The Blaus - South America and Europe

21 del Marzo - Potosi, Bolivia

There is no way to tell the history of Bolivia, and of all Latin America, without talking about Potosi. Potosi is situated at the base of Cerro Rico (rich mountain), at about 12,000 feet, making it the highest city of its size in the world. This is where the Spanish, when they began to colonize South America, capitalized on a mountain of silver. From the 16th century to the mid 18th century, the Spanish imperialists exported over 2 billion ounces of silver. This became the first international money in the world (the Real), which made Spain the most powerful country in the world at the time. The wealth that they extracted from Cerro Rico is what financed the Spanish Armada, as well as the rest of Spanish imperialism. The native Indians who lived here got nothing, of course, except to be forced into slave labor extracting the silver from the mines.

Potosi was the richest city in the world, and in 1620 was larger than Paris, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Since all the money was created here, all the best goods from China, India, the Spice Islands, and across the world were imported and bought with Potosi silver coins. The wealthiest viceroyalty lived here, and the town still has remnants of those glory days. In Potosi you marvel at the enormous churches with incredibly intricate stone carvings on their facades, narrow streets on the hills stacked with old theatres and other colonial style buildings. In Spain to this day they say ¨Es un Potosi¨ to describe something incredibly rich.

On our first afternoon here we adjusted to the altitude, and walked around the streets. It is a bustling town, with tons of teenagers and old women in their traditional garb rubbing elbows in the streets. Cerro Rico is still being mined for zinc, lead, silver and tin, so a good portion of the town´s inhabitants are still miners, and the second largest profession seems to be lawyers (abogados) who help with miner disputes over ownership of territory in the mountain. We have never seen so many law offices anywhere in our lives. George Bush would be very dissapointed. There are also lots of cafes and restaurants, making it quite a nice place to be.

Our second day in Potosi we booked a tour to go into the mines of Cerro Rico. We got into a van and were provided with protective gear for our feet and rubber pants and jackets to wear over our clothes so they would not get dirty, as well as helmets and head lamps. We were not sure what to expect, but what we saw was the highlight and the low point of our trip so far. On our way to the mountain, we stopped at the miner part of town to buy the miners gifts at the market, namely dynamite, coca leaves, and soft drinks. We headed up to one of the mines with our gifts, there are over 500 mines in the mountain, but only about 150 are active.

With all our gear on, we started into the tunnels of the mine. After about 1 minute it was totally black and cold and the dirt floor turned into a wet and sludgy mud. We walked along what looks like small train tracks, where the miners bring their days work of minerals out of the mine by the ton on trolleys. Two men push one ton of rocks through the innards of the mountain on these trolleys at least twice a day. When we descended to the second and third levels down inside the mine, it became very hot and stuffy. We could smell and taste the arsenic and asbestos that forms naturally and is pervasive in the mines. Our throats burned with every breath. Since we were up inside the mountain, it was more like 14,000 feet, so walking and crawling through the hot, stuffy mines at that elevation is not easy. As we would pass different miners working, we would give them our gifts, some coca leaves, something to drink, and sometimes dynamite. We met one old miner named Ciento Seisciento (100 - 600). All the miners have nicknames, and his is Ciento Seisciento because like most miners he is Indian, and speaks Quechua and not Spanish, and he had trouble saying 160 in Spanish, instead he would say 100 - 600, hence the nickname.

Our tour guide was Pedro Blanco, an ex-miner himself. He worked in the mines from age 13 to 18, but was lucky enough to get a different job as a tour guide as his back was hurt from bending over in a small section of the mine to transport the minerals all day long. The mine shafts are not tall, so every step you take while hunched over. He told us many stories about working in the mines, and how he had to do one year of military service at age 18, which he likened to a vacation.

We then slid down a shaft about 30 meters deep to another part of the mine where they were still excavating. We came across a guy who was working by himself, chiseling a hole in the rocks above his head to place dynamite in. He was wearing only jeans, and was completely dripping with sweat as he hit his chisel with a hammer time after time after time. It takes 4 hours of constant work to create one hole big enough for one stick of dynamite. It was very sad to see someone working that hard for such a little payoff (average salary is 400 Bolivianos a month, or $50 US). He had 5 kids to feed, and had 5 children die after birth, no doubt due to the toxins in his blood from the arsenic and asbestos.

From there we climbed through another small shaft to a spot where we actually worked with the miners. Well, Jen and Billy worked, the rest of the tourists couldn´t be bothered to do much of anything to help out. We shoveled rocks into a wheelbarrel, and then took it down the tunnel and dumped it in a pile to be put into the trolleys. This is where we saw two kids, no more than 14 years old, and one woman working, sweating, chewing coca leaves, and we could tell that they had aged beyond their years because of such hard labor. After 4 loads of rocks, we were totally dripping with sweat, having trouble breathing, and feeling light headed. We both could not imagine what it would be like to spend 10 hours a day doing that for a living.

That was the end of the tour, so we made our way up the small shafts and out of the mines, where we could breath easily again and cool down in the fresh air. On our way out, both of our head lamps ran out of battery power, so we were in complete darkness in a very small and steep spot for a few minutes and had to yell for Pedro Blanco to come back and guide us out. That was a bit scary. It was nothing but incredibly sad that after 500 years in Cerro Rico, nothing has changed. The poor indigenous people still work the mines the same way they did in Colonial times, and the rich foreign companies reap the profits. It was also amazing to experience first hand such an important part of history. As Pedro Blanco said, without the silver from Potosi, there would have been no industrial revolution in Europe, and it might have been in Bolivia.

The next day we toured the Museo de la Casa de Moneda which is the mint where the Spanish viceroyalty turned the silver into coins. It was another impressive place full of 17th century artwork and all the Spanish riches. We learned a lot about the process, and saw coins with date stamps of 1594. I´m sure this would be the coin collectors Mecca.

For us Potosi is the most historically significant place we have been on this trip, and makes us realize how lucky we are to have been born in the States. The materials that make our industries move forward are often taken from places like Potosi for next to nothing. What we found most amazing is how the Bolivians that we have talked to don´t seem to feel very much resentment about having their natural resources taken by foreign countries. They are almost proud of their linkage to the Spanish glory days in colonial times. The cover of the Sports section on the Potosi paper always features what happened in the Spanish Soccer Leagues the night before. People here are nice and very welcoming, but we can´t help but feel embarrassed to be from one of the places that exploits and bans (in the case of coca where the US withholds humanitarian aid from Bolivia unless the Bolivian government agrees to destroy their coca crops) their natural resources at the expense of their people. This is a place that we will never forget.

posted by The Blaus @ 7:04 PM