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LABOUR-BOLIVIA: Childhood in the Pits

José Luis Alcázar* - Tierramérica

TARIJA, Bolivia, Oct 4 2005 (IPS) - He looks like he is around 60 years old, but he just turned 35. Valentín Condori was only 15 in 1985 when the Bolivian government closed the tin mines it owned and left him – and 30,000 other miners – without work.

At age 10, Condori became the head of his household after the premature death of his father, also a miner. Now he is working as a bricklayer in the southern city of Tarija, with precarious health as a result of silicosis (an illness resulting from inhaling silica dust) and with “the old memories on my shoulders.”

“I was eight when I began to help out my ill father working on the surface of the mine in Chorolque. When he died, his co-workers let me into the pits to help carry the ore. Later I was digging rock, preparing dynamite charges and also setting them off. Thank God I never had an accident,” he told Tierramérica.

“We began in the early morning. We chewed coca leaf, smoked cigarettes, we drank a bit of alcohol, and that’s how we got up the nerve to go into the mine,” he recalls.

Condori was a privileged mining child in comparison to those working in the mines today. No longer are there stable working hours or social security programmes, and the government is no longer the boss. “I even retired at age 15,” he commented, in ironic reference to the 1985 layoffs.

According to the Mining Promotion Centre, the Bolivian counterpart of the U.S.-based non-governmental organisation CARE, more than 13,500 children and adolescent work in traditional mining (extraction of tin, silver and zinc), mainly in the southwestern departments of Oruro and Potosí, and in gold mining in the subtropical area around La Paz.

A 2004 report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the health of the children who work in traditional mining is the most vulnerable.

They are exposed to accidents because they handle explosives, and they damage their lungs by inhaling toxic gases, dust and particulate matter in the mines. Miners suffer hearing loss from the noise of the explosions and from the large machinery, and they often spend hours lying in uncomfortable positions as they work. Furthermore, they run the risk of crushed limbs, and damage to their muscles, tendons and joints.

Contact with and inhalation of toxic substances cause acute and chronic diseases. Tuberculosis and silicosis are the most frequent illnesses associated with mining.

In gold mining, “barranquilleo” – rinsing sand to extract gold – takes place in an unhealthy environment of rivers contaminated with mercury, sulphurs, mineral residues, sewage and garbage. Girls and boys alike face skin and respiratory infections, yellow fever, rheumatism, chronic intoxication and diarrhoea.

The life expectancy of a miner is, on average, 45 years.

Bolivia has legal instruments in place, like the Labour Code and the Children and Adolescent Code, which establish the minimum working age at 14, and prohibit hiring minors for dangerous and unhealthy jobs like mining. Bolivia has also signed international agreements for the prevention and elimination of child labour.

Though the problem persists, government and non-governmental entities continue in their efforts to end the drama of child miners.

The Project for the Progressive Elimination and Prevention of Mining Child Labour (PETIM) offers alternatives by encouraging technical training through workshops for carpentry, welding, sewing and mechanics in the schools attended by child miners.

In Potosí, cradle of the legendary Cerro Rico, whose silver deposits have been exploited since the Spanish colonial era, around 1,000 children work in different mining activities. The German non-governmental group Kindernothilfe (KNH) is carrying out a programme aimed at motivating the youths to study, and to improve their working conditions.

Some 300 children benefit from the programme, but without abandoning their jobs. “We don’t believe child labour in the mines can be eradicated. It is a necessity of the children and their families to improve their economic conditions when there is no alternative,” Alberto Mosquera, national director for KNH, told Tierramérica.

Most of the children involved in small-scale mining work with primitive tools on sites worked by their families or by cooperatives.

Children work with their families or in operations where they are paid cash or in-kind by an employer. In the former case, they are pitching in as the family does not have the resources to hire help.

In the cooperatives, often made up of former state mining workers, the wages – in money or in-kind – are around five dollars a day for those who work inside the mines, and 1.3 dollars a day for those working the surface.

Children are also often utilised for “juqueo” – stealing mineral ore – under the cover of night at the mines.

(* José Luis Alcázar is a Tierramérica contributor. Originally published Oct. 1 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)