• Former Congressman for Apurimac participated as a panelist in Road to PERUMIN, organized by the Peruvian Institute of Mining Engineers.

In recent decades, southern Peru has not only become a center of attraction for mining investments, but also a scenario where social conflicts have increased, a problem that to date has not been resolved in the country.

For Richard Arce, former congressman of the Republic for the Apurimac region, southern Peru is an area that deserves more attention and study on the part of the State and other actors, especially in terms of social management and political analysis.

"Although there is no direct correlation with respect to the Human Development Index versus conflict, as they point out, there is a background issue that we would have to contextualize in the case of southern Peru," he said in the framework of Road to PERUMIN, where he participated along with other specialists.

Arce pointed out that this area of the country is mainly characterized by the protest vote, which has been demonstrated in the elections of the last decades, from Alejandro Toledo to Pedro Castillo, where their support was decisive.

He commented that in the electoral map, marginally, the south is not strong, it does not have the electoral flow to impose an election, but it has the capacity to generate a trend. They mark a position with a certain candidate and generate a trend, he said.

"We can corroborate this with the results in the second round with Ollanta Humala or Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, who, without the support of the southern left, would not have beaten Keiko Fujimori.

This led him to conclude that in this area of the country a platform of vindication, even ideological, of protest against the establishment or the current system has been generated in recent years. "So this variable is very important to consider," he said.

The Peruvian south currently produces around 50% of the copper exported by our country. Important mines such as Las Bambas, Antapaccay, Constancia Cerro Verde, among others, are located in this area.

Road to PERUMIN

Road to PERUMIN is an initiative of the Peruvian Institute of Mining Engineers (IIMP) and the Executive Committee of PERUMIN 36. It includes an agenda of virtual activities that seek to generate spaces for analysis, knowledge and debate on mining.