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How lucky we are
A visit to the co-operative silver mines at Potosi reminds you how your life can be determined just by where you are born. If our school group had been born in Potosi, there is a fair chance a few would be working in those mines, inhaling lung fulls of dust and dying young, because it is the best of few options.
We’d seen a film in Sucre called the Devil’s Miner. It followed the life of a 15 year old boy whose father had died and so he worked in the silver mines from the age of 10 to support his family. It was a fascinating and sad film, which speaks volumes about how some people have to earn a living. It had sort of prepared us with an idea of what to expect - conditions which are more suited to mines 150 years ago rather than 2009.
Like everyone else, we took a tour led by an ex miner. I’d guess he was late 20’s but he had worked in the mines as a child from 10-15 and still occasionally did shifts when necessary. After getting kitted out in our protective gear, we
first stopped at the miners market. Here you can buy all sorts of stuff, from headlights and pickaxes through to coca leaves and 90% alcohol and no less than four types of dynamite. The idea is that you take some gifts for the miners, so we plumped for coca leaves, dynamite and bottles of fizzy pop - this last item did seem a little odd but apparently the miners really like it. We then headed up the Cerro Rico to the mine entrance.
Under the Spanish, the silver discovered in “rich mountain or hill” led to the development of a fine town which, at its peak, was more populous than London or New York with 120,000 people. Much of the labour used to mine the silver was forced indigenous or African slaves and a mint in the town rolled and minted all of the silver coins used around the Spanish empire. The hill now can hardly be described as rich. The remaining silver is only 15% pure even after being refined. If you find a good vein though, this can still make you very rich in Bolivian terms.
The whole mine reminded me of an Indiana Jones film.
The roof of the entrance tunnel was held up by old timbers and the twin tracks for the trolley carts disappeared into the darkness. Initially it was ok. You could stand up most of the way and air came from the tunnel entrance. After a brief stop in a little museum they have created in a side room, we crouched down for some metres to visit their “Tio”. The Tio is supposedly the guardian of the mine. He takes on a devil like appearance and every day the miners ask for protection from Tio from rockfalls and for the mine to give them a good vein of silver. They do this by offering coca leaves, beers, cigs and the 90% alcohol we’d seen at the market. Once a year the miners and their families will also sacrifice a llama and spread its blood all over the mine entrance and on their faces. This is to satisfy Tio’s need for blood, so that he doesn’t take a miner. It’s quite a strange concept when outside of the mines most people seem to be very catholic.
We then started the descent down a few levels of the mine. This one has
5 levels and we went down to level 3. To get there you literally had to crawl on hands and knees through narrow tunnels, clamber down rickety old steps and avoid gapping holes that dropped a couple of levels below. All the time it got hotter and hotter and more difficult to breath due to the combination of being 4200m above sea level and the amazing amount of dust that seemed suspended in the air. We got down to level 3 where we saw 4 blokes haul and push two tonnes of rock in the old trolley carts in near darkness. We then had a go at shovelling rocks into bags that would be hauled to the surface. It was tough just doing it for 5 minutes and these blokes do it for 12 hours a day.
It really was an eye opening experience. It was bad enough being down there for 3 hours with the dust and the heat, never mind having to work there. The worst thing is that these guys are doing it for an average salary of $100 a month but in the process contract all sorts of respiratory diseases. We were told that most
miners don’t see it past their 50th birthday! The guide thought about 4000 people still make their livings from the mines though, so it is still relatively attractive employment. This unfortunately means that children can be encouraged to work down the mines if their families have hit hard times. We didn’t see any child miners on our visit but were told that, despite recent laws to try to stop it, they still work in certain mines.
Potosi
The wealth the mines created is clear in the plazas of Potosi. It isn’t as bleak as you might expect for the highest city in the world. After finally getting all the dust from our clothes, body and throats, we did a little exploring. Really interesting is the mint museum where you can get a guided tour of all the various machinery used to roll the silver and create the coins. A lot of the stuff was pretty ingenious, particularly one room where massive wooden cogs were driven by mules to roll the silver into precise 2mm thick sheets.
Perhaps the most ironic thing is that Spain now produces all the coins for Bolivia! With thoughts of what a strange
world we live in we embarked on another bumpy overnight bus ride to Uyuni to see one of the strangest landscapes on earth.
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