Unearthing Potosi: The Enduring Plight of Bolivian Miners
The Mountain that Eats Men
Aaron Roesch reflects

When my tour guide Jaime told me that Bolivia is truly a rich country, I certainly had trouble seeing it as such. Indeed, Bolivia is commonly considered the poorest country in South America. And as Jaime made that statement, a woman sat on a pile of debris, only a few meters away, chipping away at rocks hauled from the mine at Cerro Rico, looking for trace amounts of zinc, tin, silver, and lead. She does that all day, every day, for $20 per month. Rich? Well, Potosi, in southwestern Bolivia, once laid claim to the titles of Highest City in the World and Wealthiest City in Latin America. At Potosi's zenith, it was larger than Paris, and its silver mine at Cerro Rico made conquistadors rich and funded the Spanish Armada. Today, however, while Potosi may still sit above the rest of the world, its citizens have fallen into the depths of poverty.

Jaime, who had spent nine years as a miner in Cerro Rico, is well acquainted with the hardships of that lifestyle. Along with 20,000 of his colleagues, Jaime was laid off when the Bolivian government, in a drastic move to curb rampant inflation, privatized numerous industries and services, including Potosi's mine. Since 1985, however, he has been a tour guide, leading groups of foreigners into the depths of Cerro Rico, navigating the warren of claustrophobic tunnels whose entrances pockmark the mountain's exterior. I met Jaime in July 2003, when three friends and I spent two days in Potosi, where every traveler is essentially instructed to sign up for a tour of the Cerro Rico mine. Jaime's firsthand experience as a miner and his fluency in English, Spanish, and Quechua lent him considerable credibility and appeal as a guide.

My friends and I — along with a sizeable troupe of Western Europeans, Australians, and a couple Canadians — donned our ridiculous black rubber boots, waterproof pants, and canary yellow raincoats. Then we grabbed our hardhats. The whole production seemed a little over the top. Outside the mine's entrance, as we stood in a circle, Jaime lectured on Potosi's brutal poverty and the adversity faced by the miners. It became clear that he wasn't just a tour guide; he was an activist. Jaime intended to make us experience the mines as if we weren't merely tourists: as if this were not our first and last day, but simply another day. Suddenly, the triviality of my costume became apparent, and instead I felt ridiculous for the $500 camera dangling at my side.

The misnomer Cerro Rico (Rich Hill) surpasses irony and approaches heartlessness. Miners there often work 12-hour days for $7 per week.¹ At the very most, a miner will make $100 in a month.² There is "practically no middle class"³ in Potosi, because it seems whenever someone earns enough to rise above poverty, he or she skips town. But if the living conditions in Potosi are appalling — the Washington Post equates them to those of sub-Saharan Africa — then the working conditions are unspeakable. Equipped with hammers, chisels, and dynamite, miners descend into the "Mountain That Eats Men."⁴

The cramped and seemingly endless tunnels have walls laden with asbestos, arsenic, and sulfuric acid and floors broken by abyssal pits. Centuries of tunneling have engendered a labyrinth of precarious walls, floors, and ceilings, which when rocked by continuous explosions always threaten collapse. In the last two years, 21 miners were killed.⁵ However, the principal threat is long-term. Or perhaps "long-term" is too generous an expression. Miners' average life expectancy is 40 years.⁶ Most die in their thirties or forties, and very few live past 50 years of age. This devastating fact is illuminated by another statistic: two-thirds of Potosi's population suffers from respiratory ailments.⁷ The noxious air in the mine leads to endemic silicosis, tuberculosis, and black lung. As much as 90 percent of Potosi's men suffer from lung diseases.⁸

A significant contributor to the astonishingly short life expectancy in Potosi is the unimaginably early age at which most miners begin work. Many boys accompany their fathers to the mines by the age of 10. When their fathers pass away at such young ages, adolescent boys are forced to become the breadwinners in their families. Workers toil with hammers and chisels in dark, dusty caverns for hours on end. They pound out nooks in the rock large enough to insert a stick of dynamite. They tap in code on the walls to warn miners in nearby tunnels, and then light the fuse and run for cover. After the explosion, miners lug out the rubble aboard wheelbarrows. In a day of backbreaking labor, a miner will often haul one ton of rocks.⁹ To sustain energy and satiate hunger at an affordable cost, miners forfeit meals and simply chew coca leaves. And to blunt the agony of their work, most miners smoke unfiltered cigarettes and drink nearly pure, 196 proof grain alcohol. If their lungs don't soon fail, their livers often do.

Into the Mine

Jaime led us deep inside one of myriad mine shafts. Soon the daylight vanished. We were each equipped with a canister of water and a small aluminum saucer that held a tiny amount of calcium carbonate. The canister was fastened to my belt and the saucer to my helmet, and when Jaime pumped water through a tube, up from the canister to the saucer and ignited the contraption, out shot a four-inch flame from my hardhat — this was my headlamp. We followed Jaime through a maze of tunnels, crawling on our stomachs at times, climbing up sheer faces at others, and sliding through crevices near the floor at others. At one point Jaime turned to us and pointed to a growth of crystals blanketing the wall on which I was bracing myself. "Don't touch that," he said, "it's asbestos." I swiftly wiped my hand on my thoughtfully provided waterproof pants and trustingly scampered after him.

Mostly, Jaime wanted to introduce us to miners. We climbed up one chute to find a man perched on a ledge, solemnly pounding away on his chisel. As the rest of us assumed positions against the walls, Jaime approached the man and questioned him in Quechua. Most of the miners at Cerro Rico do not speak Spanish, but only Quechua, which was once the language of the Inca and today is spoken by the indigenous Quechua people throughout the Andean highlands. Jaime asked us to pass forward our pre-purchased gifts of coca leaves and dynamite, which we promptly did. It is customary for tourists to confer these staple components of the mining process upon the miners, who would otherwise purchase them themselves. Tourists often donate cigarettes and bottles of grain alcohol as well, but Jaime requested that we not bring those for, while highly valued, they are ultimately injurious to the already endangered miners. The man on the ledge was very appreciative. As Jaime questioned the miner and translated his answers, I could not help but feel ashamed. The disparity between my lifestyle and his is, quite simply, incomprehensible. At the end of the day, I would emerge from the mine and never have to return. Eventually, I would return to college where I would be offered opportunities inconceivable to the miner. My future is wide open; it has yet to be written. The miner, however, has already surrendered to his fate. He told us that he endures his daily battle against exhaustion and illness and poverty and the rock face directly in front of him in the faint hope that his son may one day go to school and lead a better life than that of his ancestors. I could not understand how this man could tolerate our presence without exhibiting utter disdain. But he only seemed tired and thankful for the gifts we had brought him. Jaime, too, seemed contented; he knew well that this interaction would leave a lasting impression on us all.

Cerro Rico. Indeed, the silver mine was a source of unimaginable wealth for a few men — like so many other colonial enterprises — it was the grave of many more. The Quechua of Potosi are well acquainted with suffering. In 1638, Fray Antonio de la Calancha wrote: "Every peso coin minted in Potosi has cost the life of 10 Indians who have died in the depths of the mines."¹⁰ In 1572, the Spanish Viceroy Francisco de Toledo instituted a system called Ley de la Mita. Each year, men from the community, from 18 to 50 years of age, were forced into the mines for four months. They were paid a pittance, enough to buy only a loaf of bread per day, and they seldom saw daylight. In the 280 years from 1545 to 1825, historians estimate that four to eight million men lost their lives in the Cerro Rico mine.¹¹ Eighty percent of the region's native male population was annihilated.¹²

Men that attempted to flee were corralled into reducciones, concentration camps where they were counted and conscripted.¹³ Those that were fortunate enough to survive the inhuman ordeal could be recalled to the mines seven years later.¹⁴ The Spanish drew an unbelievable profit from this tragic exploitation. During their rule, the Spanish extracted two billion ounces of silver.¹⁵ Legend holds that they could have paved a road of solid silver from Potosi to Madrid. However, it has been suggested that that road would more appropriately have been paved with the bones of Potosi's natives.

The Rule of El Tio

Presently, while Potosi has escaped the shackles of European colonialism, it now squirms in the yoke of deceptively named free-market capitalism. The collapse of the international tin market and unmitigated domestic inflation — to the tune of 25,000 percent¹⁶ — spurred the Bolivian government to succumb to U.S. pressures to open its markets. In 1985, the government-owned Cerro Rico mine was privatized. A mine that once employed 30,000 workers now employs 10,000.¹⁷ Those that remain work in 36 different cooperatives where they earn a quarter of what they did when they were government employees. None receives health benefits, workers' compensation, technical guidance, or safety assurances — all guaranteed under government employment.¹⁸

About the only support miners can count on is from El Tio, the god of the underworld. Catholic on the outside, most miners only respect El Tio when they descend into the mine. To sate his hunger, they offer him coca leaves, alcohol, cigarettes, and the occasional sacrificed llama. If El Tio is not fed, he will take matters into his own hands and feed on human flesh. But for many of Potosi’s citizens, El Tio is more trustworthy than their own government.

United States-backed privatization is not limited to Potosi. It incites turmoil and uprisings throughout Bolivia (and, indeed, throughout the continent). When I arrived at the bus station in Potosi, I was struck to see a young boy wearing a pair of jeans with an embroidered logo; rather than a brand name, though, on his leg was stitched a portrait of Osama bin Laden. His visage popped up often during my three weeks in Bolivia. He is idolized there — often depicted standing with Che Guevara. I do not know whether many Bolivians truly understand bin Laden's cause, but to a certain extent that is immaterial. His significance is symbolic; to them, he represents opposition to the U.S.

Bolivians are most reproachful, however, of their own government. Besides mines, Bolivia has sold its airline, railroads, and electric company to private corporations. In 1999, Bolivia sold Cochabamba's municipal water system to a private company. Guaranteed a 15 to 17 percent profit by the government, the company raised rates, making the costs of tap water unbearable to Cochabamba's citizens.¹⁹ The people revolted. Eventually the company withdrew, but they are now suing the Bolivian government in the World Bank for $25 million worth of compensation.²⁰

The Bolivia Connection

For some people it is difficult to see the relevance of the plight of the Bolivian people to their own lives. At my school, we reside under a "bubble" — a shroud of ignorance and apathy that emerges from the suburban comforts of a private university and the eternal California sunshine. But the connection is always stronger than it appears. I learned that the company that bought Cochabamba's water system is called Aguas del Tunari, part of the larger American corporation Bechtel. Stanford's campus happens to be dotted with buildings bearing the name of the generous Bechtel family.

When Jaime said that Bolivia is a rich country, he was being sincere. Bolivia possesses unmatched natural beauty — from the salt flats near Uyuni to Copacabana on Lake Titicaca to the jungles in the East. It also has huge caches of natural resources; in fact, prospectors have determined that Cerro Rico still contains as much silver as the Spanish extracted during colonialism.²¹ And Bolivia's culture is rich and enduring.

In some ways, Bolivia's strongest asset is its people. Today, however, Bolivians have fallen victim to harshly inequitable capitalist reforms. The citizens of Potosi learned the hard way that a free market often does not translate into economic freedom.

At present, the people of Potosi have all but lost hope. Their future, like their past, is grim. Boys enter the mines before they are teenagers, already resigned to the fates of their fathers. Freedom comes at a cost, and it is one that most people in Potosi cannot afford. However, as dire as their prospects seem, the future has yet to be written. The first step in righting these wrongs mirrors Jaime's own objective: spread the word. Perhaps the most painful aspect of Potosi's plight is the world's ignorance of its suffering.

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Aaron Roesch, a student at Stanford University, is an intern at World Hunger Year.



References

1. Faiola, Anthony. "Miners Bear Brunt of Bolivian Reforms; Country's Poor Blame Free-Market Policies for Harsh Conditions." The Washington Post 26 June 2002, Final Ed.: A Section; p. A16.


2. Forero, Juan. "As Bolivian Miners Die, Boys Are Left to Toil." The New York Times 24 March 2003, Mon. Late Ed.: Section A; p. 3; Column 1; Foreign Desk.


3. Barron, Amalia. "Potosi's Silver Tears." The UNESCO Courier March 2000.


4. Forero. The New York Times.


5. Ibid.


6. Ambler, Isabel. "Inside the Rich Mountain. (The Bolivian Silver Mine of Potosi)." Geographical Magazine v66 n5 (May 1994): 26-30.


7. Barron. The UNESCO Courier.


8. "Open Veins: For More than Five Centuries, Silver and Blood Have Run Freely from the Mines of Potosi." Life v22 i8 (1 July 1999): 38+.


9. Kadane, Lisa. "Tarnish Grows on City of Silver: Potosi Was Once the Biggest Source of Silver in the World, but Diminishing Resources and Increasing Poverty Have Dulled Its Sheen." The Calgary Herald 13 April 2002, Sat. Final Ed.: Observer; p. OS02.


10. Barron. The UNESCO Courier.


11. Kadane. The Calgary Herald.


12. Barron. The UNESCO Courier.


13. Ferry, Stephen. "Potosi's Mountain of Misery and Riches: Venturing Deep into an Ancient Realm of Minerals, This Photojournalist Documents the Life and Culture of Tenacious Miners and Their Legacy of Sacrifice." Americas (English Edition) v54 i1 (Jan.-Feb. 2002): 30-39.


14. Barron. The UNESCO Courier


15. Ibid.


16. Faiola. The Washington Post


17. Forero. The New York Times


18. Faiola. The Washington Post


19. "Leasing the Rain". 5 July 2002. NOW with Bill Moyers.


20. Ibid.


21. Barron. The UNESCO Courier