The mines of Potosi

On my last day in Potosi, Bolivia, I was healthy enough again to go on a tour of the Cerro Rico mines. So much silver was found in the mines in Potosi, that by the 17th century it was the largest city in the Americas. But since then, as the silver supply has diminished, so has the town. Now tourists visit the mines to see the medieval conditions under which todays' miners still continue to work to extract tin, zinc, lead, etc.

We were dressed up in mining outfits, complete with rubber boots and headlamps with heavy battery packs. On the way to the mines, we stopped by a shop to buy gifts for the miners – dynamite, coca leaves, cigarettes, soft drinks, and water. When we got to the mine, we all piled on top of each other into a small wooden railroad cart, one of the few at the mine with an engine, and had to duck our heads together as we rode into the tunnel entrance to the mine.

The inside of the mine is dark, claustrophobic, and dusty. It consists of over 3km of tunnels and caverns through the mountain rock, and descends five levels deep. Several men were drilling into cavern rock walls with huge hand-held drills, and were making so much dust that it was difficult to breath. Other men were loading the extracted rock into the wooden railroad carts, and then manually pushing the heavily laden carts on the rails up and out of the mine.

We gave the mine workers the gifts we had brought. It is tradition for the mine workers not to eat during their long workday (bad luck?), but instead they chew on coca leaves all day long. They can consume the coca leaves and cigarettes, or they can leave them as an offering to the god of the miners, Tata C'acchu. The dynamite is for the drillers. They set it off in the caverns they are drilling in at the end of their workday just before they leave. The next morning, after the debris has settled, they return again with their drills.

At the end of that day, the miners were drinking pure alcohol as a toast to Tata C'acchu, a tradition called Ch'alla, that they practice every Friday. We ran across a group of drunk miners who stopped to talk to us, and babbled drunkenly for a while about the policies of foreign governments which have resulted in lack of funding for better working conditions for the miners. I don't really know what they were saying since they were speaking in Spanish. I was just amazed that these same drunk men were about to light a dynamite fuse before leaving for the day.

Our tour group waited aways off to experience the dynamite blast from inside the mine. Our tour guide asked our group if we wanted to experience this – and the group said yes?!?! As for myself, being in the small, dark, dusty mine tunnels was difficult enough. Being in the tunnels and waiting for dynamite to explode not too far away from me was miserable. Claustrophobia began to kick in and I just wanted to get out of there. I asked how far we were from the entrance to the mine, hoping I could make my way back alone, but learned we were a few levels down. I had become completely disoriented inside the mine. I couldn't find my way out alone. So, instead I just concentrated on breathing.

Fortunately for me, the dynamite never went off. Perhaps it was a bad fuse – they had to wait until Monday to find out as is was too dangerous to return to the spot of the dynamite for several hours. Though once we were outside again, our tour guide set off another stick of dynamite for us just for our entertainment. Being the joker that he was, he lit the fuse, and then stuck the stick of dynamite in his mouth for fun! After we all took pictures, he still had time to climb the hill and place it at a safe distance before it went off.

One of the most interesting facts of the tour was to learn the wages of the miners. The men loading and moving the carts make between $3 – 5 a day. The drillers make between $5 – 8 a day. The managers of the men make slightly more, but their wages depend on the daily production of the mine. We also learned that these miners, being as their jobs are so dangerous (most only survive up to 20 years in the mines), are among the highest paid workers in the town of Potosi.