The treasure of the Cerro Rico

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 1997 by Pascale Absi

The history of the Bolivian city of Potosi began in 1545 when the Spanish began mining silver deposits in a mountain which became known as the Cerro Rico. Within a few years a rich settlement studded with opulent baroque churches, theatres and the mansions of the colonial bourgeoisie had grown up at the foot of this 4,000-metre-high peak, and soon Potosi had a bigger population than that of London, Paris or Amsterdam. Fabulous fiestas were organized by the wealthy mine-owners. It is said that a silver bridge stretching from Potosi to Madrid could have been built with the ore extracted from the mountain by the Indians during the colonial period.

But first and foremost Potosi was a mining camp whose fortunes were closely linked to its veins of ore and to the vicissitudes of international markets. After a period of great wealth, decline set in, and in the mid-1980s plummeting prices brought an end to the tin cycle that had begun at the turn of the century. The state-run mines closed, and Potosi was plunged deep in crisis.

Today it is the capital of the poorest department in the Bolivian Andes. Of its 120,000 or so inhabitants, more than 7,000 miners - men, women and children - organized in co-operatives still work night and day deep within the mountain. Mining methods have barely changed since colonial times, and because of the combined effect of accidents, silicosis, poor diet and lack of medical care, the average life expectancy of workers is no more than fifty.

GIVE THAT YOU MAY RECEIVE

One August day in 1996 more than a hundred women from Potosi's mining co-operatives decided to occupy the summit of Cerro Rico to protest against their working conditions and the policy of privatizing ore deposits for the benefit of multinational companies. Their action also had a cultural aim: to protect the Cerro Rico from the intrusion of the modern technologies used by the big companies that would threaten its geological stability. One side of the summit had already caved in, partly destroying the mountain's characteristic conical shape.

The city's entire population rallied behind the mining women, whose struggle is far more than a mere defence of Potosi as a historic symbol. For everyone, miners and farmers alike, the Cerro Rico is the incarnation of Pachamama, an Andean divinity associated with the earth's fertility.

The mine workers, who belong to the region's indigenous, Quechua-speaking communities, still have plots of land in the places from which they came. They often return to the countryside to do farm work, attend festivals, or assume some kind of political office. Townsfolk and miners they may be, but they are not cut off from the rural world. The mining culture has been built around a conception of the world rooted in rural life: you must give in order to receive; people are not the rulers of the world, but must negotiate continually with the forces of nature in order to gain access to its wealth. The Potosi miners believe that the Spirit of the mountain is the real owner of the mineral deposits that people are allowed to mine (but only in exchange for offerings).

THE GODS OF THE MOUNTAIN

The present equilibrium between the workers and their mountain is the culmination of a long process of taming the vital forces of the Cerro, which was intact in 1545 when the Spanish discovered the existence of fabulous deposits of silver within it. The Cerro Rico is a sacred mountain on whose summit stands a place of worship. The miners say that it has exacted a toll of human lives in exchange for being exploited. The earliest sacrifice was made by the Indians who came to Potosi to do compulsory service for the Spanish crown and died in their thousands in the bowels of the mountain. It is their blood, so it is said, that gives the mountain its singular red colour. Nowadays, sated at long last, the Cerro Rico lets people live in exchange for more modest offerings.

The Europeans appropriated the souls of the indigenous population as well as the riches of South America. The Spanish soon replaced the divinity of the mountain by the Madonna de la Candelaria (Our Lady of Candlemas). They built chapels along the mountain roads, and placed a cross on the summit. Pagan elements that could not be assimilated by the Catholic missionaries (ancestor worship, for example) were considered to be devil-worship and condemned.

Today the miners divide their loyalties between two divinities, Pachamama and Tio. Pachamama is associated with the mountain and is personified at the entrance to each mine by an effigy of the Virgin Mary, whose protection the miners solicit. She is also the wife of Tio, the god of mine shafts and the lord of mining and mineral deposits.

Represented by mud statuettes placed here and there along the mine galleries, Tio has inherited horns, hooves, forked tail and the nickname diablo from the European image of the devil. Yet the moral idea of the devil and the Manichean division into good and evil propounded by the Catholic Church have never been totally integrated into Andean concepts of the vital forces of Nature. The devil of the mine punishes workers who fail to make offerings to him not because he is evil but because he is hungry. He is held responsible for most of the mortal accidents due to roof-falls or suffocation - on these occasions he is said to have eaten his victims. Propitiatory rites therefore consist largely of feeding the mine divinities in order to solicit their wealth and win protection from their gargantuan appetites. Every Friday miners gather around one of Tio's statuettes, pour a spot of alcohol at his feet, lay a few coca leaves on his outstretched hands and place a lighted cigarette between his lips. During the dry season, the miners improve his rations by sacrificing llamas.