La Penumbra del Larima
This documentary-type work aims to narrate the life of a small mining settlement in the Sierra de Bahoruco located in an impoverished province of the Dominican Republic. It is estimated that around a thousand people work in that camp, extracting Larimar to support their families. This semi-precious stone was discovered in the mid-1970s and since then the extraction process has not stopped. Today this stone with blue tones is in all the jewelry stores of Santo Domingo and is considered of national interest since it is unique in the world. The beauty of this stone contrasts with the harsh and precarious extraction conditions that these miners have to face, devoid of all safety clothing. Even so, these men are getting lost in the middle of that wooded hill that has at least thirty tunnels, all of them lacking adequate ventilation and poor electrical installations, which cost more than one electrocution or suffocation. Life in the settlement seems to go by without stress, there seems to be no set schedule, and the billion people move between the tunnels and the grocery stores (a kind of grocery store) you can see groups of friends talking or playing cards, accommodating labor ignorance and the total helplessness that underlies them. In 2015, the Dominican State together with the collaboration of the European Community inaugurated the only safe tunnel that allows miners to enter and exit with their forklifts without having to be in uncomfortable positions. Despite this effort, the project could not be completed due to lack of resources and lack of investment, the miners continue with the same precariousness. They seem exploited, there is no employment contract that covers them, and many works by extraction, which means that they can go days without earning anything. Larimar a stone that is attributed to healing qualities, but under these conditions, lacking in humanity.












