Unable even to care for her three-year-old daughter Tania, Chuquitucto blames her blindness on the June 2000 spill from one of the world's top gold mines, Yanacocha, an environmental disaster that has prompted villagers to file a lawsuit in Colorado against Denver-based Newmont Minerals.

"I just want help for my baby," the sober-faced Chuquitucto says softly, her hands resting limp on her knees. She says she has not received a cent from Yanacocha, owned by Newmont, Peru's Buenaventura and the World Bank.

A group of almost 1,000 people and municipal authorities of Cajamarca, near Yanacocha, have filed lawsuits against Newmont in Colorado. But Yanacocha is asking for the cases to be dismissed, arguing that since the case occurred in Peru it should be tried here under Peruvian law.

Consuelo's mother, Lucia Leyva, hovers nearby: "She can't do anything now. She used to study but now just sits all day."

In June 2000, a truck contracted by Yanacocha leaked 334 l (151.5 kg) of toxic mercury over a 27-mile (45-km) stretch of highway from the mine to the Pacific coast. Much of that seeped into Choropampa, a poor village only a few blocks long where farmers bring their wares to market twice a week.

Townsfolk, thinking the mysterious metallic liquid could be valuable, gathered mercury using empty soda bottles, brooms, even their hands. Children played with it and tasted it.

"People were surprised. They said, 'What is this stuff?'" said Alfonso Carrasco, who ran a store in Choropampa when the mercury, a natural by-product of gold mining, spilled.

His wife Rocio picked up some mercury in her hands and put it on fire to see what would happen. After inhaling mercury fumes, she broke out in a rash and had trouble breathing.

"I couldn't even stand up," she said, adding that two years later, her eyes and skin still burn occasionally and her joints swell. The couple and their three children later left town.

Mercury affects the nervous system and can cause nausea, vomiting, breathing trouble, kidney and skin damage. In Choropampa, some families stored the mercury for days in tiny, poorly ventilated homes or even boiled it in dinner pots.

YANACOCHA SAYS NO LASTING EFFECTS

According to Choropampa Mayor Lod Saavedra, more than 200 people were hospitalised. "Everyone was sick," he said.

Leyva said her daughter's eyes began to itch and burn and her hair fell out after the spill. While blood tests showed no mercury in her system, she was blind seven months later.

Yanacocha, which says it adheres to international safety and environmental standards, recovered nearly all the mercury. It also paid for medical treatment and blood tests for many of the town's 1,000 inhabitants.

All told, the firm says it shelled out $14 million on medical treatment, clean-up and public works projects.

"The area is now totally de-toxed and there was no permanent damage from the spill," Yanacocha's environmental supervisor Luis Campos told Reuters. The company says it paid between 2,000 to 21,000 soles ($570-$6,000) in compensation to individuals whose health was affected by the spill.

He said the real problem wasn't the spill - mercury evaporates at a relatively low temperature - but that people touched it, tested it and kept it with them out of curiosity. He said the company was still monitoring intoxication cases.

Choropampa's only doctor, Vittery Ramirez, says residents' reports of birth defects were false. But the physician, whose government paycheques are funded by Yanacocha, said some blood tests after the spill were oddly inconsistent.

Most residents said the compensation was paltry, especially from a firm that is, quite literally, sitting on a gold mine and whose annual output is worth some $514 million.