Oxfam America Blog

Father Marco Arana:

Reports about recent conflict in Peru have me thinking about a day I spent last November, riding around in the back of a truck in Cajamarca. I was with Father Marco Arana, a Catholic priest, writing a story about his work for our magazine.

At one point we passed a contingent of heavily armed men. Father Arana whipped out his phone and called his office to report their location. The men were elite police officers, he explained to me after he’d hung up, part of a DINOES unit (Dirección Nacional de Operativos Especiales, sort of like a SWAT team). They are used to quell violence that occasionally flares up near the Yanacocha gold mine when local farmers and indigenous people protest a lack of water or other problems that they attribute to mining. This type of violence is part of a pattern: indigenous people, farmers—those without sufficient political clout to get their local government to address a problem—sometimes block a road, or seize an oil well, anything to get someone to pay attention. Hopefully their protest will spur an official to come and talk with them, maybe promise to fix a problem, and everyone can go home.

Or DINOES can come.
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The relocated community of San Andres, Honduras. Photo by Edgar Orellana / Oxfam America

A rock hitting a metal roof makes a certain sound.

When I heard it I was in a meeting in a small house in San Andres, Honduras, with a group of people who had been moved off their farms to make way for a large gold mine. They are now living in a tidy, well-laid out town built just for them.

When you talk to the people they say they are disappointed: “They gave us [building] plots, just three meters by 20 meters [about 10 feet by 66 feet], and there is no place to expand. We can’t have chickens or pigs, there’s just no room,” one man reluctant to give me his name said.  “This is a place for middle class people, not poor people, it just does not work for us.” 

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