Where would you
meet the devil? Where does he live? How does he look like?
Many cultures
have a concept of the devil. The three monotheistic religions have him living
in hell, a place mostly depicted as one of torture and fire and heat. He (he
seems to be male) has horns, a goat’s beard, a pointy tail and animal’s legs.
Greek mythology has Hades, God of the underworld, the underworld being a place
beneath the depths of the world. And also in Buddhism we can find the Mara, a
demon associated with death.
So if you’d like
to meet the devil you would most likely find him in a place beneath the earth’s
surface, a place not made for the living, a place with conditions unbearable, a
place of death.
Potosi, at more
than 4000 m above sea level, is a Bolivian town with a rich yet tragic history.
Its existence stems from its proximity to the ‚Cerro Rico‘, literally the ‚rich
mountain‘. Cerro Rico is full of minerals, most notably silver, and has been
exploited since pre-Columbian times. When the Spanish conquistadores arrived in
their quest for El Dorado, the mythical land of gold, they quickly settled for
the silver establishing a system of forced labour that sent thousands of
indigenous workers into the mines and many of them to death. Potosi became one
of the richest places on earth (its grand colonial city center bearing testimony)
but it also became a symbol of the cruel nature of colonialism and human greed.
Today the
mountain is still mined for silver, although the Spanish seem to have taken the
lion’s share. It is not mined by international companies but by cooperatives or
even individuals whose equipment has changed little since colonial times. It is
a hard and backbreaking work in which life expectancy drops to 40 years and it
is estimated that an unbelievable number of eight million miners have lost
their lives in the mines due to accidents, bad working conditions and,
foremost, lung diseases.
It is possible to
visit the mines together with actual miners. It is possible to visit this
underground place of torture, suffering, heat, explosions, toxic gases – this
place of death.
Exploring this
place will test your limits. The first person in our group of seven had to
return to the entrance of the mine after just five minutes. The rest of us
continued with bent backs deeper and deeper into the abyss passing miners who
pushed wagons loaded with tons of minerals on rusty tracks. Then we went into
side tunnels where the same thing happened with wheelbarrows since the tracks
were either cracked or nonexistent. At times oxygen levels are so low that
breathing becomes difficult and more than once we had to fight mental or
physical breakdown.
At one point we met
an old miner of almost 70 years who has been working in the mines since he
turned 18. He was one of the miners who did not work in a cooperative but on
his own using one of the abandoned colonial tunnels earning him a meagre 400
Euros per month. This is still double the average income in Bolivia as he
explained and he had learned nothing else in his life. He took some pride in
his age and experience calling himself the maybe oldest miner in the mountain. We
could quickly talk to him before he left for his tunnel his weak chinese
headlamp slowly disappearing into the rock.
Eventually we
reached a hole at the end of a tunnel and we changed levels via a set of shaky
and rotten ladders. And there we met him: the devil! He sat there in his own
chamber, horned, with a goat’s beard, holding a huge penis, yet strangely
human. Before him lay cluttered sacrifices of coca leaves, bottles of strong
alcohol, cigarettes, flowers. He sat there on his throne of rock, unmoved,
untouched.
As the miner who
guided us explained, the Spanish had set up hundreds of these statues across
the mines to keep the miners in fear so that they would perform their hard and
dangerous work without complaining. However, over time, a change had taken
place. The devil (or Tió as he is called) has turned from an object of fear and
death to a protector of the mines. His animal legs have been covered by miner’s
boots. His good will is sought by the sacrifices and as long as he is pleased,
good luck will come to the miners.
Our guide also
offered him some sacrifices and we continued on our way out. After another
backbreaking passage with colourful stalagtites of toxic blue and green (a
testimony to the vast variety of minerals in the mountain) we finally reached
an exit tunnel. The fresh air entering our lungs came as a real relief. Silent
from all the impressions we had gathered inside the mountain we slowly trodded
down its slopes. This time the devil had not taken our lives. Maybe he
protected us?
