Cardinal's 20-year fight yields $150m settlement for 1,373 Peruvians poisoned by US smelter

In June, while Cardinal Pedro Barreto sat in Rome with Pope Leo XIV and other church leaders, word arrived that a two-decade battle had finally ended. The Doe Run Company, a subsidiary of billionaire Ira Rennert's Renco Group, would pay $150 million to 1,373 Peruvians who had been poisoned as children by lead emissions from a smelter in the Andes. Barreto, now 82, called it a historic milestone—though he was careful to note that no amount of money could undo the neurological damage these young adults would carry for life.

The story began in La Oroya, a town nestled in the Peruvian highlands, where a multi-metal smelter had operated for decades. When Doe Run took control of the facility in 1997, emissions of lead, arsenic, cadmium, and sulfur dioxide climbed. By 2004, when Barreto arrived as archbishop of the region, the damage was already catastrophic. Researchers from Saint Louis University found that nearly every child under six in La Oroya had blood-lead levels above 10 micrograms per deciliter—far beyond the threshold known to cause permanent harm to developing brains. The Blacksmith Institute, an environmental watchdog, would later rank La Oroya among the ten most polluted places on Earth.

Barreto began speaking out almost immediately. He contacted the university researchers, helped document the poisoning, and became the public face of the town's suffering. The response was swift and brutal. Smelter employees, fearing for their jobs, sent him death threats. The harassment was relentless and often public—messages warning that if he continued, they would "take much more drastic measures." Barreto endured it. "It was an irrefutable fact that I was threatened in various ways," he said later, but he insisted the real courage belonged to the families of La Oroya, who lived with the consequences every day.

In 2007, a St. Louis law firm called Schlichter Bogard filed suit on behalf of 17 Peruvian children. The case would grow into a federal lawsuit involving 1,373 plaintiffs, now young adults. For nineteen years, it ground through the courts—one of the longest civil cases ever brought against a multinational corporation for environmental harm across borders. The Department of Justice itself sided with Doe Run, asking that the case be moved to Peru. The lead attorney, Jerry Schlichter, refused. "If the case had gone to Peru, the children would have got nothing," he said. He assembled a team of lawyers and religious leaders, including Barreto, who fought what he called a David-versus-Goliath battle against one of the world's wealthiest industrialists.

Rennert, now 92, had built his $3.8 billion fortune in the junk-bond markets of the 1980s before assembling an empire of mining and smelting operations. Doe Run never admitted wrongdoing in agreeing to the settlement. The company's chief executive, Matt Wohl, issued a brief statement saying they wanted to "put this behind us" and focus on their business. But the settlement stood: each of the 1,373 plaintiffs would receive at least $100,000.

For Barreto, the victory was bittersweet. The money would change lives—open doors to education, healthcare, opportunity that lead poisoning had threatened to close. But it could not reverse the damage already done. Children who should have grown up healthy had instead absorbed poison into their bones and brains. Some would struggle with learning disabilities, behavioral problems, stunted growth. The settlement was justice, he said, but it was also a measure of what had been lost. "The money will not compensate for the harm they have suffered," Barreto told the Guardian, "but it is a sign that justice has been served."