La Oroya, Peru may be a town that many in the U.S. have never heard of, but it’s quickly become well known as the site of an environmental disaster many would prefer be kept quiet.

The city is host to Doe Run, a polymetallic smelter that handles the processing of a number of different industrial metals, including copper, zinc and lead. The site has been described by a number of different environmental groups as one of the most polluted places in the world, a suspicion that Parker Waichman, LLP, Sr. Litigation Counsel Mike Hugo says is shown in widespread health problems borne by residents there.

“La Oroya is a city that’s the closest to what you would envision hell to look like. Mountains, which are famous for lush forestation and huge plants, all of a sudden stop. Peaks of 14,000 feet consist of no vegetation and are covered by lead,” he said. “Everything that’s alive in the entire town has been affected by lead. Children, dogs, farm animals, crops – everything that lives is poisoned.”

When Hugo visited the city to investigate the allegations of widespread health issues, he expected to hear a number of different people describe what it was like to be exposed to toxic levels of lead. Instead, the welcoming committee was an unwelcoming mob.

“We were greeted by 300 to 400 demonstrators who screamed in unison ‘La Oroya’s not for sale.’ Resistance to our entry was so strong, we needed an escort into the room where we anticipated a reception with parents. We could see that probably 20 percent of attendees were there to hear lawyers talk about the case, but the other 80 percent were chanting and doing all they could to break us up,” he said.

While the easy thing would have been to give up and leave, Hugo said he and others in his delegation decided it was more important to drive home the fact that the U.S.- based Renco Group Inc., which owns Doe Run, must hear their message.

“About 50 percent of Renco’s income comes from this facility, so we wanted to tell them that as a global company, they have a responsibility to treat everyone with the same level of respect,” Hugo said.

“We want Peruvians treated exactly the same as Americans by an American company. We want no further exploitation of the people.

A father with his daughter in La Oroya, Peru. Visible in the background is Doe Run's lead smelting plant.

The church in Huancayo, Peru was dark.  It had been a quiet day.  The Archbishop had been out in the countryside, in the village of La Oroya with the American lawyers.  There was much trouble in La Oroya.  The children had been poisoned by the lead from the Doe Run mining plant.  The company was lying to the people and telling them the plant was closed because of the lawsuit in the United States.  That wasn’t true, the nun knew, because it was the government of Peru that had closed the plant.  It made some sense to her.  You weren’t allowed to poison children to make money.  God wouldn’t allow that, even if you were like the American who owned the company, the one with the gigantic house that had more bathrooms than bedrooms.

As she walked through the darkened church, the nun sensed someone in a front pew.  As she approached, the bowed head of a woman came into focus.  Her clothes were not city clothes and, as the nun got closer, she could see that she the physical features of a person whose ancestors had lived in the Andes since before the church was built.   It wasn’t so much the head bowed in prayer that caught the nun’s eye, but the invisible weight on the woman’s shoulders.

“Is there something bothering you?” the nun asked.  The woman raised her head.  Her eyes were tired.  The woman explained that she had come from La Oroya.  She had ridden the bus for hours.  She came looking for the American lawyers, the ones who knew about the poisoning of the children.  She had children and she was concerned about them and their health.   The lead poison was very bad.  She knew that.  But until the lawyers came, there was nothing she could do about it.  So she had come to Huancayo to look for the American lawyers.  She knew it was dangerous and that many workers in the pay of Doe Run had threatened and yelled, even against the Archbishop.  So she had come to Huancayo, quietly and on her own.  To see the American lawyers.  She had looked for them the whole day, but couldn’t find them.  Now it was night and she would have to return to La Oroya with no answers for her children.  She was, she told the nun, praying for the Virgin Mother’s help.  One mother to another.

The nun took two steps into the pew in front of the mother and took her hands.  She lifted the mother up to her feet.  “The lawyers are here, upstairs in the church, meeting with the Archbishop.  Come.  We will go see them together.”  So the nun and the mother walked out of the church and up to the Archbishop’s chambers.  The nun sat the mother in a soft chair in an anteroom and went inside.  A few moments later, the nun came out with a young man in a suit jacket.  Looking up from her seat, the mother listened.  “Hello,” the young man said in perfect  Spanish, “I’m Eric Hager.  I’m a lawyer from America.  Sister says you came very far to see us.  Can I help you?”

The story is true and, for security reasons (there have been terrible attacks directed against the mothers of La Oroya who dare to meet with American lawyers,) I have not used the name of the mother or the nun.  But if you doubt me, ask Eric Hager.  He’s one of our superteam , a Columbia University law graduate who maintains one of our team’s offices in Quito, Ecuador.  He’s smart, very smart; and tough, very tough.  However, on that night in Huancayo, he was much more.  He was the light that the mother from La Oroya had needed to brighten the long trip home.

Billionaire industrialist Ira Rennert may have a legal problem big enough to match his East End house, say lawyers preparing a massive lawsuit against his mining interests. The likely plaintiffs in the case against the Brooklyn-born Rennert — whose 66,000-square-foot mansion in Sagaponack is the nation’s largest single residence — would be as many as 3,000 Peruvian kids suffering from blood poisoning allegedly caused by a lead-smelting operation he invested heavily in, the lawyers said.

Read more of the New York Post article: Poison Playtime

The La Oroya Metallurgical Complex, a smelting plant located in La Oroya, Peru and owned by St. Louis, Missouri-based Doe Run Resources Corporation, has been blamed for poisoning hundreds of children. The massive smelting plant, which processes copper, lead and zinc, is known to have emitted lead, cadmium, arsenic, antimony and sulfur dioxide. Because of Doe Run’s negligence, soil, air, water and even people have been poisoned by these toxic chemicals.

In October 2010, the Twenty-Second Judicial Circuit for the City of St. Louis, Missouri, in the United States ruled that a lawsuit filed by a group of citizens from La Oroya would be allowed to go forward in that venue. The people of La Oroya, especially children, who have been poisoned by the Doe Run smelting plant may finally have a chance at justice. Such lawsuits could enable these victims to obtain compensation from Doe Run, its subsidiary, Doe Run Peru, and Doe Run’s parent Renco Group Inc., a privately-held corporation owned by billionaire Ira Rennert.

Lawyers with our firm who practice exclusively in the area of toxic torts are offering free legal consultations to victims of the Doe Run smelting plant in La Oroya, Peru. If your health or the health of your child was ruined because of Doe Run’s operations in Peru, we urge you to contact us immediately to protect your legal rights.

In 2006, La Oroya was named one of the 10 most polluted areas in the world by the Blacksmith Institute, an environmental organization in New York. According to an article in the St. Louis Dispatch, the La Oroya Metallurgical Complex generated annual discharges of roughly 32 tons of lead, 36 tons of poisonous arsenic and 69,000 tons of the toxic metal cadmium into the nearby Mantaro River. Between 2002 and 2004, lead emissions through the main smokestack at La Oroya increased by 33 percent.

Alarmingly high concentrations of lead have been detected in the blood of La Oroya residents and many have bronchial troubles. A 1999 study showed high levels of air pollution, with 85 times more arsenic, 41 times more cadmium, and 13 times more lead than amounts generally considered safe. Even though national courts, international authorities, and countless organizations and institutions have called for action in La Oroya, the Peruvian government, Doe Run, Doe Run Peru, and the Renco Group have been slow to respond to the environmental catastrophe that has occurred in La Oroya.

Despite the pollution, many citizens of La Oroya whose economic lives depended on the La Oroya Metallurgical Complex have supported Doe Run even when the Peru government pressured the company to further reduce emissions. Unfortunately, those supporters have also been betrayed by Doe Run, which closed the facility in 2009 because of financial concerns. It is unclear when or if the plant will reopen.

The La Oroya Metallurgical Complex is not the only Doe Run facility known for pollution problems. In 1996 MagCorp was named the number one polluting industrial facility in the United States by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). As recently as April 2010, the EPA said that investigations on the company’s Utah site found “high levels of environmental contamination …. [including] arsenic, chromium, mercury, copper, and zinc; acidic waste water; chlorinated organics; polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs); dioxins/furans, hexachlorobenzene (HCB); and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).” Doe Run has frequently been cited by the EPA for exceeding legal emission limits, as well as polluting roads and soils around its facilities in Herculaneum, Missouri. In February 2002, health officials in Missouri found that 56 percent of children living near the Doe Run smelter had high blood-lead levels. An October 2009 EPA report says that soil on one-third of properties situated within a mile of the company’s lead smelter contain lead at levels exceeding the legal threshold for mandatory removal and replacement. An EPA administrator said that Doe Run’s emission reduction efforts there “clearly fall short of what was necessary.”

While the Renco Group’s facilities have poisoned people and the environment in both the United States and Peru, Rennert has become one of the richest men in the world. Rennert was awarded the Awful Truth Man of Year Award in 1999 by filmmaker Michael Moore, based on the 1996 EPA MagCorp report, as well as a second EPA report from the same year which lists Renco Group as the worst polluting parent company.

As I wait to hear that our team of lawyers in La Oroya are safely out of the Andes and sitting comfortably in Lima, I’m reviewing some of the hourly emails and Blackberry messages that have kept us all here on the edge of our seats. There are stories of danger, of having to travel with police protection, of seeing anger and confusion in the eyes of villagers who thought that they had to choose between their children and their livelihood. Of course, once they learned that wasn’t true, things calmed down a bit, but nerves are raw in the mining town of La Oroya and there is tension in the air.

Through all this, one man has stood tall. Monsignor Pedro Barreto Jimeno, the Archbishop of Huancayo. You might remember that it was he who brought the story of the lead poisoned children of La Oroya to the public’s attention. You might also recall that the first scientific study of the blood levels of the children was accomplished because Archbishop Barreto made it happen, bringing the first scientists up into the Andes to tell the world of the story of La Oroya. Even this time, he brought a group of Italian river experts up into the Andes to examine the river that turns through La Oroya.

On this trip, however, Archbishop Barreto has shown something else. Not just compassion, but the ability to back it up with strength. As reported in the pages of Peru’s newspapers and online news services, the Archbishop had to endure shouts and foul insults from people with ties to Doe Run; he had his path blocked by hooligans who try to prevent him from entering the Town Hall; he even had objects thrown at him by the protesters. In the face of all this, the Archbishop turned to the crowd and told them to listen to the lawyers, who had come to them; who had decided to speak directly to the villagers of La Oroya, because it wasn’t just a matter of money, but of justice and a respect for human rights.

Later that day, Monsignor Barreto explained. The Church, he said, has a responsibility to exercise its concern in the public arena, “to defend the land, water and air as gifts of God, the Creator for all.” Powerful words. But what impressed our team of lawyers most was that this morning, Archbishop Barreto headed back into La Oroya. Remember those Italian river scientists? They had been mistaken for our American lawyers and had been assaulted the day before. Their escape cutoff, they had spent the night in La Oroya, in hiding. Now, the Archbishop, like a sheriff in the Old West, was riding back into town to get them out.

And that’s just what he did. One man against the mob. The scientists had come at his invitation, to watch over the river that served his people, created by his God. Archbishop Barreto would not leave them there. That night, while sitting in his chambers in Huancayo, surrounded by the scientists and our seven lawyers, Archbishop Barreto joked. “You know,” he said to them, “I must be in Hell, because look at all the lawyers here!” They all laughed, like soldiers who had just come through a great battle together.

Our team of lawyers has left La Oroya, leaving behind paralegals and local attorneys on the ground who will talk to the mothers of the village who now quietly bring their children to them to be tested for the poison from Doe Run. Yet, they also leave behind a comrade, Archbishop Barreto. But that’s okay, because he’s not alone. He’s the priest who walks the walk, with God.