The Mines of Potosí

The entrance to the Candelaria mine

The mines of Potosí are a disturbing place.  For one thing, there's the claustrophobia of being several hundred meters below the earth, feeling the vibration of jackhammers and dynamite explosions in the walls around you and struggling to breathe the air thick with silica dust.  And then there's the knowledge that, while you'll leave in a couple of hours and very happily never go back, there are several hundred miners for whom this is their life.  Eight to 24-hour days six days a week, usually without food, breathing the poisoned air and hacking away at walls of solid rock to take home a weekly salary as little as 100 bolivianos - that's a bit less than $15 USD.  A week.

Potosí was once the richest city in South America.  The mine there was discovered about 10 years after the Spanish conquest and exploited - along with the indigenous population, who were used as miners - for the next several hundred years.  Production peaked around 1650, and at this point the deposit is nearly exhausted.  Modern-day miners are quite literally scraping at the dregs.  These days, the mines are run as a cooperative - miners give 15% of their profits to the coop in exchange for the right to mine where they please.  Maybe about 20 years ago, someone had the idea to open the mines to tragedy-porn-seeking tourists, and now mine tours must be almost as big a source of income as the metals extracted from the mine's walls.

After overcoming a few moral qualms and, more significantly, the fear I would discover I was claustrophobic  

Stalls at the miners market.  Those giant sacks are filled with coca leaves,
and the little blue-labeled bottles on the top shelf contain "miners alcohol."

under 500 meters of solid rock, I went on a tour of the mines Wednesday morning.  We started in the miner's market at about 10 am.  A few hours earlier, it would have been full of miners eating breakfast - up to four bowls of soup apiece; they don't eat in the mines, since the dust and minerals that get in the food would poison them even faster than does the dust and minerals in their lungs - and stocking up on supplies, including dynamite, coca leaves, juice and a kind of Bolivian ethanol that clocks in at 96% alcohol, and that the miners drink straight (but only on Mondays and Fridays).  The idea is that pure alcohol will somehow beget pure silver.  By the time we showed up, it was mostly tourists.  We purchased juice, coca leaves and dynamite to give to the miners we would meet, and made an offering of miners alcohol to Tío, the devil-god of the mines, pouring a few drops of a tiny shot on the ground and then taking the rest.  It was exactly how one would imagine drinking ethanol would taste. 

Next stop was the refinery, where the ore that the miners extract from the mountains is turned into silver.  I'm still not entirely clear on the process, except that it involves a lot of gnarly chemicals like arsenic that you don't want in your water and that probably end up there anyway.  The silver that results from the process is a fine wet dust, which our guide painted around our fingers like rings. 

Finally, we went further up the mountain and entered the mine itself.  The miners divide it into four levels, each hotter and deeper than the next.  The first level was for the most part walkable (although I had to crouch pretty much always - Bolivia wasn't built by people my size) and was several degrees colder than the outside.  The second level was, as far as I could tell, mostly just a passageway to the third - a narrow tunnel at a 45 degree angle, with the occasional rickety wooden ladder.  We all had to do parts of the climb with our backs parallel to the ground, crawling on our hands and feet like so many crabs.

The third level seemed to be where most of the work happened.  Miners cleared away large boulders in wheelbarrows, and every five or ten minutes someone gave a signal and we all hugged the rock wall as a mining cart shot by - literally tons of rocks and ore trundling along a set of metal rails, pulled by two shirtless men in front and pushed by two others in back.  It got hotter as we went further in, until we were all pouring sweat in our jumpsuits.  Our guide, an erstwhile miner himself, estimated that it was about 35 degrees Celsius (95 Fahrenheit) at the hottest.  The air was thick with dust and an endless variety of unidentifiable, probably poisonous mineral gases, each with its own sick earthy odor. The bandana I'd bought as a filter was of limited usefulness, since the air was so thin that when I put it over my mouth and nose it filtered out the oxygen along with the dust.

On the fourth and lowest level of the mine, we stopped to talk to Martín, a solo miner who had been working in the mines for several decades.  (Or, rather, our guide talked to him, and translated his monosyllabic responses into usable information.)  Every time we talked to someone over the age of about fifty, I felt a little ill, knowing as I did that most miners die by fifty-five of lung ailments.  Martín was hitting a metal spike with a hammer, drilling a small hole, maybe about an inch in diameter, into the solid rock.  Eventually it would be big enough to insert a stick of dynamite.   He works eight hours a day, seven days a week, except for Friday, when he pulls a triple shift and works for twenty-four hours straight.  He estimated that his daily profits were about fifteen bolivianos, or two dollars, a day, although of course that fluctuates depending on the productivity of a given deposit.  Most miners work in groups and share their profits, and make a steadier income of around 60 to 100 bolivianos a day - a small fortune in a country where the minimum wage just made the leap to 647 bolivianos a month. 

After three weeks in Bolivia, the poverty here is starting to wear at my consicence.  People are poor in a way I haven't ever experienced, poorer here than anywhere else I've ever been.  (Since most of my third-world experience is in South America, and Bolivia is the poorest country in the continent, that might just be a tautology.)  For a tourist, it mostly manifests itself in the prices, and for a while I felt gleefully like I was getting away with murder.  Eight dollars a night for a fully-furnished apartment!  Twenty-five cents for six mandarin oranges!  Then I realized that, geopolitically speaking, getting away with murder isn't so much a metaphor as a pretty apt description of what's going on.  Things aren't cheap because someone feels like giving me a cosmic gift, things are cheap because people can't afford anything more expensive.  So what do I do?  I pay 100 bolivianos - the same amount that some of the miners take home in a week, remember - to see just how shit things are.

The night after I visited the mines, a girl from my hostel invited me to the movie También La Lluvia (Even the Rain), which deals with a lot of these issues.  The plot concerned a group of Spanish filmmakers who came to Bolivia to shoot a movie about Bartolome de las Casas, a priest who agitated for indigenous rights.  At first they're just thrilled to hire extras for $2 a day, but as time passes they come to realize they're basically re-creating the Spanish oppression of the indigenous people, four centuries later.  Heavy-handed meta-symbolism aside, it hit pretty hard. 

The movie ended with the Spaniards leaving the country, and today, that's what I did, too.  I'm now in Argentina.  My epic journey from Bolivia was one final miserable lesson in cosmic and political unfairness, and merits a blog post in itself.  That next.