The Mountain That Eats Men: A descent into Bolivia’s dark heart

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

“Not yet,” says Julio, reading my mind as he disappears into the darkness. “We must go deep before we visit the devil.”

Last week, shortly after Jason and I arrived in La Paz, the city’s streets erupted in demonstrations. Labor strikes, riots, and roadblocks swept through many of Bolivia’s eastern departments, the unrest reaching its climax when at least three protesters were killed in the city of Sucre. La Razón, the most widely read newspaper in a country all too familiar with strife, called special attention to these events by dubbing the spreading crisis Black November, a reference to the violence of Black October in 2003, when 67 people, most of them indigenous, were killed in El Alto in confrontations with the army.

At the end of 2005, in a profound break with history, Bolivia elected its first fully indigenous president. Evo Morales is an Aymara Indian, a former bricklayer, a trumpet player, a cocalero (a coca leaf grower), and a darling of the radical left. He won an absolute majority, securing over half the vote, and immediately set to work on a mandate to “refound” the Bolivian Republic after years of corrupt neoliberal leadership.

Morales—along with his political hero, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela—fast became a figurehead of the populist New Left wave sweeping across a politically reinvigorated South America. His stated goal is to empower the nation’s historically oppressed Indian majority. His platform promised to redistribute land to poor campesinos, assist coca growers in their struggle against a mendacious war on drugs, reject U.S.-backed free trade policies, nationalize Bolivia’s natural gas industry (which he did in 2006), and convoke a constit­uent assembly to rewrite Bolivia’s constitution.

It was this promise of a new constitution—approved in January 2009 and the country’s 17th in under two centuries—that led to the violence in La Paz.

The morning after the killings in Sucre, Jason and I saw hundreds of Aymaran women wearing long black braids, pleated pollera skirts, and black bowler hats scurrying down Avenida 16 de Julio toward the Plaza del Estudiante in La Paz. Firecracker blasts echoed off the walls of the surrounding Choqueyapu canyon, and we felt the will of Bolivia stir. As thousands of miners and their campesino brethren marched up Avenida Villazon to join the women—arms linked, chanting slogans of solidarity, the imposing visage of Mount Illimani behind them—we realized that the mines of the Cerro Rico might have something extremely pressing to say about the country and its perpetually tenuous future. The next night, we boarded an overnight bus bound for Potosí.

“Now pay attention,” says Julio. “we are late, so I explain just once.” We crouch, wheezing and coughing and spitting up phlegm, on the lip of a vertical shaft. An antique ladder of rotting wood drops down into the three-foot-wide hole, as does a manual winch cable.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print