Project
Protecting the health of La Oroya's residents from toxic pollution
For more than 20 years, residents of La Oroya have been seeking justice and reparations after a metallurgical complex caused heavy metal pollution in their community—in violation of their fundamental rights—and the government failed to take adequate measures to protect them.
On March 22, 2024, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued its judgment in the case. It found Peru responsible and ordered it to adopt comprehensive reparation measures. This decision is a historic opportunity to restore the rights of the victims, as well as an important precedent for the protection of the right to a healthy environment in Latin America and for adequate state oversight of corporate activities.
Background
La Oroya is a small city in Peru’s central mountain range, in the department of Junín, about 176 km from Lima. It has a population of around 30,000 inhabitants.
There, in 1922, the U.S. company Cerro de Pasco Cooper Corporation installed the La Oroya Metallurgical Complex to process ore concentrates with high levels of lead, copper, zinc, silver and gold, as well as other contaminants such as sulfur, cadmium and arsenic.
The complex was nationalized in 1974 and operated by the State until 1997, when it was acquired by the US Doe Run Company through its subsidiary Doe Run Peru. In 2009, due to the company's financial crisis, the complex's operations were suspended.
Decades of damage to public health
The Peruvian State - due to the lack of adequate control systems, constant supervision, imposition of sanctions and adoption of immediate actions - has allowed the metallurgical complex to generate very high levels of contamination for decades that have seriously affected the health of residents of La Oroya for generations.
Those living in La Oroya have a higher risk or propensity to develop cancer due to historical exposure to heavy metals. While the health effects of toxic contamination are not immediately noticeable, they may be irreversible or become evident over the long term, affecting the population at various levels. Moreover, the impacts have been differentiated —and even more severe— among children, women and the elderly.
Most of the affected people presented lead levels higher than those recommended by the World Health Organization and, in some cases, higher levels of arsenic and cadmium; in addition to stress, anxiety, skin disorders, gastric problems, chronic headaches and respiratory or cardiac problems, among others.
The search for justice
Over time, several actions were brought at the national and international levels to obtain oversight of the metallurgical complex and its impacts, as well as to obtain redress for the violation of the rights of affected people.
AIDA became involved with La Oroya in 1997 and, since then, we’ve employed various strategies to protect public health, the environment and the rights of its inhabitants.
In 2002, our publication La Oroya Cannot Wait helped to make La Oroya's situation visible internationally and demand remedial measures.
That same year, a group of residents of La Oroya filed an enforcement action against the Ministry of Health and the General Directorate of Environmental Health to protect their rights and those of the rest of the population.
In 2006, they obtained a partially favorable decision from the Constitutional Court that ordered protective measures. However, after more than 14 years, no measures were taken to implement the ruling and the highest court did not take action to enforce it.
Given the lack of effective responses at the national level, AIDA —together with an international coalition of organizations— took the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and in November 2005 requested measures to protect the right to life, personal integrity and health of the people affected. In 2006, we filed a complaint with the IACHR against the Peruvian State for the violation of the human rights of La Oroya residents.
In 2007, in response to the petition, the IACHR granted protection measures to 65 people from La Oroya and in 2016 extended them to another 15.
Current Situation
To date, the protection measures granted by the IACHR are still in effect. Although the State has issued some decisions to somewhat control the company and the levels of contamination in the area, these have not been effective in protecting the rights of the population or in urgently implementing the necessary actions in La Oroya.
Although the levels of lead and other heavy metals in the blood have decreased since the suspension of operations at the complex, this does not imply that the effects of the contamination have disappeared because the metals remain in other parts of the body and their impacts can appear over the years. The State has not carried out a comprehensive diagnosis and follow-up of the people who were highly exposed to heavy metals at La Oroya. There is also a lack of an epidemiological and blood study on children to show the current state of contamination of the population and its comparison with the studies carried out between 1999 and 2005.
The case before the Inter-American Court
As for the international complaint, in October 2021 —15 years after the process began— the IACHR adopted a decision on the merits of the case and submitted it to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, after establishing the international responsibility of the Peruvian State in the violation of human rights of residents of La Oroya.
The Court heard the case at a public hearing in October 2022. More than a year later, on March 22, 2024, the international court issued its judgment. In its ruling, the first of its kind, it held Peru responsible for violating the rights of the residents of La Oroya and ordered the government to adopt comprehensive reparation measures, including environmental remediation, reduction and mitigation of polluting emissions, air quality monitoring, free and specialized medical care, compensation, and a resettlement plan for the affected people.
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Furthermore, the constitutional text represents a significant step backwards on environmental and human rights issues; it also opens the doors to mega-mining -including lithium mining- under the guise of energy transition, criminalizes protests and allows the privatization of both water and indigenous lands. Indigenous communities have claimed that the indiscriminate advancement of lithium mining projects in the province will exacerbate the water crisis currently affecting the area. With increasing international demand for lithium - considered a strategic resource due to its energy storage capacity (useful for the battery and electric vehicle industries) - global mining and production has accelerated in recent years, with a focus on regions rich in the mineral, such as the Andean salt flats of Argentina, Bolivia and Chile, where more than 53% of the world's proven reserves are located. Lithium is found in brines, pegmatites and sedimentary rocks, although it’s easier to from the former. However, extraction requires large quantities of water and takes place in fragile ecosystems such as salt flats, which suffer from water-deficiency and are severely affected by the impacts of the climate crisis. The social resistance to the constitutional reform in Jujuy is also a resistance to a global trend that, in the name of an energy transition that is far from being just, seeks to perpetuate extractivist models that violate human rights. Human rights violations in Jujuy AIDA - along with seven other civil society organizations with extensive experience in environmental and human rights defense - was part of an international mission that visited Jujuy from 21 to 25 August to learn first-hand about possible violations of the right to protest and participation in the context of the constitutional reform. The mission visited the main protest centers and documented testimonies from people from indigenous groups and communities, farmers' associations, trade unions and human rights organizations, as well as social leaders, teachers, lawyers and provincial authorities. Preliminary conclusions indicate that: Even when indigenous peoples and their communities demanded participation in the constitutional reform, it was carried out without an exhaustive deliberative process. Despite climate crisis and water scarcity, the reform doesn’t properly address integrated basin management and ecosystems conservation. The reform seems to favor large-scale industrial, agricultural and livestock use of water resources and opens the doors to concessions that can lead the privatization of water, damaging ecosystem cycles and failing to protect small-scale agriculture and livestock, vital to the existence of native communities. There is a repeated and manifest concern from indigenous communities about the negative impacts of mining, particularly lithium extraction projects. Testimonies report cases of repression of social protest, arbitrary arrests, harassment and alleged torture by the police of people involved in resistance, as well as disproportionate use of force. The mission is currently systematizing the information collected in order to prepare recommendations oriented that will highlight the complex situation in the province of Jujuy and contribute to a dialog that will allow for a better resolution of the social conflict and respect for human rights. What kind of transition does the constitutional reform in Jujuy point to? Addressing this question is important to understand that a just energy transition is incompatible with a context in which private economic interests prevail over social and environmental considerations, and in which government actions ignore the impacts of lithium extraction and the legitimate claims of local communities to manage their water and territory. Jujuy is home to over 12 indigenous peoples and around 400 communities -whose members have dedicated for millennia to salt extraction in Salinas Grandes, the fourth largest salt flat in South America. Their connection to water is sacred and ancient. It’s a cultural connection that is threatened by the exploitation of lithium, which jeopardizes the availability of an extremely scarce resource. "To extract one ton of lithium (through evaporation), 2 million liters of water are evaporated from the wells, that is, 2000 tons of water that cannot be re-circulated," says Ingrid Garcés, professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Mineral Processes at the University of Antofagasta, Chile. This "is profitable for the industry because it means a process without energy costs, but unfortunately it has the cost of losing water from a system that is not renewable, especially in a desert region" (like the salt flats). The constitutional reform in Jujuy doesn’t stipulate an order of priority for water use, but puts human and industrial consumption on the same level. Limited access to water is a central concern in the province, as there are few groundwater resources to meet the demand for water for human and domestic use, as well as for small-scale agricultural and livestock production. An urgent change of course The water crisis is one of the most pressing crises worldwide and is intrinsically linked to the climate crisis and the need to switch to alternative energy production. Extreme weather patterns - such as prolonged droughts, floods and more intense storms – have a direct impact on the availability and distribution of water in different regions of the world, leading to a decline in water resources. In this scenario, competition for water use intensifies and requires social water management for the benefit of communities. This is the only way to address the situation in terms of sustainability and environmental justice. The extraction of lithium to satisfy corporate interests is an example of the paradox that tackling the climate crisis comes at the expense of communities and ecosystems. The lack of fair and equitable distribution of benefits and the externalization of environmental and social costs underscores the urgency to rethink and radically transform our relationship with natural resources and the way we address the climate crisis.
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According to a recent report published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), climate litigation has doubled worldwide in recent years and has become an important and increasingly popular tool for tackling the climate crisis. Furthermore, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) noted in its sixth report that there is now "a growing academic consensus suggesting that climate litigation has become a powerful force in climate governance". Climate litigation is indeed an integral part of the activists' toolkit for promoting climate action. And it is children, youth, indigenous peoples, civil society organizations, women and local communities who have taken the lead in bringing these legal actions. Climate litigation is, at its core, strategic litigation, which means it seeks far-reaching changes in society that go beyond a specific case. Typically, this is achieved by promoting the protection of rights or changes in public policy. Such litigations hold governments, public authorities, companies and other non-state actors accountable in court for the climate crisis and oblige them, among other things, to adopt, implement and gradually increase concrete measures to reduce their emissions and mitigate the impacts of the climate crisis. Over a year ago, AIDA launched the Climate Litigation Platform for Latin America and the Caribbean, a reference website that collects cases of climate litigation in the region. The goal is to promote the exchange of diverse experiences in order to strengthen cases in favor of necessary structural changes. The Platform contains systematized and updated information on litigations filed before any jurisdictional authority (judicial, administrative, international or autonomous). It contains the arguments supporting the cases, related to the legal obligations of States and other actors in the face of the climate crisis. It also contains cases that, while not directly related to the climate crisis, contribute to the pursuit of climate justice on the continent. And this is where confusion and questions arise: what makes a litigation a climate litigation? The truth is that there is no accepted definition to determine which litigation is climate and which is not. It is a relatively new niche in the field of environmental law and -as with many things in life, it has blurred edges. The fact is that our planet is suffering from multiple crises, all of which are interconnected and closely linked to environmental degradation. In this sense, it is almost always possible to link environmental litigations, in some way or another, to the changing climate. In any case, and with the aim of stimulating a discussion on this subject, we venture here to reflect on possible definitions that shed light and allow us to delimit this concept that is gaining so much relevance. 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