Potosí Silver Mines

Part I

One of the main objectives of exploring the world is to see how different cultures live. With Eric traveling, we arrived in Potosí, Bolivia, the site of one of the world's largest silver mines. Spanish conquistadors began exploiting the mines in the 1500s to underwrite the Empire's currency. In the five hundred years since then, an estimated 8 million indigenous miners and slaves have perished to the Devil (Tio). The Spanish had originally brought the Christian fear of God to the miners. While they worked underground in the Devil's domain, they began to pay homage to the Devil, giving him gifts and preying to his effigies. In the indigenous language Quechua, the sound of "D" doesn't exist, so the miner's new "pagan god" because known as Tio instead of Dios (Spanish for God).

Eric woke the planned morning of our mine tour with a throbbing, altitude-induced headache. The world's highest city, Potosí, sits in the Bolvian Altiplano at 4200 meters above sea level. All morning, it appeared that Eric's adjustment to the altitude would keep us from visiting one of my most anticipated social sites in South America. Thanks to a handful of dried coca leaves stuffed into his lip, the age old traditional remedy help alleviate E's headache enough for us to march on to the mines.

Our first stop on the way to Tio's domain was the Miner's Market. Here, we bought small gifts, like bags of coca leaves, to hand to the workers who spoke to us about their lives, their work, and the mine itself. Lobo, our guide, picked up a stick of dynamite to show up. We cautiously passed it around. When it got back to Lobo, he moved his lit cigarette towards the explosive. All of us defensively jumped backwards as the tobacco's embers touched the dynamite. His laughter crackled as the dynamite stick didn't explode. Apparently, dynamite requires a fuse and is therefore ease to control. Lobo later blew up the stick for our enjoyment as the entire mountain shook with the bellowing echos of exploding rock and gun powder.

At the Miner's Market we also picked up cigarettes made with pure tobacco without any chemical additives because the miners actively try to diminish their exposure to inhaling additional carcinogens. They also prefer their libations with 96% alcohol (pure alcohol to superstitiously pay homage Tio and their wishes for pure metals to extract). This was is alcohol our guide Lobo used to prep us for our tour, much like the rubbing alcohol used before a doctor injects a tetanus shot.

After outfitting ourselves with helmets and head lamps, our group enter the mines that tore apart the mountain neighboring the city center. The mountain is nothing more than veins of small tunnels exploded fifteen floors deep. The low ceilings force the workers to constantly hunch over though small passes, many with unstable rocks stacked up as impromptu walls and centuries old wood still supporting unsturdy roofs. The heat in the trenches of the mountain reach up to one hundred twenty degrees.

Forty eight different cooperatives inhabit this gigantic anthill. The section of the mines Eric and I entered were controlled by Cooperativa 11 de Abril. This cooperative, like many others, consisted of eight members. After fifteen to twenty years of work, depending on the coop, workers can buy into the cooperative for three thousand US dollars. Considering that workers make on average forty five Bolivianos a day (roughly six dollars) and half of their earnings go directly toward dynamite, coca, tools, headlamps, and equipment repairs, many workers can't afford to purchase their earned share of the cooperative. If a father dies, the large investment of the ownership of his controlled area automatically gets transferred to his oldest son. Consequently, generations of grandfathers, fathers, and sons get stuck in this perpetual cycle of mining.

Our guide, Lobo, explained to us that he started working as a dynamite runner at the age of ten. At one point in our tour, a group of three fourteen year old miners passed by us, asking for gifts of coca leaves that they added to their already fattly stuffed lips. Recently, President Evo Morales changed the child labor mining laws to restrict children under the age of fourteen from working. Eric noted that after spending so much time in the developing world, I had become callused by seeing child laborers so often that I thought nothing of of seeing these young passerbyers. There is supposed to be an award winning documentary about child miners here in Potosí called the Devil's Miner.

While locked inside the maze of stone tunnels, I reached out to a light colored mineral deposit that twinkled when my headlamp shined over it. I asked Lobo which precious metal this was. He told me that the crystals that I was holding was pure asbestos. In the mines, people only survive 20-30 years after beging work. After inhaling carcinogenic toxins for so long, workers often develop silicosis and die. Miners often create small funds to help their sick or fallen brethren.

In anticipating the Potosí mines, I expected to be completely shocked by the sights in the mines, as other travelers claimed that the mines were the most moving part of their year long excursions. Unfortunately, I wasn't taken back much at all. Maybe Eric was right that I have become too callused.

Part II

In trying to leave Samaipata, Eric and I found that Bolivians seem to spend an entire week celebrating New Years. Buses run less frequently, as drivers often show up drunk or are too hungover and sloppy to show up for work. Apparently the miners in Potosí follow a similar schedule. Very few were digging away when Eric and I visited the mines well into the week after January 1st. To me, the lack of miners in the mines were a great disappointment (selfishly).

As part of our tour we explored tunnels resembling large ant holes carved into the mountain. But that was it. Our tour only felt like an adventure tour, rock climbing with head lamps and rubber boots. We saw only one lonely miner actually working. This wasn't the exposure to the world's social problems I had expected. We passed by a few groups of miners who seemed to be relaxing on their day off in the pits of the mines. Our guide listed off depressing statistics that I had already heard from other traveler's words of mouth, but we didn't see any of the sweating faces pushing overly heavy loads of rock, silver, and zinc. We didn't see the already aged, young kids stuck in the mining cycle. We didn't breath in the contaminated air of toxins and rock particles that fill the shafts after recent dynamite explosions. I didn't have the weathered faces to attach to the statistics I heard.

I recently read an article by Nicholas Kristof

talking about successful non-profit campaigns and how the most effective fundraising came from individual sob stories rather than from generalized numbers rambled off by statisticians. Psychologically, people need to associate a problem with an individual face to make it real. People don't like to undertake the guilt associated with problems that seem too large to fix and therefore they ignore enormous tragic realities described in statistics.

After visiting what many other backpackers have described as the most horrifying and moving stop in their travels through South America, there is void in my memories of faces to associate with one of the greater ills of the world. On the rock climbing, hands on adventure through the mine tunnels, I still cracked Zoolander jokes. I honestly recognize that the mines in Potosí employ mining techniques outdated for centuries and that they push a modern-day-slave class of peasants into poverty and early deaths. I visited the site where these horrors occur, but the mines did not leave any more impression than a book on the subject would have left. The hurting faces were never burned into my mind and I guiltily feel that I still don't understand the pains of Potosí mine workers.

Potosí Silver Mines