Abigail Canaviri, 14, attends school by day in the Bolivian Andes. But when the sun sets she and other children tunnel deep into the world’s highest mine, following in their late fathers’ footsteps in a treacherous search for silver.
“Since age 12 I’ve worked here,” a frail Canaviri says about Cerro Rico, the spectacularly perched mountain-top pit in Potosi, a remote city popular with tourists, that is home to the widows and orphans of Bolivia’s mining world.
“They pay me 20 bolivianos (about US$3) per day to scavenge through 10 or 12 mine carts. I enter at 6pm and leave at 4 or 5 in the morning,” she said.
Canaviri is one of several dozen children who work alongside 12,000 adults mining the mountain of money that is Cerro Rico, which for four centuries has veined the greatest silver deposit ever uncovered by the Spanish empire.
She and her young friends know the dangers, but have few options as they seek to end — or at least ease — the vicious cycle of poverty afflicting their families.
“My dad died of the mine illness,’” Canaviri said, referring to the respiratory disease silicosis, which worldwide is believed to have killed thousands of miners, whose lungs become infected with crystalline dust that is raised during drilling and inhaled by workers. “Now, I work to help the family.”
She pushes rickety mine carts along metal rails that wind toward the entrance, each bearing about a tonne of earth and rock that she hopes will yield a high payload of silver, tin or zinc.
Her face darkened when she recalled how she suffered an infection earlier this year that sent her to hospital and led to the removal of one of her kidneys — and yet she toils on.
“We lack things. My sister needs shoes, and to meet such needs I go down the mine,” Canaviri said.
Other young teens like Canaviri work in Cerro Rico, southern Bolivia’s historic symbol of wealth that has been operated continuously since the 14th century, first by the Incas, then the Spanish and their indigenous and African slaves, then the Bolivian government and now by private firms.
Fourteen-year-old Efrain Cartagena works alongside Canaviri. His father, too, died from silicosis, forcing the boy to become a breadwinner. He said that after working here for two years he earns about US$8 per day loading and unloading ore.
Before entering the mine, workers of all ages sit and chew coca leaves to ward off hunger and fatigue — a ritual begun centuries ago by native Indians and embraced by today’s miners.
In often vulgar language, they gossip and share their dreams and troubles. Then they hunch over and trundle into various low-ceilinged tunnels, the mud floor often slickened by an acidic liquid runoff containing dangerous chemicals and minerals that drips from the mine’s walls and ceilings.
The future is bleak for these so-called “child moles” who live with death on their backs, according to the Voix Libres Foundation, a Swiss humanitarian organization which runs an orphanage and school in Potosi.
For boys: the future holds work at the mine, with a life expectancy of “around 35 years” because of silicosis, the foundation says. For girls: mine work, multiple pregnancies and early widowhood, before winding up as a “recycler” or night guard at the mine.
According to Voix Libres, which has won an award from the Women’s Union of Potosi for its work with children in the Bolivian Altiplano, there are now between 50 and 60 teenagers who work at the mine — although that number rises along with the price of silver and tin.
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