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

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At the end of the cul-de-sac looms a fearsome figure, a six-and-a-half-foot-high clay statue of a seated man coated in chipped red paint. He has a shaggy woolen beard, a cut physique, curved black horns, and a thick, erect phallus. Countless cigarettes spill from his mouth, colorful ribbons drape his shoulders, and empty booze bottles and piles of coca leaf scatter his lap. This is the Tío. Uncle. The devilish landlord of the Cerro Rico.

We sit before the Tío, and the miners speak a few reverent words in Quechua. Then the puro begins its rounds. Before each sip, we stand and sprinkle a few drops onto the statue with our right hands. In no time, we are profoundly drunk. Julio smiles sloppily, gesturing at the stone walls. “This is the world of darkness. This is the world of darkness! And who is living here? The Tío, the devil.”

Every mine in the Cerro has at least one statue of the Tío, a pagan custom that dates back to the conquest. By the light of day, most miners are pious Roman Catholics, but in the dark of the mountain they become devout devil worshippers. At the end of each week, they visit the Tío to make offerings of coca, liquor, and cigarettes. If a miner is feeling especially hard done by, he might bury a llama fetus—or, if local legend is to be believed, an unborn human one—at the Tío’s foot. “If the miners don’t want to have injuries, they must offer presents,” says Julio.

Andean spirituality holds that the rich veins of minerals in the Cerro are the result of sexual relations between the Tío and Pachamama—hence the massive phallus. Every February, during the annual miners’ carnival, a man dressed as the Tío dances down from the mountain and joins the drunken mobs on the streets of Potosí, hunting the souls of earthbound sinners. “If we don’t give, the Tío will be hungry,” says Julio, leaning close, his eyes glazed with booze. “Hungry means he wants to eat something. But what will he eat?”

I shrug.

“Bodies,” he says. “Understand?”

I nod, and Julio leans closer.

“They say the miners are eating the mountain,” he says, flicking a few drops of puro up onto the Tío’s knee before drinking deeply. “But the mountain is eating the men.” For the next hour, inebriated discussions veer from the laughably sexual to the tragic, the men posturing as Casanovas in one breath, then relinquishing their fortunes to the Tío in the next. More miners join us, dusty phantoms at shift’s end. We drink the puro down and start in on the singani. A distant explosion rumbles through the shaft—the dynamite we saw earlier, packed and blown. One of the men, his face tinged blue from silicosis, motions for me to return my hard hat to my head.

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