Letter from Peru Hugh O'ShaughnessyThe trusty Russian helicopter of the Peruvian air force, narrowly avoiding a vertical wall of rock covered in tenacious tropical vegetation, clatters down on to what the foreigners call Henry's Hill, 13,000 feet high in the Andes, a stone's throw from Peru's border with Ecuador.
We clamber out and begin making our way a thousand feet down a tricky series of steps to the mining camp below, while the helicopter goes off lifting and delivering heavy loads round the steep mountain valley.
The company that operates the camp, Monterrico Metals, is the creation of two Australian entrepreneurs: its shares are quoted on the Alternative Investment Market or AIM in London and it has the backing of such financial institutions as Aviva and Lehman Brothers.
On the fiendishly difficult site, know as Majaz or Río Blanco, Monterrico wants to produce a million tons of copper and molybdenum ore a year for 32 years, shooting 100,000 tons of concentrated ore a year down a pipeline to the Pacific, where ships will bear it off to be smelted into metal, perhaps in China.
At 13,000 feet, above the cloud forest, the breathtakingly ambitious nature of the scheme is particularly striking, the quintessence of entrepreneurial spirit, one feels. And Monterrico is in a great hurry, realising that on the AIM, as elsewhere, time is money.
It has already disappointed its shareholders by missing some deadlines and the share price has suffered. That must not happen again.
The directors are not giving up, eager to join in the mining boom which has arrived as metal prices have shot up - the price of copper, for instance, has gone from under $1,400 a metric tonne five years ago to around $8,000 today, a little short of the record price of $8,800 set in May.
Investment has flooded into this country and large and small prospectors from around the world have sought to stake their claims to future mines. Peru is already the world's first or second biggest producer of silver and the third of zinc. There is lead, copper and gold, and there are abundant untapped deposits.
The Peruvian treasury has prospered mightily thereby and Peruvians are now a little less sensitive about their neighbours to the south, the Chileans, who not only conquered them in war and occupied Peru in the 1880s, but have consistently outshone them in many fields of endeavour since.
Yet there is a change in Peruvian public opinion and the mining industry is not having its own way as it once did. Opposition is rising to the disadvantages that mining brings and new projects are under increasing scrutiny from many parts of society.
The new business-friendly, pro-Washington government of Alan García, which took office in July, still backs the mining companies. His supporters maintain a stream of criticism, often vitriolic and personal, of local and foreign non-governmental organisations, notably Oxfam, and of the Catholic church leaders who object to new mining schemes.
But the change in popular attitudes is not lost on the companies themselves. "Five years ago when a scheme was announced everyone shouted 'hurray'. Today there are no hurrays," a mining engineer commented to me.
The World Bank itself, once an uncritical cheerleader for business strategies and an uncomplaining funder of them, is having a rethink. In a frank document entitled Wealth and Sustainability: Social and Environmental Dimensions of Mining in Peru, published last year the bank wrote: "Expectations created by [ mining] developments are damaged by the harm done to the environment, on one hand, and the limits on the use and distribution of mining income, on the other". Such a truism took a long time to surface at the World Bank.
From the earliest colonial times when the Spaniards arrived, overthrew the Inca emperor, seized his gold and killed him, mining has meant a life of slavery or semi-slavery for millions of Peruvians at the bottom of the pile.
Profits have for centuries gone to Spanish royalty, local landowners or foreign companies, thus consolidating one of the world's most scandalous concentrations of wealth in the hands of the rich.
For its part, the mining and smelting of Peruvian ores into metal have produced some world-class disasters. According to Christian Aid, children at La Oroya, for instance, home to a smelter set up in 1922 and now the property of a US company, Doe Run, are suffering from advanced lead poisoning. Other areas have suffering from massive spillages of mercury. Contaminated water from mines kills fish and livestock and ruins agriculture.
Opposition to mining has been stiffened by the development of legislation from the mid-1960s giving new rights to indigenous communities: they have to agree collectively about permitting the presence and plans of strangers. Monterrico Metals, according to some, lacks this vital permission.
Poorer Peruvians today have a weapon to enforce their rights. The rondas, or vigilante groups put together in the 1980s to fight the murderous left-wing Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement, have retained their basic organisation and now are active in opposing mining schemes in northern Peru.
A leading politician, Santiago Fujimori, the brother of Alberto Fujimori, the disgraced former president now living in exile in Chile, says the government is keen on more investment in mining but wary of any outburst of popular discontent that could provoke unrest on the scale of the Sendero campaign, which claimed 70,000 lives in the 1980s.
Meanwhile, at the site of Majaz, Monterrico labours on, rather isolated amid rumours of a takeover bid.
Local opponents of the mine remember that two of their number died in demonstrations against the mine and that others were smeared by company staff as terrorists and drug dealers. And the company is unpopular with Peruvian mine owners. Dante Lira, a leading spokesman for the mining industry, said this month: "We consider the British company excessively aggressive."
For his part Andrew Bristow, Monterrico's operations manager, finds the actions of some of the Peruvian mining companies distasteful. He complains: "People write about violent foreign mining companies: why does no one write about violent Peruvian mining companies?"
Peru's investment boom in mining conceals some difficult dilemmas for the even the boldest investors.