Enjoying Bolivia 179Potosí
At 4,070 m (13,350 ft) above sea level it looks like a valley
and acts like a valley but wins the prize for the highest city
in the world. In the year 1545, silver was discovered and by
1650, Potosí was the largest city in the Western Hemisphere.
Today, with the decline of the mining industry, and with
aluminium having defeated tin, its other resource, in the
industrial arena, Potosí’s dwindling population has now
levelled off at about 110,000.
Potosí exemplifi es the functioning of colonial and neo-
colonial economies. From its heyday of silver mining to its
tin boom during the middle of the 20th century, Potosí had
400 years to change from an exporter of raw material (the
bottom of the economic totem pole) to an exporter of value
added products. It never made the transition.
Its three tin barons, led by the Frenchifi ed Simón Patiño,
were vilifi ed in the Revolution of 1952 for having sent Bolivia’s
mining wealth abroad. Yet, after the nationalisation of the
mines in 1953, this country continued to dig up its riches and
send them abroad. The tragically glorious and corroded Cerro
Rico that overlooks the city is the imagistic testimony of this
plunder. Between the mid-1500s and Bolivia’s independence
in the third decade of the 19th century, eight million miners
of African and Indian descent died working under brutal
conditions in the mines.
Of the silver extracted from the Américas by the Spanish
colonisers, 80 per cent came from Cerro Rico alone, from this
one rugged hill. Grated with hues of deep orange, Cerro Rico
still contains operating mine shafts. Fleeing this depressed
area, many ex-miners have relocated to the Chapare to farm
coca leaves, after the promised post-layoff jobs were never
delivered by the government. But most of Potosí’s fi erce
residents are sticking it out, defying the harsh winter cold of
highland nights. They have purposely built-in bends in streets
such as the narrow Calle Quijarro, a block from the market,
in order to break the force of wind gusts.