November 22, 2009
UTNE READER

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

(Page 8 of 8)

May-June 2009
by Andrew Westoll, from the Walrus 
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Dig down to the heart of Bolivian rebellion, and you will find a trove of natural resources. Whether it’s silver, gold, zinc, copper, water, land, gas, or tin, it is the wealth beneath the soil, and sometimes the soil itself, that has been the protagonist here ever since the Spanish arrived. The mines of Potosí (silver), the Bolivian Revolution in 1952 (land and tin), the Cochabamba water war of 2000 (municipal water), the deadly gas war of 2003 (natural gas)—control over resources, the money and power that arises from their extraction, has been the real social and political organizing force here ever since Huallpa lit his feeble campfire.

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Bolivia’s fractured history lies beyond the grasp of a single journey into one infamous mountain. But sitting deep inside the Cerro Rico, where the cleaving of Bolivia and the pillaging of a continent began, it is hard not to feel as though I’m in a living museum, where past and present are indistinguishable, and the future threatens to join them in the dark.

 

Andrew Westoll (right) is the author of The Riverbones, a travel memoir set deep inside the jungles of Suriname. He lives in Toronto and online at www.andrewwestoll.com. Jason Rothe is a multimedia journalist whose work has appeared in the Walrus, Explore, and the Globe and Mail. He can be found online at www.jasonrothe.com. This essay is an adapted excerpt from the Walrus(Jan.-Feb. 2009), a Canadian general interest magazine with international scope and a 2009 Utne Independent Press Award nominee for best writing; www.walrus magazine.com.

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