Road block, mining

Today we hitched a ride with our new friends Laura and Matt, a brother and sister pair from Denver who are driving from Chile through Argentina and north all the way back to Denver.

Matt and Laura drove us to Oruro, from where we will take a train to the Salar de Uyuni. It was a nice change of pace, and somehow a different way of life, to ride in a private car with friends. A few hours down the road we were very glad to be in a private car rather than a bus, as we ran into a bloqueo, or road block.

A group of campesinos (peasants) had blocked the highway, and trucks and buses were lined up in both directions. This is a common form of protest here, although in this case I have no idea what the protest was about. We approached the road block cautiously, and one of the campesinos told us that the road block does not target tourists, and that there is a special road for tourists.

We followed another private car on this "special road" which consisted of a dirt trail through gullies and fording a small stream. The other car was having some trouble with the terrain, and we pushed them a couple of times when they got stuck. They were tourists from Peru. We were lucky to have had the opportunity to push them because soon we encountered a small group of men blocking the dirt road with rocks and poles. Just as we were discussing whether we should try to talk our way through this or pretend we don´t speak Spanish, the Peruvian tourists negotiated our passage through for a cost of 20 Bolivianos, or U.S. $2.26. The money was ostensibly so that the protesters could buy some coca leaves to chew.

Only as we were driving through did the protesters realize that we were gringos. We wondered if we would have paid a lot more if that had been apparent from the beginning. We´ve been told that if you try to pass without permission, the protestors will break the windows of your car, or worse.

Twenty minutes later, and after pushing the Peruvians one more time, we were back on the highway to Oruro. If we had been on a bus, we would still be sitting at the road block.

In Oruro we said goodbye to Laura and Matt, and we visited a mining museum. The mine tunnel, strangely, starts in the back of a church. We walked through the church and down into the tunnel, where we saw lots of mining equipment and two statues of "El Tío," the god of the underground -- some people call him a devil -- and protector of miners. The Bolivian family who toured the mine shaft with us put a lit cigarette in El Tío´s mouth, adding to the many offerings of tobacco, coca and alcohol that surrounded El Tío. The section of the mine that we visted has been closed for 80 years, but other sections of the mine are still in operation.

Many travelers visit the working mines in Potosí, another Bolivian mining town. The women and men and children who work in Potosí´s cooperative mines work under the most primitive conditions and normally die of silicosis pneumonia within ten to fifteen years of entering the mines.

Since cooperative mine are owned by the impoverished miners, they must purchase all of their tools themselves, and all of the work is done by hand with explosives and primitive tools. At one time Potosí was the largest and richest city in the Americas, due to the silver extracted by millions of indigenous and African slaves.

The slaves worked, ate and slept in the mines, remaining underground without seeing daylight for four months at a time. Between 155 and 1825, eight million Africans and indigenous Bolivians died from the appalling conditions. Today, conditions have improved little, and I am not sure whether I want to visit the mines in Potosí.