“I am the rich Potosi, treasure of the world, king of mountains, and the envy of kings.” The alluring dicho [proverb] of the 1547 coat of arms of the city of Potosi, Bolivia captured the essence of what the world thought of Potosi and its great Cerro Rico silver mines at the time. Potosi and the Cerro Rico were a silver El Dorado, a bastion of unfathomable, myth-like riches in the heart of the Spanish Empire. Although it had long been the fervent wish of Spanish conquistadors like Francisco Pizzaro, the mercenary who infamously ordered the death of the Incan King in the public square, to discover such a prize of immense wealth, this honor and glory would instead fall to Diego Gualpa, an indigenous Andean who came upon the mountain of silver in 1545. However, this momentary symbolic victory of the humble Andean prospector over the greedy Spaniard conquistador quickly became a nightmare as hundreds and then thousands of nearby indigenous people were forced into slavery to work in the richest mountain of the “New World”. An ensuing meteoric rise in immigration and slave traffic to the city in the 16th century from all different regions of the world soon rocketed Potosi’s population and wealth to a status that rivaled the great “Old World” cities of Paris and London. There was no questioning that Potosi was the material and ideological center of America throughout the period, as it provided muse for colonial art, supplied silver currency to the world, and stimulated technological development via heightened capital flows into the region. These fantastic new achievements of mercantilism preceded and eventually resulted in a shift toward the more cunning mode of exploitation that now controls the economic possibilities of Potosi’s inhabitants: domination by multinational corporations and international finance.
This past summer, I had the chance to visit Bolivia, the birthplace of my grandparents and home to many of my cousins, where I took the opportunity to visit Potosi and its famed Cerro Rico. Potosi is now a shell of its romanticized colonial portrayal and is one of Bolivia’s poorest cities. Today, it unfortunately seems that many of those who work in the mines of Cerro Rico—which still produce silver some 500 years after the height of the Spanish Empire—are plagued by an immense guilt over the consequences of their toil. One miner, in reference to his work and the meager profit he makes, said that he owes a massive debt to the Pachamama, an indigenous Bolivian conception of “Mother Earth”. The idea of Pachamama, originally an Incan goddess who represented fertility, benevolence, and balance in nature, has thrived and evolved due to the reliance that Quechua and Aymara people have maintained on the land and the strong synthesis between the goddess and the similarly benevolent Virgin Mary introduced by the Spanish. Thus, the Bolivian miner goes to work every day believing that his work is deeply evil and that it pulls him further and further into a deep moral debt to this pure deity he wishes never to disappoint. This torment is significantly different from the more typical laborer’s apathy or even anguish toward their job, as the Bolivian miner’s self-disgust is derived from a visceral, spiritual revulsion to how they are killing the Earth even as they continue to engage in the bloodletting anyway. At least the bloodletting surgeons of the past (like the coal miners of West Virginia today) could find mental comfort and absolution in a pseudoscience which told them that their work was benefiting humanity. Unfortunately, there is no ‘Americans for Prosperity’-style dark money organization in Bolivia to propagandize to the miner that his work is somehow pushing his country towards a new frontier of economic prosperity. Even if this sophistry was prevalent in Bolivia, the Bolivian miner would be a natural skeptic. He has already heard an eerily similar mythology blared out by the Spanish colonizers. He will not be fooled again, and so the mind in the mine of the Cerro Rico is hardly ever at ease.
How do the Bolivian miners get through a day of excruciating mental discomfort, constantly feeling that they are participating in the slow murder of Pachamama? How do they shoulder the burden of furthering a disgusting extractivist colonial tradition which has gone on for generation after generation? How do they grapple with having to pass this burden on to their adolescent sons, many of whom begin toiling in the mines at the age of 13? A visit to Potosi reveals the answer, as it is evident at every kiosko corner: drugs. The mine workers do all they can to alter their doors of perception so that they can hang tough for their family without becoming insane. The drugs (or drug-adjacent substances, depending on your definition of drug) include copious amounts of coca leaves from the Chapare jungle region, poured into small plastic bags from one of the massive sacks slung over the shoulder of a cholita woman; long and thick tobacco cigarettes so the lungs and mind will be filled by tar and smoke rather than silica dust and culpability; and el puro, a beverage composed of 96% alcohol to ease the mind and banish the worrisome thoughts which remind the miners their family is hungry. It is important to note that the coca leaves make the miner more alert and suppress his own hunger, so that he can work harder and longer without break. Additionally, the coca leaves, aside from being integral to indigenous Bolivian tradition, also seem to magically counteract the extremely thin air of the highest city of Bolivian’s altiplano [high plain], which threatens to crush the spirit of work with intense altitude sickness. With these goods in one hand and dynamite from the same kiosko mart in the other, the miner prepares to descend into the depths of the section of the mine that has been designated to him by his worker cooperative.
As the worker travels through the bocamina, the entrance to the mine, he makes sure to offer his gratitude to El Tio, the god of the underworld and one of the thousands of statues that wait at the entrance to every bocamina. The more gratitude shown to El Tio, the more precious metal the miner will discover, whether it be silver, tin, zinc, lead, or even gold. If El Tio receives a miner incredibly well, it is the most ardent hope that the snaking golden veins present on many of the mine’s walls will not be of the “fool’s gold” variety. And if El Tio is feeling heroic, he will lessen the chance of the miner drunkenly stumbling to his death in one of the many pits or getting bludgeoned by rocks thrown by the dynamite explosions that send visible shock waves of dust through the mine corridors. Thus, every El Tio statue is well-taken care of by the miners, who blanket him in coca leaves, give him tobacco in the mouth to smoke, and drench him in el puro alcohol. Each day of work begins with this deal with the devil.
After bartering with the devil one too many times, and amassing an unpayable debt to Pachamama, the Bolivian miner will likely die around the age of 40. Many of these deaths are due to complications from a disease called silicosis, a respiratory ailment similar to black lung which develops in the lungs after many years of inhaling silica dust in the mines. They do not have the proper ventilation equipment to mitigate the silicosis; nor, for that matter, do they have many safety measures of any kind. When visiting or studying Potosi, it slowly becomes obvious that the concrete economic conditions on the ground have made this hellish reality, this life and ideology of coping, one of the only options a Bolivian miner has if he wants to survive. The Bolivian miner cannot simply work harder to fix the shape that he’s in. The development of miner cooperatives appears to be a progressive step toward enabling the miner to keep more of the direct fruits of his labor, the metals he extracts, as the rewards are not redistributed by the cooperative nor are they taken by the state. It also seems that worker cooperatives are helping to limit violent sectionalism within the mining community, a momentous step in the right direction given that the history of mining in the region is mired in violence. These benefits cannot be ignored. However, the hard-to-swallow economic reality is that the worker’s only option is to sell his raw metals to large foreign corporations in the international market economy. Only these entities have the capital to process the metal, and they thus control the price at which any raw earth metal will be sold. The worker hopes that the price dictated to him by these faceless profit-driven entities will allow him to eke out subsistence, but hardly ever more.
This is a very short view into the life of the modern miner at Cerro Rico in Potosi, Bolivia. Perhaps in the future the Bolivian miner will no longer have to plunder the earth he loves so much for the entirety of his work life, all the while resorting to drugs and alcohol to mentally and physically cope with the trauma. Perhaps Potosi’s workers will soon feel solace in letting the historic Cerro Rico transition into a tranquil UNESCO World Heritage site rather than allowing this mystical Andean peak to sink lower every year as its foundations are blown and torn out from underneath it. Perhaps, at the very least, Cerro Rico miners will not only be referred to as “he” because the mining conditions will have improved to a point where the miner will no longer have to insist that “this is no place for a woman.” However, for the time being, it seems that the Bolivian miner is mildly content with working at Cerro Rico to provide the most basic necessities for himself and his family. This is better than nothing and better than serfdom or slavery. He has no delusions of some sort of coming economic revolution, nor does he have the opportunity to imagine such a thing, but Princeton students are imagining this—or at least they should be.
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