June 2015. I am standing on the roof of a church, looking over Potosi, a colorful city situated in the heart of Bolivia at 4090m above sea level. It was once the richest city in the world, but today serves as a mere reminder of the colonial era, throughout which it was the location of the Spanish colonial mint. The mountain in the back is known as Cerro Rico, the Rich Mountain, since it contained large amounts of rare metals like silver. According to locals, in 1545, a native was searching for one of his lost llamas on the Cerro Rico. As night set, he stopped, set up camp, and lit a fire. The latter illuminated the rocks and the farmer saw the reflection of silver from the rocks in the mountain. Since then, the mine has taken the lives of two to eight million people. This is the story of a few hours within the Potosi mine, and a tribute to the women and men that still work in it.
I met Oscar in town, the night before this photo was taken. He offered to take me into the mine to meet some of his friends the next day, in counterpart of a donation to the miners and the association. Oscar had been a miner since the age of 16 and had been lucky to make enough money to retire and open his own business, far from the mines where life expectancy is often lower than 45 years old (due to accidents and chronic illnesses from the dust particles). According to him, he is one of the few that managed to make enough to change career path.
Our first stop was a factory in which the ore is chemically treated to separate the metals. Large metal wheels turn quickly in a seemingly uncontrollable dance, there are no safety mechanisms and the wooden floor is far from stable.
The fumes from the chemicals stung my throat, yet no one here had a gas mask. I stayed a full 5 minutes inside the factory and came out feeling nauseous, can you imagine working here on a daily basis?
We took the bus to about half-way along up the Cerro Rico, with other miners who where chewing on coca leaves, the herbe used to make cocain, but whose properties help alleviate the lack of oxygen at the high altitude and within the mine.
This is the view from the entrance of the mine we went through, probably far different from what the Spanish saw in mi-1500s. Cerro Rico was immediately exploited and the mining town became one of the largest in the world. It is said to have produced about 50,000 tons of silver since that time, but today, the mountain is running out of ore. Silver is scares and working conditions still primitive. The lives of the miners are in constant danger.
15,000 miners work in Cerro Rico, 14 miners die per month: 10 of accidents, 4 of illness. There is no electric machinery here, everything is done by man power: the miners use lighters to light their dynamite, use hammers to break the rock, and walk in and out of the mines on foot. The youngest (on this picture the youngest is 11 years old) workers push carts along the tracks in the mine. You can see they use piece of cloth in front of their mouth as an air filter. They work for 9 hour shifts and are paid 50 bolivianos (9$) per day.
After waiting for a calmer moment in the dance of incoming and outgoing carts, Oscar and I ran in.
As we made our way along the main tunnels you could see smaller entrances into the rock. Oscar engulfed in one on the right, and climbed vertically for some 25m to one of his friends. The wooden beams on the picture have to be put every time the miners go further along their tunnel, to prevent the mine from collapsing. But that is not cutting it: the mine is slowly collapsing. The mine is separated into cooperative that owns part of the mine. To gain access the cooperative, like Oscars and his friend, miners pay 2000 bolivianos, about 300$ at the time. The miner can opt to buy part of the cooperatives' area and obtain exclusive access to it. In exchange of this right, they must pay a 12-35% fee to the cooperative. A single miner is expected to output 120 kilograms of ore per week and the prices they get for each of these is highly volatile and subject to chance, depending on the area you where given by the cooperative.
After a few coca leaves and some 96% alcohol, Oscar and I went back down and continued further into the mine. After a few more minutes of walking, we got to this "bridge". Although no longer used, this timber over a 70m precipice, known as Puente de la Muerte (Bride of death), was once crossed by workers every day to part of the mine that was found to be plentiful.
Since the rock is far from homogeneous and most of the resources depleted, some workers have more revenue and can purchase better equipment. In this picture, the miner has a gas mask to filter out the particulate matter floating in the air. Oscar and I came here to see two workers, family friends he told me. They where finishing drilling the holes for thirteen sticks of dynamite. After the wholes are dug, they place a dynamite stick in the hole and use a long metal stick to push it in and pack it tightly.
Once the dynamite is packed tightly, the last step is to light it up using a lighter. I stood there, feeling a bit uneasy, as the miner in the picture lit all dynamite sticks.
After lighting the 13th stick, he turned around and said: "ahora corremos" (now we run), and we ran through the tunnel to a safer area. Suddenly the miners stopped and we waited for the dynamite to blow up. We heard eleven blows, but the last two seemed to have gone off. It was time to go home for these guys, to wait for the dust to settle and to make sure the two sticks left were not going to explode when they went back. It was also time for me to get out, after a four hour trip (which felt like an eternity) inside the mine. This experience was humbling, but also scary. The discrepancy between high-tech western mines and the mine at Cerro Rico is disheartening. Rio Tinto, the third largest mining company in the world by revenue, has been experimenting with driverless trucks for the past 10 years. On the opposite side of the spectrum are the men and women of Potosi, who barely have enough money to buy proper safety equipment.