Silver, Sword, and Stone

by Marie Arana

  The labors of Juan’s children, which until then had been sporadic and secondary, now became indispensable, primary. Although he encouraged them to attend the run-down little school where miners who knew how to read and write taught in their off-hours, they all went to work when they could. His eldest daughter, Mariluz, eleven years old, dedicated herself to her mother’s work, the pallaqueo. Jhon lugged water from trucks that rumbled up-mountain from Lake Titicaca and sold it to pimps in the cantinas. Senna, five years old, dedicated herself to chopping ingredients for Juan’s stews. When she turned seven and able to earn a wage, she went to work scouring out the squat holes in La Rinconada’s public toilet.

  But they all stayed on in La Rinconada. Like most families that had inhabited mining towns for generations, it was what they knew.

  Less than two years later, their father was dead. His bloated body—shot through with chemical toxins—had reached crisis point as he exited a bus at the foot of Sleeping Beauty, trying desperately to find a cure. He had sought help wherever he could find it: he had visited witch doctors, made offerings to El Tío, consulted with social workers who drifted up now and then from Juliaca. He had even traveled to Cuzco with Senna—to the convent perched on top of the ancient sun temple—hoping a priest might lay on hands. But his body gave out suddenly as Leonor helped him across the road after a choppy ride down-mountain. Crumpling to a heap, he gasped for air, clutching at his throat as a deep guttural squawk rattled from the depths of his being. Leonor cannot recall much of what happened after that. Only her terror. Only his bulging eyes, the sudden red of his face, and then the color draining away entirely. Juan Ochochoque’s long battle with La Rinconada’s poisons was over.

  In those last few months of life, Juan had left a powerful lesson for his children. It was he who had pointed out—as they puttered about, cooking, telling stories, singing, making the best of things—that they were not like him. They did not need to be like him. He, like most on Mount Ananea, was a benighted man, a throwback to another time: Illiterate. Unworldly. Doomed. They, on the other hand, had futures beyond the age-old cycle that had trapped him. Senna was good at words, good at rooting out the right ones, good at polishing them to a fine shine. Jhon could fix things, determine how they worked; he had a knack for solving problems. Mariluz might run a business someday, if she would just set her mind to it—have her own food stall on the square. Henrry, a mere baby, was destined for better things, too, although it was hard to say what. You will dig yourselves out of this cursed mountain, he told them. You are miners of a different kind.

  * * *

  If those who labor in illegal mines—the most dynamic and productive branch of South American mining today—do so in conditions their forebears endured five hundred years ago, it is probably because something fundamental hasn’t changed. If multinational operations bring scant progress to the communities on which they depend, it is probably because more is being taken than given. Then and now, there is a sameness at work, a dogged consistency, a stubborn mind-set in occupier and occupied alike. For all the strides made in the economic progress of Latin America—the growth rates, the steady reduction of poverty, the gradual emergence of a middle class—the ruling brain often remains the same.

  As the feisty Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano put it almost fifty years ago: some nations win, others lose. It may not be a zero-sum game, exactly, but Latin America has specialized in losing since Europeans, flush with a Renaissance sense of self, ventured across the seas and buried their teeth in the throats of the indigenous. In North America, where English colonists virtually eradicated the Indian and broke the African, whites looked around, saw themselves in the majority, and framed themselves as undisputed victors. Since time immemorial in Latin America, however, Indians have looked around, seen themselves in the majority, and remain losers still. By now, they and their descendants have become past masters at losing. Riches surrendered by the ubiquitous Earth Mother—whether it be silver, sugar, oil, or human capital—have been gathered up by invaders, forged into profits, and swept away to a far metropolis.

  Much has been made of the inherent failures of Latin America. It is, as global economists say, the most unequal continent in the world, a region whose economic potential was sapped first by the Spanish Crown and then sapped some more by whites who inherited that power. During the nineteenth century, when ordinary North Americans, not just the rich or elite, surged to the fore as the most inventive citizens on the planet—creating patents, establishing public institutions, fomenting competition—Latin American elites adopted policies and institutions that enriched them but impoverished everyone else around them. Whereas, by 1914, there were almost thirty thousand banks operating in the United States, there were only forty-two in all of Mexico—and two controlled more than 60 percent of the nation’s wealth. The same was true throughout Latin America. Competition was discouraged. Industrialization was prevented. Innovation was stifled. Even education for the masses of indigenous and poor went ignored. Why educate someone when what you want is a pair of hands, a strong back, and blind obedience? As a result, Latin American republics became extractive by nature: they concentrated all power in a tiny elite, placed few restraints on their staggering clout, and invited the rest of the world in to exploit the land and its people.

  Little wonder that the mentality that ruled in the days of the conquistador simply continued, with the difference that there was now no uniformity in government. No systematic rule of law. Despots, dictators, rich hacienda owners, unscrupulous opportunists looking for enrichment—these were the kings in that unruly century from 1830 to 1930. To be white was to be master. To be brown was to be locked into a menial class. Latin America emerged from its wars of independence ravaged, and, although its revolutionary armies had been largely people of color, governments were improvised to keep those races in servitude and give whites the seats of power. Bigotry, institutionalized by the Spaniards, now hardened under their descendants, the fair-skinned criollos and the European immigrants who joined them, and a virulent racism became the region’s tinderbox. Even as Simón Bolívar lay dying, the territories he had liberated became wild, ungovernable. He fretted in his deathbed that Latin America was no strong, united force against the world, after all, no bulwark against colonial predators. Those who had served his revolution had plowed the sea. And indeed, the chaos was endemic. Corruption became widespread, morality slipshod, ambitions tyrannical. Coups and bullies prevailed. The strongest, as always in these Americas, did as they pleased.

  Throughout this volatile history, it was miners—of silver, gold, copper—who served as proverbial canaries in the coal shaft. Although precious metals yielded vast fortunes in Latin America—for Spaniards, for whom wealth was the paramount object of conquest, or for foreigners, who looked for full veins and cheap labor—silver and its like have always been more profitable to faraway powers than to those who live on the ground. The rule of the market is supposed to be simple: if you possess something others want, you stand to benefit handsomely. And yet, the lust for these glittering prizes has brought more despoliation than development, more drain than gain. “Mining is the hole through which the vitality of the country escapes,” the Bolivian intellectual Sergio Almaraz Paz wrote fifty years ago. “In more than three centuries, it has left nothing, absolutely nothing . . . it is a passing prosperity that translates to an empty shell.”

  That is certainly as true for Leonor Gonzáles today in the wild, glacial reaches of La Rinconada as it is for Cajamarca’s Máxima Acuña, trying to survive on the brink of one of the most profitable multinational mining companies in the world. For many who have relied on the silver hunt as livelihood, there is no question that it has been a gamble. It is a wager with El Tío, a question of survival. It is also rank speculation for the overseer, the investor, governments. As the Scottish economist Adam Smith wrote more than two hundred years ago in a comment that is still meaningful today: “Of all those expensive and uncertain projects which bring bankrupt
cy, there is none perhaps more perfectly ruinous than the search after new silver and gold mines. It is perhaps the most disadvantageous lottery in the world, or the one in which the gain of those who draw the prizes bears the least proportion to the loss of those who draw the blanks.”

  And yet it is the lottery on which Latin America’s future still depends.

  HISTORY’S GHOSTS

  National wealth consists in the abundance . . . and national poverty in the scarcity of Gold or Silver.

  —Adam Smith, 1776

  We know what the mining lottery says about opportunists who chase metal dreams. What does it say about the people who, for centuries now, have been subjected to those opportunists? Leonor Gonzáles has never quite been free of her husband’s improvident quest for gold, although her children now live down-mountain, away from the blinding chemicals, the glacial cold, the grinding hunger. Every Friday at dawn, nevertheless, she boards a ramshackle bus that takes her on a bone-rattling journey from Juliaca, where the family now lives, to Putina, where she takes another bus up-mountain over an ice-crazed road, past a pocked and desolate moonscape. Six hours later she is in La Rinconada, inside the pile of stones Juan built for her and their family. Squatting over a blue flame on the dirt floor, she stirs the stew she will sell as miners stagger out of the darkness into the light.

  Juan’s quest to wring life from the veins of Mount Ananea still lures Leonor because it was her father’s quest, her grandfather’s, her great-grandfather’s—a hunger that has raveled through her people’s one thousand years of fickle history without yielding much in return. She certainly cannot make a living in the riotous city of Juliaca, where her children struggle to advance, where skills are far higher than her own, where work is impossible for an illiterate widow of the mines.

  The irony is that, although globalization began with Spain’s first boatload of Montezuma’s metal—the cargo that triggered world trade, lifted faraway populations, and sparked the industrial age—for hundreds of years, the vast majority of Latin Americans like Leonor were left behind to wallow in primitive conditions. Whereas open frontiers in the United States of America or trade routes in Europe and the Far East meant real opportunity for ordinary people prepared to risk the venture, in Latin America, land and open trade were available only to the politically powerful: the Spanish-born rulers, the white oligarchs who came after them, the landed gentry who held all the property to begin with. Plata, or silver, the lodestone of the conquistadors, became plata, the universal Latin American word for wealth in general. That there has been as much progress as there has been in the last two decades—that more plata has funneled down and lifted so many out of poverty—is miraculous indeed. That countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, and Colombia have been more vigilant of their patrimony, less willing to submit to foreign masters, is perhaps the “turning of the world,” the fundamental revolution in thinking that the great Incas Pachacutec and Tupac Yupanqui wanted for their people.

  But the past is a teacher. If there is a foundational cornerstone in these Americas, it is the impulse to extract and exploit—mandated by conquest, perfected by Spain, extended through history. Freedom, the rule of law, “the shining city on a hill”: these guiding principles have come late to Latin America. We are a people shaped by coercion and submission. This is never more evident than in the mines; never more defining than when native Americans are sent to dig metal for a distant master. Call it metaphor, call it simplified history, but it is also fact: an extractive economy is the shackle that has bound Latin America since Columbus set boots on its shores. That extractive economy has been inimical to true prosperity in these lands. Money courses through, businesses expand, economists register the growth, but growth in this part of the world is a fragile business. Usually it has meant that the rich grow richer, the powerful more powerful. If there is human progress, it is ephemeral, and it usually comes because something has been forfeited in the bargain.

  Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia have seen a growing middle class in the first stretch of this century, but the question is whether they can sustain the corresponding expectations. A single coup, a threat of civil unrest, a rampant wave of corruption, a fall in the price of commodities—all of these are common enough—is often all it takes to bring progress to a standstill. History is ever combustible in this cradle of cultural shock, this land of violent amalgamation. Unlike North America, where Indians were herded, reduced, exterminated, and their brutal history suppressed or forgotten, Latin America still lives with its colonial and postcolonial scars. A legacy of abuse, resentment, and distrust has wormed its way deep into the character of our people. “Silver” was the start. It continues to be a holy grail. And it is proving to be a hard master.

  PART TWO

  SWORD

  The distant past never disappears completely, and all its wounds, even the most ancient, still drip blood.

  —Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude

  CHAPTER 6

  BLOOD LUST

  Question: When did Peru fuck up, exactly?

  —Mario Vargas Llosa, 1969

  Answer: The moment it was born. The insemination was all wrong, brutal, and it birthed a wounded nation, at war with its other half, the Indian.

  —Jeremías Gamboa, 2017

  Carlos Buergos is at large. Nobody knows where he is. Not his former wife. Not his friends. Not his correctional officer. Lorton Prison in Virginia, which held him for a while, no longer exists. The inmate information system that monitored him has lost track. He came barefoot to this country from Cuba in 1980 and, after a profligate ten years, was arrested, imprisoned, and then set free on a blue-sky summer morning in 2001 to make his way in freedom as best he could. The last he was heard from was in a plaintive call to his ex-wife: How could their six-year-old son have died while he was gone? Had the boy been ailing for long? Sick even in the womb? Was it a curse that he, as father, had brought on him? The woman simply hung up the phone.

  He moved on. Back to Miami, Dade County, the ground he had kissed when he crawled off a ramshackle boat to deliverance.

  Seared into the memory of every Marielito who arrived from Cuba in 1980 is a terrified exodus from one coast, a dazed arrival on another. Every once in a while, those memories rush back. The knock at the door. The stone-eyed police. The neighbors shrieking “Escoria! Gusano!” (“Scum! Worm!”) and wielding rocks. The bumpy bus ride through the Cuban countryside to the port of Mariel. The regiments of rifle-toting guards. The fierce-faced dogs. The biblical mass of humanity huddled beneath the hiss of a nearby electric plant. And then the heart-stopping sight of thousands of American boats bobbing in the water, waiting.

  In the scant six months from April to September of that year, the Mariel boat lift brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States in one of the most remarkable waves of immigration in recent American history. It began when a driver seeking asylum rammed his van through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana on April 1, 1980. A fight broke out. A guard was shot. When Fidel Castro pulled Cuban security forces out of the area, ten thousand Cubans flooded the embassy grounds, clamoring to leave. Furious, Castro opened the borders and announced that anyone who wanted to leave was welcome to go. American adventurers in Florida—largely Cuban Americans—took to their boats, descending on the northern coast of Cuba by the thousands, eager to save the oppressed.

  The Freedom Flotilla, President Jimmy Carter called it, and it was an invitation as clear and open as the one carved in stone: “Give me your tired, your poor . . . the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” The new arrivals poured into Florida, jamming immigration facilities, straining police and welfare services, and giving Americans one more reason not to reelect their president.

  The lives of the Marielitos converged fleetingly when they boarded those boats and traveled the open sea together. Some, like Carlos Buergos, arrived shirtless, shoeless, without so much as a scrap of paper bearing their name. Months later, they had all dispersed to h
undreds of cities and towns throughout the United States, each taking a divergent path. A few worked their way up the American dream to become successful entrepreneurs. Others sought educations and became teachers, lawyers, doctors. The rest found work doing what they had always done: as musicians, menial laborers, construction workers, farmhands, kitchen help. Still others remained trapped by an angry past. Buergos’s violent trajectory eventually led him to forfeit the very liberty he had won in coming to America—a paradox he was to contemplate in a prison cell for many years.

  “America,” the philosopher and writer George Santayana once wrote, “is the greatest of opportunities and the worst of influences.” For many Latin Americans who enter the country as political or economic fugitives, life can be good and the work rewarding, but for just as many, it can be a bewildering maze. The context is so radically different, the opportunities exhilarating, the temptations irresistible, the potential failures, stark. Undertaking to become an immigrant can be a voyage every bit as stormy as the ninety miles from Mariel.