On January 31st, the local prosecutor’s office in Talagante issued protection measure No. 4261, which establishes periodic rounds of carabineros for 60 days at the house of Luis Eduardo Pino Irarrázabal. This, due to the repeated death threats received through phone calls and by Facebook against him. “Stop saying lies. Do not publish more things and take care of yourself because we will reach the final consequences if you do not shut up“.
Other calls said: “You have to be careful, stop talking and posting lies. Don’t bother anymore”. All generated by a presentation he made, in mid-January, before environmental groups from Valparaíso, Ventanas and Quinteros. There he spoke about his struggle and told about one of the achievements of the association that he chairs: the exhumation of four former Enami workers. He spoke of Héctor Villalón, whose analysis revealed a percentage of copper in the bones, and of Raúl Lagos, whose remains found mercury, arsenic, lead and copper.
“For me it is not easy at all. I do not dare to leave the house, partly because of the pandemic I was a little hidden, but now I am not calm, I keep an eye out for someone parking outside my house, if they ring the bell, if a suspect appears. This is not life. The worst thing is that I have lived on the defensive for so many years and I have had so many threats and problems that I have little hope that this cause will prosper. But on the other hand, I cannot remain silent, “he confesses .
And he attacks: “This is because I speak of the right to breathe clean air, to health, the right to live in a clean environment. I say that all politicians of all parties try to cover everything because it is an economic thing. Now they are all summering there in the contamination and nobody says anything. There is even a fisherman hired to clean the beaches with a crew when some companies dump coal. I cannot shut up”.
For Luis Pino (72) this is a deja vu. In his capacity as president of the Regional union association of former employees of Enami, smelter and refinery Las Ventanas V Region (Aserofen), (to which the group of widows joined), is also a leader of the Central Unitaria de Pensionados de Chile at the national level and V Region, charged with dozens of death threats, attacks and intimidations. “They have persecuted me in the marches, I have had to start and at one time they followed me in Quintero.”
His activism was born to denounce the deaths and illnesses suffered by the former workers of the Ventanas Foundry: the green men. These employees were named because their bodies have manifested the effects of contamination through painful sores of an intense green color, blisters that have spread all over their skin, and greenish tissue inside their organs. Luis Pino himself shows the ravages of years exposed to the furnaces of the silver and gold smelter. Also contaminated with lead, he lost the vision in his left eye, has arsenic-induced scars on his skin, and a series of sequelae such as respiratory crises, permanent dizziness, and memory disturbances.
Luis joy at the age of 38 when his body billed him for his work as a chemical analyst in the laboratory. He worked at Enami since he was 17 years old, when he left his studies as a lathe mechanic to enter a position as a cockerel (junior) at the central laboratory located in Quinta Normal. He went through different trades until working as a refiner. When the Santiago headquarters closed, he applied to Region V, joining Ventanas as a chemical analyst. And he moved to live in Quintero. “At that time, risk prevention was unknown. We did not use instruments or protective clothing, or an anti-gas mask. They gave us a face mask, a leather apron and a glove to hold the pliers with which the metal was taken. That was all. When many vapors gathered, the doors were opened to produce currents of air and clean everything. Nobody thought it was abnormal. The gases came out through the corridor where the workers passed through, ”he says.
The only measure of protection was a glass of milk that they drank to improve the sour and bitter taste that remained in the mouth due to the inhalation of gases.
Before the age of 30, he already felt weird. “I was choking, I could barely breathe. I began to suffer from insomnia, memory failures, decreased libido… Then they did tests, but the results went straight to the company, I never saw them. I drew conclusions that they were bad because they changed my position for two months. I never thought it was work that made me sick.”
These episodes repeated themselves for years. Over time, she began to receive treatment for mental disorders due to insomnia and memory problems. “Some shiftmates had already died of cancer. Then others were getting sick little by little. Only two of that group remained.
Luis assures that they all put up with it because the pay was good and the discomfort in their stomachs, a sour mouth and a certain smell stuck to their skin became normal. “We had normalized things. It didn’t surprise us that when we showered, a little greenish water came out of our pores or that when we went on vacation we missed gas because we were addicted to it”.
But one day before leaving for work he felt something strange. It was his mouth. There was something in her. He went to the bathroom, looked at himself and touched a loose tooth, then another and another. “I was left with two in my hand at once… there was no blood, nothing. The gums were dry, only a thread of tissue was hanging from my lip… At 38 I ended up without a tooth.”
He spent a year and a half on medical leave before retiring due to disability.
The doctor told him to continue living near the fireplace.
“They told me not to leave the area for any reason because it was going to happen to me like heavy smokers or addicts. You have to lower the rate of exposure to addiction slowly. However, they never recognized contamination as a reason for retirement.
He knocked on a thousand doors, sought advice. His mistake was signing a settlement for company needs. That left him out of Law 16,744, which recognizes occupational diseases.
It was then that he began to try to join forces. He knocked on a thousand doors and received many promises and also many slamming doors.
In these procedures He realized that his companions continued to get sick and almost all died of the same: cancer of the stomach, throat, lungs. Others had vascular accidents and skin problems. “We were literally destroying ourselves inside, with the viscera dyed coppery green.”
He recalls the case of his friend Agustín Cuevas (80) who now lives in Quilpué and has undergone surgery twice. “Each time the doctors opened him they found green residue on his organs. And when he had gallbladder surgery, they extracted green nodules”.
Like Erin Brokovic
Then it occurred to Luis to make a list of retirees. He called former colleagues, widows and relatives. He looked up death certificates and cross-referenced data. The list began to grow and the documents too. The association came to have 440 members, of whom some 300 have died waiting for a solution.
Pino has several boxes and filing cabinets full of certificates, protection resources, exams, his own medical records and those of his former colleagues. He even has a copy of a study carried out by the workers’ union of Enami Ventanas I (1993), which says that between 1973 and 1993, 75% of the employees who died in Ventanas were caused by cancer and cardiovascular diseases. In both causes, the mortality rates far exceeded the figure at the national level. Pine adds that “the medical literature says that the possibility of getting cancer and cardiovascular diseases is increasedular in contact with heavy metals”.
There was no risk prevention. The foremen, yes, always recognized that when the Germans installed the foundry, the first thing they said was that the workers of the electrolytic warehouse could not work for more than 10 years because they became contaminated. A warning ignored for decades!” he exclaims.
In 2010, they filed the first complaint for quasi-criminal multiple homicide in favor of former Enami Ventanas employees who died of chronic and terminal illnesses directly linked to prolonged exposure to heavy metals. During the following eight years, the Quintero prosecutor’s office in charge of Mauricio Dünner —today in La Calera— sought the dismissal of the case on two occasions. It was the court of Valparaíso that revoked these resolutions, ordering to continue with the investigations and including the exhumation of 29 bodies of former mining officials in 2013. Finally, the remains of four people (Raúl Lagos, Clemente Aguilar, Héctor Villalón and Gabriel Arroyo) were examined in which the Legal Medical Service (SML) determined the presence of arsenic, copper, lead and mercury. However, the body took five years to submit the conclusions. Only in a meeting held in August 2018 —generated by the pressure of the intoxication events in Quintero in 2018— between Aserofen, Senator Francisco Chahuán and the then regional prosecutor of Valparaíso, Pablo Gómez, were the complainants informed that the The conclusion of the Quintero prosecutor was that the causal link between the deaths of the former officials and the presence of heavy metals found in the bone remains could not be proven, so they would close the investigation without determining the identity of the perpetrators.
After this, Aserofen filed another claim that was unsuccessful. That case was closed.
Gabriel Arroyo’s widow, Carmen Villablanca commented: “They have denied us justice and from all sectors they have offered us help, without anything ever materializing. Hope of what we will have. Mrs. Andrea Molina came here when she was a deputy and then she went to talk to other widows and told them different things. In the end we ended up divided. I’m tired of hearing prosecutors insist that the contamination didn’t take my husband. I lived with him and I saw how his body changed, how he suffered. On this path there are many who have tried to silence us by taking advantage of people’s needs.
Her neighbor Marina Cisternas, former president of the Ventanas Communal Union, did her own survey of the deaths of her neighbors in the John Kennedy community. “Virtually all have died of cancer. Of the two blocks that surround me have suffered from this disease, the rest have been due to cardiovascular problems”.
Luis Pino has little hope in the new government. “It is possible that if they are sensible and since almost all of them are humanists and pro-environment, they can investigate what is happening to us. Most parliamentarians are aware of this situation, we have delivered documents to the Environmental Commission and all of them, in different periods and from different parties, have committed themselves and here we are waiting to do justice. Outside of the deceased, we have a large number of workers in their homes in bed. Tell me, what more proof do you need? ANDhe State is guilty of the genocide suffered by the Enami workers. I will only tell you one more dramatic case: Clemente Bastías burst at the ballot box. The greenish flows stained the floor of the chapel”.
