Participatory social research — — — — — Co-produced territorial diagnoses — — — — — Source: Prepared by the author based on the 2024 Sustainability Reports of Minsur, Antamina, Las Bambas/MMG, Gold Fields, and Cerro Verde. Legend: ✓ = present/basic; ✓✓ = developed; ✓✓✓ = highly developed; — = not documented. As Table 1 shows, the five leading companies in the 2025 Merco Ranking invest significantly in infrastructure, local employment, and dialogue mechanisms, but none document community cultural production programs, libraries linked to their operations, community journalism, participatory audiovisual production, participatory social research, or co-produced territorial assessments. This gap is not explained by a lack of resources—the five companies invest hundreds of millions of dollars in social management—but by a paradigmatic bias: mining social management has historically operated under a model of service and infrastructure provision (top-down approach), not under a model of co-producing symbolic capacities and managing local knowledge (bottom-up approach). 3.3 Reference experiences in the components of Nuestros Saberes While there are valuable isolated experiences in each component of the program, these operate in a fragmented manner: Rural and community libraries. The Cajamarca Rural Library Network (founded in 1971, with over 50 years of operation) demonstrates that community co-production of texts is viable: more than 50% of the materials circulating in its libraries are produced by the communities themselves (Acevedo-Merlano & Flórez, 2022). In Colombia, the Itinerant Rural Libraries Program implemented 600 libraries in 574 municipalities between 2019 and 2022, with 1,891 rural mediators (National Library of Colombia, 2022). López-López et al. (2023) documented how rural libraries in Inzá (Colombia) function as agents for preventing territorial conflicts. In Peru, the National Library has announced the creation of rural libraries in all 25 regions of the country. Text production and community journalism. Colombia's National Plan for Reading, Writing, Orality, and Libraries (PNLEO) recognizes text production as a tool for citizen participation. GRADE/CREER has identified significant literacy gaps between urban and rural areas in Peru (GRADE, n.d.). Experiences such as Radio Surphuy demonstrate the viability of community journalism in rural Peruvian contexts. Community-based audiovisual production. CLACPI (founded in 1985) has been promoting Indigenous audiovisual communication in Latin America for almost 40 years. In Peru, the Chaski Group has developed networks of community micro-cinemas as tools for empowerment. The FAO documented Peruvian experiences on video for peasant training. Social research and community censuses. Sánchez-Velázquez et al. (2021) documented participatory socio-environmental diagnoses in Mexico. The experience of community censuses 74
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTM0Mzk2