In Danger's Way - Trapped In Cycles Of Poverty, Children Toil In Bolivia's Mines

In danger's way - Trapped in cycles of poverty, children toil in Bolivia's mines

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Boston Globe

June 26, 2005

POTOSI, Bolivia -- The day Lucas Garito's father died, his childhood ended. The family needed an income to survive, so 7-year-old Lucas and his brother Marco, then 11, went to work the next week on the storied mountain that had taken their father's life and those of countless other miners over the last five centuries.

Now 12, Lucas -- who can't read or write -- toils alongside his mother to support his five siblings. He hauls rocks out of a tiny hole his mother dug into the vast mountainside, an opening just wide enough for a child. For a total of $18.75 a week, he chips away at flashes of zinc, sulfate, tin, bronze, or silver.

Marco, now 16, spends from dawn to dusk a half-mile inside the unforgiving bowels of the mountain. After trudging 30 minutes down a muddy, suffocating tunnel, he descends down a wobbly ladder to light dynamite fuses and help drill for traces of minerals nearly exhausted after 500 years of exploitation. For the perilous work that had destroyed his father's lungs and has cost Marco half a finger on his left hand, he earns $25 a week.

Lucas and Marco are among thousands of youngsters working in Bolivia's southwestern mining belt, where privation and a stagnant economy trap families in a cycle of danger and early death that dooms the next generation to the same. Vulnerable to rockslides, floods, noxious gases and dust, suffocation, and explosions, youngsters who work in mining and quarrying are among the most endangered in the world, according to the International Labor Organization, which this month launched a campaign focused on eliminating mining as one of the most insidious forms of child labor.

The ILO estimates that 250 million children worldwide are forced to toil in a range of menial or dangerous jobs, more than half of them full time, missing out on an education that might offer a way out.

In Bolivia, South America's poorest country, child labor is prohibited by law, but economic need compels 24 percent of children under 16 to work outside the home, according to a study by the Atlanta-based charity CARE. The government estimates that as many as 120,000 children work in and around life-threatening conditions in small-scale mining. Officials acknowledge they have no alternatives to offer families who send children to work. Schools are often so bad that parents don't see education as a ticket out.

With a $1.5 million grant from the US Department of Labor, CARE, in cooperation with Bolivian charities, is trying to change that. Three years ago, CARE Bolivia launched a project involving 15,000 mining children and 684 teachers to raise awareness of the perils of mining, and improve primary education and vocational training for affected families. Yet mining -- no matter how dangerous -- remains the only option for many residents of the southern highlands. Persuading parents to sacrifice a child's vital income for a hypothetical better future is a hard sell, a long-term project that won't be done when CARE's grant ends next year.

''It's been getting worse in recent years, with younger and younger kids," acknowledged Dr. Elizabeth Patino Duran, Bolivia's vice minister of Children, Youth, and Elderly. ''It's not enough to offer them education, because the problem is a structural one of the labor market" -- a lack of safe, well-paid work that allows children to study as well.

Rich Mountain

Mining has been the lifeblood of this city of 140,000 since silver was discovered here in the mid-1500s. The extinct volcano that dwarfs the city was so abundant in minerals that Spanish colonizers dubbed it Cerro Rico (Rich Mountain). Potosi soon became the richest city in the Americas, its bounty underwriting the Spanish conquest of the New World.

But over the centuries, historians say, overwork and disease claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of indigenous people and slaves from Africa who were forced to work in the mines, and Cerro Rico came to be known as the ''mountain that eats men."

The adage still holds true, with the average male miner dying by age 45 of black lung disease or silicosis, if an accident hasn't already killed him -- 20 years shy of the ordinary Bolivian's lifespan. Female miners, who work outside the mine shafts sifting through tailings, die on average by 53.

Conditions have worsened since the collapse of tin prices and the state-owned mining corporation in the 1980s, which sped the disappearance of well-paid state mining jobs and benefits. A few dozen private cooperatives now operate hundreds of poorly regulated mine shafts where conditions are reminiscent of centuries past. Miners often work without masks, protective equipment, air hoses, water, or carts to haul rocks. Mineral brokers set low ''take-it-or-leave-it" prices, taking advantage of the weak cooperatives.

Miners say they need their sons to help them light more dynamite, drill more holes, and retrieve more minerals to make the low-paid work worthwhile. Only when something goes terribly wrong do the costs outweigh the short-term benefits for families.

Alvaro Apuri, 16, lost sight in both eyes and the use of his left arm when a faulty dynamite fuse he was lighting for his father went off prematurely, exploding in his face and altering his life two days before his 15th birthday. Apuri recalls hearing ''a horrible noise -- I couldn't see anything. I thought my lamp had gone out. I touched my face and felt bumps. . . . People were screaming and I heard later I was covered in blood," said Apuri, a skinny, shy youth who looks more like a chess team member in his school tie than a manual laborer.

After five operations and six months in the hospital paid for by CARE, Apuri regained partial sight in one eye and is beginning to move the fingers of his left hand. Mustering a brave face in the half-light of the one-room shack at the mouth of Monja Dos Mine where his family sleeps four to a bed, Apuri says perhaps something good came of his accident; now he can't work as a miner. Apuri dreams of studying medicine, but his family doesn't have money to remove the cataracts from his one eye, much less pay for books and tuition.

With no adult male to support the family, Lucas and Marco Garito have no choice but to get used to the miner's life. Every morning, they crawl out of a bed they share with two other siblings, splash water on their faces, and head to the plaza at the foot of the mountain. There, they try to hitch a ride on the bumper of a truck bringing miners up to the thin, cold air at 12,000 feet.

A typical day

By 8 a.m., Lucas has burrowed into the crawl space from which he tosses promising rocks out to their mother, Alberta. Marco took this reporter into Colquechaquita Mine (''Anthill of Riches" in the indigenous language), where he labors in clammy claustrophobia till a break at noon. The boys chew coca leaves, the raw ingredient in cocaine, for energy and to stave off hunger, eating lunch only on Saturdays, courtesy of a local charity that feeds miner children. They leave offerings of coca, cigarettes, and liquor at altars for ''El Tío," a devil-like spirit, and an indigenous earth mother clad as the Virgin Mary, hoping both will protect them. At dusk, their older co-workers head for the bars, drinking themselves into oblivion on $1.25 quarts of beer.

Marco, a quiet teen who seems old beyond his years, dropped out of night school a few months ago, too exhausted to study after eight hours of hard labor. He says he has no choice but to keep working in the mines.

''I'm willing to work to support my family so my younger siblings don't have to become miners. I want them to study so they can become teachers, secretaries, whatever." He admits that for Lucas, illiterate at 12, it may be too late. Marco harbors no illusions for his own fate: ''I know I am getting the same disease that killed my father."

Such hopelessness and fatalism are among the biggest obstacles to getting children out of mines. ''They can't imagine another life," said Edgar Arando, 38, president of the parent-teacher association at Luis Subieta Sagarnaga Integrated Night School, a high school and adult education center in the shadow of the mountain.

Arando studied economics for two years at a university and got a degree from a teachers' college. But when it came time to work, ''I had to return to mining like my father and grandfather before me -- there were no other jobs," he said. His biggest frustration is that with all the tools and advice from CARE on how to start small businesses such as tailoring and metalworking, ''there's no relationship between the training they're giving us and the jobs out there."

Yet there have been a few success stories that give teachers hope. Jose Lujan, acting director of the Subieta Sagarnaga school, tells every student about a 16-year-old who mined by day and studied by night. Last year, he brought his parents to school with him, and dropped his studies for a year to support his parents while they learned new skills. His mother learned dressmaking and his father carpentry, and both found jobs. The boy emigrated to Argentina, where he works in construction. ''This is a kid who saved his whole family from mining," Lujan said proudly.

Many of those who never escape the mines end up down the road at Obrero General Hospital, where there's a ward for black lung disease. Pablo Cruz started mining at age 13; now 47, he lies weak and skeletal, gasping for each breath. With a Bible as his comfort, he is fatalistic, reflecting that ''we all die someday."

Cruz wants his children to study and find other jobs. But asked what advice he would give to a fatherless youngster like Lucas, he paused before answering.

''That is not easy. . . . A young miner is working to get money for his family. There are no other jobs, so you are lucky to be a miner. The day I left the mine, I cried."