marcona

There was no future,
but it wasn't like anyone expected.
No future 2012 / Mark Fisher

“What are you doing?”, the security guard asks me while two other men wait in the car with the engine on. “Photographing”, I reply. “Get into the pick-up”, says the guard. In one of the mining company’s offices, two Chinese security agents look over my papers. A third one translates. “Why are you photographing?”, he asks.

It is the summer of 2005. It is the future of Marcona.

Marcona Mining Company was founded in 1952 by American businessman and World War II veteran Charles Wesley Robinson. A mining enclave located in the desertic Southern Pacific coast of Peru, in the province of Nazca, San Juan de Marcona would become a company town that would house the workers and employees dedicated to the exploitation of its vast iron ore reserves. A whole town designed around the productive criteria of an American company, which in the following two decades, and thanks to the work of the mining union, would obtain working conditions rarely imaginable in Peru’s long mining history. In 1975, the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Force, still commanded by General Juan Velasco Alvarado, nationalized the Marcona Mining Co., and created the Minera Estatal del Hierro del Perú, Hierro Perú. Considered as a miners’ union triumph, the nationalization marked the beginning of the company’s slow decay culminating in its bankruptcy in 1989, towards the end of President Alan García’s first government. That same year, on the 13th of June, the government’s paramilitary arm, Comando Rodrigo Franco, assassinated Saúl Cantoral Huamaní, Secretary General of the National Mining and Metalurgic Workers’ Federation of Peru. Cantoral who had begun his union work in Marcona and was once the local union’s secretary general, was one of the country’s most important syndicate leaders, having organized two successful mining strikes during the previous year. Like many of the country’s social leaders, Cantoral would die in the middle of the war between the armed forces and the Maoist group Sendero Luminoso, which left thousands of dead and disappeared citizens in little over a decade. In 1992, the same year in which Sendero Luminoso’s leader Abimael Guzman was captured, then president Alberto Fujimori, who is now in jail, sold Hierro Perú to the Chinese state company Shougang Corporation in a much-questioned contract that included the mine, the port and the city of Marcona. It is thus how Shougang Hierro Perú came into being.

In the future, the union has no power, the drive-in cinema in front of the ocean is a ruin and Cantoral – “Ringo” to his friends – clad in a denim jacket and fist raised high, defies the wind from a plinth in the plaza of a postwar company town in the Nazca desert. Yet another specter of the XXth century stares perplexed at the XXIst.