Since the turn of the twenty‐first century, the rapid growth of Peru's extractive industries has unleashed diverse forms of political resistance to an economic system dependent on ecological destruction and human harm. In the central highlands of Peru, a Catholic scientific project based out of the Archdiocese of Huancayo undertook six years of research on heavy‐metal contamination in the Mantaro Valley. This included lead‐exposure studies in the notoriously polluted city of La Oroya, home to the country's largest polymetallic smelter. How did the Catholic Church become an apt institution for the production of science in this region? Drawing on fieldwork with the Revive the Mantaro Project, this article conceptualizes the integration of religious and scientific practitioners and practices and the political landscape that necessitated, shaped, and limited them. Technocratic governance and anti‐leftist sentiments made science a suitable political idiom for the Catholic Church to enact its ethos of abundance and demand the legitimacy of life beyond bare life. A state of endemic corruption and epistemic mistrust also obliged Catholic accompaniment to scientific practices to generate trust for the researchers and to provide ethical credibility as their knowledge entered the fray of national mining politics. Ultimately contending with entrenched systems of power, the Revive the Mantaro Project's significance extended beyond political efficacy; its practices enacted a world of democracy, rights, and legal protections not yet of this world.
How much is a body with minerals worth? Through the lens of lead‐exposure politics, this article analyzes how people living near the mineral‐storage yards of Peru's seaport of El Callao enact a response to this question. El Callao's port serves as a transport and storage hub for metal particulates awaiting foreign markets. The infrastructure required for this undertaking—trucks, roads, and repositories—also generate conditions of metal leakage and human exposure. Over the decades, low‐income port residents have effectively acted as human infrastructures of toxic storage, a service for which they are selectively paid through ad hoc indemnification practices by multinational metal‐trading corporations. While arguing that such infrastructural incorporations materialize the racialized ethics of Peru's extractive economy, the article also shows how denouncing lead exposure has generated new political means for port residents to access previously unavailable infrastructure (water, electricity, building materials) for their formalizing or informal settlements as well as other basic necessities of life. Decades after the “discovery” of lead at the port, these isolated gift exchanges and infrastructural improvements provide corporations a palliative approach to lead remediation and indemnification, producing a state of ongoing ethical deferral of complete lead eradication, which keeps minerals moving swiftly through the port and inside the bodies of residents. [infrastructure, ports, toxicity, ethics, corporate social responsibility, racial extractive capitalism, Peru]
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