Bernardo Guarachi is the most famous Bolivian climber, the first to climb Everest. In recent years, his skills have been used to detect illegal gold mines operating on the slopes of Illimani, a 6,460 meter high peak near La Paz. In a recent exploration of its eastern face, Guarachi found, among dozens of local mining camps, traces of a Chinese operation. Asians come and go from this mountain, which is the symbol of the city. Traveled through rivers formed by melting ice, which are no longer clean and crystalline, it has become another victim of the “gold fever” that the country suffers.
In 2009, Bolivia produced about seven tons of gold annually. In 2022, 53 tonnes were officially recorded, but it is believed that significantly more were unaccounted for. With this, the same year, gold was the main export: 3,000 million dollars, above gas. 90% of this extraordinary result was due to micromining, which is not far from the image of the peasant with pickaxe and mule immortalized in American movies. When it is legal, it is carried out by thousands of cooperatives with a few dozen members each, which are prohibited from hiring employees and pay very few taxes. When it is illegal, it admits Chinese subjects and those from neighboring countries, and larger investments from unscrupulous businessmen who camouflage themselves as cooperative members to evade taxes.
Two causes explain the gold boom in Bolivia: the international price of the metal, which has doubled in the last decade. And the simplicity of exploiting gold in the country, where it occurs in alluvial deposits, that is, on the banks and bottom of water courses, especially in the Amazon area, but also in the highland basin. All it takes is dredges and physical strength to move the earth and sift it, and then mercury to separate the gold. Because of the latter, Bolivia has become one of the main importers of mercury in the world. The environmental consequences of the use of this substance are serious and have turned the population against gold mining. According to a survey, 70% of the population rejects it. The main victims are the Amazonian indigenous people, with a diet based on fish.
Cooperatives
Survival mining reappeared in Bolivia in the 1980s, after the bankruptcy of the state mining company Comibol, which would be privatized in two ways: the best deposits would be sold to large businessmen and the others would be given to mining workers, who would form cooperatives. to exploit them. It is estimated that today there are around 20,000 mining cooperatives, of which 10% are dedicated to gold exploitation. This highly diverse conglomerate is the heir to the mine workers’ movement, which openly fought for socialism in the second half of the 20th century. Today their ideology and class condition are very different, since some cooperatives have become greatly enriched at the expense of labor exploitation of members who in practice are salaried workers without social security.
Most cooperative members have not changed that much, but their dream is no longer an egalitarian society, but rather earning as much as their luckier colleagues. Between them they form a very important political force, whose drive contributed to the rise of indigenous president Evo Morales two decades ago and which, as long as the left continues to govern, makes it very difficult to suspend the legal and tax facilities that continue to benefit it. So the State sees very little, almost nothing, of the golden boom that the country is experiencing.
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