The Mines of Potosi

From it's current appearance, you'd never know that the town of Potosí was once, 400 years ago, the third largest city in the world, after London and Shanghai. As I wandered through the winding streets in a 4,070-meter-altitude-induced daze, passing ornate churches and colonial houses painted pink, yellow and blue, I could hardly believe that they had once been paved with pure silver.

And looming above it all is was the famous Cerro Rico of Potosí. I wondered if it had ever actually looked like a mountain because today it seems more like a sad pile of exploited earth. It almost seems fitting that the origin of our entire capitalist system would be something so ugly.
During the colonial era, the Spanish extracted millions of tons of silver from the mines of Potosí, using the labor of millions of indigenous and African slaves. But the majority of the wealth didn't stay in Spain, but rather was used to pay their enormous debts to German, Swiss and English banks. And that money was then used to finance the development of manufacturing and business in Europe, right up to the industrial revolution. I've been reading about this whole process in Eduardo Galeano's incredible book, "The Open Veins of Latin America." It's incredible to think that not only did the wealth exploited from Bolivia actually make Europe's industrial development possible, but also ever since Bolivia (and many countries like it) has had to try to develop in a world already inundated with the products of those mature European industries. And now we tell them that the only way to economic development is to throw down all their barriers to the global market? What a sad joke. A powerful example of the reality that Bolivia is living today is the mines of Potosí where miners still toil to extract zinc, lead, tin, and a little silver. I had the incredible (and terrifying) opportunity to enter into those mines on Tuesday and see the conditions that 25,000 people still work under. As we descended into the tunnels, chomping on coca to fend off altitude sickness, we stopped to visit the statue of the Tío of the Mines, a Devil-like character that protects the miners in his underground world. Apparently worshipping a devil-like character was also one of the miners' ways of protesting the hypocritical Catholic church's complicity in their exploitation (evident from the bizarre quantity of gaudy churches in the relatively small town).
We watched workers hacking away with shovels and picks and pushing huge carts of earth through water-filled tunnels barely large enough to stand. The hours they work are insane, as each worker only earns money based on the amount of the mineral he extracts (unless he works for the government, but that's a different story). Chewing on coca leaves and a little Bolivian whisky (basically rubbing alcohol) every once in a while make all of this bearable apparently, at least until they retire when they've lost half their lung capacity to silicosis. The average Potosí miner's life expectancy is 45 years. (Buying coca, cigarrettes, alcohol, and dynamite for gifts for miners we met in the tunnels.)

For some reason I really loved the town of Potosí, despite the tragic history and the harrowing reality that the miners are still living. Maybe it was the musician friends we met or the bittersweet vitality of the people who congregate and socialize in the streets and plazas at night. It's a place and a history that I will never forget.

With some of the SIT group before we entered the mines.