Dateline: Potosi, Bolvia
January 2000
First posted on Vizshun.com
This morning I ventured inside the Cerro Rico, and I was stunned.
At the turn of the new millennium the working conditions of the silver miners here are medieval, worse than those of the French miners immortalized by Emile Zola in his 1885 novel “Germinal”.
These Bolivian miners use open flame lamps on their rickety safety helmets, powered by 96% alcohol and a silver rock that costs them a dollar a day to purchase at a shack in the mining supply camp on the outskirts of Potosi. Headlamps like this were outlawed in the United States more than a century ago. Face masks to keep out the dust and poisons within the hill are non-existent.
The glory days of Cerro Rico are long gone. Mostly today these miners are digging out minute traces of silver, and some zinc and copper if they are lucky. The tin is long gone. We entered the mine through as shaft opening first dug by Incas 500 years ago. They drilled 300 feet into the mountain using the finest technology they could afford in the 1400’s before the Spanish conquistadors and their successors seized the mine for themselves.
The tunnels are dark and cramped, built for the average five foot tall Indian of the 1400’s. No one has ever bothered to spend the money to widen the tunnels out to fit 20th Century humans. In places a visitor has to get down on hands and knees to crawl through the tunnels.
The air is bad—first you can see your labored breath, then around the next corner the temperature shoots up to 100 degrees or more. And at 4300 meters, there isn’t much oxygen to spare anyway, and toxic gases abound—arsenic, boron, carbon monoxide, acetylene. The harsh bitter taste burned my throat and lungs, lasting for days after spending three hours underground.
Most miners die of silicosis or black lung disease. Many enter the mines to work in their early teens, and life expectancy is low.
After the Spanish stole the mountain from the Incas, they mined Cerro Rico continuously for more than 300 years, using mostly Quechua Indians and African slaves. Bolivian historians estimate more than eight million miners died from accidents and disease over that timeframe. All to fund the Spanish monarchy and the Inquisition.
Legend maintains that a bridge of silver extending from Potosi to Madrid could have been built with the amount of silver pulled out of the mountain. Potosi once had a population of 200,000, the largest city in the world at the time, larger than London or Paris. Old-timers claim their ancestors paved the streets of Potosi with the silver that fell out of Spanish pockets. The streets are cobble-stoned now, but left behind is a tightly packed inner city perched on a hillside filled with colonial architecture, stone buildings of grace and beauty built for the Spanish oligarchy and their mangers.
By the time Bolivia won its independence from Spain in 1825, the mine was past its prime, but a new generation of Bolivian aristocrats took over the Cerro Rico, now focused on the mining of tin ore. Massive fortunes were built—at the beginning of the 20th Century Cerro Rico provided nearly 30% of the world’s tin.
In the Bolivian revolution of 1952 the mine was nationalized, and working conditions improved greatly—largely because the Bolivian miners, long the most militant sector of the Bolivian population, provided most of the muscle to overthrow the military dictatorship. But it was too little, too late. The mine was mostly played out, and when the silver and tin markets collapsed in the last two decades of the century, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and a potpourri of Neo-liberal economic advisors convinced the government to sell the mine and lay off thousands of miners. One result was a mass migration to the jungles of eastern Bolivia, where many miners turned their hand to growing coca.
What is left at Cerro Rico are cooperative mining operations, owned by the workers themselves. This is not as progressive at it sounds. There is so little silver and zinc left (tin is almost non-existent) the miners struggle in poverty. Where 200,000 miners once toiled, some 8,000 now scratch out 50 Bolvianos a day ($10).
They dig several miles underground, amongst a maze of shafts and tunnels that spread out for miles underground, in a darkness lit only by the aforementioned open-flame gas lamps. Most days are marked by explosions, as various groups of miners explode sticks of dynamite at the end of active shafts (one stick of dynamite costs a miner about $2, purchased at one of many shady mining supply shacks), blowing holes once or twice a day with sticks of dynamite they spend 10 Bolivianos on at the shady mining supply shacks on the edge of Potosi.
After these daily morning explosions, the miners spend their day shifting through rubble and loading what ore they find into 60 kilo gunny sacks they then carry out of the hole on their backs. Once they reach the main shaft they load the ore on old-fashioned wooden carts (with their wooden wheels) and push it out of the mine by hand. It can take more than an hour to reach the mine opening.
There it is weighed and immediately bought by ore merchants who wait patiently all day, chewing coca leaves and smoking harsh cigarettes, for the ore to trickle out from underground. Once paid, the miner heads back underground for the next 60 kilo load.
One fellow, shirtless, dirty, and sweating profusely, shoved his few precious Bolivianos into his raggedy pockets and shrugged at his fate. “It is the only life I know. It is the only life my family has ever known, going back for generations.”
The day before, the mine had shut down for the day as the miners buried one of their own, an old-timer, a leader of one of the cooperative mining operations. The man had been a union leader in the government mine, and had spent several stretches in prison under one Bolivian dictator or another over the years for his union activity, the first time 20 years ago.
He died of silicosis. He was 38.
