicaca. Last month there were no fewer than 71 riots in the mineral-rich provinces of Ancash, Apurímac and Puno.
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