The Children of Lead

While La Oroya's stark landscape may estrange the outside observer, the city's infamy as a toxic place grew in the first decades of the 21st century through human lead testing, mostly of children. Los Niños de Plomo, the Children of Lead, frequented the national press and publications of international and national NGOs, like SPDA (a Peruvian environmental NGO, based in the capital of Lima). As in this image, the photographs of children, often of young girls, always foreground La Oroya’s barren hillsides and the smelter’s giant chimney. The innocent body of the child, presumably permeated with very high levels of lead, condenses the moral stakes of La Oroya's toxic state of affairs and heightens the political stakes of the matter. This screen shot includes a portrait of a young girl that appeared in several different press releases in 2012. The image proliferated as the government belabored its decision of whether to force the US owner of the smelter, Doe Run, to forgo ownership and leave the country due to its fiscal and environmental malfeasance. Contributing to an onslaught of press against Doe Run at the time, this headline reads, "Study reveals that children in La Oroya are born with lead in their blood due to contamination." The article goes on to explain that despite three years of closure, pregnant mothers continue to inhale heavy metals dispersed in the environment. Quoting the study conducted by the regional Ministry of Health (via the national newspaper, La República), the press release goes on to explain that lead causes cognitive disturbances, like problems with psycho-motor development, attention deficit, hyperactivity, and behavior problems. Referencing the Black Smith Institute’s study discussed in the first image, SPDA reminds its readers that La Oroya is considered one of the ten most contaminated cities in the world. Taken together, this image précises the constellation of signs and actors that made La Oroya into a toxic place at the turn of the 21st century: "stark landscape, chimney, lead tests, cognitively impaired child of lead, internationally rated top ten most polluted cities." For many residents of La Oroya, it is also the associative constellation that has estranged them from any mention of the environment. In part, because toxicity environmentalisms have made the future of the smelter, along with their constitutive socialities and economic livelihoods, increasingly precarious. Frequent depictions of their children as mentally impaired, like this press release by SPDA, particularly struck a nerve among proud parents of La Oroya. Accusing environmental NGOs of falsely maligning their children as "mongolitos" (little mongoloids, a derogatory and racist defamation of unintelligence) became a common way of disparaging and refusing diverse enactments of environmentalism within the city.