Silver, Sword, and Stone Read online

Once upon a time, my little dove, there was a dazzling city, floating on a blue lake, radiating such brilliance that, seen from afar, it seemed to be made of silver. They called it Tenochtitlán.

  —Myths, Fables, and Legends of Ancient Mexico

  CHAPTER 2

  VEINS OF A MOUNTAIN GOD

  Descend to the mineral depths and find, in those grim metal veins, mankind’s struggle on earth.

  —Pablo Neruda, “Canto General”

  POTOSÍ, BOLIVIA

  The long drab, arid plateau between Porco and Potosí on the Bolivian altiplano is surely one of the most desolate landscapes on earth. What the ancient Incas described as a region of sparkling lakes and leaping fish—a grassland alive with alpaca, vicuña, chinchilla—has become a barrens that beggars the imagination. The brush is scarce. The earth is turned. To the northwest, Lake Poopó, second only to Lake Titicaca in size, has disappeared entirely; today it is an endless expanse of crazed sediment, a cemetery of aquatic life. What you see, as you cross the valley of Tarapaya and approach Porco or Potosí, the ancient medullas of Inca and Spanish dominion, is what you might see in any mined territory in this part of the world—a lunar scape, pitted with murky ponds that reek of ruin. The waterfowl are gone; few birds flap overhead save the occasional vulture. There is a rank odor about, the stench of dynamite and anatomical decay. Even the shearing winds and freezing rain cannot mask the smell.

  Along the road to Cerro Rico, the fabled “rich mountain,” there are heaps of stone. An occasional figure slips past, weaving through the rubble. These are itinerant miners, springing from that bare and boundless plain like mythical soldiers, toting their worldly possessions on their backs. Eventually you come upon the famed red promontory and the city that sprawls at its feet. This is Potosí, once one of the largest urban centers of the Western Hemisphere: a metropolis, during its heyday in the 1600s, as populous and vibrant as Paris or London or Tokyo. A mighty cathedral clings to its heart. For as far as the paved streets will lead, you see rickety mansions with intricate Moorish balconies—lumbering phantoms of a splendid past. Thirty-six churches in varying states of dilapidation punctuate the decline. The storied city of silver is no longer. Gone are the stately palm trees, the silks from Canton, the Neapolitan shoes, the London hats, the perfumes from Araby. No one in Paris finery leans from the balconies anymore. A lonely dog howls from a rooftop. It is hard to believe that this was the seat of modern globalization as we know it—the sixteenth-century economic marvel that drove European commerce and prefigured the industrial age.

  But that is precisely what Potosí once was. In the one hundred years between 1600 and 1700, Potosí single-handedly supplied more than one hundred million kilos of the silver that made the Peruvian Viceroyalty one of the most vibrant financial enterprises in the world. Lima grew rich because of Potosí. Metal mined by Indian hands poured into European capitals, giving that region the bullion it desperately needed, stimulating the economy and allowing capitalism to stamp out feudalism and become the prevailing wave of the future. Spain used that infusion of wealth to enrich its aristocrats, wage war against England, curb the spread of Protestantism, and ensure the dominion of the Hapsburg Empire. But the money did not stay in Spain. As England marched into the industrial age, boosted by the solvency that Latin American mines provided, and as Europe forged ahead, expanding its commercial reach, Spain stagnated—resolutely agricultural, doggedly tied to the past—and its colonies’ hard-won silver slipped through its fingers. Wealth moved on to build lavish fortunes elsewhere. The stain of that failure is still visible in this legendary boom town. Potosí.

  At the edge of it, climbing in chaotic angles up Cerro Rico’s jutting rock, are a scattering of tin houses. Here and there, huts of stone. A string of humanity moves in and out of the holes that scar the face of the mountain. Along the precipitously winding paths, flocks of women in wide woolen skirts hurry with food and rude implements; children shoulder bags of rock. There isn’t much to carve away from Cerro Rico now. Legend has it that the many thousands of tons of silver extracted from this colossus would have built a gleaming bridge from here to Madrid. But the red leviathan seems deflated now; a tired heap that bears little resemblance to the soaring peak of sixteenth-century engravings. Riddled with tunnels, it is a fragile grid on the verge of collapse, a labyrinth of perils. The hopeful remain, but the bonanza has moved on.

  It wasn’t like this when Huayna Capac, the Lord Inca, traveled between Potosí and Porco five hundred years ago, before the civil wars, before the plagues, and before the fateful conquest of his empire. Porco had long been one of the main sources of precious metals for the Incas. Since the thirteenth century, when the empire is said to have originated, the Inca lords traded no metals, nor did they use them as currency; they valued the glittering substances as sacred symbols of their gods, essential elements in the ritual worship of sun, moon, and stars. Gold, with its resplendent yellow, was a reflection of the heavenly body that ruled by day, the father of all earthly life. Silver represented the white deities who lit the night sky and commanded the seas. Copper was the swift current of lightning, a force to be revered. These metals were mined under strict supervision of the Lord Inca’s administrators in Cuzco. In Porco, the oversight was meticulous, as slaves scrabbled for silver with deer antlers and carried it away in animal skins. Reserved for the exclusive use of the nobility, these metals were hammered into strikingly original ornaments: ceremonial breastplates, gilded raiments, ritual altar pieces, decorative sculptures, funerary baubles, household decor. There was no incentive to steal or hoard them, nor search out their source, since they had only one use and only one consumer. They were mined as the emperor’s ceremony demanded. Nothing more.

  That all changed with the reign of Huayna Capac, the eleventh Inca sovereign, who loved gold and silver with an abandon his royal forebears did not share. It wasn’t enough to have the sacred sun temple, Coricancha, arrayed in gold, or his chambers’ walls lined with silver, or his ceremonial raiments bespangled with both. This Lord Inca wanted to eat and drink from them, demanded that his chairs and litters be made of glittering metals, commissioned statues of himself and his ancestors made from hammered gold. His overweening love for these hard-won metals meant that the empire had to step up production, and it brought on a covetousness and oppression never in evidence before.

  Huayna Capac was at the height of his power when he visited his mines in Porco in the early 1500s. Handsome, well built, a warrior king who had expanded his realm to far corners of his universe, he decided to take a grand tour to review those conquests, expel invaders, and stamp out the rebel factions. It was beyond his capacity to appreciate that dominion, but just then, at that pivotal moment in history, he presided over the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than China’s Ming dynasty, more vast than Ivan the Great’s Russia, larger than the Byzantine, Songhai, Aztec, or Ottoman Empires, the Inca Empire was more sprawling than any European state of its time. Huayna Capac ruled over lands that stretched for more than 2,500 miles, or roughly the distance between Stockholm and Riyadh. The Tahuantinsuyo, as he called it, was a territory as long as North America is wide, the most formidable domain this civilization would ever hold, and it had taken more than three centuries and eleven generations to build it. Huayna Capac had begun his reign just after Columbus’s fateful landing in Santo Domingo, and he would die just before Francisco Pizarro rode across his lands to plant an alien flag on the sacred Temple of the Sun. But now—right now, in the glow of Huayna Capac’s preeminence—he was mounting an expedition to beat back a Guaraní invasion in the South and reassure his people that they had his protection against the wild, marauding tribes of the known world.

  As the emperor and his armies crossed the valley of Tarapaya, he decided to stop in Porco and visit the silver mines. It was just after the turn of the sixteenth century, and although he didn’t know it, the winds of change and an epic plague had already been loosed on the peoples of that hemisphere. Hernán Cortés would soon captur
e the powerful emperor Montezuma and cripple the Aztecs at the Battle of Tenochtitlán. Pedro de Alvarado would sweep into Mayan territory and kill its ruler, Tecún Uman. Silver and gold had already left indigenous hands and crossed the Atlantic in what would become a brisk traffic to Seville, and a virulent strain of smallpox had traveled the seas in the opposite direction. But in the sublime isolation that Huayna Capac inhabited as he surveyed his empire, aloft on his litter of gold, the journey to Porco was a perfunctory visit.

  As his retinue continued across the valley, the Lord Inca noticed an imposing peak on the southern horizon. It commanded that stretch of the Andean cordillera—the imposing mountain range that runs like a spine from Venezuela to Argentina—not only because of its height but also because of its rust-red hue. Pointing to it, he opined that surely it contained rich lodes of some precious metal. Legend has it that he ordered his miners to investigate, and, as they did, a mighty roar of displeasure arose from the belly of the mountain. Terrified, the miners withdrew. Earthquake, thunder, whatever the reason, the Inca potentates never did insist on exploring the mountain. Some say it was because the promontory was considered sacred, holding within it a great spirit—an apu, a mountain god; others, because there was no particular urgency, as long as the royal court had what it needed. It was not until a decade after the conquest, when a lowly miner for the Spanish Crown stopped to warm himself on a winter’s night, that everything changed. He saw a trickle of molten silver gather at the base of his fire, evidence of the bounty within. Soon after that, his Spanish overlord expropriated the discovery and made Potosí known round the world.

  MOUNT ANANEA

  Peru, 1829–2009

  On the fourth day, the All Powerful beautified the world with the sun, moon, and stars. Once these were in the firmament, the sun gave birth to gold and the mines, and the moon saw about the silver.

  —Bartolomé Arzans de Orsúa y Vela, 1715

  In 1829, three hundred years after Huayna Capac made his grand sweep of the altiplano and pointed prophetically to the red mountain of Potosí, a young Irish geologist, Joseph Barclay Pentland, dashed off a letter to the celebrated explorer Alexander von Humboldt and, in it, pointed to the wealth of precious metals that might be found just north of that territory. Potosí’s glories were past, finished, its treasures sacked, its investors in ruins. But there were hard rock deposits of gold on higher ground four hundred miles away, Pentland assured Humboldt, especially in the Cordillera de Carabaya, on the forbidding slopes of the hoary behemoths that circled the highest navigable body of water in the world: Lake Titicaca.

  The diplomat geologist—as interested in metal as in foreign affairs—had just returned to Lima, Peru, after a grueling two-thousand-mile mule ride through the rugged highlands of Bolivia. The wars of independence had just ended, Spain had been thoroughly routed from American shores, and Britain’s foreign secretary, George Canning, who had been watching the revolution with keen interest, was eager to assess Latin American mining and see what was in it for England. The great liberator Simón Bolívar, fresh from freeing Peru and founding Bolivia—and an avid fan of the British to boot—had welcomed Pentland to the task. Being an energetic social climber of the first order, Pentland now wrote about Latin American possibilities to Humboldt, Charles Darwin, and other great scientists of the day. As Huayna Capac had pointed presciently to Potosí three centuries before, Pentland now pointed emphatically to the promontories of the Carabaya cordillera, where future fortunes would be made.

  The Carabaya mountain chain, which straddles Peru and Bolivia due north of Lake Titicaca and cradles Mount Ananea, was certainly not virgin ground to fortune hunters. Over the centuries, the glacial grind and lacerating winds had eroded the rock, hacked off enormous boulders, and coaxed forth the treasures that lurked within. According to Inca lore, gold nuggets as large as a human skull had rolled from cracks in the stone. One trophy was said to be as large as a horse’s head. El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Huayna Capac’s great-nephew, had written that the mountain contained gold beyond our imagining. He had good reason to think so: his lordly grand-uncle had sent a contingent to mine there. But the terrain had proved impossible: the peaks too vertiginous, the cold too punishing. Before long, the Incas stopped their operations in Ananea. The Spanish, too, eventually abandoned their mines, but for different reasons. The shafts, which bored deeper into the glacial rock than any Inca pit, had collapsed under ice and snow.

  Ironically enough, Pentland’s projection, like the mines themselves, remained frozen in time as Bolívar’s newly liberated republics fell, one by one, into political and economic chaos. The gold and silver lodes that had been exploited to such advantage in Incan and colonial days were now left to the caprices of a string of despots and their temperamental regimes. It wasn’t until the Latin American mining industry experienced a vibrant renaissance at the turn of the twenty-first century that Bolivian geologists revived Pentland’s work and credited the Irishman for his meticulous analysis of the rich arteries that coursed through the geologically exuberant Carabaya. He had described, almost two centuries before, the Potosís that were yet to come.

  * * *

  In 2004, even as Pentland’s name was being resurrected on the Bolivian side of the cordillera by functionaries wanting to attract foreign investors, Leonor Gonzáles’s husband, Juan Ochochoque, was alive and laboring in the pitch-black mines of Mount Ananea, in the very region that Pentland had indicated would be the golden way of the future. After his meager breakfast of pig’s ear broth cooked over an improvised ethyl burner, Juan would head out with a pickax over his shoulder. Although he was a man of the twenty-first century, he was also a miner in the centuries-old lottery of cachorreo, a system in which a laborer works thirty days for no pay before he is allowed to keep whatever rock he can lug out on his back. Daylight would reveal whether or not it contained gold. Sometimes Juan’s haul was enough for a few days of water and food; sometimes it yielded nothing at all.

  Juan’s days began in the freezing penumbra of dawn and ended long after nightfall. Joining the files of shadowy figures snaking up the muddy paths, he entered the mine to be swallowed into a deeper darkness. Night was a permanent state—tunnels, his natural habitat—and, like any nocturnal creature, Juan learned to navigate the stygian labyrinth of Ananea and suffer its fetid damp. There were few rules in the makeshift, informal enterprises dedicated to hewing that icy rock, but those that existed were firm: no female was allowed to enter that underworld—no one could risk the bad luck a woman might bring. Miners had to trust one another, share what little they had, and make offerings to the god of all miners, the lord of dark places, Supay. Chewing coca leaf to brace themselves against an airless gloom, hunched by cramped channels of stone, speaking to no one so as to conserve the scant oxygen, they trudged past husks of spent dynamite, pools of chemical waste, the leering, horned effigies of Supay, the litter of past sacrifices, until they were a thousand feet into the mountain’s heart. For Juan, it was, in every way but one, the repetition of an ancient practice.

  With this essential difference: no miner in the service of the Inca would have dared penetrate a mountain so deeply. Perhaps because each was seen as harboring its own god, perhaps because the Incas had strong constraints against forcing slaves to suffer ill health—perhaps because so little gold or silver was needed for such exclusive purposes—mining in the time of the Incas was largely superficial, scraping a mountain’s surface, or scooping out a cave, rather than plunging a three-hundred-meter hole into its flank. Shaft mining, after all, would have represented a flagrant violation of the most physical manifestation of a god, or apu, which was the mountain itself. Perhaps that is why the lion’s share of gold that the indigenous extracted was from rivers, sifted carefully from coursing silt. Indeed, the Huallaga River, which starts high in the Andes and flows majestically through the Amazon jungle, is said to have been so laden with gold that it made mining elementary for the Incas. But any explanation we might offer for a reticen
ce to bore deep into Pachamama, the sacred earth, would be conjecture. We have no real explanation for this.

  * * *

  In truth, “real” explanations for the continent’s indigenous past are rare. Reconstructing pre-Columbian history or culture is a tenuous business. But there are facts we can deduce. The Incas and Aztecs did not see time as we see it: for them, it consisted of different cycles, other dimensions. Its organization was largely binary—rain versus drought; day versus night; harvest versus hunger—and time raveled in a way that reflected a profoundly held belief in the eternal repetition of order and chaos. The Aztec world view, too, was deeply binary: there was earth below, sky above; fire and water; darkness and light. But for all the seeming simplicity of this cosmology, much about these ancient societies was fluid, complex, built on a sense that while the physical world might be clear and evident, human affairs were not.

  To be an ordinary mortal in the Inca realm was to inhabit a transitory existence: work was interchangeable, rotational, highly disruptive. As in later totalitarian systems under Joseph Stalin or Mao Tse-tung, whole populations were often uprooted and mobilized, families divided, all for the convenience of the state and its economic necessities. Rebel tribes would be relocated to areas where they could be watched by loyal subjects. Peons knew to expect a life of constant upheaval. A man in the labor force, the mitmaq, might scavenge for gold in a nearby mine, or harvest maize in a far field, or be sent to bear arms in war. A lifetime of travail in one line of work—a single industry—was almost unheard of. A laborer in this ever-revolving system might be required to fish for three months, be free to spend another three dancing and drinking, and then be called to resume labors elsewhere. We know from chronicles—or from evidence in tombs—how great rulers lived and died, but history has left scant record of the commoners.