Word: mining
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...heard most of the Seasons' songs, and the mood wasn't achy-breaky; rather bold and uptempo. It's true that "Sherry," the first Seasons' hit, was a standard girl-name song (they had a lot of those) with a you-look-so-fine, gonna-make-you-mine lyric. But listen to their later, more mature (I want to say Blue Period) work and you'll hear little pop poems about hard-won love lessons, wrapped in fairly complex narratives...
...unpaved streets. Houses are often built of nothing sturdier than flattened gasoline drums, and the surrounding terrain looks moonscaped from the slash-and-burn deforestation. Chávez has begun to organize the miners into some 3,000 government-backed cooperatives, which would be given legal access to any gold-mine reserves the government might take away from idle concessionaires, foreign or Venezuelan. But many miners remain skeptical, especially since the cooperative funds are moving as slowly through Caracas as Crystallex's environmental permits. "We're always living with conflict and manipulation," says Humberto José Alonso, 37, an illegal miner...
...Chávez, where any semblance of business as usual is usually unintentional. The miners, who are illegal squatters, were protesting because they say Crystallex is trying to bar them from doing their free-lance work at Las Cristinas--despite the fact that Crystallex has yet to begin operating the mine and, as a result, has failed to create the 1,500 formal, well-paying mining jobs (more than $200 a month, with benefits) that had been promised. Crystallex points out that it can't open the mine--and thereby offer the legitimate jobs--because the company has yet to receive...
...meantime, the mine continues to be worked by thousands of illegal miners such as Henri González. Laboring under a sweltering sun, he blasts a water cannon against clay to loosen any tiny gold-bearing nuggets. He then extracts the gold with mercury, which sticks to gold like glue. "Sometimes I spend 15 days at a time in here without finding anything," he says. Like most of his fellow miners, González, 29, typically earns only enough to afford a shack made of zinc sheets and tree branches, set in a seedy mining camp where kids play in mercury-contaminated...
...Venezuelan mines create more heated debate than Las Cristinas. Rights to the mine were a Dickensian legal muddle for most of the 20th century until Chávez granted Crystallex the concession in 2002 for a bargain $15 million. But company executives cannot open Las Cristinas because, among other reasons, the Chávez government has not granted the necessary environmental permits, which, so far, have been mired in bureaucratic review. One problem may be the chronic concern, as government officials have said privately, that foreign companies like Crystallex rarely create as many jobs as promised. For now, Crystallex complains it must...