From the Mines to the Streets: A Bolivian Activist’s Life

Chapter 2. Moving to the Mines

27 Chapter 2 Moving to the Mines History of Mining Bolivia has always been shaped by the promise, the greed, and the agony that drive mining. Even before the Inka invasion in the fifteenth century, mining was important locally, but once the Inka were firmly in control, Bolivia’s silver regularly traveled north by llama train to decorate Cuzco’s ornate Temple of the Sun. The mine the Spanish discovered at Potosí in 1545 became the richest silver mine in history. The settlement quickly grew larger than either Paris or London, packed by the turn of the seventeenth century with some forty thousand fortuneseekers from all over Europe. Its Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), known as Sumaj Orcko (Beautiful Mountain) by the Inka, provided more than half of world production of silver and gold for over a hundred years. This wealth paid off debts the Spanish crown owed to northern European bankers, partially fueling Europe’s industrial revolution and transition to capitalism (Klein 2003). Mining continued to dominate much of Bolivian economic and political life during the Republic. In the late nineteenth century tin production soared in northern mines, including Siglo XX–Catavi, and proved strategic for the nineteenthcentury industrial expansion of both Europe and the United States. Demand spiked as technological advances expanded the use of tin to preserve foodstuffs precisely when Europe’s principal source of tin in Cornwall, England, was exhausted. By the early 1900s, three tin mining firms, Patiño, Hochschild, and Aramayo, collectively known as the Tin Barons, consolidated an almost absolute control over Bolivia’s export economy and political apparatus. Between 1896 and 1917 tin quadrupled in price, driven in part by the First World War, when tinned food permitted soldiers to suffer in trenches almost indefinitely. The Tin Barons’ fortunes mushroomed. Simón Iturri Patiño, who rose from humble indigenous origins to become one of the world’s richest men, owned his most important mine at Siglo XX (Twentieth Century), the site of much of Félix’s story. During its first thirty years Llallagua–Siglo XX. Prepared by Eric Fox. 29 this mine alone produced 6 percent of the world’s tin from among the richest veins ever discovered, some as wide as ten feet (Klein 2003). By the end of the 1920s, Siglo XX was riddled with over ninety miles of tunnels, and exploration expanded at a feverish pace. Production plummeted during the 1930s global depression, and miners were laid off by the thousands. But just as world tin prices recuperated, the mines were hit with a labor shortage precipitated by Bolivia’s Chaco War with Paraguay. Women were recruited to work underground for the first time. Companies had little choice but to hire married workers, which they had previously resisted so as to avoid providing family housing and services (Nash 1992). By 1950, the mining complex of Siglo XX–Catavi and nearby Llallagua comprised Bolivia’s seventh-largest urban area. Llallagua, a Quechua word, means “the spirit that makes potato harvests abundant,” for prior to mining, the potato was the staple that underpinned the local economy. More and more of the miners who flocked to Siglo XX were like Félix’s father— campesinos from the windswept altiplano in northern Potosí near the mines, rather than those who, in previous generations, came from the Cochabamba valley. The position of miner was increasingly handed down from father to son, a strategy that helped families retain their urban housing. The Family Moves After the 1952 revolution,previously employed mine workers were allowed to return to the jobs they had lost. As my siblings and I were growing up quickly, our parents worried about our education. But my father was reluctant to return to the mine because the work had been so miserable and difficult. He kept asking my mother,“Do you really want me to die in that mine?” But my mother insisted,“If you won’t go, I’m going anyway with my son.I’ll work there and put him in school.”Just like all campesinos, my father believed that if we left our land, we would never return, and this meant we would lose it.And for a campesino, land is everything. They argued for some time. It was very clear that because I was a boy, it was more important to educate me than my sisters, who were thirteen and fifteen at the time.This discrimination...