For nearly four decades, residents of Arica, Chile, have lived with the toxic legacy of imported industrial waste. After repeated legal defeats and government inaction, a group of mothers has stepped forward to demand justice. Mamitas del Plomo (Mothers of Lead) is a grassroots foundation born from these mothers’ grief and their determination to protect their children’s health. Read part I of this story here.
Time is always the enemy of campaigns for environmental justice that relate to contamination or toxicity. It takes time for the health impact of contamination to become apparent. It takes time to build a solid legal case demonstrating culpability and/or negligence on the part of the company and/or individuals involved, and the longer a case goes on, the harder it is to make these connections.
All these difficulties are magnified when the campaigners come from poor or marginalized communities, without financial or political resources, and the Arica polymetals scandal is no exception.
It took more than a decade before the health crisis in Los Industriales and Cerro Chuño became apparent, by which time the Chilean company Promel that had received the waste in 1984-85 had gone out of business. In the years that followed, successive legal actions against the Chilean government and Boliden Minerals AB were unsuccessful, either because they were time-barred, or because they were unable to demonstrate cause-and-effect correlation between the Boliden sludge pile and the affected communities.
These defeats have not ended the health crisis in Arica, because the consequences of heavy metal poisoning are not time-barred, and the campaign for justice has also become intergenerational. The Fundación Mamitas del Plomo (Mothers of Lead Foundation) was established in 2019 by a group of local mothers from the affected communities, who had not been part of previous campaigns. In May this year, the Foundation sued the Chilean government at the First Environmental Court in Antofagasta for ‘grave and significant environmental damage’ resulting from polymetal emissions at Sitio F, and accused the Chilean State and the relevant authorities of failing in their duty to ‘care for the life and health of persons and of the protection and conservation of the environmental heritage of the Republic.’
I spoke to Luz Ramírez, the director of Mamitas del Plomo, about the Foundation’s work. The 48-year-old mother-of-two came to live in Los Industriales at the age of 15. She paid little attention to the polymetals issue until 2019, when tests at Arica’s Environmental Health Centre revealed that her 10-year-old son had high levels of arsenic in his blood. Further tests confirmed this, and revealed that her 25-year-old daughter also had arsenic in her body.
‘I was really upset by it, it was really painful,’ she said. ‘I went to my friends and told them that this was happening to me, wondering what we could do. I told them to get their children tested.’ Under the 2012 Polymetals Law, only children born before 2012 are eligible for free blood tests, but some of Luz’s neighbours had children born after 2012, who presented symptoms related to arsenic poisoning – from damaged teeth, megacolon, and neurological problems to attention deficit disorders. ‘No one was examining them. No one saw them,’ said Luz. ‘They were invisible. Even though they also had health problems.’
Luz and her neighbours sold sandwiches to pay for five women to have the 45,000-peso (around $50 USD) private urine and blood tests to see whether their children were affected. Environmental norms regarding harmful exposure to arsenic poisoning are not universal. Internationally, the measurement of 50 milligrams or arsenic per litre of urine is generally considered to be the point when the presence of arsenic is considered potentially harmful. In Arica, the threshold is lower, at 35 micrograms per litre.
The tests carried out by Luz and her neighbours found that their children had arsenic levels of between 50 and 60 milligrams per litre. On the basis of these findings, the women took the decision to establish a foundation. With the assistance of adult and children volunteers, the five-woman committee sold sandwiches to raise the 200,000 pesos (over $200 USD) required to secure legal status for the foundation with the Arica municipality.
In 2019, Mamitas del Plomo began its campaign for the ‘defence of life, health, and the rights of our communities’ in Arica. From the beginning, the Foundation was determined to avoid external funding or membership fees, and it relies exclusively on volunteers and on professionals working without payment. These efforts have reinvigorated the struggle for environmental justice in Arica. When Dr Marcos Orellana, the UN Special Rapporteur on Toxic Substances and Human Rights, visited Arica in 2022, Mamitas del Plomo accompanied him on his visit to the affected areas.
The Foundation’s lobbying also resulted in a new series of urine and blood tests carried out by the Arica Health Service, which found the presence of heavy metals and inorganic urine in 127 children. In January this year, Luz and other members of Mamitas del Plomo travelled to Antofagasta, 720 kilometres away, to present their legal case against the Chilean government at the Environmental Court.
This was a bold move, after so many legal defeats, and it also required intensive grassroots fundraising efforts. Adults and children sold raffle tickets to pay transportation, food, and accommodation costs during the three-day proceedings. Other specialist witnesses and researchers worked on the case for free.
In May, officials from the court visited Sitio F and Quebrada Encantada, to assess the Foundation’s claims. The Foundation is calling on the Chilean government to recognize heavy metal contamination as an ongoing problem in Arica, and to extend the Polymetals Law so that children born after 2012 can be tested and assisted. It also wants the government to provide more health specialists with experience of the specific problems in the affected communities, and to establish an educational and training centre to help children and mothers struggling with learning difficulties related to arsenic and lead poisoning.
Luz is unsparing in her criticism of Chilean state authorities that she believes have repeatedly failed in their duty of care and protection during the last 40 years. She accuses them of not telling the truth about the health emergency in Arica. Luz is nevertheless optimistic that this time the court will make the right decision. When I asked her where such optimism came from, her eyes welled up. ‘We mothers never lose our faith. We have struggled for a long time.’ Did she consider herself an inhabitant of a zone of sacrifice? ‘Yes. I’m a mother who lives in a zone of sacrifice,’ she replied, ‘and if I had known that I was in such a contaminated place, I wouldn’t have had my children. Perhaps I would have prepared my body.’
The Antofagasta court has yet to announce its findings. But earlier this month, it issued a summary statement of its findings in Arica, which noted the ‘extraordinarily high levels of Arsenic and Lead’ in the original metallurgical furnace used by Promel to process the Boliden smelter sludge. The court called for further toxicity tests to be carried out at the furnace, but rejected Mamita del Plomo’s request for a ‘medida cautelar’ (precautionary measure) to cut off all access to the contaminated sites, as ‘disproportionate to the limited risk detected’.
It remains to be seen whether the court will finally bring about a resolution to this 40-year calamity. But whatever its verdict, Luz has no doubt that the Mothers of Lead remain committed to the fight for their children’s health and their children’s rights. ‘I want people to know that our children exist,’ she said, ‘that our children suffer. That many mothers suffer in silence, because many have lost hope. Many lost their children. Many died waiting for justice. I want the world to know that the Mamitas del Plomo Foundation exists, and I want women in other parts of the world to know that when women are united, they can do it, they can go forward, they can work together, they can defend their children.’
