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

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I watch the men perform their delicate work by the light of their headlamps. One of them sieves a pinkish sand from the rice sacks while his partner packs the resulting powder into paper tubes. These cartridges of explosive ammonium nitrate will be set alongside the dynamite. Two other miners wrestle with coils of safety fuse, snipping off an arm’s length at a time and affixing a blasting cap to one end. Each flick of their wrists has the potential to usher us all to oblivion. The blasting caps are live; if one falls and contacts stone just so, we’ll be blown to smithereens.

This doesn’t stop the boozing. On the contrary, now that we’ve arrived, the men are working one-handed, fuses and caps in one hand, bottles in the other. Before each sip, they sprinkle a few drops of liquor on the ground as an offering to Pachamama. Finally, the booze makes its way to me. I grab it with my left hand, and Julio explodes. “Right hand!” he yells, alerting me to a less tangible danger. Andean superstition holds that it is very bad luck to drink alcohol with the left hand.

A new anxiety soon sets in. As I strip the stems of coca leaves with my teeth and chew the energizing greens, I stare at the man sifting ammonium nitrate. His face has a strange smoothness to it, a fleshiness in the cheeks. Then it hits me: This miner is not a man. He is a boy, no older than 12.

UNICEF estimates that 10 percent of all miners in Bolivia are children. They are drawn to the dark from across the country and are often their families’ sole breadwinners. This boy’s father died a few months ago, so he quit school and moved to Potosí with his mother and two sisters to find work.

The air becomes unnervingly gray; the dust from the drilling has found us. As we take our leave, I realize that the two youngest miners aren’t wearing masks. “When you are young, you think you are king of the world,” says Julio. “You don’t think of the future.” Even if this little boy becomes a relatively well paid driller, I realize, he’ll probably be dead by the time he’s 22.

We emerge from the depths of level four, half drunk and shaking with exhaustion. We pass toppled trolleys, strewn dust masks, black sacks heavy with ore, men with the gleam of the berserk in their eyes. The miners fall in line behind us, drawn by the promise of more puro and, I soon learn, a tremendous sense of duty. At the end of a shift on a Friday afternoon, the climb to level one of La Negra has the air of a pilgrimage.

I begin to recognize our surroundings: the parallel shimmer of the trolley tracks, the swamp at my feet. But before we reach the respite of the mine’s mouth, Julio leads us down a short side shaft, the one I’d peered down six hours earlier.

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