By Deepa Fernandes
BOLIVIA — This is a country of rich natural resources. Tin, silver, gold, bismuth, zinc and iron occur abundantly. Yet Bolivia is also a country of extreme poverty.
Over the years, massive exploitation of these resources, and of the 70,000 workers in the mines, has led to a very poor, very sick and extremely fed-up and angry Bolivian population. Now an Australian company is about to inflame the situation.
The mines in Bolivia supply 60% of the country's income. The rest comes from oil and other resources. Currently, there are two systems of mines — one is state-run, the other is privately owned and administered. Neither of these systems are doing the miners any favours. Forget extra pay for dangerous work; the Bolivian miners are among the most exploited in the world. Despite their ill health, malnutrition and lack of education, however, the people of the mines are fighting back.
Their latest actions are against four multinationals, including Australian-based Rennison Goldfields Consolidated, that have responded to the Bolivian government's call for private investors to buy the mines. The now bankrupt state-run mines, (out of which a couple of "tin barons" got very rich very quickly), are on the international market. As the miners see it, "our wealth is handed over to the voracity of the capitalists, at the lowest possible prices, through agreements which don't benefit us."
The struggle between the people of the mines and the government, which has been going on for 50 years, has always centred on the problem of exploitation. During the first half of 1996, for example, Potosy, a small mining town in Bolivia, exported minerals worth $US62.1 million. The government received a mere $US359,945 in royalties. The people of Potosy (as in other mines in Bolivia) receive barely $US1 a day from these giant profits. On this pittance the miners support large families and contribute towards their own aged pension, a payment that most never collect since the average life expectancy of miners is 35 years.
The people of the mines are well aware that their working lives are devoted to filling the pockets of the First World. Now, their struggle, which has always asked for the basics (increased wages, access to clean water, hygienic communal facilities, housing and education), has suddenly switched tracks. Now, the people of the mines have started saying "no" to international ownership of their resources.
Bolivia's trade union federation, the COB, was established in 1952 during a revolution of miners resisting exploitative working conditions with the aim of deepening the revolutionary process. The COB is now leading the miners' resistance to international exploitation. When the mines go to auction later this year, the people of the mines will be striking, starving and showing their anger.
The history of struggle during the 1950s, which produced trade unions and committees of the people of the mines fighting for workers' rights, is ugly. It involved government-authorised massacres, frequent wage and working condition cuts and the removal of basic services. But the history that the people want to remember is of resistance.
After the 1976 countrywide strike in which the women and children blocked mine entrances against soldiers and negotiated with the authorities while the men occupied the mines, secretary general of the Housewives' Committee, Domitila de Chungara, said: "My people are not struggling for a small victory, for a small wage increase here, a small answer there. No, my people are preparing themselves to get capitalism out of their country forever, and its domestic and foreign servants, too. My people are struggling to reach socialism." That struggle in Bolivia continues.