We purchase soda, alcohol, pure tobacco, coca leaves and a stick of dynamite in a narrow hole of a shop on the road to the Cerro Rico mines.
Handled appropriately, these items guarantee safe travel through the infamous silver mines of Cerro Rico at Potosi, Bolivia. The mines have been operating for 500 years and have killed an estimated 8 million people along the way so we hedge our bets.
Carlos, a 36 year veteran of the mines and our guide, directs us to bite off the tips of 3 small coca leaves and toss the remainder over our shoulders. Then we mix a little alcohol with the soda, spill a bit on the ground and take a sip. With these gifts to the Pachamama, we are now safe to enter the mines – provided, of course, we don’t get crosswise with EL Tio who rules below.
The entrance is a gaping hole with a rickety wooden ladder with cracked and splintered rungs, disappearing into an abyss. Carlos escorts us down the ladder and half-stooped, through a disorienting maze of gray tunnels, where we occasionally encounter miners, cheeks bulging with coca leaves, pushing wheelbarrows of ore which is loaded into buckets hauled to the surface by hand-operated winches. Women work the mines, too; about 800 of them by last count, toiling in traditional Andean bowler hats and wide brightly-colored, flounced-out skirts. Children work in the mines illegally but we don’t see any today.
We pause in a nondescript alcove and Carlos pulls the dynamite from his pocket and places it into a crevice. Laura, Dick’s youngest daughter, lights the fuse before Carlos leads us around a corner into another bewildering series of tunnels and alcoves. We forget about the dynamite until it explodes minutes later, the boom coursing down the tunnel along with a roiling dust cloud.
In a small grotto, a 2.5 foot tall, terra cotta El Tio holds court. El Tio is also known as Tio Jorge, Tio Ramon or just the devil – he isn’t fussy. We place a lighted pure tobacco cigarette in the hole that serves as EL Tio’s mouth then with the same rituals with which we placated the Pachamama, we appease EL Tio, pouring a bit of the alcohol onto the statue before taking a sip and scattering coca leaves.
Thirty-eight workers associations divide the mountain’s mines and each has its own El Tios. We encounter 5 and a devil guinea pig who apparently also has a strong smoking addiction. Streamers and balloons festoon the statues sitting amid coca leaves, beer cans, soda bottles and cigarettes.
We reach the final El Tio, a life-sized, leering, blood-red fiend with an enormous hard-on.
“This one is for the tourists”, Carlos laughs.
Nevertheless, we accommodate this El Tio as we do the non-tourist El Tios, providing him with a cigarette and coca leaves. Laura obligingly pours a bit of alcohol on its swollen penis, ensuring her fertility and our safe passage from below.
Once a year in a great 24 hour celebration involving much drinking and dancing, the miners clean the alters and make them ready for the coming year’s offerings.
Cerro Rico is the mountain that eats men. The wealth of its mines enabled Spain to successfully wage war with other European heavy-weights and the Ottoman Empire. The coins minted from its silver became the world’s first international currency – the famous pieces of eight that facilitated world trade and created immense fortunes. Slave labor produced it all.
The Spanish tried importing African slaves to work the mines but the cold and elevation at over 15,000 ft, killed them off quickly. So the occupiers turned to the indigenous Quechuan population, conscripting men from all over the empire of the High Andes.
Thousands died soon after arrival and a majority of those who did survive developed silicosis, ensuring a slow and miserable death. The underground was perilous but it was even worse for the slaves who worked in the refineries. Those who handled the mercury used to extract silver had a life expectancy of about 3 months.
Some 15,000 descendants of the original slaves mine Cerro Rico today. Ore is dug and worked largely by hand. Modern technology and safety measures are woefully in short supply. Little has changed during the hundreds of years since the mountain’s discovery. Rockfall, toxic gases and silicosis still kill many miners. The big difference is that after five hundred years of excavation, passageways honeycomb the mountain rendering it porous and unstable, so increasingly more dangerous.
A miner’s life expectancy is about 40 years. The local widow’s group says that about 14 new widows are created each month. Small children, some as young as eight, work below ground although it is illegal.
Yet, the mine is life to the men, women and children who have no other options in an impoverished country. The miners proudly do what they must with a necessary dose of fatalism and a pragmatism that lets them worship both a Catholic god and the Pachamama above ground and the devil below.