Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent

by Eduardo Galeano

  TIN MINERS, UNDER AND ABOVE GROUND

  Almost a century ago a man half dead from hunger battled against the rocks of Bolivia’s desolate altiplano. A dynamite charge exploded. When he approached to pick up the pulverized bits of stone, he was dazzled by what he saw in his hands: sparkling fragments of the world’s richest vein of tin. At dawn he mounted his horse and headed for Huanuni. Tests confirmed the value of his find. The tin could go straight from the vein to the port without the need for any concentration process. The man became the king of tin, and when he died Fortune described him as one of the ten multi-est multimillionaires on earth. His name was Simón Ituri Patiño. For years he sat in Europe making and unmaking Bolivian presidents and ministers, planning the hunger of his workers, organizing massacres, ramifying and extending his personal fortune: Bolivia was a country that existed for him, that was at his service.

  Bolivia nationalized its tin after the heroic revolutionary days of 1952, but by then the super-rich mines had become poor. On the Juan del Valle mountain where Patiño found his dazzling vein, the degree of purity of the ore had fallen 120-fold. Of 156,000 tons of rock brought out every month, only 400 tons are now recovered. The total length of the perforations is twice the distance from the mine to La Paz: the mountain is an anthill pierced by countless galleries, passages, tunnels, and chimneys. It is on the way to becoming an empty shell. Every year it loses a little height, and the gradual process of collapse is eating away the crest; from a distance it looks like a cavitied molar.

  Antenor Patiño not only collected a fat indemnity for the mines his father had almost exhausted, but he also kept control of the price and destination of the expropriated tin. He sat with fixed smile in his European mansion. “Mister Patiño is the affable Bolivian tin king,” the society pages continued saying for years after nationalization.* For nationalization—a fundamental achievement of the 1952 revolution— has not changed Bolivia’s role in the international division of labor. Bolivia has continued to export the crude mineral, and nearly all the tin is still refined in the Liverpool smelter of Williams, Harvey and Company, which belongs to Patiño. Nationalization of the production source of any raw material is not enough, as painful experience has taught. Even if a country has become nominal master of its own subsoil, it can remain as condemned to impotency as ever. Throughout its history Bolivia has produced crude minerals and refined speeches. Rhetoric and poverty abound: cheap writers and expensive sages have always dedicated themselves to absolving the guilty of all guilt. Of every ten Bolivians, six still cannot read, while half of the children do not attend school. In 1971 Bolivia was at last to get a tin smelter of its own in Oruro, after a chain of betrayals, sabotage, intrigues, and bloodshed stretching back into the mists of time.† This country that till now has not been able to produce its own ingots can, however, boast of eight different law schools which turn out suckers of Indian blood in industrial quantities.

  * The New York Times (August 13, 1969) described him thus in ecstatically reporting the vacation of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at Patiño’s sumptuous sixteenth-century castle near Lisbon. “We like to give the servants some peace and quiet,” the hostess confessed, describing her daily program to Charlotte Curtis.

  Then it is time to vacation in the Swiss mountains; photographers pursue counts and fashionable stars to St. Moritz. A fifty-year-old millionairess has just lost her second husband, a Ford vice-president: she smiles before the flashbulbs and announces her new romance with a youth who takes her by the arm and gazes at her with frightened eyes. Beside them in the magazine picture is another “in” couple. He is a stubby man with Indian features—thick eyebrows, hard eyes, squashed nose, prominent cheekbones: Antenor Patiño still looks like a Bolivian. In another magazine he appears dressed as an Oriental prince, complete with turban, among various real princes who have gathered in the palace of Baron Alexis de Rédé: Princess Margaret of Denmark, Prince Henry, María Pía de Savoia and her cousin Prince Miguel de Bourbon-Parma, Prince Lobckowitz, and other toilers in the vineyard.

  † In July 1966, when General Alfredo Ovando announced an agreement with the German firm Klochner to install a state smelter, he saw a new destiny for “those poor mines which have only served, till now, to open pits in the lungs of our brothers the miners.” As Sergio Almaraz wrote, the men who give their lives for the mineral “do not own it. They never did, neither before nor after 1952. For tin has no immediate value except in ingots. The mineral, a heavy, earthy powder, serves no purpose except to be thrown into a smelter.”7

  Almaraz tells the story of an industrialist, Mariano Peró, who for more than thirty years fought a lone war to have Bolivian tin refined in Oruro and not in Liverpool. In 1946, a few days after the fall of nationalist President Gualberto Villarroel, Peró walked into the Quemado Palace. He had come to pick up two ingots of tin, the first produced in his Oruro smelter. There was no point in leaving the symbolic ingots to continue adorning the president’s desk: Villarroel had been hanged from a lamppost in the Plaza Murillo, and with his fall the power of the oligarchy had been restored. Peró picked up the ingots and walked away with them. They were stained with newly dried blood.

  A story is told of Mariano Melgarejo, a dictator of a century ago, who forced the British ambassador to drink a barrelful of chocolate as punishment for sneering at a glass of local chicha. The ambassador was paraded down La Paz’s main street sitting backward on a donkey and then shipped back to London. An infuriated Queen Victoria supposedly called for a map of South America, chalked an X over Bolivia, and pronounced sentence: “Bolivia does not exist.” For the world, in effect, Bolivia did not exist then or later: the looting of its silver, and later of its tin, was no more than an exercise of the rich countries’ natural rights. The tin can is, after all, as much the emblem of the United States as the eagle or apple pie. But the tin can is not merely a “pop” symbol; it is also, if unwittingly, a symbol of silicosis in the Siglo XX and Huanuni mines: Bolivians die with rotted lungs so that the world may consume cheap tin. Tinplate is made from tin, and the tin is worth nothing: a half-dozen people fix its global price. What does the Bolivian miner’s bitter life matter to the consumer of preserves or the money-exchange manipulators? Most of the tin refined in the world is consumed in the United States: according to Food and Agricultural Organization figures, the average U.S. citizen consumes five times more meat and milk and twenty times more eggs than the inhabitant of Bolivia. And the miners are well below the national average. In the cemetery at Catavi, where blind people solicit pennies to pray for the dead, a forest of white crosses stand over small graves scattered among the dark headstones of adults. Of every two children born in the mining camps, one dies soon after opening its eyes. The other, the survivor, will surely grow up to be a miner. And before he is thirty-five he will have no lungs.

  The cemetery creaks. Beneath the graves countless tunnels have been dug, with openings barely wide enough for the men who disappear into them, like rabbits, in search of tin. New deposits of tin have accumulated through the years in the tons upon tons of slag piled up in huge gray mounds across the landscape. When the violent rains pour from low clouds over Llallagua—where men drink themselves into a desperate stupor in the chicha taverns—one sees the unemployed crouching beside the dirt roads to collect the tin as it is washed down. Here, tin is an omnipresent canned god reigning over men and things. There is not only tin in the bowels of Patiño’s old mountain; the black sparkle of cassiterite betrays its presence even in the adobe walls of the camps. There is tin, too, in the yellowish mud that slides off the slag, and in the poisoned water that flows from the mountains; it is in earth and rock, surface and subsoil, in the sands and pebbles of the Seco riverbed. In these dry and stony regions almost 13,000 feet above sea level, where no grass grows and everything—even the people—is the dark color of tin, men stoically endure their enforced separation from the joys of the world. The camps are a huddle of one-room dirt-floor shacks; the wind howls through cracks in
the walls, cutting to the bone. A university study of the Colquiri mine found that of every ten boys questioned, six sleep in the same bed with their sisters. “Many of the parents,” the report added, “feel embarrassed when their children observe them in the sexual act.” There are no baths; the latrines are public sheds covered with filth and flies. People prefer to use open ash-dumps where, despite the accumulated garbage and excrement and the contentedly rooting pigs, at least air circulates. Likewise, the water supply is collective: people must await the moment of its arrival and hurry with gasoline tins and pots for a place in the queue at the public trough. The food is meager and bad. It consists of potatoes, beans, rice, dried potato starch, ground corn, and sometimes a little tough meat.

  We were deep down inside the Juan del Valle mountain. Hours earlier the siren shrilly summoning workers of the first shift had resounded through the camp. Going from gallery to gallery inside the mine, we had passed from tropical heat to polar cold and back again to the heat, always—for hours—in the same poisoned air: humid, gas-filled, dusty, smoky. Breathing it we could understand why miners lose their senses of smell and taste in a few years. They all chew coca-leaf and ash as they work, and this too is part of the annihilation process, for coca, by deadening hunger and masking fatigue, turns off the alarm system which helps the organism stay alive. But the worst of it was the dust: circles of light from the miners’ helmets danced dimly in the gloom, showing thick white curtains of deadly silica. It does not take long to do its work. The first symptoms are felt within a year, and in ten years one enters the cemetery. Late-model Swedish drills are used in the mine, but the ventilation system and work conditions have not improved with time.

  Up on the surface, independent workers use twelve-pound wooden sledgehammers to conquer the rock, just as they did a century ago, as well as antique pumping devices and sifters to collect the mineral. They work like dogs and are paid in pennies, but they have the advantage of fresh air over the underground workers, prisoners sentenced without appeal to death by asphyxiation.

  The din of the drills stopped and the workers took a break as we waited for more than twenty charges of dynamite to explode. Death in the mine can also be quick and thunderous: it is enough to miscount the number of detonations or to leave a wick burning longer than it should. Or a loose rock, a tojo, may crash on your head. Another form of death is by bullet: St. John’s Night 1967 was the latest bead in a long rosary of massacres. At dawn soldiers took up kneeling positions on the hillsides and fired volley after volley into mining camps lit by bonfires for the fiesta.* But slow, silent death is the mine’s speciality. Vomiting blood, coughing, the sensation of a leaden weight on the back and acute chest pains are the signs that herald it. After the medical diagnosis, pilgrimages to an endless chain of bureaucrats. You are allowed three months before eviction from your house.

  * “When I sit up, I’m drunk. My eyes—see three or four of you. Can’t feed myself. I’m just a baby, a child.” Saturnino Condori, a veteran construction worker in the Siglo XX mining camp, lies in a Catavi hospital bed. He has been there four years, one of the victims of the St. John’s Night massacre. He had been offered triple pay for working on Saturday, and he decided not to join in the chicha party like everyone else. He went to bed early. That night he dreamed that a gentleman was hurling spikes into his body: “Big spikes, they stuck in me.” He awoke several times because of the rain of bullets that began whamming into the camp at 5 a.m. “My body felt all torn to bits, I had the shivers, and I was scared, scared—that’s how it was. My old woman said to escape. But what did I do? I didn’t go anywhere. Get going, she kept saying. Guns firing in the night, what’s it about, what goes on, pap-pap-pap-pap-pap! And me waking and drowsing off and not escaping, and the old lady repeating, Get a move on, escape! What’ll they do to me, I says to her, I’m a bricklayer, what could they want to do?” He woke again around eight and sat up in bed. A bullet tore through the roof and through his wife’s hat, burying itself in his body and cracking his spinal column.

  After the explosions we could talk. The workers’ cheeks bulged with coca and greenish juice oozed through their tight lips. A miner passed in a hurry, splashing up mud from between the rails of the gallery. “That’s a new man,” they told me. “See how fresh he looks in his army pants and yellow jacket? Just came on the job, and how he works! He still thinks he’s smart. Still doesn’t feel anything.”

  The technocrats and bureaucrats do not die of silicosis, but they live off it. The general manager of the Corporación Minera Boliviana (COMIBOL) earns 100 times as much as a worker. From a slope that falls sharply to a riverbed, in the Llallagua region, one can see the María Barzola pampa. It was so named in honor of the militant woman worker who, the Bolivian flag sewn to her body, was machine-gunned at the head of a demonstration thirty years ago. Beyond the María Barzola pampa one can see Bolivia’s best golf course—the one Catavi’s engineers and chief officials use. Dictator René Barrientos had cut the miners’ hunger wages in half in 1964 and at the same time had raised salaries for technicians and chief bureaucrats. The top-echelon salaries are secret—secret and paid in dollars. There is an all-powerful “advisory group” of technicians from the Inter-American Development Bank, the Alliance for Progress, and the foreign credit bank, who lay down the guidelines for the nationalized mines in Bolivia—to such an extent that COMIBOL, by now a state within a state, has become living propaganda against the nationalization of anything. The power of la rosca, the old oligarchy, has been replaced by that of a numerous “new class” which has devoted its best efforts to sabotaging the state-owned mines from within. The engineers not only torpedoed every project and plan for a national smelter, but helped to confine state mining within the limits of the old Patiño, Aramayo, and Hochschild deposits, accelerating the process of draining the reserves. Between the end of 1964 and April 1969, Barrientos, with the open complicity of technicians and managers, broke the sound barrier in the surrender of Bolivian subsoil resources to imperialist capital. Sergio Almaraz has told the story of tin concessions to the International Mining Corporation. With a mere $5,000 in declared capital, this pompously named enterprise secured a contract that enabled it to amass more than $900 million.8

  IRON TEETH IN BRAZIL’S FLESH

  The United States pays less for Brazilian and Venezuelan iron than for iron from its own subsoil. But this is not the key to the feverish desire for iron ore deposits abroad: more than just a business, capture of foreign mines is an imperative of national security. Steel cannot be made without iron, and 85 percent of U.S. industrial production contains steel in some form. As we have seen, the subsoil is becoming exhausted. When supplies from Canada were reduced in 1969, this was at once reflected in the increase of iron imports from Latin America.

  Venezuela’s Cerro Bolívar is so rich that its dirt is taken by U.S. Steel and loaded directly into the holds of U.S.-bound ships; its flanks betray the deep wounds that bulldozers are making in it. The company estimates that it contains some $8 billion worth of iron. In a single year, 1960, U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel realized a greater than 30 percent profit on their Venezuelan iron investment, and this profit equaled all the taxes paid the Venezuelan state in the decade since 1950. Since both firms sell the iron ore to their own steel mills in the United States, they have no interest in defending prices; on the contrary, it suits them that the raw material should be as cheap as possible. The world price of iron, which fell sharply between 1958 and 1964, has been relatively stable since and remains so; meanwhile, the price of steel has continued to rise. Steel is produced in the world’s wealthy centers, iron in the poor suburbs; steel pays “labor aristocracy” wages, iron mere subsistence wages.

  Thanks to information gathered and published by the International Geological Congress in Stockholm in 1910, U.S. businessmen could for the first time evaluate the amount of wealth in the subsoil of various countries. One of these—perhaps the most tempting—was Brazil. Many years later, in 1948, the U.S. e
mbassy in Brazil created a new job: “minerals attaché.” From the start he had at least as much work as the military or cultural attachés—so much, indeed, that two minerals attachés were soon appointed instead of one. Soon Bethlehem Steel received the splendid Amapá manganese deposits from Eurico Dutra’s government. By 1952 Brazil had agreed, in a military pact with the United States, not to sell raw materials of strategic value—such as iron—to any socialist country. This was one of the causes of the tragic fall of President Getulio Vargas, who sold iron to Poland and to Czechoslovakia in 1953 and 1954 at much higher prices than the United States was paying. In 1957 Hanna Mining paid $6 million for most of the shares of the British firm St. John Mining, which had been exploiting Minas Gerais gold since the empire’s early days. St. John operated in the Paraopeba valley, where the greatest iron reserves on earth, valued at $200 billion, are located. The British firm was not legally authorized to exploit this fabled wealth, and, under clear constitutional and legal clauses (which Duarte Pereira lists in his work on the subject), neither was Hanna. But as it was later realized, this was the business deal of the century.