A meeting with the devil

By Daniel

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?