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Potosi’s big drawcard, which has elevated it out of the forgotten murk of history and placed it among the main tourist sites of Bolivia, is its still-operating mines in Cerro Rico. Few people stay more than a couple if nights in Potosi, but that is long enough to descend into the mines, and to encounter a life and a world utterly different to anything any gringo will ever know.
Silver was officially discovered in Cerro Rico in the year 1545 (though the Incas seem to have suspected there was a whole lot of it buried in the mountain before this), and the exploitation of it has been ongoing ever since. It is thought that some 45,000 tonnes of silver have been extracted from the mountain. Throughout the colonial period the mines were worked by conscripted labour from the surrounded villages. When this proved insufficient, the drafting of African slaves was approved. Needless to say, little of the wealth of the mountain remained in the hands of those who were responsible for mining it. It is thought that as many as 8 million people died as a result of working the mines during this period.
In the centuries since silver first started to flow out of the mountain, the only significant technological advances have been the introduction of battery-powered headlamps and dynamite. Otherwise conditions in the mines have continued virtually unchanged. Now the miners work for themselves, in loose collectives based on extended families. They determine their own hours but still need to work long shifts for six days a week in order to make much profit. The veins of pure silver that once ran through the stone are all depleted; now it is crude ore with a content of around 15% valuable minerals that they dredge forth. This ore is sold to refineries at the rate of about 200Bs ($30US) per tonne. Even at these paltry rates, miners can expect to make twice as much as the minimum wage earned in other industries in Bolivia. No lesser incentive, I am sure, would see the mines still operating.
In preparation for our descent into the mines, our burgeoning tour group was kitted out in high mining fashion; rubber boots, helmets, headlamps and uniform pants and jackets. Wearing these we were taken to by gifts of dynamite, soda and coca for the miners unlucky enough to be working on this Saturday (the lucky ones with the day off were already littered comatose in the streets).
Thereafter a quick trip to see the refining process in action. It’s hard to understand why only dangerous materials can be used in this process, but here was cyanide and mercury separating waste from silver, tin and lead. The process is very water-intensive, a problem in a city as high and dry as this. Some of the water is recycled, the rest of it flows back out and into the rivers, bearing with it most of the cyanide.
Our guide had started working in the mines with his father and brothers when he was 13. Now he is one of the lucky ones who has learned a few languages, can lead tours, and hopes never to see any of his family ever having to return to the mines. Different numbers are given for the average life expectancy of miners, but there is no doubt that the harsh conditions take their toll, and that few reach retirement age (this is one reason why the tour company, unlike Lonely Planet and other resources, insists that tourists not give the miners cigarettes as gifts).
I could feel the difficulty of life in the mines within a few labyrinthine twists of the first tunnel. The ceiling was low enough to leave my thighs burnings for days afterwards, as I stooped and ducked along after the flickering light of our guide. The miners are of course all much shorter than I am, but in the lower galleries everyone, giant gringo or diminutive miner, is forced to crawl on hands and knees to reach the spots where the most work is being done. Invisible barriers of heat and cold lurk in the dark, drawing forth torrents of sweat and then sending shivers through the body. A litany of toxic dusts and gases (I’ll mention acetylene vapour, arsenic gas and asbestos and not move on to ‘B’) are present in the mines, but altitude and common rock dust are enough to bring gasps and chokes to the throat.
In the mines we encountered El Tío, a statue of the devil, complete with pitchfork and wilted cigar. The pre-Colombian Andean cultures were polytheistic rather than dualistic, and so the devil, as appropriated into this world, is not a figure of absolute evil, but one of many entities-within-the-world to be revered and placated. El Tío, as lord of the underworld, is the deity onto whose turf the miners are transgressing, so they remember him with offerings of booze, smokes and coca, and hope he will visit a lucky strike upon them, rather than cave-ins or silicosis.
There weren’t many people working while we were in the mine. Still, we met men knocking holes for dynamite into the hard stone. This takes about three hours with hammer and chisel. We also passed men pushing and pulling heavy trolleys full of ore along the main tunnels, and the men who then shovelled the ore into buckets that were manually hoisted to the surface. The strain of the work was awesome, the loads being carried and the scale of their productivity enormous.
We were in the mines for less than two hours; long enough to get covered in dust and sulphur-heavy mud; long enough to be left with burning lungs and legs; just long enough to catch a glimpse of the impossibly difficult life that the Cerro Rico had always offered to miners; not nearly long enough to fully comprehend the conditions faced here, the daily repetition and burn. How lucky I am to live a life so different to this one quickly passed under Cerro Rico.
The bus trip from Sucre to Potosi is one of the few in Bolivia that can be completed in an afternoon. The road is almost completely paved and has few of the precipitous drops that characterise Bolivian intercity connections. Why then had it taken me so long to visit this, the city in Bolivia I was most eager to see?
As the bus trundled and grumbled through the countryside the mountains got taller and the cliff faces sharper. The green and golden valleys of Sucre were replaced with the stone of the Potosi heights. Isolated shepherds and families sat by the roadside, surrounded by the immensity of the Andes. Dogs sat dispersed along the roadside, and their presence there was something of a mystery.
Potosi sits at just over 4000 metres above sea level. At this height not much can grow or flourish. The air is cold but the sun is fierce, and water is in short supply. And yet in the 17thcentury Potosi was the largest city in the Americas and one of the largest in the world (behind only London, Sevilla, Paris and Madrid). The stellar ascent of the city is entirely due to the enormous amounts of silver that were found and extracted from the nearby mountain ‘Cerro Rico’.
Arriving in Potosi it is easy to see why Cerro Rico was revered by the pre-Colombian indigenous peoples, and thus why they never mined it themselves. The perfectly triangular mountain reaches about 4800 metres, towering over the surrounding area. Today its slopes are denuded and wrapped around with roads, and punctuated by mine entrances, but even so it is a stunning sight, all red earth hues against the clear skies.
Once silver had been discovered and was being exploited (as were the thousands of indigenous and African slaves pressed into service in the mines), the wealth of Cerro Rico and Potosi spread around the world. The ‘treasure fleets’ of silver from Potosi kept the Spanish monarchy solvent for over a century. The crown was entitled to only one fifth of the gleanings of the New World, though, so that there was still vast, vast private wealth to be made in Potosi in the 17th and 18th century (especially considering that the illegal extraction and trade of silver is supposed to have been so enormous that a bank was established specifically to control the illegal silver trade).
Much of the colonial splendour of Potosi is still apparent. The enormous mint built in Potosi, which flooded the world with Potosi coins, is a magnificent building occupying a whole block. Close by it towers the cathedral, one of the more than 80 churches built with Potosi silver. At its height Potosi had its own school of art, and its influence can be seen everywhere, in the blending of the high art of Europe with traditional American forms and styles. Uncoiling out from the central plaza and the cathedral is the demented grid of Potosi’s colonial streets; narrow, twisting alleys that spill out into plazas and churchyards before winding on, a patchwork of faded colours and chipped facades. Given how much wealth Potosi produced, little of it is in evidence in the private houses of colonial Potosi. Those that made their fortunes tended to move on to more hospitable climates and lands like Sucre or (comparatively speaking) La Paz, or to more distant cities in the Americas and Europe. Still, traces of the former wealth of the city can be seen in the grand balconies and porticos that look down on the streets.
By the 19thcentury Potosi was in a steep decline. The purest veins of the Cerro Rico had all been bled dry, and as the promise of wealth dispersed so did the opportunistic population of the city (as did the reluctant labourer population). As silver was replaced by paper currency its value plummeted, and Potosi became a tin mining town, with none of its former lustre.
Today the ore still hacked from the mountain contains trace amounts of silver, lead and tin, and it takes far more work and strain to turn a profit from the mines. Although these metals are still hugely important, most of their refining and exploiting is done overseas, where there is better technology. Only the first stages – mining and basic processing – are done in Potosi. This is enough to keep the city alive, but its population today is half of what it once was. Its former elegance is fading, and although it is still unequivocally a mining town that does not mean what it once did. The outer barrios of the city are a mix of little brick houses and garbage dumps. The mint that once produced one of the world’s first international currencies is now a museum, and Bolivia’s currency is minted in other countries.
There is still a faint trace of the former mingling of the rich and poor, but today the wealthy are tourists, who come to see the mines and the colonial streets. For a city as forgotten as Potosi there is a wealth of gringo facilities in the city. Expensive cafes and bars, earnest clubs and some of Bolivia’s best hostels now fill the facades of the inner city. When the mines eventually run dry Potosi will need to find a new future, a new definition for itself. Tourism could be one way forward, but the city will never again be what it once was.
Autumn arrived in Sucre, replacing the summer tempests with long nights and mornings of cool rain. When the sun came out hummingbirds thrummed among the late flowers and the soggy street dogs re-took the streets. The hard sun lost its edge and the evenings grew longer and slower.
Another important date for the Bolivian calendar followed close behind the official start of autumn; March 23rd, remembered as the day that Bolivia lost its coastline to Chile in the war of the Pacific. The word in Spanish for this is enclaustromiento, which captures perfectly the sense of shrinking borders, and of confinement within the continent.
Every one of Bolivia’s neighbours had, at some point around the end of the nineteenth century, encroached into its territories, annexing them and their potential resource wealth. Brazil claimed great stretches of jungle just before the rubber trade collapsed. Paraguay claimed much of the Chaco badlands, but found none of the hoped-for petroleum there. Chile, on the other hand, not only took Bolivia’s coast, and its guano (used for fertiliser) and saltpetre (used in explosives) supplies, but subsequently found the world’s largest copper source in the previously-overlooked deserts that linked Bolivia to the coast.
It is the coast, though, that Bolivians yearn for. This is a cause that is still often brought up when Bolivians talk to me about their history; a source of shame and also vague and improbably hope that somehow someday a way to the ocean might open up again.
The War was fought between Chile – goaded on by British interests who sought to profit from the opening up of the nitrate (guano and saltpetre) resources – and Bolivia and Peru. Every time the War is brought up here, so too is the fact that Chile invaded during Carnival, a time held sacred and reserved for revelry. As a result Bolivia was caught off guard. Even so, the war carried on for several years, fought on land and sea, with old wooden warships and newer steel ones. The Chilean armed forces were far better equipped, bringing that terrible victory to Chile.
More neutral sources (i.e. Wikipedia) tell a slightly different story, with the exact territory before the war never specifically delineated (due to the rather rough partitioning up of South American in colonial times), and with a dispute over resources already raging when Chile sent in troops. Thereafter it was Bolivia that declared war.
Today the war is remembered mainly through the figure of Eduardo Avaroa, a civilian who lead the Bolivian defence in a skirmish, and an early casualty of the war. Every city seems to have a street and often a monument dedicated to Avaroa. Usually he is depicted already fallen, but raising his hand or gun or head in defiance, a national martyr and a symbol of the pervasive spirit of defiance toward larger, outside powers that is so characteristic here.
The chances of Bolivia ever escaping its enclaustromiento are basically zero. Not without another bitter war at least. This is probably why March 23 is still an important date. It is a chance to remember, and to dream about what Bolivia once was, and what it would be nice for it to someday be again. Until that unlikely golden age arrives, there is little to do but eat trout from Lake Titicaca and the other smaller bodies of water still belonging to Bolivia, and to imagine what that great and distant ocean must look and taste and smell and feel like.
The long, long bus ride north, the twenty something hours, the shitty food and the breakdown, the standing in the slim shadow of the bus waiting for a new bus while watching the drivers harass a massive tarantula with their pens; it was all for the sake of a visit to Calama, a mining town in the Atacama Desert.
Calama exists because Chuquicamata exists. Chuquicamata exists because the desert rocks in northern Chile contain trace amounts of copper, which if exploited on a large enough scale can be worth millions. Che Guevara had visited Chuqui back when it was owned by the (American) Anaconda Copper Mining Company, and when the mining had been done by impoverished, unskilled miners. Guevara had not been welcome at the time; he was told it was not a tourist site.
In the interim between Guevara’s visit and mine, Chuqui had been nationalised, the miners’ conditions had improved, the scope of the operation had increased dramatically, and daily tours had started running.
The mine today is immense and awe-inspiring. The name and ownership may have changed, but the ruthlessness of The Company in hasn’t. It is still in the business of refining desert stone and human labour and invested dollars and pesos and petrol and smoke and heat into copper and eventually into money. The vision of the company is immense; this is where the earth is broken down, where everything is viewed as transformable and manipulatable and exploitable.
My host in Calama had grown up around the mines. Twenty years ago there had been a village for the miners at Chuquicamata. They had been paid quite well, albeit in company credits instead of in currency, and had been provided with the best medical centre in South America, stocked with American doctors and pharmaceuticals.
Today that village is abandoned. Christmas decorations still hang around the town plaza, but the windows of the houses are boarded up, the church and the cinema are barred, and the old furniture lies in broken heaps of junk. For The Company, even towns are temporary, malleable things; when it was discovered that the stone upon which the town was built contained copper, the entire population was relocated to Calama so that the town could be broken down and its mineral wealth extracted.
Calama has a strange feel to it. Part of this is the high ratio of men to women. Many miners have families in distant towns. The families that do live in town only have young kids. There are very few twenty-soemthings around. There is no university in town and few prospects other than mining. The town is full of tough, ugly bars and clubs, auto workshops and masculine cars. The road from the town to the mine is lined with shrines commemorating car accident victims.
The people in Calama have their diversions, but there is still a forlorn feeling about the town. The Company provides for its employees, but not too much. Most of the profits and revenue from the mines end up in the bigger towns like Antofagasta, from which the copper is sent around the world. Calama is a town that exists to fuel the mine, but it won’t do so forever; there is copper in the stone beneath Calama too, and eventually this town will also be ground down and consumed by the expanding pit to fuel the continuing need for copper, and for profits.
Eventually there will be no more copper. Currently the mine is 4km long, 3 wide, and almost 1 deep. Calama is 16km away and all of the land in between contains copper. When the area is depleted of its resources The Company will pull out and whatever towns remains will either be abandoned, or will finally assume a sense of permanency. But while there is money to be made nothing can be considered permanent, and the only certainty will be the expanding of the pit, and breaking down of the earth into its sellable, profitable resources. It is a terrible, grim view of the world. And when there is nothing left worth exploiting, what will we be left with? Where will we turn our hungry gaze?
