黄金的代价
就跟他的许多印加祖先一样，璜‧阿帕萨对黄金着迷。在进入秘鲁安地斯山脉5100公尺高的结冰坑道时，这位44岁的矿工把一团古柯叶塞进了嘴里，以便为不可避免的饥饿与疲惫做好准备。阿帕萨每个月深入这个矿坑干活30天，没有薪水，并在全世界最高城镇林科纳达上方的冰川底下往下挖掘。他在30天里要面对已使许多矿工同事丧命的危险，包括爆炸、毒气、坑道崩塌，以开采出全世界所要的黄金。阿帕萨不领薪水地做完这一切，这样他才有今天这个第31天可做。这一天，他和他的矿工同事会有一个班次，四小时或者可能更长一点；看他们疲累的肩膀扛得动多少矿石，他们就可以拖出多少，并把它纳为己有。这套古老的乐透制度在高耸的安地斯山脉依旧盛行，也就是所谓的cachorreo。这么做就等于付了薪水：一袋矿石里可能包含一小笔的黄金财，或者往往根本就少得可怜。
阿帕萨还在等好运来敲门。「也许今天就会中大奖。」他说道，并张嘴大笑，还露出了一颗金牙。为了提高中奖率，这位矿工已经「缴了钱给大地」：一瓶当地的皮斯科酒，就摆在矿坑口附近；几片古柯叶，轻轻塞在石头下；另外，在几个月前，巫师曾在神圣的山顶上献祭一只公鸡。此时阿帕萨一边走入坑道，一边用母语克丘亚语对掌管这座山和里面所有黄金的女神默念着祷文。
「祂是我们的睡美人。」阿帕萨说，并对着矿坑上方高耸雪原一个弯曲处点头示意。「要是没有祂的保佑，我们绝对找不到任何金子。我们可能无法活着离开这里。」
它绝非黄金国埃尔多拉多。但500多年来，埋在此处高于海平面五公里的冰川底下、闪闪发光的矿层，一直吸引人们来到秘鲁的这个地方。第一批是印加人，他们把这种永恒光亮的金属视为「太阳的汗珠」；接着是西班牙人，对金子和银子的渴望激发了他们去征服新世界。但唯有此时，才有3万人随着金价飙涨（过去八年来涨了235%）蜂拥至林科纳达，使荒凉的探勘营地变成了世界之颠上一个肮脏的鄙陋小镇。在碰运气和走投无路的驱使下，这个同时深陷在本身的有毒废弃物和法治不彰的三不管地带，如今充斥着作梦的人和别有所图的人。他们渴望致富，即使这代表他们的环境和他们自己会在过程中毁灭也一样。
这个场景听起来可能跟中世纪没两样，但林科纳达可是一个标准当代现象的边区，这个现象就是21世纪的淘金热。
The Real Price of Gold
By Brook Larmer
Photograph by Randy Olson
Like many of his Inca ancestors, Juan Apaza is possessed by gold. Descending into an icy tunnel 17,000 feet up in the Peruvian Andes, the 44-year-old miner stuffs a wad of coca leaves into his mouth to brace himself for the inevitable hunger and fatigue. For 30 days each month Apaza toils, without pay, deep inside this mine dug down under a glacier above the world's highest town, La Rinconada. For 30 days he faces the dangers that have killed many of his fellow miners—explosives, toxic gases, tunnel collapses—to extract the gold that the world demands. Apaza does all this, without pay, so that he can make it to today, the 31st day, when he and his fellow miners are given a single shift, four hours or maybe a little more, to haul out and keep as much rock as their weary shoulders can bear. Under the ancient lottery system that still prevails in the high Andes, known as the cachorreo, this is what passes for a paycheck: a sack of rocks that may contain a small fortune in gold or, far more often, very little at all.
Apaza is still waiting for a stroke of luck. "Maybe today will be the big one," he says, flashing a smile that reveals a single gold tooth. To improve his odds, the miner has already made his "payment to the Earth": a bottle of pisco, the local liquor, placed near the mouth of the mine; a few coca leaves slipped under a rock; and, several months back, a rooster sacrificed by a shaman on the sacred mountaintop. Now, heading into the tunnel, he mumbles a prayer in his native Quechua language to the deity who rules the mountain and all the gold within.
"She is our Sleeping Beauty," says Apaza, nodding toward a sinuous curve in the snowfield high above the mine. "Without her blessing we would never find any gold. We might not make it out of here alive."
It isn't El Dorado, exactly. But for more than 500 years the glittering seams trapped beneath the glacial ice here, three miles above sea level, have drawn people to this place in Peru. Among the first were the Inca, who saw the perpetually lustrous metal as the "sweat of the sun"; then the Spanish, whose lust for gold and silver spurred the conquest of the New World. But it is only now, as the price of gold soars—it has risen 235 percent in the past eight years—that 30,000 people have flocked to La Rinconada, turning a lonely prospectors' camp into a squalid shantytown on top of the world. Fueled by luck and desperation, sinking in its own toxic waste and lawlessness, this no-man's-land now teems with dreamers and schemers anxious to strike it rich, even if it means destroying their environment—and themselves—in the process.
The scene may sound almost medieval, but La Rinconada is one of the frontiers of a thoroughly modern phenomenon: a 21st-century gold rush.
No single element has tantalized and tormented the human imagination more than the shimmering metal known by the chemical symbol Au. For thousands of years the desire to possess gold has driven people to extremes, fueling wars and conquests, girding empires and currencies, leveling mountains and forests. Gold is not vital to human existence; it has, in fact, relatively few practical uses. Yet its chief virtues—its unusual density and malleability along with its imperishable shine—have made it one of the world's most coveted commodities, a transcendent symbol of beauty, wealth, and immortality. From pharaohs (who insisted on being buried in what they called the "flesh of the gods") to the forty-niners (whose mad rush for the mother lode built the American West) to the financiers (who, following Sir Isaac Newton's advice, made it the bedrock of the global economy): Nearly every society through the ages has invested gold with an almost mythological power.
Humankind's feverish attachment to gold shouldn't have survived the modern world. Few cultures still believe that gold can give eternal life, and every country in the world—the United States was last, in 1971—has done away with the gold standard, which John Maynard Keynes famously derided as "a barbarous relic." But gold's luster not only endures; fueled by global uncertainty, it grows stronger. The price of gold, which stood at $271 an ounce on September 10, 2001, hit $1,023 in March 2008, and it may surpass that threshold again. Aside from extravagance, gold is also reprising its role as a safe haven in perilous times. Gold's recent surge, sparked in part by the terrorist attack on 9/11, has been amplified by the slide of the U.S. dollar and jitters over a looming global recession. In 2007 demand outstripped mine production by 59 percent. "Gold has always had this kind of magic," says Peter L. Bernstein, author of The Power of Gold. "But it's never been clear if we have gold—or gold has us."
While investors flock to new gold-backed funds, jewelry still accounts for two-thirds of the demand, generating a record $53.5 billion in worldwide sales in 2007. In the U.S. an activist-driven "No Dirty Gold" campaign has persuaded many top jewelry retailers to stop selling gold from mines that cause severe social or environmental damage, but such concerns don't ruffle the biggest consumer nations, namely India, where a gold obsession is woven into the culture, and China, which leaped past the U.S. in 2007 to become the world's second largest buyer of gold jewelry.
For all of its allure, gold's human and environmental toll has never been so steep. Part of the challenge, as well as the fascination, is that there is so little of it. In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years. Now the world's richest deposits are fast being depleted, and new discoveries are rare. Gone are the hundred-mile-long gold reefs in South Africa or cherry-size nuggets in California. Most of the gold left to mine exists as traces buried in remote and fragile corners of the globe. It's an invitation to destruction. But there is no shortage of miners, big and small, who are willing to accept.
At one end of the spectrum are the armies of poor migrant workers converging on small-scale mines like La Rinconada. According to the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), there are between 10 million and 15 million so-called artisanal miners around the world, from Mongolia to Brazil. Employing crude methods that have hardly changed in centuries, they produce about 25 percent of the world's gold and support a total of 100 million people. It's a vital activity for these people—and deadly too.
In the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the past decade, local armed groups fighting for control of gold mines and trading routes have routinely terrorized and tortured miners and used profits from gold to buy weapons and fund their activities. In the Indonesian province of East Kalimantan, the military, along with security forces of an Anglo-Australian gold company, forcibly evicted small-scale miners and burned their villages to make way for a large-scale mine. Thousands of protestors against expansion of a mine in Cajamarca, Peru, faced tear gas and police violence.
The deadly effects of mercury are equally hazardous to small-scale miners. Most use mercury to separate gold from rock, spreading poison in both gas and liquid forms. UNIDO estimates that one-third of all mercury released by humans into the environment comes from artisanal gold mining. This turns places like La Rinconada into a sort of Shangri-la in reverse: The pursuit of a metal linked to immortality only serves to hasten the miners' own mortality. |
发表于 2009-1-6 16:23
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发表于 2009-4-29 16:40
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