La Rinconada, is a ramshackle pueblo clinging to a mountainside at the end of a long, bad road in southeastern Peru. The town is seventeen thousand feet above sea level—the highest-elevation human settlement in the world. Above it rises the Cordillera Apolobamba, an ice-capped Andean range that runs southeast into Bolivia. The Incas mined gold in these mountains, as did many people before them, and the Spanish after them. Today, the mines are small, numerous, unregulated, and, as a rule, grossly unsafe. New Yorker contributor William Finnegan discusses the situation in his latest article, "Tears of the Sun."