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Published: October 5th 2007
The grim city of Potosi exists because of one thing, Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain), which looms large over what would otherwise be a barren and empty plain over 4000 meters above sea level. Early on in the Colonial Period the mountian was found to contain an enormous wealth in silver, which the Spanish were quick to exploit. Potosi has been there ever since.
We arrived in the early afternoon. The sun was shining and it was relativley warm. Potosi is by no means a large sprawling city, there are no new suburbs, no outer districts and the whole place can be taken in from one view. However Potosi is a very old city and this can be clearly seen in the narrow streets and delapidated buildings.
We found a comfortable and friendly hostal near the central plaza and went out for a brief explore. The main plaza was small but the cathedral looked imposing but for the scaffolding of renovation. Feeling tired from a mixture of the journey and the sudden return to limited oxygen we headed back to our hostal and took advantage of the huge DVD collection. However we were just passing the time. There is pretty much only one reason why backpackers visit Potosi, again that reason is Cerro Rico.
Perhaps the most bizzare of tourist attractions on this trail, a visit to the mines of Cerro Rico has somehow become one of the quintessential Bolivian experiences. We chose to go on a tour organised through our hostal becasue 15% of the money goes directly to the miners and they have a strong tie to the mining community itself.
The day started at 7.30 with breakfast and by 8.15 the four people from our hostal doing the tour were on a bus journey through Potosi. We picked up a full compliment of tourists in the plaza and headed towards the mining district.
The streets that lie directly beneath and on the lower slopes of Cirro Rico have long been home to a very large, proud and old working class community. Here we found the homes of the miners of Cerro Rico and the markets where they by food and equipment. The bus pulled into an unpaved square and we were lead into what really seemed to be someones backyard. This was the headquaters of the mining side of the tour company. We were kitted out with boots, overalls, hats and headlaps. Our guide was an enthusiastic Bolivian, 30 years of age who had himslef been a miner for 15 years before geting involved with the tours, learning English and taking groups of gringos down into the dark of the mountain.
Our guide had a friendly air about him but he was also very serious when it came to making us understand the hardships of visiting the mines, let alone working non-stop inside them for 10 hours a day. He pressed home to us the toll the work takes on the miners, the breathing problems, short life expectancies and the general entrapment in a life of hard labour. Within an hour I could tell that this was no ordinary tour that takes tourists down to gander at dark caves. This has been set up with the miners unions and societies to provide extra help for their communities and give gringos and insight into how the ´other half´ of the world live.
One of the most striking facts about mining in Cerro Rico is that it takes place in a kind of anarchic system. Since the late 1980s when the Bolivian mining industry collapsed no mines have been owned or run by official corporations. There is no capital here, no bosses, nothing that I thought of when I thought of mining. Really it is this simple: there are mines running deep into Cerro Rico, there are a few mineral processing plants at the base of the mountain and there are 15 to 20, 000 men and boys in need of work in Potosi. The result is a kind of freelance mining industry in which groups of fathers, brothers, sons and so on form work teams that every day go to a particular part of the mountain and just start mining off their own backs. They buy their own equipment (dynomite, shovels and pick axes) and sell the meager minerals they render from the rock directly to the processors.
Our guide could not tell us exactly which multinationals buy minerals from the processors of Cerro Rico but American, European and Chinese buyers are always in town. The metals are poor in quality and sell very cheap. Eventually, thousonds of miles away, the materials mined in Cerro Rico become wiring in micro chips for PCs and mobile phones and a million and one other goods which contain cheap metals. What really struck me by visiting Cerro Rico is how much of the formal industrial world of mass produced goods has ties to the brutal labour of men and boys in places like Cerro Rico. It got me to thinking that just becasue I think I know a mobile was made in a fully legal and regulated factory it does not mean that the materials used to make it come from such an ethical source.
Walking through a hole into the mine itself the first thing I noticed was the thickness of the dust in the air. I had been told before that it was dusty in mines but this was something else all together. The beams from our headlaps cast light on what we were breathing and there seemed more dust that clean air.
The tunnel continued straight and level for maybe five minutes and we soon realised that this was the main way used for getting the mining carts in and out. Pulled and pushed along the tracks by teenage boys, some as young as 13, these carts come out full and then speed past empty as they head back inside heart of the mines.
Someway inside on the first level this particualr cooperative have set up a small museum dedicated to eductating us about the terrible histroy of Cerro Rico. Here we learnt that somewhere in the region of 9 million African and indegenous slaves died under the Spanish mining operation, making Cerro Rico a venerable Auschwitz of the Americas. The silver of Cerro Rico was the biggest sinlge source ever discovered and a major contribution to the surge in monetary wealth Europe exprienced in the 17th century. It has been said that the growth of the Western world was funded by the silver of Cerro Rico. We learnt also about the brutal struggles between mining labour movements and various anti-union Bolivian regimes. This is a history peppered with strikes and massacers.
We were led further down, at times crawling through tight tunnels for minutes at a time, the acrid taste of the dust coating our mouths and throats, occasionally reaching a gallery where we could more or less stand up straight. It was hot and there was little oxygen, moving in any direction was tiring and we constanlty had to be aware of where we put our hands and feet, whether a cart was about to speed past and what the chances of a cave in were. As our guide had told us: this tour is not like going to the beach.
We were introduced to a father and son mining partnership, the son legally should have been in school but our guide told ud that there is no one to regulate this. We met two teenage boys pulling a cart, one already had a cough that sounded like that of a sixty year old. Another miner told us that he had been working in Cerro Rico for almost 35 years and that he hoped he had only one year left.
This trully is a very hard way to earn a living. Our guide explained to us that there really are no alternatives in Potosi, a city built on the riches of a mountain long ago exhausted of its wealth. The mining coporations have moved on leaving 15 to 20,000 people to pick at their scraps. What is left feeds the miners and their families. As our guide told us, they do it for survival.
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Walter
non-member comment
The true price of capitalism.
I am sure that those who work and those who have died in the mines of Potosi have never been recognised or shared much in the wealth that they created for their European 'masters'. The 1st world owes a lot to the 9 million who died and their descendants deserve a better future. Many of the slaves who died here were African and Native Americans.