Global Policy Forum

By Juan Forero

Grover Orcko is only 16, but when he goes to work, he puts on a helmet and headlamp. Then he enters the mines, through a dank, dark tunnel, careful to avoid the unmarked shafts that fall to oblivion. He crawls through narrow openings and lowers himself on rickety ladders through craggy holes, all the while breathing a deadly fine dust. He descends ever deeper into the stifling bowels of a mountain once so famed for its abundant silver that the Spanish named it Rich Mountain.

Today, those who mine its seams call it the "Mountain That Eats Men." Here, 250 feet down in a warren of caverns and cavities, Grover and the other boys — some of whom start as young as 10, most hardly 15 or 16 — work in much the same way they would have 300 years ago. They clear rocks with picks and shovels and heave 100-pound loads on their bare backs, as dynamite blasts shake the ancient timbers around them that hold back countless tons of rock.

Older miners, wheezing and slowly dying of lung disease, have trouble keeping up. By their 40's most are finished. Few live past 50. So much of the labor falls to the young, their sons, until they, too, wither, generation by generation. The mountain does not discriminate. It eats boys, too.

"At first when I came into the mine, I just cried," said Grover, a mere 5 feet tall, his eyes like saucers. "But I had to work, so I began to learn, little by little."

Today, nimble and energetic, he is often the first to explore the deepest crevices. Seemingly oblivious to danger, he helps prepare dynamite charges and pushes hundreds of pounds of debris on wheelbarrows. Stopping to talk on a recent day, sweat pouring from under his helmet, he had already worked 2 hours, and had 10 more to go. "I try to think about how I am going to get out, so the day passes fast," he said.

The Spaniards built Potosí­, declared it an "imperial city," and forced Indians to plunder the silver of Rich Mountain until the early 19th century. Today it houses a honeycombed inferno of 70 active mines over the old colonial city. Though one mine has a rail line with heavy iron cars and tunnels tall enough for a man to stand in, most have changed little since the Spaniards arrived here in the mid-1500's.

In these mines, there is no lighting. No rail cars to carry out minerals. No pumped oxygen. No safety regulations or overseers. Instead, miners use headlamps powered by little chunks of charcoal. There are no face masks or gloves or heavy work boots. They use wheelbarrows to extract minerals from the deepest crannies of a mountain that long ago gave up most of its riches.

Now searching for scraps, perhaps as many as 10,000 miners bore ever deeper for zinc, a little silver and perhaps lead. The minerals, harder and harder to reach, require more risk to mine, more manpower and, increasingly, the use of child workers. The young are not exploited by some faceless multinational company; the miners work in cooperatives they run themselves. In an industry badly battered by collapsed commodity prices, poverty is the harshest taskmaster of all.

"It is not the employers forcing children to work, but the fathers who take their children to work," said Elí­as Clavijo, who oversees the Labor Ministry commission that is working to eradicate the most dangerous child labor. "The co-ops are small. They just use family capital."

At one time, 30,000 miners worked the mountain, all in the government-owned company, which provided a steady wage, subsidized food, housing and health care. Then the prices of minerals, particularly tin, collapsed in 1985, and soon practically all the miners had been laid off. They opted to form cooperatives and keep mining.

Now, 36 cooperatives operate here, with everyone sharing in the spoils. But the take is minuscule: miners make, at most, $100 a month and usually far less. Entire families pitch in, with mothers sifting through rocks extracted from the mines, and teenage boys joining their fathers in the shafts. Along with work come the habits of a miner's life: chewing coca, drinking pure alcohol, abandoning school.

In Latin America, languishing in its worst economic cycle in decades, the use of child labor is becoming more widespread. The children sell knickknacks on streets, work the fields, tend restaurants and, increasingly, work in dangerous jobs in industry and mining.

The problem is particularly pervasive in Bolivia, a poor, isolated country of 8.3 million people gripped by political turbulence and recession. An estimated 800,000 children work in this country, with thousands toiling in mines or assisting in the sugar cane harvests, some of the riskiest work. In Bolivia, as in most countries, those under 18 are banned from dangerous jobs. But the government lacks the resources to crack down, and families say their economic situation is so bad that their children need to work.

"It is sad, so sad, to have our children go in the mines," said Rosa Palenque, 45, who has two under-age sons in the mines. "But I have to have them work. I do not have enough to buy them the clothes they want, or the food they need."

CARE, the international aid agency, is trying to help alleviate child labor in Potosí­, with a $1.5 million grant from the United States. But the problem is not only in the mines. All over this city of 145,000, children work — as shoe shiners, cemetery workers, miners and assistants to bus drivers. There is even a nascent union made up just of child workers.

They toil in a city of past glories, as evidenced by its colonial splendor. In its heyday, Potosí­ was as big and rich as London. Its silver helped build the Spanish Armada and bankrolled Spanish military expansion. But it was also the scene of one of history's lesser known tragedies — the deaths of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Indians in the mines over 350 years under Spanish domination, falling to illness and starvation, or simply overwork.

The descendants of those miners, Quechua Indians, still work here. Like their ancestors, they revere a godlike figure whose image, cast in clay, adorns every mine. They daily leave coca leaves, alcohol or cigarettes so that the guardian of the mines, called Tí­o, or uncle, brings them luck.

By now, the mountain itself appears devastated — heaps of slag and shavings have created noxious mounds of contaminants hundreds of feet high. Polluted water flows down its sides. The holes of dozens of air shafts and the entrances to 300 mines, most of them closed, pockmark the mountain face.

Into this labyrinth go Agustí­n Quispe, 46, and his son, Santos, 15. Like other miners, they buy sacks of coca leaves, which they then chew to ward off hunger and fatigue. They will not eat during their entire 8 or 10 hours in the mountain.

"I do not work as hard as I used to," the elder Mr. Quispe said, explaining that his lungs were giving out. His son, who began working here at age 10, said he was the one who carried the biggest loads, and carved out the holes for dynamite charges with eight-pound hammers. "It is no problem for me," he said quietly.

But the work is backbreaking, and damaging. Rock slides are common. Fingers or limbs are often mangled. At least 21 miners were killed in the last two years. One, a 15-year-old, was crushed to death in January.

Then there is the dust that swirls in the air, clogging lungs. Some "older" miners, in their 30's and 40's, spend their last few months in the pulmonary wing of the local government hospital, gasping for breath.

"I regret this so much," said one, Aurelio Isla, 35, who started mining at 12 and is now a victim of black lung disease, unable to draw a full breath. "This illness has beaten me, won over me. The mountain has finished me off."

The boys shrug off the dangers, resigned that there is little they can do but work for their families. "I went in with my father," said Abimael Cayo, 16, "and I was never scared."

Others, too, interviewed in three mines over a week, never complained in the presence of other miners. But out of earshot of the adult miners, some complained that they could no longer go to school, that their days were long and tiring, that they never got enough to eat. Mostly, quiet and focused, they worked.

Santiago Limachi, 16, beat a metal spike into a deep corner, making a hole for a stick of dynamite. Santos Quispe hauled heavy rocks on a wheelbarrow. Dámaso Flores, 16, groaned and poured sweat as he worked a pulley to haul up still more of the mountain. Grover said he had to stop going to school when his father, Severino, died two years ago, at 45, of black lung disease. At 14, Grover quickly took his place in the mine, to help his mother and his siblings.

"There was no one else to take care of the family, and I was the oldest," he said. "So I went in."

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