There was no more landscape after this, just desert. The Atacama is said to be the driest place on earth: some scientific sources claim that no rain has ever been recorded here. The cold current of the South Pacific yielded an occasional fog but no refreshment. By the end of the fourth day I came to Antofagasta, where I could once again pick up the trail of the Argentines.
Ernesto and Alberto had done everything in their power to avoid traveling the route I had just crossed. As hitchhikers, they knew enough to avoid such a relentlessly long, lightly traveled route. They left Valparaíso by hitching, but hitching a boat. A friendly sailor snuck them onto a cargo ship headed for Antofagasta, and they hid in a bathroom until the boat was at sea, then presented themselves as stowaways and volunteered to work their passage. Ernesto didn’t regret this trick for a moment, and the feeling of being carried over the limitless sea awoke a flight of “sentimental nonsense” in him:
At night … we’d lean on the rail and look out over the vast sea, gleaming greeny-white, side by side but each lost in his own thoughts, on his own flight towards the stratosphere of dreams. There we discovered that our vocation, our true vocation, was to roam the highways and waterways of the world for ever. Always curious, investigating everything we set eyes on, sniffing into nooks and crannies; but always detached, not putting down roots anywhere, not staying long enough to discover what lay beneath things; the surface was enough.
The surface was enough. At least for now.
Antofagasta was a mean town, dirty, colorless, rumbling with trucks. The municipal motto could be “Looks good after two hundred miles of desert.” The city was dominated by the military and a few big mining companies, which created sympathies not found everywhere in Chile. A monument at the harbor celebrated the military coup of 1973 on an equal footing with the 1810 War of Independence against Spain. The only explanation for Antofagasta—for the streets, the colorless apartment blocks, the military barracks, the port, the railway—lay out in the hard soil of the Atacama. The desert was full of minerals, nitrate (for fertilizer and explosives), and copper (for wiring the information age). Between war and gossip there was a heavy demand for the products of Antofagasta, and Chile had seized these lucrative northern territories from Bolivia and Peru in a war before the turn of the century. The Peruvians were still sore about their defeat—the Chileans had even occupied Lima at one point—but the Bolivians were truly traumatized. They’d lost their coastline and now huddled in isolation in the mountains, blaming their poverty on their lack of access to the sea. They were serious about this: Bolivia still had a navy department, just in case, and its army kept rumbling about reconquering the lost lands. The Chilean military relished the challenge, and I would sometimes see army troops moving through the far desert, training or digging emplacements. I watched three Jaguar jet fighters leap off the local runway and smear the sky with black exhaust. Despite the pressure of an arms embargo and the poverty of everyone involved, the Pinochet regime had promoted an arms race with its neighbors. The Jaguars could be equipped with cluster bombs and even fuel-air explosives, an obscure technology so powerful it was sometimes called the poor man’s atomic bomb.
I spent a few days interviewing people around Antofagasta. An environmentalist told me that the main problem at the copper mines was the ignorance of the workers. The corporations had adopted fairly responsible environmental policies, he explained, which the older workers routinely ignored. They wouldn’t wear their safety masks and were used to dumping anything from trash to oil to chemical leaching agents into the thirsty ground.
A new mine had opened in the area five and a half years ago, and I went to see a display on copper production. Chilean copper ore is of low grade, but since the Atacama holds the largest deposits in the world, quantity makes up for quality. The ore was crushed into a fine grit and then sprayed into “concentrators,” huge tanks where a chemically induced reaction allowed the stone to sink and the copper to rise. A thick scum of bluish slurry was visible across the top of the tank, and that contained the copper. Almost all the copper left Chile by boat and was then made into useful things, many of which were sold back to Chile at a huge markup (Chile still imports copper telephone wire, for example). The public relations officer balked when I asked him how many men had died at the mine. “To ask how many died, that is a very hard question,” he said. “Explosives, trucks that weighs many tons, heavy machinery; it’s always possible to have accidents.”
I asked again how many had died. “Two,” he said. “That’s how many workers have died in five and a half years of operation. Two.” It sounded like a statistic the way he said it, and I suppose it was.
Roaming the waterways of the world for ever proved impossible, of course. The boys couldn’t even get out of Antofagasta. They tried their stowaway trick once more but were discovered and angrily tossed off a ship before it left the harbor. They set out the hard way for the north, spending most of the first day lying by the side of the road hoping for a lift. Finally a van carried them as far as a little town called Banquedano, which wasn’t far at all. Because of the important commerce in the area—the copper industry provides forty percent of Chile’s export earnings—the state invested heavily in the local roads, and a smooth, fresh blacktop swept me to Banquedano in thirty minutes.
Ernesto and Alberto spent a freezing night here covered by a single thin blanket. They had two, but loaned the second to a couple they met in the railway station who were in even worse shape. The man had just spent three months in jail on suspicion of communist activities; his wife was now loyally following him as he searched for work in the mines, where the conditions were so dangerous that they would hire anyone, regardless of politics. Both of the boys noted in their diaries the powerful effect this encounter had on them. Granado was struck by the wife, who endured desperate circumstances without complaint, but Ernesto—perhaps because he had spent less time thinking about it than his friend—was fascinated by the man’s communist beliefs, by his purposeful dedication to an abstract ideology that seemed to be breaking over the world. In 1952 the Soviet Union was a rising power and Mao’s Red Army had seized control of China, but communism was still a remote notion in Latin America, a strange doctrine that had yet to be tested in practice in the region. Ernesto noted rumors that some Chilean communists were being abducted by the military, killed, and dumped into the sea. This seemed so obviously impossible in a civilized country like Chile that he discounted it as a rumor. Still, the communist under his blanket awoke Ernesto’s sympathy:
It’s really upsetting to think they use repressive measures against people like these. Leaving aside the question of whether or not “Communist vermin” are dangerous for a society’s health, what had burgeoned in him was nothing more than the natural desire for a better life, a protest against persistent hunger transformed into a love for this strange doctrine, whose real meaning he could never grasp but, translated into “bread for the poor,” was something he understood and, more importantly, that filled him with hope.
Obviously, this was not Cuban Comandante Che Guevara writing, but an uncommitted observer, inspired more by basic hopes of justice and dignity—bread for the poor—than by specific plans for realizing them. The benefits or costs of communism had not been calculated yet. Ernesto was still not Che.
They watched the sun rise over the desert, one of those moments when the earth seems revealed for the first time and all life is compressed into a transient instant. The spectacle moved Ernesto to quietly recite several Pablo Neruda poems that he had memorized.
Alberto countered by reciting the only Neruda poem he knew, one that the poet, a dedicated communist, had written during the dark days of World War II when his usual subjects, love and nature, seemed too frivolous:
I wrote of the weather and about the water
I described sorrow and its purple metal
I wrote of the sky and the apple
now I write about Stalingrad
For Alberto, the sunrise was red i
n more than one sense.
I rode on toward the next stop on our mutual itinerary—the great mine at Chuquicamata.
Kooky was equipped with an adjustable throttle screw on the right handle grip that you could tighten down to keep the motor racing as you warmed it up on cold mornings in Bavaria. I had always resisted the temptation of using this screw as a poor man’s cruise control—until now. The desert was so immensely boring, and I had been holding the throttle with my hand for so long—two months now—that I couldn’t resist. Flying down the road at seventy miles an hour, I twisted the screw inward until it pushed hard on the throttle and locked the speed in place. Then I let go.
I went along like this for quite a while, steering with my left hand while my right rested comfortably on my lap. The screw worked well as long as I didn’t need to slow down, which I didn’t. Chuquicamata was somewhere up ahead, but I figured on plenty of warning before hitting it.
After a few minutes I decided that using one hand to ride a motorcycle was one hand too many. The road was straight and in beautiful condition, and as long as I didn’t move suddenly, hit anything, or miscalculate how smart I was, I would be able to steer by balance alone. I took my left hand off the handlebar, tentatively at first, but then with confidence. I put both hands in the pockets of my black leather jacket. I thought I might be able to do it for a mile, and a mile went by.
Then another, and another. Occasionally a car would pass in the other direction, the drivers invariably staring at me with concern. After five miles I got out my camera and took some blurry pictures. After ten miles I saw a long, slow curve to the left, and swung gently through it without a hitch.
After thirteen miles, it started to rain. I put my hands back where they belonged, loosed the throttle screw, pulled over, took off my helmet, and let the warm drizzle wet my upturned face.
They said it never rained in the Atacama, ever, but obviously they were wrong. The fact was, there had never been any recorded rain in the Atacama. It did rain there, as the canyon washes coming out of the hills showed. The rain was simply in short and rare bursts that tended, in a big world, to miss the few measuring instruments of scientists and government monitors. That didn’t rob the Atacama of its arid beauty or its title as driest desert in the world. It did, however, make me wonder if I was getting stupider with every mile. I stood there, wet, looking at the handlebars. I was starting to do things that made no sense. The drizzle stopped after a few minutes, and when the air cleared I looked up toward the horizon and there, visible through the washed air like a dark mountain, was the mine.
At last, a hero I could believe in. At the firehouse in Chuquicamata I deployed the exact script that Ernesto had proudly outlined in his diary for cadging free room and board. First, I talked my way inside (“I just need a place to change my clothes,” I told the lonely eighteen-year-old caretaker), and soon enough I casually began entertaining this innocent young man with stories of my world travels. We discussed all his important questions: Was China a good place to find a job? Was America founded before Christ? Eventually he provided a glass of Chilean red to accompany such talk, but I steadfastly refused to touch the wine until he grew concerned and even insulted. “Well,” I said, having memorized Ernesto’s own line, “no offense, but in my country we’re not used to drinking without some food to wash it down.” In no time at all the caretaker had whipped up a vast meal. He threw in a free bed for the night. Guevara knew so many ways to lead men.
In the morning I stood, slightly hung over, at the lip of the Chuquicamata copper mine. It is an astoundingly large hole in the desert, two miles long, a mile and a half wide, almost two thousand feet deep. All of this had been dug out by the ten thousand men who have labored here over the course of the century. The pit has hardly changed since 1952—it was the largest open-pit mine in the world then, and it still is—but the political terrain had shifted around it. When Ernesto stood here the mine belonged to Anaconda, the Montana copper giant. The miners were paid a dismal wage and lived in shacks.
Ernesto and Alberto toured the facilities on the strength of their medical credentials, and the former noted that while health care for the miners was bad, it would prove much better than what he would see later in the trip. The hospitals were dirty and their rates were “monuments to legalized robbery.” Much had changed since that conversation, but the realities of mining were constant and the political climate, after shifting back and forth around the mine, was now heading again toward what it had been. In 1964 the mine was partly nationalized, and not by a Marxist like Salvador Allende but by President Eduardo Frei, a centrist. During the early 1970s Allende expanded state control and gave the miners a social contract unprecedented in Latin America: housing allowances, a subsidized canteen, free medical care, and guaranteed employment for life. Chuquicamata was an immense national treasure. Even General Pinochet, the laissez-faire dictator, was careful to preserve this public ownership of the means of production. This is why some Chileans called his economic policy “right-wing socialism.”
Now President Frei—that is, the son of the earlier President Frei—was talking about “efficiency” and “new times” for Chile, which the miners interpreted to mean selling the mine back to the gringos. The men Ernesto called the “blond, efficient, arrogant managers” were already back in the desert: Australian, South African, and American firms were behind the new, highly automated mine whose settling ponds I had visited near Antofagasta.
From the lip of the pit I could see trucks working in every direction. There were a hundred and five of them in the fleet; one of the smaller ones, parked behind me, had tires so big I could not touch their tops even with my fingertips. It took them two hours to drive from the bottom up to the rim where I stood.
Perched high above the money, I was not alone. A single miner stood nearby, gazing over the works. He was a short fellow in a dusty orange jumpsuit and a blue hard hat. From time to time a little Motorola radio in his hand cackled and he muttered something in reply. He was studiously ignoring a suitcase at his feet from which two wires ran to a disk resembling a Frisbee on a stick.
“G.P.S.,” he said when I asked, referring to the Global Positioning System. He worked for the mine’s surveying office, which tracked on a daily basis the constantly changing shape of the hole. They were testing the new GPS technology. If it worked, the surveying office would be reduced from ten men to five.
“They will find a job for me somewhere else,” he said. It might be with one of the new private subcontractors the mine has relied on more and more to cut costs. The pay was guaranteed the same, but the safety standards were much lower. “They care only for this,” he said, rubbing two fingers together. He thought Codelco—the Chilean state’s copper company—was well run. The health insurance was very good, he said, and after thirty years you could retire with a pension and a gold watch. That was the dangerous moment, he explained; after a lifetime in the desert, miners who left the region were vulnerable to humidity and would grow sick and die within five years. It sounded like silicosis was a more likely culprit than moist air. The disease finally caught up with retired miners just when they lost their health coverage.
The Spanish word for retirement is jubilación. “It’s called jubilation,” he said, “but few survive long to enjoy it.”
He’d worked here for sixteen years. One way or another, he doubted that he would make it to the gold watch. While I looked at the tiny trucks crawling slowly up from the seventh circle, he discoursed with casual familiarity on the challenges of globalization, the benefits of added-value production, the latest rumors about privatization, and the price of Indonesian copper. The union kept them informed about these things in a newsletter.
Ernesto recounted a disturbing conversation here with a miner he called the “foreman-poet” due to his eloquence. Guevara asked how many men had died working the mine, and the man’s only reply was gratitude for Guevara’s concern in asking; no one knew how many had died at Chuqi. This was the bedrock
reality beneath all ideologies and outcomes. No matter what happened, the work would still be harsh, the life of the miner squalid. Although Ernesto indirectly criticized the gringos running the mine, he did not blame the lack of hope on capitalism. Granado did, and liked to cite the glories of communism and Joseph Stalin that were rising in the East with all the historical certainty of the morning sun. But for Ernesto, this “red blaze” looked like nothing more than another false hope. He closed the chapter on Chuqi with a prescient observation:
… maybe one day, some miner will joyfully take up his pick and go and poison his lungs with a smile. They say that’s what it’s like over there, where the red blaze dazzling the world comes from. So they say. I don’t know.
A great cloud of dust floated up from the left, where the digging was close to some buildings that my new friend from the surveying office pointed out. “El pueblo norteamericano,” he said: “The American town.” The little village of white clapboard houses had been constructed long ago for the Anaconda engineers and their families. The digging had to follow the copper vein wherever it went, and right now that was toward the pueblo norteamericano. It would take years to cover the last few hundred yards, according to the surveyors’ calculations, but eventually the iron rule of profit meant that the copper must be taken out and the town must fall. “In 2005,” the miner said, undercutting the white houses with a swift slice of his hand, “pfft.”
Back in town, I ate lunch in the mine workers’ social club. Off-duty machine operators and electricians were drinking orange soda and watching blondes sing on television. I pestered those at tables near me about when there had last been a strike at the mine. The response from each was the same: “A strike? I don’t know … no, I can’t remember one, ever.… A strike?”
Chasing Che Page 17