Francisco Apaza. His concerns about his community and his dreams for their future

The biggest problem our community faces is the arrival of mining. I understand that it will bring destruction of not only the ecosystem but also of our people with all the pollution. I think the people in our community who are agreeing with the mining project are not thinking about our future generation of children. Mainly our younger people are having dreams with the mining. They think mining will take them out of a bad economical system, but through our experience we understand that they are wrong.

I explained in one of our large community assemblies to all present, including the younger generation, that they miners are like the fox, only one of them comes and tries to intrigue us and take us into their ideas but nobody understands that behind this fox there is all this machinery that is going to invade our communities. The younger ones are easy to convince with beautiful words as the miners did in Las Bambas and other communities and all these are samples of the damage that mining creates.

On the other hand, we would love a lot of help to increase our herds of Alpacas with new breeds with soft hair to improve our weaving arts, that would be very nice. We would like help to create more grass fields and more kinds of irrigation with new technology. We have our Qochas (water reservoirs) and we still have water in some ares, but we are very sad our snow peaks are receding. Still, I think there are other ways we can get water from the rain. So I trust that if we have that help we could still survive here. Agriculture would be another option because we have vast territories in the high lands, the middle lands, and in the jungle. So we can take advantage of that.

The only thing we need is technical support that our country could give us or the international community could help as well. Tourism would be another option because we could display and share all our traditional customs and traditional clothing, our oral wisdom and our handcrafts, we could help empower and inspire the younger generations to keep working with our priestly lineage. WE can preserve our environment which is one of the unique places in the world where we still live in the same way our ancestors did.

That would be very nice. So what I really want is that our community blooms in the organic way with nobody being damaged, preserving the ecosystem and that plants animals and people live there happily.

Francisco Apaza Flores—is a highly respected Paqo (Andean Priest) and an important community leader from Qolpa Kucho who has several times been elected President of his village.

Share