The pillage of Potosi

The face of greed: mural hanging over the entrance to the Mint House in Potosi (Source: own photo)

Greed was always the main motivation behind colonialism in Latin America. For hundreds of years, greed manifested itself in countless ways across Spain's American possessions, but nowhere was avarice taken to greater and more cynical extremes than in the Bolivian silver-mining town of Potosi.

A mere swamp before the arrival of the Spanish, Potosi would become one of the greatest cities in the world within mere decades of the discovery of silver. Pieces of Eight as the coins struck in Potosi's Mint House came to be known would became the first truly global trading currency.

Yet, Potosi's stellar rise also inflicted devastating costs on the local population. In human terms, the price of silver mining in Potosi was simply incalculable. When the silver boom ended, Potosi was left with the ghosts of millions of dead and very little else. Bolivia, having once produced the greatest wealth the world had ever known, was left a broken country and remains to this day the poorest nation in Latin America.

When Columbus stumbled upon the Americas in 1492, the Spanish had no idea what they would find. In fact, they had not expected to find land at all, because they were on their way to India. After discovering gold, silver and precious stones in Mexico, Peru, and Colombia, the Spanish quickly became obsessed with accumulating wealth. Having grasped the full potential of the New World, the Spanish crown forgot all about India and instead assigned to its conquistadores in South America a simple mission: enrich Spain as much as possible, as fast as possible, regardless of the cost to the local population.

After raiding the north of the continent, the conquistadores began to slowly push south, reaching Bolivia in 1538. They set up camp in the pleasant valley at present-day Sucre, some 155 kilometres north-east of Potosi town, and began prospecting in the nearby areas.

Pleasant Sucre (Source: own photo) 

The Spanish were not the first to mine the region. Prior to their arrival, Huayna Capac, ruler of the vast Inca Empire and father to the last Inca Emperor, Atahualpa, had mined silver at Porco, which is about fifty kilometres south-west of Potosi town.

It would take seven years for the Spanish to hear about the silver at Potosi and it happened through a stroke of luck. The Spanish might never have learnt of Potosi had it not been for a llama herdsman, who, in 1545, was tending his animals in a swampy area, which once existed where Potosi's main square stands today.

As his day was drawing to a close, the herdsman discovered to his dismay that he was missing a few animals. Surmising they must have gone up the mountain that towered over the swamp, he climbed its slopes and eventually found his llamas, but by then it was too late to go down, so he set up camp, lit a fire to keep warm, and went to sleep.

The next morning the herdsman noticed a trickle of shining metal flowing from the base of his camp fire. When he got back to his village, he told his friend about his discovery. The friend advised him to tell the Spanish, who were known to execute anyone found to have withheld information about precious metals and stones.

And so it was that a humble herdsman in a remote part of central Bolivia, by following a friend's advice, handed Spain the keys to the largest silver deposit in the world. The mountain above the swamp would soon become known to the world as Cerro Rico, the rich mountain, while to the Indians, who would die mining it, it would forever be known as 'the man eater'.  

The discovery of silver on Cerro Rico caused immediate chaos. The precious metal could literally be scraped off the top soil, so every Spaniard in the area rushed to Cerro Rico to get their share. It was the law of the jungle. There were no authorities to issue concessions. There was no infrastructure to process and transport the silver. There was no police to protect property rights. And, of course, there were no means for the Spanish crown to tax the booty. Worse, frequent fights between silver-fevered conquistadores threatened to shatter the unity, which was essential to maintaining Spanish control in the territory.

By the early 1570s, Spain was fully briefed about dangers and opportunities of Potosi. Determined to stamp out anarchy and put silver production from Cerro Rico on an industrial footing, Spain dispatched Lima-based Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, the highest authority in the Spanish colonies to Potosi to put things right.

Toledo's top priority was to secure a steady supply of labour to the mines. To this end, he adopted a version of the Mita system, which the Incas had used to implement public works. Under the Mita system, all able-bodied men were required to provide a certain number of hours of labour to the Inca empire each year, usually a few days to build infrastructure.

Toledo twisted the Mita system beyond all recognition, effectively turning Indians into slaves. From the mid-1570s onwards, Spain forced 13,000 able-bodied Indian men to work in the Potosi mines every year. Most never made it out. Unlike the Inca Mita, the work commitment under Toledo's Mita was open-ended. Moreover, conditions were inhumane in the extreme, both inside the mines and along the gruelling processing path that ended in the Mint House in Potosi town, where the silver coins were struck.

It is difficult to exaggerate the cynicism of Toledo's Mita system and its impact on Indian life in South America. It drained male labour from an area spanning Quito in the north to Buenos Aires in the South, from the Pacific coast to the Amazon lowlands. Suffering was not confined solely to mining operations; the loss of male labour collapsed food production in the local Indian communities, which led to widespread famine. All told, some 7 million Indians died at the hands of the Spanish during Colonial rule.

Having secured the supply of labour through his version of the Mita system, Toledo turned his attention to improving the efficiency of silver production. He built 10 kilometres of viaducts that connected lakes in the high mountains to 130 downstream processing mills. Each mill powered hammers that pounded rock from the mountain into powder from which the silver was extracted using mercury amalgamation. The mercury method was far more efficient than earlier systems, but it also led to the illness and death of thousands of Indians from mercury poisoning.

Few remaining section of the viaduct and water mill system implemented by Toledo (Source: own photo)

Each of the 130 processing plants produced silver ingots, which were then carried back up the hill on the backs of Indian slaves to the Mint House (Casa de la Moneda), which Toledo built in Potosi town. In the Mint House, the silver ingots were flattened using large German-made mule-powered rollers and then cut into coins and stamped with the official logo of the Spanish crown.

These were no ordinary silver coins; they were Pieces of Eight, or Spanish Dollars as they were also known. Due to the volume of these coins, they soon became adopted by businesses as the world's first truly international trading currency. For the next two centuries, all international transactions were undertaken in Pieces of Eight until they were gradually replaced by Pound Sterling.

The landscape around Potosi (Source: own photo) 

The silver coins were transported from Potosi to the Pacific coast via two routes. The main route was 780 kilometres long and wound itself through the mountains north of the Salar de Tunupa (Uyuni salt flats) to the port of Arica. The other route was 890 kilometres long and went south of the salt flats to Antofagasta. In early days, the silver was carried by enslaved Indians, but llamas, which could each carry 40 kilos of silver, were soon found to be more efficient. Trains were not introduced until the late 1800s, many years after the end of colonialism.

Old steam engines and rolling stock at  Uyuni, where the line heads to the Pacific coast (Source: own photos)

You can still trace the rutas de la plata (the silver route) by names of the towns between Potosi and the coast, because they have large churches and bear Spanish names, such as San Cristobal, San Pedro, and San Agustin. The Spanish were keen to keep up the appearance of being devout Catholics, so they insisted on rest and prayer on Sundays. To facilitate this, they constructed entire new towns along the silver route to the coast, one town for every six days march of the llamas.

The Spanish church at San Cristobal (Source: own photo)

From the ports of Arica and Antofagasta, the silver coins were shipped in galleons to Acapulco in Mexico. In Acapulco, half the silver coins put on galleons and sent to Spanish Philippines, where they entered into circulation as payment for silk, porcelain, and spices from China, Japan and elsewhere in East Asia. These luxuries were then shipped back to Acapulco and, along with the rest of the silver, transported by ship to Panama City, where the cargoes were put on mules and logged across the Isthmus to the town of Colon on the Caribbean side. When Panama City was occupied by pirates, which happened quite frequently, the silver and the Asian luxuries were instead carried across present-day Colombia south of the Darién Gap to Cartagena de Indias. The treasures were then shipped to Seville in Spain via Cuba and the Azores.

Perhaps the finest Baroque church facade in all of Latin America (Source:own photo)

Toledo's interventions transformed mining at Potosi. By the time production of silver peaked in the 1600s and 1700s, Potosi had become the largest city in the New World with a population exceeding 200,000 inhabitants. Potosi was also the richest city on Earth. As befits a city of such standing, Potosi boasted shops with unimaginable luxuries, salons, theatres, and, of course, a large number of churches only exceeded by the number of brothels that catered for every conceivable sin. Churches and brothels were often located on the same street, mere meters apart.

Former brothels with green balconies, the church next door, and Cerro Rico rising behind Potosi (Source: own photo) 

Like elsewhere, the Catholic church in Potosi ingratiated itself with power and money by blessing the lethal mining business in exchange for large quantities of silver. So intimate was the connection between the church and mining that, uniquely, the Virgin Mary was painted wearing in a large dress, whose triangular shape exactly matched the shape of the Cerro Rico mountain. These paintings are on display in the Mint House, which is now a museum.

Virgin Mary wearing Cerro Rico mining dresses (Source: own photos)

By 'sanitising' the genocidal exploitation of Indians in the mines, the churches of Potosi accumulated so much wealth that when Antonio José de Sucre became Bolivia's first president in 1825 and found the state coffers empty after years of war, he was able to fund the new nation's public services (schools, hospitals, and the army) with the treasures he confiscated from Potosi's churches. 

Potosi church ornaments in pure silver (Source: own photos)

All official business pertaining to Potosi was conducted from Sucre, which had been granted the status of Audiencia de La Plata by the Spanish crown. Audiencia gave Sucre overall administrative control over an enormous area that covered not only Potosi and all of present-day Bolivia, but also Paraguay, Northern Argentina, Uruguay, and large sections of Peru. This level of power, it was felt, was required to ensure Potosi did not get too big for its boots. Managing things from Sucre also helped Spain's image; pleasant, clean, religious, and very Spanish in architecture, Sucre put a civilised face on the mining industry, which, in reality, was one of extreme greed, ruthless exploitation, and violence. To this day, well-to-do business people and officials living in Potosi still have second homes in Sucre.

Potosi pedestrian street with Cerro Rico in the background (Source: own photo)

Sixty thousand tonnes of silver were taken from Cerro Rico. Wealth extraction remained Spain's core objective in Latin America right up until Spain lost the War of Independence in 1809. In fact, Potosi was the last place the Spanish let go in Latin America, underlining the enormous value Spain attached to the province's legendary silver mines.

Ultimately, Potosi was a city built on commodities and, as such, its fortunes were always closely tied to the price of silver. When silver prices tanked in the late 1800s and production shifted to tin in northern Bolivia, Potosi's decline was as spectacular as had been its rise. The economy collapsed and the city depopulated. Spanish coins lost their status as global reserve currency in favour of Pound Sterling as Britain proved far better than Spain at profiteering in the new modern, industrial age.

Throughout the second half of the 1800s, Britain lobbied hard for greater control over rich guano and copper deposits in the Bolivian coastal zone north of Chile. Aided in all likelihood by British engineers, Chile secured significant chunk of Bolivian mineral-rich territory in the War of the Pacific (1879–1904). Bolivia also lost access to the sea. In 1952, in the wake of intense political pressure from unions, the Bolivian government nationalised all mining and rail industries in the country, but to no avail. By the 1980s, the Bolivian government was bankrupt and had to sell its railways to Chile, adding insult to injury.

When looking back at the history of Potosi, it is thought-provoking how little Bolivia had to show for centuries of exploitation. The Spanish did not care about the Indians and left almost nothing of value behind. Bolivians are still among the poorest people in Latin America. While Potosi remains an important mining centre, the excesses of the colonial days are long gone. Indeed, the most obvious manifestation of the centuries of exploitation in Potosi is Cerro Rico itself. Today, the mountain has more holes than a Swiss cheese and the top has partially collapsed onto itself, but somehow Cerro Rico still manages to cast its long and sinister shadow over Potosi and the rest of Bolivia.

The End