Mongabay.com: Pope and Peru’s top mining CEO agree and at odds on environment

Roque Benavides, CEO of BuenaVentura, Peru's largest precious metals mining company. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Roque Benavides, CEO of BuenaVentura, Peru’s largest precious metals mining company. Photo by Emilia Catanoso

Through the good fortune of meeting TV producer Luis Moray in Lima, I was able to spend the last morning of my reporting during my first of two trips to Peru last summer interviewing one of the country’s most influential businessmen — Roque Benavides, CEO of BueanaVentura Mining. He read the encyclical before our interview so he would be prepared.  Mongabay.com, with expert editing by Glenn Scherer, published a series of three of my Q&A stories during the week of Pope Francis’ history visit to the United States in late September 2015.  My first Q&A is here.

Glenn Scherer wrote as an intro to my interview: 

  • Roque Benavides makes no apologies for Peru’s extraction industry, noting that it employs tens of thousands, and gives much back to the communities in which it works.
  • The CEO fears that the Pope’s encyclical is overly simplistic, putting too much of the blame for the environmental crisis on industry and business.
  • He argues forcefully that government has failed in its role as environmental protector, and that the poor are more destructive to the environment than industry.

Emilia Catanoso took a series of amazing photographs. Her best of the entire two-week experience.

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