Poverty at the Gates of Bolivia’s Riches
The life of a family working the silver mines of Cerro Rico
Home is a one-room shack at the mine entrance. The family that lives inside watches over the tools that enable workers to extract Bolivia’s silver from beneath the mountain. Pay for these guardians is meager, supplemented by forays into the shaft for hours of hard labor in a dangerous world of darkness.
The brutalities of mine work is a reality photographer Jonas Wresch learned of in the news and saw for the first time during a month in Potosi, the colonial-era city sitting beneath the richly veined Cerro Rico. He made the trip from his home base in Colombia to investigate child labor and found the situation much more complex, and much more desperate.
“When I got to Cerro Rico for the first time I was struck by the fact that people not only go up this desolate mountain to work, but actually live their lives in this moon-like, highly-polluted environment in order to take care of the mines,” says Wresch.
In town, Cepromin, an NGO trying to create economic alternatives to the extraction industry, helped Wresch understand the lay of the land. While walking around he met Maxima Limachi, a widowed mother of three who represented one of roughly 200 families living on the slopes above town supporting the various shafts dug into the mountain. She took the photographer in.
Maxima’s children, daughter Yoddy and sons Paul and Israel, make the long walk to school most mornings, then spend off hours selling marked up sodas and home-cooked meals to the miners passing by their front door. When times are tight they join the roughly 300 underaged laborers toiling away inside Cerro Rico. These long days are broken by nights of fitful rest worrying over the gear left in their charge.
“They store drills beneath their mattresses,” Wresch says. “In case something gets stolen they would have to replace the expensive tool. That makes it very difficult for Maxima to sleep a whole night through. She jumps out of bed every time she hears something.”
Just being around mines is unhealthy. It only took a couple of days before Wresch was stricken with burning lungs and a clogged nose by the constant clouds of contaminated dust. During the day the sun bleaches rock and at night, 13,000 feet high, bitterly cold wind cuts to the bone.
Medical care is far away and out of reach for the poor families living on the mountain. At a friend’s house one night the sleeping Paul’s leg was doused with alcohol and set alight, a child’s prank gone terribly wrong. Wresch learned what had happened from neighbors and hunted the family down, finding them doing laundry and not at a hospital. Eventually one of the representatives from Cepromin took Paul in for medical care.
“As photographers we can leave whenever we want and it’s important to remember that the people we work with are not in this comfortable position.”
Poverty and harsh living conditions aren’t the only injustices metered out to Maxima and her children. Decentralization of Bolivia’s mining industry saw the rise of small companies reliant on contracted labor with little oversight.
While Wresch was trying to find out what had happened to Paul he was confronted by one of the local mine bosses who told him that he wasn’t permitted to be on the mountain or visit the families living there. He was also told that the company had taken Paul to the hospital, which was untrue. Quietly other families aired grievances with the way business had changed.
“Here is a family earning less than $60 a month to take care of the mine. They are barely allowed to leave the place, they are not allowed to decide freely who comes to their house, and in the likely event of an accident they don’t even receive any support. Finding Paul with extensive second-degree burns and seeing his mother rather helpless in the situation made me realize how alone they really are and how little support they have.”
“The mines used to be state owned and people told me that the working conditions were much better then. There was proper work security and a better organization. Now the mining titles have been given to private cooperatives looking to maximum profit at minimum cost. Usually miners even have to buy their own gloves and dust protection but few of them do.”
Organizations such as Cepromin continue to develop new economic opportunities for Bolivia’s poor but for now Maxima continues her long days and sleepless nights. The children continue to walk into town for school and trek back to help earn money, a daily routine Yoddy has grown weary of as she begins to attract the attention of miners hanging out and drinking after work. Wresch plans to return next year to see what changes come, with hopes of publishing a book of his work after the second trip.
Currently Wresch lives in Bogotá where he moved from his native Germany five years ago. Being an expatriate comes naturally to him, having already lived in Seattle and growing up with frequent trips abroad. His international savoir-faire may have prepared him to reach out and make friends in places like Potosi, but he admits that Colombia took some adjusting.
“Having grown up in the safety of Central Europe it has always been hard for me to adjust my behavior and to become more cautious and suspicious towards strangers,” he says. “It’s a necessary for self-protection and I adopted it without becoming paranoid or reserved, but it goes a bit against my pre-South-American worldview. Talking about the culture here in Colombia, I find it troubling to see how low the value for life is. For me that starts with healthcare and workers’ rights and ends with an 86-year-old woman who was killed for $40.”
Although he was given a camera at the age of ten it wasn’t until his stint in America that taking pictures became more than a hobby. After running through the photography paces at a university in Hannover and an internship with a national German paper he decided that long-term investigative projects were where his heart lay.
Latin America is providing plenty of inspiration for his work. The ongoing peace talks between the Colombian government and the insurrectionary FARC (The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia) has Wresch traveling the countryside where conflict has exacted a heavy price, meeting the survivors of decades of war and witnessing the resilience of people rebuilding in the aftermath.
“I feel that the more time I have to really understand the topic or person I’m photographing and to become sensitive for the reality I’m facing, the better my photographs get and the more I learn about life as a whole.”
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