by Marie Arana
Creoles could see that very different histories were being made elsewhere. Their counterparts in North America had shed predatory masters, fought a revolution, and won. In Europe, French commoners had shucked the status quo and sent their king and queen to the guillotine. To the south, Brazil, which was now furnishing 80 percent of all gold circulating in Europe, had begun to chafe under its iron-fisted, Portuguese bosses. Yet Spanish America was singlehandedly—dutifully—continuing to fuel Madrid’s wars and caprices with its colossal reserves of silver.
Indeed, by 1800, a veritable torrent of silver flowed from Veracruz to Havana to Cádiz. Never in the history of Spanish America had so much ore been extracted to secure Spain’s survival. Having laid waste to Potosí, Madrid now latched onto Mexico as its prize, a fecund host to which the Crown became resolutely, parasitically affixed. The Veta Madre—as the mother lode at very heart of Central America was known—became Spain’s new fiscal mammary. Even so, all the silver of Mexico would not be enough: in 1804, finding himself strapped for cash, the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, imposed a punishing new tax, carried out largely by the Catholic Church and requiring Mexican mining magnates to hand over a steady stream of pesos to line the royal purse. These Creole tycoons, whose accumulated wealth rivaled that of the most moneyed classes in Europe, now provided the king with a dizzying 250 million silver pesos in the course of a few decades, for which they were compensated with titles of nobility. The Creoles surrendered their metal fortunes, coughed up personal savings, and in the bargain were dubbed counts, dukes, and marquises. But they still had no political power.
In the autumn of 1807, when Napoleon I invaded Spain and put its king under arrest, the Creoles and rebels of Latin America saw their window of opportunity. Galvanized by Spain’s swift emasculation and paralysis—an unexpected bit of good fortune—they sparked a rolling war for independence that, for the better part of twenty years, convulsed the hemisphere from California to Cape Horn, the southernmost tip of South America. But even when the violence ceased, the liberation of more than a dozen republics did not usher in an era of peace and prosperity. Freedom did not convert the Americas into a vast economic force for its own profit. Quite the contrary. After the revolutions had expelled Spain, the victory cries had died down, and white Creoles managed to snatch liberty from the black and brown hands that had won it, a bloody-minded era followed. The wars of independence could not have been won without vast armies of black and Indian slaves, yet that went ignored. Revolutionary heroes were assassinated or driven to ruin. Generals took power, and fledgling governments began to spar about the new borders. Racial violence erupted and was tamped down, violently, by the very whites who had dominated before.
The great mines, as a result, fell to utter ruin. The prolific veins of the Veta Madre, which had yielded 342 million pesos in the course of the previous century, were now choked with debris, their shafts flooded and useless, their miners dispersed by war. The famed silver and gold harvests of the New World plummeted to a trickle. In the majestic cordillera of the Andes, the mines of Peru, Colombia, and Bolivia were either abandoned or demolished, first through war and then through intermittent waves of anarchy. Once financial engines of the world, Peru and Mexico now fell into postrevolutionary chaos. Mexico, rent by cycles of brutality and lawlessness, would survive thirty-eight governments in its first twenty-five years of freedom. Peru—the anxious heart of a gutted empire—proceeded to have twenty presidents in twenty years.
The principles of Enlightenment—freedom, democracy, reason—which had been battle cries for the Latin American liberators, were tossed to the wayside as rich whites scrambled to appropriate the wealth and power the Spaniards had left behind. Seizing all privileges, they held them fast, consigning Indians and blacks to virtual slavery. Just as the conquistadors had adopted the dictatorial ways of the Incas and the Aztecs, Creoles now borrowed Madrid’s concept of absolute rule. The extraordinary sacrifices made by black and Indian revolutionary armies were forgotten, and the darker races were returned to the rung they had inhabited since the conquest: the very bottom.
As this difficult history settled, other prejudices stiffened. Latin America, having galvanized an economy that had connected Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, now began to be perceived as the troubled spawn of Spain; the unruly orphan of a failed power. It was a minor actor, no longer a “principal” in the wider world. What it needed in this unfolding phase was guidance, management, a new supervisor. London bankers rushed in with loans, making Mexico a bit player in Britain’s vast economic empire. “We slip in between!” the British foreign minister crowed gleefully, “plant ourselves in Mexico . . . we link once more America to Europe.” Thomas Jefferson’s smug suggestion that the United States might want to snatch Latin America for itself “piece by piece” began to prove true as the growing giant turned a hungry eye to the south. The rest raveled quickly: by the close of the nineteenth century, Brazil’s gold rush had come and gone; tin and copper gradually replaced silver and gold in the Andes. Bird dung—or nitrates—now served as the region’s most promising mineral trade; a war would be fought over the dung islands that dotted the Pacific from Chile to Peru. Foreign opportunists flooded in to pick at the leavings. One British company impounded black slaves to work the pits of Minas Gerais, once the most coveted gold mines of Brazil. Other British corporations moved quickly to take over Mexico’s prize silver deposits. Even as the United States massacred its own Indian population at the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, American enterprises were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in mines where Mexican Indians labored. A rabid racism froze in place throughout the hemisphere, and Latin America dug in for another century of pillage.
CHAPTER 5
BLIND AMBITION
In the long course of history many substances have been used as currency. . . . Only two, the precious metals gold and silver, have endured.
—Ludwig von Mises
Legend has it that Ai Apaec, the creator god of the Moche people—a fierce, powerful civilization that inhabited the rim of the Pacific during the first century—fell helplessly in love with Pachamama, the goddess who ruled the earth and all riches that lay below. He was a cunning god: part spider, part reptile, part jaguar. A fiend with long fangs and an insatiable lust for human sacrifice, Ai Apaec had a fondness for lopping off heads. Yet some say he was the fount of life itself. Snakes coiled from his ears, horns jutted from his head. Scorpions, lizards, and crabs were his preferred companions. A notched belt circled his waist. He was god of high places, and his elements were mountain and sky, but he was also drawn—as yin to yang, male to female—to the dark, secret passages of the earth.
They say that Ai Apaec prized mountains because it was on those promontories that Pachamama reached up to receive him. They also say that come winter, he would betray his moon wife to plunge deep into Pachamama’s loins, boring his way through the loam and rock to spill his seed on the deepest part of her being. Eventually the spawn of that union would emerge in surprising ways: copious harvests, rich deposits of clay, streams teeming with gold. But the journey from mountain to the heart of Pachamama would not be easy: Ai Apaec would need to claw his way through black universes, vanquish monsters, and offer peace to strange gods, and brotherhood to his spirit creatures: the owl, the gull, the vulture.
As remarkable as it seems, given the relative isolation of ancient American cultures, versions of this story appear throughout the hemisphere at different points in time. The names and details may differ, but the deities are recognizable: creator gods who live in the skies but have a pronounced attraction to the underworld. At the site of the renowned archeological marvel Chavín de Huántar, for instance—a sacred sanctuary tucked into the Andes 250 miles from the Moche ruins on the Pacific coast—there is a statue of just such an idol, although the civilization that worshiped it preceded the Moche by a thousand years. The only way to reach Chavín de Huántar is to follow a labyrinth of pitch-black tunnels to the very heart of darkne
ss. There, in the temple’s airless penumbra, is a towering sculpture with a fearsome face, long fangs, and large, round eyes cast skyward. Its right hand is raised, the left one points down, signaling heaven and earth. The fingers have long, reptilian claws. Serpents spring from two protuberances on his head. He wears a low, notched belt.
More than 2,000 miles north, in the depths of the Yucatán jungle, a Mayan divinity bears a striking similarity to those Andean likenesses. His name is Kinich Ahau. The Mexican god has long fangs; a serpent springs from his head; his taloned hands are pointed in opposite directions: the right one up, left hand down. His large eyes squint at the sun. A macaw is his spirit brother. Often he is portrayed with insects circling his head. He is the fearsome jaguar god of the underworld, also known as the Night Sun. But he is also the dark star that lights the world—the blazing heavenly body that plummets to earth, descends to its entrails, and begins a subterranean journey that goes from west to east, to rise again on the other horizon.
For yet another American culture—the Aztec—the earth itself is Coatlicue, a goddess who combines attributes of Pachamama and the creator god. Her skirt is a mantle of writhing snakes. Her fingers and toes are clawed. Her neck is festooned with skulls, human hearts. Spiders, scorpions, centipedes are her companions. She is life and death in one; our birth mother with an insatiable lust for human sacrifice. Her teats sag with the effort of feeding the children she will ultimately devour.
There is a reason why Indians of Latin America are hesitant to gouge the earth beneath their feet. It is from her that all life flows; to her that all life will return. Ride a microbus down the winding roads of the Andean sierra toward a tunnel, and you may see a devout farmer dutifully get off, walk around the bluff, and meet the bus on the other side. The others on the bus will be patient about this reluctance to mindlessly penetrate ground—the roots of indigenous cultures run deep—they know he feels it would be a violation of the Earth Mother to do otherwise.
So it was for Juan Ochochoque and those who labored beside him in the gold mines that pock the frigid peak they call Sleeping Beauty. Their fickle home, La Rinconada, the highest human habitation in the world, is little more than a precarious cluster of tin and stone that girds the heights of Mount Ananea. And yet, for all the altitude, Juan and his cohort are creatures of a life lived below. Like Ai Apaec, lord of the mountains, these miners inhabit the skies but suckle the earth’s dark heart.
Come the keen, menacing blue just before dawn, when Leonor set about making his breakfast, Juan would always feel a certain dread. Soon he would be plunging deep into the flank of that glacial mountain, hunching his way down its burrows to hack at the stubborn rock. He always brought a few leaves of coca and a bit of chicha to offer Pachamama against the offense. Now and then, he took part in the wilancha, a ritual sacrifice to the mother in which snow-white llamas are slaughtered at the mine’s entrance, their beating hearts ripped from their chests, their gushing blood smeared on the verge of the jagged orifice where men, and only men, can pass into the darkness. At the main tunnel’s deepest point, where the way parts to take miners to far arteries of Sleeping Beauty’s loins, they will find the trickster god El Tío, “the Uncle,” the idol whose face—as jolly as it is sinister—reminds them that luck is often the brother of hazard; that danger can bring opportunity. With El Tío’s favor, the rock slide that someday will bury them, the glacier that will crush their bones, the explosion that will splatter them into eternity might be avoided today. All these catastrophes are certain to come eventually. But today—who knows?—they might find a hidden vein of gold. El Tío will decide.
El Tío is god of the mines, lord of the underworld. Horns jut from his head. A miner’s light glares from his cap. His teeth are fangs. His arms are festooned with snakes. He inhabits a universe of subterranean creatures. He is Ai Apaec, night crawler, web maker, venomous creature. Comfortable in the Earth Mother’s gut, he commands the flow. Since the early days of the conquest, priests have called him a demon—a devil who reigned over the mines—and, to accommodate Catholic overseers, miners gave him horns, a goat’s head, a goatee. But he is not the face of evil. He is not the fallen angel of Christian lore. Like Kinich Ahau and Coatlicue, he is half light, half darkness. Half rising sun, half night pilgrim. He is what might rescue a miner or send him to oblivion. Part mother, part monster. He is a Pan-American god.
So it is that the collective memory of ancient divinities lives on through millennia, connecting the green of the Yucatán to the arid exuberance of the Andes. These echoes may not be recorded in history books, for history is ever told by the conqueror, but the evidence is there if we open our eyes.
Take the Spanish word Tío, for instance. Uncle. Early chronicles tell us that Indians had difficulty pronouncing D; it did not exist in their languages. So the Spanish word for God—Dios—was often rendered as Tios, and when terrifying semblances of El Tío emerged in the mine shafts, the Spaniards dismissed him—along with all the other underworld gods—as Lucifer. But the indigenous realm is not the Spanish realm; its gods are not the God of Scripture. It may be in places as mundane as mines that these differences are most apparent.
For Juan Ochochoque, El Tío was a useful idol. In a netherworld in which fate can mete out a miserable death or a shining nugget of gold, a man needs a trickster god. El Tío, who knows full well that all miners are violators living on borrowed time, might look favorably on a supplicant today. Juan always remembered to save a few extra coca leaves, bring a cigarette, and lay these tokens of faith at El Tío’s feet.
BEGGARS ON A BENCH OF GOLD
“¡Oh, Perú de metal y de melancolía!”
—Federico García Lorca, “A Carmela, la Peruana”
Peru is booming these days. It is one of the fastest-growing economies in Latin America. At times in past decades, the country has boasted one of the highest growth rates in the world, rivaling the colossal engines of China and India. It is one of the world’s leading miners of silver, copper, and lead. It is Latin America’s most exuberant fount of gold. It is an up-and-coming producer of natural gas. It harvests and sells more fish than any other country on the planet, save China.
But it is gold that has gripped Peru all over again—that age-old fever that fueled the conquest, stymied the Incas, and set a defining course for a hemisphere. More than five hundred years later, the rush is in full frenzy: a blind, overriding ambition not unlike the one that fueled the dreams of Pizarro. Minerals are the country’s main export; mining, its principal source of foreign exchange. Rushing to accommodate the caprices of an alien hunger, Peru is once more defined by what it can dig out and ship away.
In 2009 Peru extracted a total of 182 tons of gold from its mountains and rain forests, the highest production of gold in all of South America. In 2016 it produced less. Every year has seen a drop in output, which is hardly surprising, since there is so little of this precious stuff in the world. “In all history,” one source reports, “only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-size swimming pools.” More than half of the world’s supply has been extracted in the last fifty years. Little wonder that the price of gold has soared in past years; little wonder, too, that multinational companies have scrambled to wrest it from remote corners of the globe.
But multinational giants are not the only ones to join the hunt. Economists have calculated that illegal mining operations run by upstart bosses such as those who employ the likes of Juan Ochochoque have increased by more than five times in the last ten years. It is an expansion largely due to organized crime. Investigators report that more than a quarter of all gold mined in Peru is illegal. But the percentages are higher elsewhere: 33 percent of all gold mined in Bolivia, 75 percent of gold mined in Ecuador, 80 percent of gold mined in Colombia, and 90 percent of Venezuelan gold is produced illegally. Meanwhile, the production from legal mines, from which whole nations might profit, has fallen drastically during the same period. “Illegal mining is crowding out th
e legal,” one Peruvian economist lamented. Improvised, primitive, toxic mines have claimed a firm place in the boom, although they wreak havoc on the environment. In Peru, illegal mining is now twice as profitable as trafficking cocaine.
The repercussions are punishing. No logger, no matter how destructive—or any other breed of tree-clearing agricultural entrepreneur, for that matter—has cut as ruinous a path through the nerve centers of biodiversity as an illegal miner does in this part of the world. Deforestation from mining in the Peruvian Amazon alone tripled from more than five thousand acres per year to more than fifteen thousand each year after the gold rush that followed the 2008 global financial crisis. The depredations have not abated. Massive swaths of rain forest are lost annually to mining, and that amount continues to exceed the damage done by other industries. Depending on whether you stand on the Brazilian side of the Amazon or the Peruvian side, that’s equivalent to wiping out an area the size of Manhattan in five days, or the entire metropolitan area of Denver in a month. Except that the planet doesn’t rely on Manhattan or Denver as much as it does on this humid stretch of earthly terrain. The Amazon rain forest is nothing less than the planet’s lungs. Home to more than half of the species of the world’s plants and animals, it cleans up our global emissions, flushes out carbon dioxide. Without it, we cannot breathe.