Potosí: A Visit to the Deadly Mines

Potosí is something else. The main reason tourists go there is to tour the infamous mine in Cerro Rico the funded Renaissance Spain's wars and courts and at one point made Potosí the most glamorous and populous city in the world. Of course the silver flowing out of the mine was paid for in the lives of the slaves used to mine it (more than 8 million deaths occurred in the mines under Spanish rule, around 300 years) and none of the riches actually stayed with the population who mined it or lived in the area, resulting in the abject poverty despite immense mineral wealth you still see today. I wasn't really sure I wanted to see the mine in light of all this tragedy, but many people I met along the way said it was worth a visit, plus one shouldn't be willfully ignorant of things that are ugly or make them uncomfortable, especially if you benefit from the system. I have silver jewelry and electronics that contain minerals mined in conditions that I would bet are very similar to the current conditions of Potosí. You can't just pretend they appear out of nowhere with no human struggle involved at some point of their creation so it's better to really look at the system. Also, Sarah wanted to see it, so I signed us up for the tour.

The whole tour was once again an example of not being in Kansas anymore. We walked through the refinery first where the metals are extracted from the ore. If any regulatory body from the U.S. saw it, it would be shut down in a minute. Dirt and caustic chemicals everywhere. There are pools of toxic sludge left over from the mining process that are apparently moved to a site outside the city to just sit. There's no attempt at cleaning out the mercury or arsenic or anything from the water, which I'm sure then seeps back into the ground water. The whole place could be classified as a superfund site. That got to me and also the fact that they're still sending out the metals to other countries to be processed.  Five hundred years after colonization and there still isn't the infrastructure to take advantage of the country's own natural resources, they're still being sent abroad and the full economic impact isn't being realized in a country that desperately needs economic development.

Ore waiting to be processed with Cerro Rico in the background

After the refinery, we headed into the mine. It's still a working mine, though by this point in time the miners run a cooperative and work for themselves, which our guide, an ex-miner was very proud of. The place is just like you would imagine a mine in the olden days, or in the movies, which is to say, not at all up to modern safety standards. The tunnels were held up with old wooden or rock supports and there was no ventilation system to speak of in place. Some of the time we were crawling through tunnels that were just small passages blasted out of the rock, or walking through puddles containing who knows what kind of chemicals. Compared to the cavern I had explored in Toro Toro the other day, it felt crawling through a corpse of a mountain. Given these working conditions, it's no surprise that the average life span of a miner is about 60 years, especially given that some of them start working in the mines as early as 12 years old. Officially, you have to be 18 to work in the mines, but there is no oversight and no body cares enough to stop the children from going in and working. The mines are where the jobs are and a salary is seen as more important than an education. And thus the cycle continues.

Exit from one of the mines

Like I spoke about in my Cusco post, the grinding poverty that in this case is driving children to the mines, is so discouraging because theres nothing an individual can do about it. It's a helpless feeling, but again huge systematic change is needed if the mines would ever be brought up to what we in the developed world would consider acceptable safety standards. But more importantly, 500 years on, the mine is still eating people and taking their futures because there isn't the education and other economic opportunities that would need to exist to lure people away from the death trap of the mines. But because it took centuries for the situation to get to the state it's in now, I'm afraid it'll take centuries to fix it all back up again. And thats if there's a competent, non-corrupt leadership in place, not always a guarantee. Not all of South America is pretty.

Offerings left to Tío the Devil/God of the mines 

And with the conclusion of the tour, I'm off again, this time with a travel buddy, my friend Sarah. We're off to Salar de Uyuni to see what supposed to be some of the most beautiful and alien like landscape in the world. So expect some lighter fare for the next blog post!