I mean no disrespect by this title. I will admit I had misgivings about visiting the mines of Potosí, having had several discussions with travellers along my ways about the pros and cons of such turismo: ¿irresponsable o no? In hindsight I don´t think the tour was like the "watching monkeys work" that one backpacker described it. At no point did I feel like I was in a zoo, behind a glass window watching the workers perform. This was their workplace and there was no forgetting this. And what a workplace!! As I struggled to breath in the hot dust filled air, inhaling the same toxic gases, crawling through (and sometimes sliding down) the same narrow tunnels they worked their fucking arses off. And while I lent my hand at unladdening a rubber basket of rubble that contained zinc and lead (the mountain´s main offering to the cooperatives now that the silver was drying up) and I helped to clear a track to make way for one of those iron trolleys from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, so they could dump more ore. I felt like passing out. The hard work that these men and boys do now renders the term meaningless when describing anything I do in the future. I would die down there, taken away from my office and my phone and computer and climate controlled airconditioning.
But the I guess they do die down here. While Pedro, our guide, never gave us numbers, accidents did happen, which was not supprising when the technology many of the miners were using came straight from the nineteenth century. The others, well they contracted silicosis pneumonia: la pulmón negra. Our guide himself worked in the mines for five years from when he was teenager. It was only night study and luck that got him a job in tourism and his stairway out of hell. And they call it as much, with little statues of el diablo, the god of the underground, strewn through the complex of tunnels of Cerro Rico. They offer alcohol, coca leaves, cigarettes to the devil on Fridays, asking for safework and a plentiful bounty from his domain. The devil incidently looks like the whiteman.
Pedro said his father had been working down there for 30 years and his grandfather now bedridden, was dying from his life spent down there. Patting his chest, Pedro said he himself had the black lung. Tellingly there is a street, a very long steet in Potosí lined with lawyers´offices and I am told that the demand from widows to get some recompense from the mine cooperatives is quite high.
But barely any of the miners wear gas masks, too expensive, too hot and hard to breath, Pedro said, preferring to chew huge wads of coca leaf that bulge from their cheeks, working anywhere between eight to twelve hour shifts, pushing trolleys that weight several tonnes, shovelling and digging and exploding dynamite (I´ll get to that). The workmen we were talking with, were bemoaning that a trolley had broken down somewhere in the upper levels and had delayed work. They told us that they could be there until ten or even two AM to finish the job and they would still have to return the next morning at nine to begin it all again. Just another day in their six day week.
What choice did the men of Potosí have? Poorly educated, some who spoke only basic spanish (their first language being quechua), Pedro said, and with Bolivia a very poor country, employment was not plentiful and the mine is Potosí´s primer form of work. Without it the town would likely cease to exist. Tourism too was dropping, our guide saying he only took two groups down a week now, which was nowhere near peak.
The miners liked gringitos, Pedro said, getting their cut of our tour fees plus getting the gifts we brought, soft drink, dynamite, smokes and coca leaves.
The experience is not an easy one. I don´t recommend it for claustrophobes or asthmatics but the guidebooks say as much. I do think it is worth it though, for two hours down there it will be a while before you will complain about your job again.
Oh did I mention dynamite? Yes there were the explosions. Pedro at the beginning of our tour told us at the conclusion of our tour we would get to detonate some TNT. Handing different sticks of dynamite at the miners´market, he told us that in Bolivia you can buy and explode it without a license or even giving a name at point of purchase. Children buy it, certain "social groups" in Sucre buy it, pointing to the current unrest there. He laughed, asking whether any of us were married. Perfect solution! Bring your mother-in-law to Bolivia and buy some TNT. KaBOOM.
He shook my stick of dynamite, explosive powder falling down my vest onto my shirt. I winced. Bolivian miners, he said preferred the Bolivian TNT and not the powdery substandard Peruvian stick that I held. Note to anyone thinking of entering the mines of Cerro Rico to strike it rich; buy Bolivian dynamite.
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