VENEZUELA
Picking a Living in Hellish Landscape
By Humberto Marquez
Barely a hundred metres away, toxic red mud, a byproduct of
the refining industry which produces hundreds of thousands of tonnes of
aluminium a year, is starting to seep into the waters of the mighty Orinoco
river, which flows on the north side of Ciudad Guayana.
"I've been doing this for 15 years, and so have members of my family. Someone
is always getting sick: we have to breathe the smoke day in, day out from sunup
to sunset. Some children in the local area have died. And this work doesn't pay
a great deal, just enough to help the family scrape by, but there is no
alternative," Jesús González tells IPS as he takes a break from scouring
the dump for scrap metal.
Ciudad Guayana was designed 50 years ago with the help of urban planners from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States, when it
was envisioned as the "Pittsburgh of the Tropics" after the Steel
City in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania: that is, as a medium-sized modern urban
development and a base for steel industries, related companies and
hydroelectricity plants, in an environment rich in timber and precious
minerals.
"We mainly collect iron, tin, aluminium, copper and bronze, as well as cardboard.
I work with some Warao (indigenous people) and criollos (people of European
descent), and we pile up our material in here," said Nelly Guevara, a
mother of three, sitting under a worn and flimsy canvas awning in the middle of
the dump.
Guevara makes about 2,000 bolivars (460 dollars at the
official exchange rate) a month, a little over the national minimum wage, by
"arriving sometimes at five in the morning, and staying past seven o'clock
at night, in the midst of the smoke, the insecurity, and the animals that pass
on infections. Sometimes we are trapped by the rain, and we cannot leave,"
she said.
Built on the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroní rivers, some 550 km southeast of Caracas,
Ciudad Guayana grew out of an older depressed zone, San Félix, to the east, and
a middle-class development, Puerto Ordaz, to the west, with shanty towns like
Cambalache, home to 8,000 people, springing up on the outskirts.
Among the people of Cambalache are 120 Warao families, an ethnic group
originating from the Orinoco river delta, some 100 km to the northeast. Groups
of Warao people have intermittently split off from the main population in the
delta, and now live as panhandlers in miserable conditions in a number of
Venezuelan cities.
Ten Warao children died from gastrointestinal or respiratory diseases in and
around Cambalache last year, according to accounts in the local press. Some
were buried simply under a tree, without a coffin, because of the extreme
poverty of their parents.
The garbage is brought to the dump site, which covers an area of a dozen
hectares, mainly in old dumpster trucks, or in one of the city government's few
waste compaction vehicles, which tip their loads on to the smoking margins of
the dump. Garbage pickers immediately congregate around the newly dumped waste
to recover materials that other people will sort and classify.
The remains are left to the turkey vultures, dogs and swarms of flies, until
the heat and smoke of the fire approach. When the wind is in the west, the
smoke spreads like a toxic cloud over a large part of Ciudad Guayana, a city of
850,000.
Lung specialists from Ciudad Guayana, such as Judith Lezama, are concerned
about the rise of illnesses like asthma and pneumonia, while Ligia Andrade, the
spokeswoman for a local community council in Cambalache, says "the plague
of flies contaminates everything, and children and adults get lung diseases, as
well as skin and stomach diseases."
What should be done with this dump, when the state Guayana Corporation, the
regional development body, had already declared back in 2001 that its
"useful life was exhausted"?
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