Each morning at five-thirty, Rodrigo Cespedes eats two rolls and drinks a cup of tea heavily laced with sugar before he slings his ratty Adidas gym bag over his shoulder and leaves for work Rodrigo lives in Potosi, the world’s highest city, perched in the Bolivian Andes at an elevation of 13,680 feet above sea level. At this altitude Rodrigo stays warm only when he holds himself directly in the sunlight, but this early in the morning, the streets are still dark. He walks with other men going in the same direction, but like most Quechua and Aymara Indians they walk along silently. The loudest sounds come from the scraping noise of the old women who laboriously sweep the streets each morning. Bent over their short straw brooms, these women look like medieval witches dressed in the traditional black garments woven in Potosi and the tall black hats native to the area.
Rodrigo reaches the main road and joins a line behind forty to fifty men waiting to board one of the dilapidated but once brightly painted buses that leave the Plaza 10 de Noviembre at a quarter before the hour. In the dawning light, he stands across the street from a small dump in which a handful of old women, two dozen snarling dogs, and a few children fight over unrecognizable chunks of food in their daily battle for garbage. When he finally boards the bus, Rodrigo squeezes agilely into the dense pack of silent and stooped men. Very slowly the old bus begins its labored climb up Cerro Rico, the mountain towering over the city. After ascending the mountain for only a few minutes, the bus passes the entrance to the original colonial mine founded on Cerro Rico in 1545. Workers long ago boarded it shut after exhausting that vein, and then they moved to higher veins more difficult and less profitable to mine. After another twenty minutes and a hundred meters’ rise in elevation, he passes the dilapidated entrance to the massive government-operated tin mine and the scene of many bloody confrontations between miners and management. Once owned by the “Tin King” Simon Patino, these mines were nationalized by the revolutionary regime of Victor Paz Estensoro after the revolution in 1952, and now COMIBOL (Corporacion Minera de Bolivia), a government-owned and highly unprofitable company, operates them as a way to keep the miners’ leftist union tranquil. The bus chokes to its first stop at the mine opening, and most of the men leave the bus.
Even though the bus has less than half a load now, the old engine wheezes and belches up thick black diesel fumes as it struggles on to an altitude of fourteen thousand feet. Few vehicles anywhere operate at a higher altitude, and this bus probably plies the highest daily bus route in the world. Barely able to climb any higher, the bus coasts to a stop near the Heart of Jesus, a large abandoned church covered with graffiti and filled with the strong smell of stale urine, all topped by a giant concrete Jesus.
The edifice and its large statue jut out on a cliff a little over halfway up the mountain. Here Rodrigo and the remaining men leave the bus, which then descends for another load.
Without a glance at the Heart of Jesus and without raising his eyes toward the immense mountain above him, Rodrigo begins to climb the long familiar path. For the next two hours he looks only at his feet and he keeps his chin tucked into his jacket and out of the mountain winds that whip around him in freezing but bone-dry swirls even though he is only a few degrees south of the equator. He does not need to look around, for as long as his legs are climbing up the mountain he knows that he is heading in the right direction. He need not fear bumping into a tree, because he is far above the timber line and because over the last four centuries millions of brown hands have already removed every bush, weed, and blade of grass searching for rocks with traces of silver, tin, tungsten, or bismuth. He need not worry about bumping into a large boulder, because generations of Indian workers have long since pounded, hammered, and shattered every boulder into millions of rocks smaller than a child’s fist. He need not fear falling into a crevice, because women carrying baskets of rock and dirt have long ago filled in all the crevices with refuse from the five thousand mines that have pierced Cerro Rico in the past five centuries. If Rodrigo did look up, he would see nothing but the endless pile of rusty brown rocks that he climbs every day.
The monotony of the mountain face is interrupted only by the mine openings that pock it like the ravages of some terrestrial cancer. Rodrigo finally stops just short of the summit of 15,680 feet, the trip from his home below has taken two and a half hours. He sits down just outside the mouth of the mine he works, opens his bag, and fishes out a flat, round roll like the ones he ate for breakfast. As he chews the roll, he looks down at the city spread out below him. Because the air is so crisp and clear at this dry altitude, he can clearly pick o’it the block of houses where he lives in the city of 100,000 people with lives much like his own. He is now ha~ a mile above the city and three miles above the ocean, which, of course, he has never seen. In the distance a small black ribbon of railroad track connects Potosi with the outside world, hauling the tin to Arica, the port on the Chilean coast of the Pacific. The line also connects Potosi to the capit~ of La Paz. Twice a week passengers can ride the day trip to La Paz on the narrow-gauge railway. Straining to cross the Condor Pass at 15,705 feet above sea level near Rio Mulato a few hours out of Potosi, this train operates the world’s highest passenger railway. But all of this is far removed from Rodrigo’s life.
Swallowing the last of his dry roll, he reaches deep inside his jacket and shirt and brings out his distinctively handwoven chuspa, a brightly colored bag of coca leaves that he always keeps on a string around his neck. Picking a few leaves, he carefully inserts them one at a time, together with a little lime, into his mouth with a well-practiced turn of his wrist. After only a few minutes of inactivity at this altitude, he begins to feel the cold, but the mildly narcotic effect produced by chewing the leaves will soon numb that. It will also alleviate his hunger, his thirst, and the sheer drudgery and monotony of the coming eight hours in the mine. It will ease but not stop the pain which slowly begins to torture him in the morning and by the close of the shift has engulfed his whole body from head to toe.
With his quid of coca securely between his cheek and gum, Rodrigo silently joins the other miners and begins his shift, hammering out small pieces of rock for eight hours without even a meal break. They work without the aid of automated machines or even of animals to haul the heavy wagons of rock. Because Rodrigo works in a mining cooperative, he receives pay only for what he produces and not for the time it takes to produce it.
Unemployed miners form cooperatives that take over old mines when the government and the private mining companies judge them too unprofitable to operate. As twenty generations of Indian miners have done before him, Rodrigo chips away at a little more and a little more of the mountain each day. The mountain is now so honeycombed that the Indians say it is nearly hollow and soon will collapse upon itself.
At the end of his shift in the mine, Rodrigo reverses his climb.
Even though he does not ride the bus during his descent, the trip down takes him only two hours. He returns home exhausted from the ordeal of twelve and a half hours.
Rodrigo repeats this routine seven days a week for a wage of approximately a dollar a day and under the constant threat of unemployment because his health might break down or the world economy might take some turn on commodities for reasons incomprehensible to him.
He pauses in this weekly routine only for an occasional fiesta or funeral, and on those days he loses that dollar.
Rodrigo knows that the colonial town of Potosi and the mountain on which he works have a long and supposedly glorious history stretching back to Inca times. He has heard that history acknowledged many times by the priest, by politicians in speeches, and by the union officials, and he also knows many of the stories about the fabulous riches, the horrible disasters, the massacres, the revolts, the swindles, the strikes, and the wars surrounding the history of these mines. He easily and vividly relates the stories about the disasters, whereas the stories about the lives of the rich and powerful are only vague accounts of limitless food in large, warm rooms. But Rodrigo has little time to dwell on such topics; perhaps if he lives past the average life expectancy of forty-eight years he can find out more about it.
This mountain on which Rodrigo lives and works is the richest mountain ever discovered anywhere on earth. Beginning in 1545, this mountain produced silver for the treasuries of Europe at a rate and in a volume unprecedented in human history. The Cerro Rico, which means “rich hill,” was a mountain of silver over two thousand feet high.
Eighty-five percent of the silver produced from the central Andes during the colonial era came from this one mountain. The name Potosi became a synonym for fabulous and inexhaustible wealth after Miguel Cervantes used the phrase _vale un Potosi,__ “worth a Potosi,” in Don Quixote de la Mancha.
For a while the expression was even used in English and became the name of towns in Wisconsin and Missouri as well as two mountains in Colorado and Nevada and another mine in Mexico.
The Indian miners say that they have extracted enough ore from this mountain to build a sterling-silver bridge from Potosi to Madrid. It produced so much silver ore and required the labor of so many Indian slaves that for a while Potosi was the largest city in America. It was the first real city of the New World, reaching 120,000 inhabitants by 1573 and 160,000 by 1650. Potosi rivaled such Old World cities as London and Paris in size. The vain Spaniards who ruled it chose to advertise their wealth even in Potosi’s coat of arms, which ostentatiously proclaimed: “I am Potosi, the treasure of the world and the envy of kings.”
According to Quechua myth, the Inca emperor Huayna Capac first mined Cerro Rico a generation before the Spanish arrived, but the Incas called it Sumaj Orcko, “beautiful hill.” The emperor stopped the operation, however, when a voice thundered out of the mountain saying: “Take no silver from this hill. It is destined for other owners.” The prophecy certainly came true, for the people of Bolivia have never profited from their great riches. The silver of Potosi was destined for others.
The story of the silver of America seems at first to be less important and dramatic than that of gold. The early invaders of America did not show as much interest in silver as they did in gold. Only after they had thoroughly looted all the gold they could find in America did Cerro Rico begin to play its unprecedented role.
Prior to Columbus, most of Europe’s gold arrived from the place the Europeans appropriately called the Gold Coast, in present-day Ghana, Benin, Togo, and Guinea on the west coast of Africa.
Two-thirds of the gold in use in Europe prior to the discovery of America came from West Africa [Wolf, p .39]. It arrived in Europe by a long and torturous route through the tropical jungle, across the Sahel and on through the Sahara. Much of this traveled by caravans and was traded from merchant to merchant through Gao or Timbuktu in present Mali on to Fez in Morocco and then to Spain. Another route crossed the Sahara to Tunis or Tripoli, whence merchants traded the gdld with Italian merchants. The Europeans traded cloth, beads, and craft items, which then made their way down the same trail. Timbuktu became so rich from this trade that it was known as the Golden City. When the Malian king Mansa Munsa undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, five hundred slaves accompanied him and a caravan of one hundred camels supposedly laden with gold. Even though the amount of gold is unknown, he supposedly gave away and spent so much of it that he caused a gold inflation on the Cairo market. This earned his kingdom and his trade cities of Gao and Timbuktu a reputation for fabulous wealth.
The Europeans sought desperately for ways to increase the trickle of gold that flowed up so slowly from the Gold Coast to Europe, and they wanted to find ways to circumvent the numerous M~slem merchants who monopolized the trade at each stage.
Spain’s need to find new sources of gold was made all the more desperate by the frequent disruption of the gold trade during the campaigns of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand against the Moors. The expulsion of the Moors and the Jews from Spain in 1492 worsened the problem.
Every step in the discovery and conquest of America was spurred on by a greed for gold that overshadowed the quest for silver, spices, or souls. Columbus gave evidence of this in his diaries with the oft-repeated statement “I was anxious to learn whether they had gold” [Pendle, p.17]. In the end, Columbus brought back only a small amount of gold, but it was enough to whet the appetite of all Europe.
When Hernando Cortes conquered the Aztecs he immediately demanded gold from their leader, Moctezuma Xocoyotzin; the conquistadores tortured and killed many Aztecs, including the next an last Aztec leader, Cuauhtemoc, to obtain more gold. On, la noche triste, the sad night, in the summer of 1520 when the Spanish army fled from Axayacatl’s palace via the Tlacopan causeway, so many of the conquistadores carried their loot of gold bars, chains, and idols that the tactical retreat became a bloody rout. About one-fourth of the army died on that one night. The Aztec soldiers easily killed and captured the slow-moving Spaniards burdened by their gold, and many of the conquistadores drowned because the heavy gold dragged them down when they fell from the causeway into the lake. As recently as 1981 one of the gold bars was found by excavators in what is now downtown Mexico City [Berdan, p.169].
When the Spanish entered what is today Colombia, they heard the legend of the Indian nation around Lake Guatavita located at an elevation of ten thousand feet in the mountains. Each year their king covered himself in gold dust, took a barge loaded with golden objects out into the middle of the lake, and sacrificed the gold to the god of the lake by throwing the objects into the water.
The leader himself then dove into the lake and swam around to wash away and thus sacrifice his “golden skin.” This became the legend of the Golden Man, or El Dorado.
The reputed location varied, but the legend remained the same: somewhere there was a city filled with the gold of this Golden Man. The conquistadores soon explored almost all of America from Kansas to Patagonia searching for this treasure of gold.
Many of the Indian nations prized gold, but they did so more in an aesthetic or religious sense than in a mercenary one. As the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega wrote in his commentaries on the life of the Incas, “there was neither gold nor silver coin, and these metals could not be considered otherwise than as superfluous, since they could not be eaten, nor could one buy anything to eat with them.” He explains further that in a nation without markets or a money economy, gold and silver “were esteemed only for their beauty and brilliance” [Vega, p.162]. The best use the Incas could make of them was to decorate temples, palaces, and convents. Inca goldsmiths of Cuzco lined the walls and columns of the great Temple of the Sun in Cuzco with beaten gold, and they decorated the temple with five golden fountains.
The emperor owned gardens in which stood examples of almost all his empire’s animals and plants cast in gold and silver. This included even golden lizards, butterflies, and snakes darting among the golden flowers and corn stalks [Vega, p.190].
When Francisco Pizarro invaded the Andes and seized the Inca emperor Atahualpa in 1532, he demanded a room filled with gold as ransom, and the Incas paid it.
Bearers from all over the empire gathered jewelry and stripped their temples to fill the room. The gold of Atahualpa formed the greatest ransom ever paid. Even though the Incas complied, Pizarro nevertheless killed Atahualpa and continued to loot the country in search of even more gold.
Hernando de Soto crisscrossed the southeastern part of the United States from Florida and the Carolinas to the Mississippi River in search of gold. Francisco Visquez de Coronado wandered through the modern states of Arizona and New Mexico, searching for the seven lost cities of gold. Francisco de Orellana sailed two years through the Amazonian jungle searching for El Dorado. No matter how hot, cold, wet, dry, or high the place, some conquistador went there searching for gold.
Today, we can still see a small fraction of the gold treasure of the Indians. The most extensive collection, belonging to the Peruvian industrialist Mujica Gallo, is in Monterico, a suburb just outside Lima. On a tree-lined street of affluent suburban homes, surrounded by a massive wall and arme& guards, is a large building that looks like a cross between a ranch-style home and a bomb shelter situated in the middle of a beautiful park.
On the ground floor of this private museum, Gallo displays his large collection of military arms from around the world. Japanese suits of armor guard the walls next to samurai swords. Small pistols, muskets, and pikes dangle in midair and rest in numerous display cases. The pride of the collection of arms, however, is the sword that Francisco Pizarro himself used in the conquest of Peru.
To see the gold that inspired Pizarro, one must leave the ground floor and descend into a gigantic subterranean vault with massive walls covered by sheets of seemingly impermeable steel. Visitors enter the room today with the hushed voices and subdued movements of mourners at a funeral. In the eerie underground cavern, they walk silently from one of the thirteen thousand golden pieces to another, staring at the small gold beads, golden masks, ear plugs, and goblets. One of the commonest figures in the collection is the tumi, an object possibly used as a scepter, made in the form of a human figure standing atop a curved blade. One of the most unusual is a set of elbow-length gloves beaten from thin sheets of golden foil decorated with geometric designs.
Protected in their well-lit cases and set against dark backgrounds and with few placards to distract the eye from the gold itself, the artifacts seem to float in space. The pieces also seem suspended in time, for no apparent history or chronology is attached to the objects. The museum presents them for the maximum aesthetic appreciation of the art aficionado and the gawkers at beauty or wealth. The displays focus on the direct aesthetic appreciation of the objects, and this helps account for the hushed tones of the awed visitors. Usually experts know nothing about the artisans who created the objects, when or why they were made, who owned them, or even who discovered them or where they were found. Most of the pieces came to the collection from grave robbers or their intermediaries, who conceal the location of their crimes for fear of either prosecution or competition.
Whenever a group of such robbers finds an object, they usually cut it into equal parts on the spot so that each man can be assured of getting his share. Each man then sells his pieces wherever he thinks he can get the best price. In this way most of the objects arrive in the museum cut into pieces, and in some cases parts of the pieces are never found. Even the famous golden gloves arrived with the fingers cut off, and Mujico Gallo had to buy each piece separately and have them painstakingly reassembled. Thus objects arrive in a historical and archaeological vacuum.
The Gold Museum of Bogota boasts about thirty-five thousand pieces of gold, much of it from the Chibcha people and the coastal peoples of Colombia. Estimates place the value of this collection at approximately $150 million, by weight alone, without factoring in the artistic and historical value of the items. The archaeological museum of the Banco Central in Quito, Ecuador, also boasts a small but elegant collection of golden objects. The Banco Central of Costa Rica in San Jose also has an exhibit of golden objects, mostly of small animals. The total value of the metal in the collection is around $6 million.
But to find the Indian gold one must look not in the banks and museums of America but in the banks, museums, and churches of Europe. The conquistadors immediately melted it, and sent it to Spain as golden bars. They shipped intact some of the more unusual objects, such as the golden sun from Cuzco, to inform the emperor about the valuable crafts of his newly conquered land. Charles V sponsored a traveling exhibit of these objects through his empire as a propaganda device to glorify his reign by displaying the wealth from his new realms of Mexico and Peru. After the public exhibit, the emperor had all the pieces melted down for use in his treasury. He minted new coins from the gold, paid some of his debts with it, gave some of it to churches, and used it to finance the expansion of his army and his palaces.
Between 1500 and 1650, the gold of the Americas added at least 180 to 200 tons to the European treasure [Braudel, Vol. I, p.467]. This amount of gold has a contemporary value of over $2.8 billion, far more than the meager hoards in Gallo’s museum or in the banks of the other Latin American capitals. The churches of Europe still groan under the weight of American silver and gold jealously guarded but ostentatiously displayed. Once-simple churches such as those in Toledo suddenly soared to new heights, expanded, and had new windows installed to let the sun pour down on the vast collection of gold and jewels from the New World. The cathedral of Toledo boasts a five-hundred-pound monstrance made in the fifteenth century from gilded silver said to have been made from the Indian booty brought back by Columbus himself. Cordoba, Avila, and every other city in the south boast similar artifacts, even though they do not always brag about the source of the precious metals. Gold became so common in European palaces and churches that architects developed a novel style of decoration emphasizing entering light that could illuminate the gold and make it dazzle the observer. Thankful conquistadors and an appreciative monarchy filled the churches with golden crucifixes, golden statues of saints, gilded frames of paintings, golden reliquaries, and gilded tombs. The Spaniards melted the American gold to fashion golden chalices, trays, and other religious articles that still survive in the churches in Spanish cities such as Seville and Toledo.
I first saw this wealth of silver and gold in a Holy Week procession in Cordoba.
The crowd in the darkened courtyard of the cathedral of Cordoba quieted as a group of young men swung open the twenty-foot-high doors of the former mosque. Out marched the members of the Pious Brotherhood of Penitents and Union of Nazarites of the Holiest Christ and Our Lady of Tears in Sorrow. Dressed in their long robes of purple and white topped by tall conical hats from which hung veils covering their faces, they looked like marchers in a Ku-Klux-Klan rally. The first one carried a six-foot-high cross of silver.
Twelve young boys, without masks but wearing twisted lace collars several inches thick, followed him; each of them carried a golden trumpet four feet long and a foot wide at the mouth. From each trumpet hung a banner of the Hapsburg eagle, which also served as the emblem of this confraternity. Following the trumpet players marched more boys with tall silver crosses and more men with covered faces.
Slowly and clumsily, like a dinosaur with too many legs, forty young men followed in tight formation carrying on their shoulders a float of Christ on the cross. The float was awkwardly pulled through the Moorish doors and into the night air, which immediately extinguished most of the several dozen candles burning in four golden candelabra that reached up to five feet in height.
As the forty men awkwardly swung their load back and forth, they entered the ancient courtyard of the cathedral where mullahs taught the Koran to generations of Spanish boys before the discovery of America. The branches of the orange trees whipped against the float, dropping leaves over the Christ and spreading the sweet smell of orange blossoms throughout the crowd. More hooded men marched behind the float with a band that alternately played marching songs and mournful dirges. Behind the band followed the float of the weeping Virgin Mary, bededked with white gladioli and orchids and far more gold and silver than the float of Christ.
Every night during Holy Week at least three such processions wended their way through the narrow streets of Cordoba, through the mosque-turned-cathedral, past the old synagogue of the ancient Jewish quarter, and through the alleys of the Arab merchant section. A few of the floats were made of wood, but most were either gilded wood or solid silver. Cordoba alone had twenty-nine such processions, each with two floats, and in the region of Andalusia over three hundred such processions marched during Holy Week, the largest and most emotional of all being in the regional capital, Seville.
These processions offered more than an opportunity for men to hide their identity while marching through the streets as an act of penitence for their sins of the year. Holy Week gave each neighborhood parish the chance to compete with the others in decorating the most beautiful floats and in using the most costly materials.
The processions and the churches of Europe offer the most visible reminders of the deluge of American gold that showered Europe in the sixteenth century, but the remains of this golden wave still shine in the secular buildings as well. Church and lay authorities found themselves with so much gold that they decorated their palaces with it.
They put gold leaf on the ceilings, added golden cherubs in the corners, strung vines of golden grapes between them, and puffed up golden clouds to fill any unadorned spaces.
The gold of America gave Europe the baroque and finally the rococo styles of ostentatious decoration for public buildings, churches, palaces, and even the homes of the rising new merchant class.
By comparison with the golden treasure, the silver of Cerro Rico provoked a less ostentatious response among the Europeans, but the eventual impact of the silver proved to be far more extensive and more profound. The exploitation of the silver in America followed very quickly that of the gold.
Once extracted, this silver did not stay in Bolivia. In the imperial mint of Potosi, craftsmen hurriedly minted the silver into sterling bars or coins that were shipped across the mountains to the sea, up the coast to Panama, across the Isthmus by mule, and onto galleons bound for Seville. In 1637 an English Dominican saw one of the mule trains carrying the silver to Porto Bello on the Caribbean coast of Panama. He described them as “laden with wedges of silver; in one day I told two hundred mules laden with nothing else, which were unladen in the marketplace, so that there were heaps of silver wedges like heaps of stones in the street” [Pendle, p.64].
Never before in the history of the world had so much silver money been in the hands of so many people. Kings, emperors, czars, and pharaohs had always accumulated great wealth in their jewels, their hoards of gold, and their coinage, but the total amount of gold and silver was quite limited by the scarcity of the precious metals. A royal treasury guarded a hodgepodge of whatever valuable items could be collected. This changed with the opening of the Americas. Now for the first time people had massive amounts of silver and gold. Quickly and inexorably the traditional mercantile system of Europe changed.
With so much money, the old system mutated into a true money economy in which large numbers of people could buy large amounts of goods, and private citizens could start their own hoards of coins. Production increased, and people began to accumulate capital in quantities undreamed of by prior generations.
The silver treasure unearthed in the bowels of Cerro Rico made this possible.
Gold serves well for making jewelry, decorating palaces and churches, and making some very valuable coins, but for the thousands and millions of small daily transactions necessary to make a money economy, silver proves much more practical. A baker buying barrels of flour, a weaver selling new bundles of cloth, a fish merchant buying the catch of small fishermen, all need coins of small but consistent value. The discovery of Cerro Rico brought them into the world economy; it let them have plentiful coinage and thereby made them active players in the monetary world.
The ancient world had never enjoyed access to enough silver to assure a plentiful supply of coins. Even in Roman times the shortage of silver led to periodic debasing of the currency by alloying the silver with less valuable metals. At times the Roman emperors even resorted to silver-plating baser metals and circulating the coins or paying their armies with them under the pretense that they were sterling silver [Garraty and Gay, pp.223-24]. never would set. But they also fought with one another in war after war. By the middle of the twentieth century, these empires too had fallen, leaving the British no better off than the Spanish.
By then, economic power on the European continent had shifted to Germany and the Soviet Union, the two nations that had participated in and profited the least from the blood money of Potosi.
Cerro Rico stands today as the first and probably most important monument to capitalism and to the ensuing industrial revolution and the urban boom made possible by the new capitalist system.
Potosi was the first city of capitalism, for it supplied the primary ingredient of capitalism-money. Potosi made the money that irrevocably changed the economic complexion of the world.