(Thueringer Allgemeine of 02/05/2011 )
By Paul-Joseph Rough
In Sucre, the capital of Bolivia live, the people who came to the silver of Potosí to wealth. The presidential palace was proud of the first part of the Bolivian diary with the governor, who was a year ago as a farmer of the village street. Of a road from Sucre to Potosi overcomes the silver mine. This is the wealth of the poor Andean country.
Potosí. At the entrance to hell three children playing about eight or nine years old. They play on a gray place, just five feet square, they're right corner scored in the dust jump for the gold medal and wear a wide brimmed hat that protects them from the sun. In addition to their playground has
brackish A narrow water channel in the brown stone milled, before Hüpfkasten is an abandoned wheelbarrow, with the stones and rubble to be removed, the piling up next door. A dog is dozing on the rocks, looking at the valley with its huts and small houses, on corrugated iron, mud brick, a dozen trees and a few pubs. Everything is gray, gray or brown, just a touch of green, a red piece of laundry on a line, balancing among the working wheelbarrows, that's all colorful, nature is turned to stone, crumbled to dust.
It is cold, everything is cold. The playground is located in thin air, 4,200 feet high on the slope of a mountain with a rounded tip. The In their native Quechua language, call it the Holy Mountain. This sounds like a joke, it is unlikely to be an unholy place where people will be staying voluntarily. Potosí, World Heritage Sites in Bolivia, is the gateway to hell.
million workers will be killed in the mine
But this hell in the Andes, in the former empire of the Incas, makes wealthy in a country where the poor is nothing else planned. In this hell is silver, silver so much that the English conquerors were blinded by greed. A bridge of silver could be built from Potosí to Madrid, boasted the colonial masters. Some 50,000 tons of silver are in almost five hundred Jahren aus dem Berg gefördert worden sein, noch doppelt so viel soll der Berg verbergen.
Man könnte auch eine Brücke aus den Knochen der Arbeiter bauen, erwiderten die Einheimischen, die Sklaven der Herren aus Europa. Zehn Millionen sollen in den Jahrhunderten der Kolonisation hier umgekommen sein, erschlagen im Stein oder erfroren in der eisigen Luft oder verzehrt von der Arbeit oder vergiftet vom Quecksilber, mit dem das Silber vom Stein getrennt wird.
Als die spanischen Eroberer vertrieben waren und Bolivien eine Republik wurde, ging es den Arbeitern noch schlechter. Die Spanier hatten ihnen wenigstens noch ihr Eigentum gelassen, die neuen Herren, die Großgrundbesitzer, nahmen ihnen alles. Das war vor gut hundert Jahren.
transformed Thirty years ago, the highest city in the world into a ghost town. The Silver prices fell by a record low against the other, the private mine operators gave up as well as the bloated state companies. In addition, let the left-wing government the money fall into a mad pace: Inflation of unimaginable 26 000 percent.
The next, a neoliberal government gave the workers at least a high compensation, so they could leave the hell Potosí. Most bought into the deeper layers of the Andes and are called a coca plantation, they became rich by the cocaine in the leaves, they harvested several times a year and included themselves into cooperatives.
As the silver price rose again, came back and attacked some of the success of the cooperatives, the Cooperativa back. Today, exploiting the workers from themselves, save in the security at the cost of their health care, are not providing for old age and bad days. They create a three-class society of their own accord.
receives ten percent of the profits the cooperative
top are the bosses, including the workers, who go at their own risk in the mountain, earning up to 250 € a week or nothing, and about ten percent of the profits pay to the cooperative. At the end of the scale are Wizard. They are responsible for the worst filth-working, they get a small but fixed wage.
Good fatal accident a dozen workers in each year, some are killed in the explosions of stones, others stumbling drunk in the death. Those who hurt, who is ill, must go. Work is only for the strong there.
We go into one of the numerous tunnels that were blasted into the mountain. The dynamite can be easily purchased in the shops along the road to the mine, it stands next to rubber boots and the lamps that are put on the helmet. Nowhere should be as easy and inexpensive access to explosives.
two or three kilometers long traverse narrow tracks the narrow, slippery tunnels that run through the veins as a single mountain. Loren with the stone is brought to light. Between the walls where the water sparkles in the lamplight, and the fluctuating Loren is barely enough room to get to safety if workers shouting push the cars through the mountain.
The workers all have a thick right cheek. It was and is a brutal work, to endure this with drugs. A dozen coca leaves, now freely available on the market of Potosi is located in the buccal cavity, the saliva turns the leaves into the heady and intoxicating drug, with which one can exploit mountains. Two hours on the effect of the time Coqueda call them. It is a measure of time has become.
The Spaniards wanted to ban the drug, a council was called 450 years ago they: work of the devil. But the silver was the Spaniards more important than the verdict of the church. They discovered that the drug had people work until the collapse.
The Spaniards fled, the coca remained. From nine in the morning until five in the evening they slave away in the mountain. The oldest worker is 65 "He slowly a little tired," they say. The youngest is Walter, at 15, he says, at least. His face betrays the fact that he is much younger.
beer cans and balloons for the devil
Walter still does not have the clumsy hands with thick fingers. He moved the wires in the corners that would otherwise reach any more. He is happy in the world of adults who respect him. Children everywhere are working in the mines, the men talk about it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But actually, they add soft, they do not want their children to be miners, they would rather send them to study.
At the end of the tunnel shines a light that illuminates an altar: a blood-red grimace, to Mardi Gras decorated with streamers, garlands and green balloons, a huge penis, beer cans, cigarette boxes and small plastic bottles with more than 90 percent alcohol, which the Coqueros that coca chewers drink when the effect of the leaves in the thick beam decreases.
The visage adorns each gallery, it is Ttio, the devil, surrounded by local devil-faces, which give the workers a name, Christian name, so just take it. In the mountain ends the power of the church. "Above us are Christians," says Fred, "at the bottom are the devil -. And we must vote mild On Sunday we do not work, then we all go to church." He does not joke.
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