Nearly 40 years ago, 20,000 tonnes of Swedish mining waste were dumped on the edge of Arica, Chile. Laced with arsenic, lead, and mercury, the sludge poisoned neighbourhoods and scarred generations. Authorities moved the heap but never removed the danger — or compensated its victims. Today, the toxic legacy fuels poverty, migration, and gang violence in the ‘city of eternal spring’. Read part II of this story here.
Situated more than 2,000 kilometres from Santiago, on the edge of the Atacama desert, the Chilean city of Arica is famous for its earthquakes, its Indigenous mummies, and its reputation as the ‘city of eternal spring’, as a result of its year-round mild climate.
In recent years, this frontier city of 240,000 inhabitants has acquired a grimmer reputation as a city with the highest murder rate in Chile. This development is largely due to the occupation of Cerro Chuño, a migrant squatter settlement on the northeast of the city, by the violent Venezuelan drug gang, the Tren de Aragua. Since the pandemic, an offshoot of the Tren de Aragua known as Los Gallegos has waged a bloody territorial war in Cerro Chuño, in an attempt to dominate the cross-frontier traffic of drugs, weapons, and people.
Last year, Chilean carabineros discovered a ‘torture house’ on the outskirts of the settlement, where rival gang members and suspected informers had been tortured, dismembered, and in some cases buried alive. Locals in and around the neighbourhood live through nightly gunbattles. In addition to carrying out dozens of arrests, the authorities have attempted to evict the population from Cerro Chuño in an attempt to control the mayhem.
When I visited the neighbourhood, accompanied by the anthropologist and community activist Rodrigo Pino Vargas, Cerro Chuño seemed like a dystopian spectacle that any fiction writer would struggle to match. Dogs roamed through piles of rubbish left over from a recent mass demolition. There were no facilities, no playground, no trees, not a single thing to soften the bleak desolation of this desert squatter town. ‘The Chilean state,’ Pino remarked, ‘has lost control of this neighbourhood.’
Neighbourhoods like this can be found in many Latin American cities, but the transformation of Cerro Chuño into a gangster’s battleground is an indirect consequence of one of the most serious episodes of environmental injustice in recent Chilean and Latin American history – the Boliden toxic metal scandal.
This complex story begins in 1984-85, when the Swedish mining company Boliden Mineral AB delivered 20,000 tonnes of toxic mining sludge containing arsenic, lead, mercury, gold, and other minerals to Promel Ltda, a local Chilean company. The deal was negotiated during the Pinochet dictatorship, on the premise that Promel would process the material and transform the arsenic into trioxide for resale. But due diligence seems to have been lacking amongst all the protagonists. Promel paid no import taxes, and claimed in a customs declaration form that the material it was receiving was not toxic. The extent to which Boliden’s technicians made an accurate and honest assessment of Promel’s processing capacity remains the subject of controversy.
It was not until the late nineties that the communities around Sitio F began to notice alarmingly high rates of cancer, neurological and pulmonary diseases, joint problems, and birth defects amongst children and adults.
What is certain is that the waste arrived in three shipments, and Promel soon abandoned any attempt to process the material, dumping it in a strip of open ground called Sitio F, only 250 metres from a residential neighbourhood called Sica Sica. Over the next few years, the local government continued to build low-income housing projects around the site in a neighbourhood known as Los Industriales, and further north on Cerro Chuño. Astonishingly, incoming residents received no warning of the risk of toxicity from the sludge pile at Sitio F, which children began to use as a playground.
It was not until the late nineties that the communities around Sitio F began to notice alarmingly high rates of cancer, neurological and pulmonary diseases, joint problems, and birth defects amongst children and adults. In 1997 an MP from Arica cited the existence of a ‘stockpile of minerals of unknown origin’ in Sitio F as a possible explanation for these morbidities. That year, the municipality of Arica commissioned the first of many sample surveys, which found high levels of arsenic and lead in the affected communities, carried by dust, traffic, and the movement of animals and humans.
Faced with growing evidence of a health emergency, local neighbourhood associations in Los Industriales and Cerro Chuño began to lobby local and national government institutions to take action. Between 1999 and 2016, 16 separate legal actions were taken against Promel and the Chilean state, 14 of which found in favour of the Chilean government and Promel, on the grounds that the cases were time-barred.
In 2013, lawyers representing 796 Arica residents sued Boliden AB in a Swedish district court. The first trial took place in Sweden in 2018, and the plaintiffs lost, on the grounds that the plaintiffs had failed to establish a causal link between the levels of arsenic and Boliden’s toxic deposits. In 2019, the Court of Appeal in Northern Norrland dismissed the appeal, arguing that the claims of the victims were time-barred under Swedish law. Boliden AB has always insisted that it performed due diligence in its initial negotiations.
Though Boliden AB emphasizes environmentalism and sustainability as part of its corporate image, it has aggressively rejected any responsibility for the health emergency in Arica, and smeared the Arica victims’ legal team as exploitative chancers. Following the second trial, it even attempted to sue the Arica victims for legal costs of 3-3.5 million euros. The costs were not paid, when the company representing the victims went bankrupt.
In 1998, the sludge heap was moved from Sitio F to a ravine just beyond Cerro Chuño called Quebrada Encantada. But there has been no attempt to compensate the victims, or mitigate the damage caused for what UN Special rapporteurs described in 2021 as a ‘denial of environmental justice’ involving ‘long-standing human rights violations’. The unwillingness of Sweden – a social democracy that accepted so many Chilean refugees during the dictatorship – to take action is particularly egregious. But even though Chile is one of the few countries in the world to have a Ministry of Human Rights, successive Chilean governments have been equally unwilling to accept campaigners’ depictions of the Boliden scandal as a human rights as well as an environmental issue.
Rodrigo Pino has been involved in these campaigns from the outset. He sees the scandal as a textbook example of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s concept of ‘organized irresponsibility’, in which individual protagonists and institutions pass the buck for harmful outcomes, and refuse to acknowledge their own involvement. ‘Of course Promel was at fault,’ Pino said, as we stood outside the now walled-in compound of Sitio F, ‘but the Chilean state was clearly responsible. This area had been an industrial zone, and it was contaminated with different material, and the institution of the state was the municipality. They knew, or should have known, that these lands were not suitable for residential housing.’
The Chilean state has not been entirely blind to the health emergency in Arica. In 2012 the Chilean government of Sebastián Piñera enacted the Polymetals Law, which promised measures to reduce pollution, provide specialized health care to affected communities and relocate them to uncontaminated areas.
None of this has materialized. In practice, only some of the residents of Cerro Chuño were moved, and even though the neighbourhood was scheduled for demolition, only a few houses were actually knocked down. The remainder were squatted, mostly by migrants.
In effect, the local authority’s botched handling of the Boliden environmental crisis created the security problem that Cerro Chuño has become, while the health crisis in Arica remains unresolved. Last year, Senator José Durana warned that Arica had become a ‘zone of sacrifice’ and condemned the local environmental authority for failing to act against the toxic smoke emanating from continued illegal burning of rubbish in Cerro Chuño and Quebrada Encantada. In the port of Arica, 800 tons of decommissioned chemicals had accumulated last May.
In May this year, a deputation from the Antofagasta Environmental Tribunal visited Cerro Chuño and the affected sites, in response to a lawsuit initiated against the Chilean government by a group of local mothers called the Fundación Mamitas del Plomo (Mothers of Lead Foundation) against the State of Chile.
It remains to be seen whether this initiative will be any more successful than its predecessors, in this decades-long scandal. Too many powerful institutions have actively or passively accepted the unequal global dynamics between north and south that turn poor communities into ‘sacrifice zones’, where rich countries export the waste that their governments would not tolerate within their own borders.
And nearly 40 years after its arrival in Arica, the Boliden sludge heap remains in Quebrada Encantada, surrounded by a low wall, and covered with a seal to prevent the fierce Atacama winds from spreading toxic dust. The ‘Swedish Boliden Cemetery’, as locals call it, continues to pose the risk of groundwater penetration, in an area that has become another informal migrant settlement. And even though the authorities have begun to evict some of these squatters, no one seems to be in a hurry to remove the waste pile that has ruined so many lives.
Learn more about the work of a group of local mothers called the Fundación Mamitas del Plomo (Mothers of Lead Foundation) in part II, here.
Main image: Cerro Chuño. Photo: Sébastien Verhasselt/El Mostrador/Hogar de Cristo
