Leer en español The locally known waters of the northern Andes of Cajamarca, Lagunas, flows through the rolling grasslands dotted with cold and shallow lakes. In Peru’s rural areas, they are the only source of life. For decades, families have depended on the Lagunas for drinking, watering crops, and raising livestock. But over the past twenty years, those lakes have turned into one of Peru’s sites for environmental conflicts. Women had been at the center of this crisis. Women defending water Image: Máxima Acuña. Source: New Internationalist Máxima Acuña, a peasant farmer who lives with her family in the highlands of northern Peru to rear animals and grow crops, has become a point for resistance when one of Latin America’s largest mining companies tried to expand its operations into her region. The Conga Project, led by Minera Yanacocha, was designed to extract gold and copper from deposits in Acuña’s network of high altitude lakes. To do that, the plan involved draining the lake’s water and replacing them with artificial reservoirs. But for the community, the move was unacceptable. “I never had the chance to go to school, I never had the chance to learn even a letter, but I know how to resist, to fight and that’s why I will never be defeated by the mining companies,” Acuña said during her environmental campaign, describing why she had laid down the thought of leaving her land despite mounting pressure to do that. In 2011, due to her resistance, her house, an extension she was building were demolished, and her sheep were robbed. Her daughter was beaten up by the Peruvian police, who violated her rights to private life and security. But despite that, Acuña refused to be pressured to run away from her ancestral community. Between water and gold The conflict in Cajamarca city reveals the growing tension throughout Peru, a country rich in minerals but depends heavily on natural ecosystems for water regulation, cultivation of crops, and fishing. The country is among the world’s top producers of gold and copper. Mining has been attributed to the growth of the economy, but it has also been the cause of increasing protests in rural areas where communities heavily rely on land and water for sustenance. As the lakes in the highlands serve as natural water storage systems, feeding rivers and wetlands, mining projects threaten them, as such, communities fear losing their only source of drinking water and agricultural use. In these communities, that fear is still driving mass movement of local populations to areas less prone to mining activities In 2012, thousands of Peruvians marched from Cajamarca to Lima, in what was popularly called the “National …
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