For more than a decade, Elvis Atachahua Ursua lived in a state of resistance. Amid rubble and explosions, he survived without water or electricity at an altitude of more than 4,700 metres in the ruins of Morococha, an historic mining town in Peru’s central highlands.
On 19 September, that resistance was broken. More than 250 police officers stormed the last remaining houses. One by one, they were demolished in a day. “They cut off our signal and took everything,” Atachahua says, through tears.
That morning, the final five families of Morococha were expelled. They had remained in place since 2012, the year the Aluminum Corporation of China (Chinalco) finished building Nueva Morococha, a settlement built from scratch and designed to relocate some 5,000 people. The evictions of Morococha have paved the way for mining at Toromocho, one of the largest copper projects in Peru. Every day, Chinalco’s mine produces 170,000 tonnes of a mineral that is critical to global energy transitions.
And so, this Andean village has disappeared. Morococha was forged by migrants who had originally settled in this corner of the department of Junín to extract minerals – to be eventually displaced by one of the largest ever Chinese state-backed investments in Peru.
Morococha’s last days
Before these final evictions, life in Morococha took place among a labyrinth of white fences and ruined streets. From her small house, which shook with every detonation from the open-pit mine, Yolit Alejo Bonifacio resisted. The 49-year-old spoke to Dialogue Earth a few days before the clear-out: “Before, at least they warned us. It’s as if they are pushing us out little by little.”
Her mother and siblings were among the first to move to Nueva Morococha, as economic life in the old town dwindled and the opportunities on offer centred around the new settlement. “If you didn’t accept, then there was no work. Fear forced them to leave,” says Alejo. She decided to stay. Of the 65 families who rejected resettlement, only five resisted until the end.
There is no voluntary resettlement. It is forced and inhumane displacementElvis Atachahua Ursua, one of the last residents of Morococha, who was evicted in September
They did so for 13 years, in extreme conditions. The families used solar panels to power lighting and received water in fits and starts. Dialogue Earth visited in early September, when vehicle access to Morococha by outsiders was being blocked and monitored by Chinalco. Our passage into the village was only possible by hitching a ride on Alejo’s mototaxi.
The pressure was constant. In 2020, two women were arrested for protesting the roadblocks. Chinalco then reported the families to the authorities for “loitering” in their own village, which the judiciary rejected, recognising their constitutional rights to dignity and integrity.
Before the clear-out operation, Atachahua repeated to Dialogue Earth what he has been denouncing for a decade: “There is no voluntary resettlement. It is forced and inhumane displacement.”
In August, the anticipated eviction order came. The day before, the police had denied the families entry to Morococha. They begged to be allowed into their homes. “We held a vigil, we cooked together – we knew they were going to take us away,” Alejo says. “We didn’t sleep that night.”
At dawn, the police contingent entered the village “without respect for anything”, she reports. “They didn’t give us five minutes to take our things. They pushed us, they pulled us. We will never get over it. We felt it in our flesh.” The last five families left with nothing but the clothes on their backs, seeking refuge in different villages across Junín department.
Dialogue Earth spoke to Edwin Alejandro, the socio-environmental coordinator for the Muqui Network. This Peruvian network of civil society organisations defends people with claims to having had their rights compromised by mining. He accompanied Morococha’s families in the defence of their rights and claims this operation was irregular: “They were evicted without trial or process, and to this day they do not know where their belongings are.” Even the houses were demolished, despite a court order to preserve them. “The only thing the families have asked is that we not abandon them,” Alejandro says.
The hidden cost of copper
Copper demand is spiking due to the global energy transition, with the metal vital to a wide range of uses across power systems and power networks. For example, the cables used for electric vehicle charging networks require a large amount of the material, while offshore wind turbines necessitate long underwater transmission cables that also rely on copper.
Globally, only Chile and the Democratic Republic of the Congo produce more copper than Peru. In 2024, more than 72% of Peru’s copper output was exported to China, according to official figures. Toromocho alone holds 5.7 million tonnes of the mineral. That wealth made Morococha attractive to Chinese policymakers and financiers’ strategies to secure minerals for the energy transition, according to AidData. In 2024, almost a fifth of Peru’s total copper output was produced by two Chinese-owned mining companies: MMG Las Bambas (11.7%) and Chinalco (7.5%).
Both companies have had to engage in resettlement schemes to carry out their projects. From 2014, MMG Las Bambas began to relocate 1,800 people from Fuerabamba, in Peru’s south-central department of Apurímac, to a new settlement. MMG had inherited a resettlement and compensation plan negotiated with villagers by Las Bambas’ former owner, Switzerland-based Glencore-Xstrata, from which it acquired the mine in 2014.
With ongoing social conflicts at their sites, among other complaints, the Las Bambas and Toromocho mines were both highlighted among Chinese investments in Latin America that have reportedly violated human rights, according to a 2022 report by the Collective on Chinese Financing and Investment, Human Rights and the Environment (CICDHA). The Chinese government later responded to a United Nations review process under which CICDHA submitted these concerns, saying that it would study the observations, and stated a commitment to international human rights instruments.
The CICDHA says what has happened in Morococha should be described as a “forced displacement”. Alejandro says Chinalco negotiated with each family, never with the whole village, describing it as “a divide and rule strategy that worked”.
In addition, in 2017 the Peruvian government declared the old town an “imminent, non-mitigable hazard” due to seismic activity and mining operations. Paradoxically, the new settlement may not be entirely safe either: its environmental impact study, published in 2009, detected lead concentrations above the permitted levels in almost all soil samples in the project’s area of influence, and excessive levels of arsenic at several sampling points.
For Alejandro, the government declaring Morococha a hazard was a legal mechanism to favour Chinalco: “The dispossession was legalised and the company took advantage of a corrupt system… The message is clear: if it happened in Morococha, it can happen in any project. It is a dangerous precedent.”
A city of broken promises
Dialogue Earth requested multiple interviews with Chinalco about the resettlement of Morococha. At the time of publication, it had not responded. However, in a 2023 ProInversión video, the mining company’s legal affairs manager Raúl La Madrid described the resettlement as a part of its “social responsibility commitment”: “The mining company uses the services of community businesses. Everyone wins.”
Dialogue Earth travelled to the new settlement, which lies 15 minutes downhill from its predecessor. Nueva Morococha is a village of straight avenues, identical red-roofed houses and pristine parks. The promise of a modern city felt, in reality, more like a lifeless model village.
“We used to be a big family. In the new city, there is no movement or work,” laments Noé Gamarra, president of the Association of Owners Displaced by the Toromocho Project. For years, he persisted in Morococha but ended up selling his house to Chinalco.
“We didn’t negotiate; the company set its price.” Today, at 66, he lives about 100 kilometres away, and is one of the most vocal of those displaced. “Chinalco promised that the operations camp would be in the new city to generate commerce. It didn’t deliver: there isn’t even 40% of the movement that there was in the old town.”
This void has been noted by human geography researcher Lin Zhu of Boston University. “What surprised me most was the lack of life; it seemed like a city designed to serve the mine, not its inhabitants,” she tells Dialogue Earth. In her study for The People’s Map of Global China, most recently updated in 2021, Lin pointed out that it was built using a “technocratic rationale which pursued efficient governance, ignoring the local ways of living and socialising”.
Of all Chinalco’s promises, employment was the most repeated. But in 2017, more than half of Nueva Morococha’s population was unemployed despite its proximity to the mine, according to a survey by the National University of the Center of Peru. “They only offer precarious jobs,” Gamarra observes. “Not even my children, who are professionals, have been given work.”
According to Zhu, the shift from underground to open-pit mining has drastically reduced employment. “That meant temporary jobs, without insurance or stability,” she explains.
To address these issues, a roundtable was created in 2012 between the state, Chinalco and the community. More than a decade later, it remains stalled, and has been extended until 2026. For many, it has been more of “a corporate tactic and a bureaucratic mechanism” than a real space for solutions, Zhu details in her research. Such state action, she points out, does not attract more Chinese investment.
“As the world moves towards an energy transition, countries with strategic minerals must be able to articulate concrete demands to foreign investors,” Zhu says. “No company will act on its own initiative for the benefit of the community.”
It is estimated that demand for these strategic minerals will double by 2040 due to the energy transition. For Carlos Monge, a researcher at the Analysis Group for Development (Grade) and an expert on the subject, “communities have neither the state as an ally nor as an arbitrator” in Peru.
“What they face is an alliance between the state and companies. This has always been the case and continues to be so in this new cycle of high demand for minerals.
“The lesson that Morococha must leave behind is full respect for rights and prior consultation, especially if there is displacement. Only then can we talk about a just transition, not at the cost of wiping out entire villages,” he concludes.
Morococha was founded in the early 20th century, a few minutes from the Ticlio mountain pass, at the highest point of what eventually became the Central Highway. Now, “not even Toromocho Hill exists,” says Gamarra. “The ‘lying bull’ that gave the mine its name has been reduced to a pit. I remember playing there as a child, the carnivals … everything has disappeared.”
While the copper from Toromocho fuels the energy transition, more than simply a village has been removed from the Andes. But Alejo, who has now taken refuge some 170 kilometres away, asserts that “history will never be erased from our minds. I have lost Morococha, but not my voice”.
Dialogue Earth contacted several families in Nueva Morococha for comment, but they declined to contribute to this article.
