Potosi (and mining)
I was watching this recent General Electric advert the other day, and couldn’t help but be reminded of its perversity when I think of the Springhill mining disasters and stories like these:
I Am Rich Potosi : The Mountain That Eats Men by Stephen Ferry
“My aim was to focus on a particular place, and document the long-term effects of the conquest on the native people there. But why choose Potosi, a forgotten mining town in the barren highlands of Bolivia, as emblematic of the whole era? The lust for treasure which motivated the Spanish was sated in 1545, when they first cut into the Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain) of Potosi. For over two hundred years, the mountain yielded more than half the world’s production of silver. This flow of wealth financed Spain’s empire, influenced the course of European economic development, and bolstered Europe’s trade relations with China. During the era of the Spanish Empire, the Cerro Rico became world famous as a cornucopia of riches, the subject of chronicles, poems and paintings that celebrated its grandeur and generosity. At the same time, the mining project in Potosi provoked one of the worst demographic disasters in history…
Under the mita, some three million Quechua Indians were compelled to work in the mines. Hundreds of thousands died there, of disease, from accidents, and at the brutal hand of their masters. Peasants fled as best they could, abandoning the land, but many were forced into reducciones, concentration areas where they could be counted and conscripted. Although some historians differ over the absolute numbers, most agree that, the course of the mita (1575-1825), the native population of the Andes declined by eighty percent…
Life in Potosi has the feel of a cruel myth. The miners are compelled to repeat the past, working themselves to death in the same mountain that was the tomb of their ancestors…
Ferry’s photo journal is compassionate and personal, with (sadly) too many stories that remind me of my own experiences growing up and studying in the Andes. Anthropologist June Nash has also written extensively on the lives of Bolivian miners. See notes on We Eat the Mines and the Mines Eat Us: Dependency and Exploitation in Bolivian Tin Mines and a review of I Spent My Life in the Mines: The Story of Juan Rojas, Bolivian Tin Miner.
In Memory of Fire Eduardo Galeano writes:
1546 : Potosi
Fifty Indians killed for refusing to work in the excavations. Less than a year since the first vein appeared, and already the slopes of the mountain have been stained with human blood… Before the conquest, in the days of the Inca Huaina Capac, when the flint pick bit into the mountain’s veins of silver, a frightful roar shook the world. Then the voice of the mountain said to the Indians: ‘This wealth has other owners.’
1670 : Lima
‘Mourn for us,’ the Indians of the Potosi mines had said to him wordlessly. And last year Count Lemos, viceroy of Peru, wrote to the King of Spain: There is no people in the world so exhausted. I unburden my conscience to inform Your Majesty with due clarity: It is not silver that is brought to Spain, but the blood and sweat of Indians.
The viceroy has seen the mountain that eats men. From the villages Indians are brought in strung together with iron collars, and the more the mountain swallows, the more its hunger grows. The villages are being emptied of men.
After this report to the king, Count Lemos bans week-long work periods in the asphyxiating tunnels. Beatings of drums, proclamations in the streets: In the future, the viceroy orders, Indians will work from from sunrise to sunset, because they are not slaves to spend the night in the mines.
No one pays any attention.
And now, in his austere palace in Lima, he receives a reply from the Council of the Indies in Madrid. The council declines to supress forced labour in the silver and mercury mines.
1719 : Potosi
Potosi persists in its French styles, clothing, and customs reproved by God, shameful to sex, offensive to nature and a scandal to civic and political decency. The city celebrates the Shrovetide carnival as usual, binge and uproar very contrary to honesty; and when six lovely damsels proceed to dance in the nude, the plague strikes. Potosi suffers a thousand ills and deaths. God is merciless with the Indians, who shed rivers of blood to pay for the city’s sins…
1825 : Potosi
The Spanish colonies that are born to independent life walk bent over. From the first day they drag a heavy stone hung from the neck, a stone that gows and overwhelms. The English debt, born of Britain’s support in arms and soldiers, is mutliplied by the grace of userers and merchants…
I abhor the debts more than the Spaniards, writes Bolivar to the Colombian general Santander, and tells him that to pay those debts he has sold the Potosi mines to the English for two and a half million pesos… The Rich Mountain of Potosi, down in the world, now belongs to a London firm, the phantom Potosi, La Paz, and Peruvian Mining Association…
Mary, Mother Earth
In churches hereabouts it is common to see the Virgin crowned with feathers or protected by parasols, like an Inca princess, and God the Father in the shape of a sun amid monkeys holding up columns and moldings adorned with tropical fruits, fish and birds.
An unsigned canvas shows the Virgin Mary in the silver mountain of Potosi, between the sun and the moon. On one side is the pope of Rome, on the other the king of Spain. Mary, however, is not on the mountain but inside it; she is the mountain, a mountain with a woman’s face and outstretched hands, Mary-mountain, Mary-stone, fertilized by God as the sun fertilizes the land…