Allegations of environmental breaches dog Anglo American’s mining operations. Now the company has been given the go-ahead for plans that communities say risk disaster
Photographs by Nicole Kramm
P
atricia Silva lays out an array of medicines and doctors’ letters on her kitchen table. She lives a few kilometres from a copper foundry operated by the British-headquartered mining company Anglo American in Catemu, a town in central Chile. Every morning and evening, she says, the air is filled with a faint blue smoke.
“It irritates your throat and makes you cough,” Silva says, remembering a day when her son Cristián, then three years old, began to have convulsions. “His face turned purple and he couldn’t breathe. He still has a red mark on his face from that episode.”
