Bernardo Guarachi is the most famous Bolivian mountaineer and the first to climb Everest. In recent years, his skills have been used to detect illegal gold mines on the slopes of Illimani, a 6,460-meter-high peak near La Paz. During a recent exploration of the eastern side, Guarachi found signs of a Chinese operation among dozens of local mining camps. Asians come and go on this mountain, the city’s landmark. With rivers created by melting ice no longer clean and crystalline, it has become another victim of the “gold fever” that the country is suffering from.
In 2009, Bolivia produced about seven tons of gold annually. In 2022, 53 tons were officially recorded, but it is assumed that significantly more were missing. Gold was the main export in the same year: 3,000 million dollars, more than gas. This extraordinary result is 90% due to micro-mining, which is not far from the image of the farmer with pickaxe and mule immortalized in American films. If it is legal, it will be carried out by thousands of cooperatives, each with a few dozen members, which are prohibited from hiring employees and pay very little in taxes. If illegal, it allows Chinese nationals and those from neighboring countries as well as major investments by unscrupulous businessmen masquerading as cooperative members to avoid taxes.
Two reasons explain the gold boom in Bolivia: the international price of the metal, which has doubled in the last decade. And the ease of extracting gold in the country, where it occurs in alluvial deposits, that is, on the banks and bottom of watercourses, especially in the Amazon, but also in the highland basin. All it takes is excavators and physical strength to move and sift the earth, and then mercury to separate the gold. Due to the latter, Bolivia has become one of the largest importers of mercury in the world. The environmental consequences of using this substance are serious and have led to the population turning against gold mining. According to a survey, 70% of the population rejects it. The main victims are the indigenous people of the Amazon, whose diet is based on fish.
Cooperatives
Survival mining resurfaced in Bolivia in the 1980s after the bankruptcy of the state-owned mining company Comibol, which was privatized in two ways: the best deposits were sold to big businessmen and the others were given to miners who formed cooperatives to exploit them . It is estimated that there are around 20,000 mining cooperatives today, 10% of which are dedicated to gold extraction. This extremely diverse conglomerate is the heir to the miners’ movement, which openly fought for socialism in the second half of the 20th century. Today their ideology and class position are very different, since some cooperatives have become greatly enriched at the expense of the labor exploitation of their members, who in practice are employees without social security.
Most co-op members haven’t changed that much, but their dream is no longer an egalitarian society, but rather to earn as much as their happier colleagues. Together they form a very important political force, whose energy contributed to the rise of indigenous President Evo Morales two decades ago and which, as long as the left continues to rule, makes it very difficult to suspend the legal and fiscal relief that continues to be beneficial to it. So the state sees very little, almost nothing, of the golden boom that the country is experiencing.
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