Talk about Newsnight

Dynamite on the highway - I meet the miners

• Paul Mason
• 19 Mar 06, 12:23 PM

The line of trucks and tankers runs like a white scar across the altiplano: the blockade is four kilometres ahead along a road spattered by rain, strewn with plastic bottles corn husks and a couple of hundred stranded vehicles. Even from here you can feel the thud of the dynamite. 3,000 miners from Huanuni have set up roadblocks on the southern altiplano paralysing commercial traffic. We’ve taped the letters “TV” all over our 4x4 so, as we timidly edge forward towards the picket line, the miners greet us by lobbing a couple of friendly sticks of TNT into the road, about 30 yards ahead...

The roadblock has become a Bolivian tradition – and is rigidly enforced. Here at Caihuasi, 22km south of the mining centre of Oruro, the miners have taken over a police station and a road-toll booth, dumping a tipper-load of earth onto the road at either end. The approaches are strewn with hundreds of foot-wide boulders, arranged into neat v-shapes. Though there are only about 200 pickets huddled under canopies and in the lee of adobe huts, there are plenty more camped out in the village up the hill. Given the miners’ reputation, they don’t really need physical force – the truckers and coach drivers bow to the moral force and sit around resignedly, waiting to be released.
Huanuni, where they’ve come from, is the Rhondda of Bolivia: when tin mining made up 50% of GDP these tough, hard-hatted men and women had the power to stop the country. They did it in 1952 in support of a nationalist revolution that delivered public ownership of the mines and land to the peasants. They tried to do it in 1985– but by then they were up against something stronger than military dictatorship: global trade. The price of tin collapsed, the government hastened the industry’s demise and the miners’ union – think Scargill’s NUM to the power of ten in terms of militancy and political consciousness – collapsed into a shadow of its former self. Many of the leaders on this picket are actually retired miners.
I explain I’m here to report on the changes under way following Evo Morales’ election victory, and to ask the people who put him in power what they want. This question is greeted politely but indignantly by Roberto Chavez, general secretary of the Miners Federation of Bolivia:
“Let me clear up a misapprehension: we are not the people who put Evo Morales in power. What we want from him has not been delivered. We will not move from this spot until Evo comes here to listen to our demands.”
It is a reminder that much of the trade union movement here sees Evo not as a radical left wing leader but a kind of Bolivian Tony Blair.
The demands of the picket are simple, and have nothing to do with mining: they want 55 extra teaching posts to be created in Huanuni’s schools. They want more money for schools and vocational training. “Education is all we’ve got,” says Marisol Huaylla, a member of the Oruro Civic Committee. She’s a tanned, grey-haired community leader and explains patiently: “Our children need education – otherwise they will end up like us.” She’s wearing a Che Guevara baseball hat.
Only one miner is wearing the traditional round tin helmet: he lets me have a go at wearing it and they all shout – now you are a miner from ’52. I ask them if they remember the revolution of that year, and the older ones nod, adding “but we were kids then”.
Most of the younger men are wearing dark blue company overalls of hi-tech design and quality. The price of tin has bounced back – thanks to Chinese demand - boosting the organised workforce, though today they work for private multinationals. There are also co-operative miners on the picket line, but Roberto Chavez is keen to draw the distinction between them and the “syndicalists”. The co-operative miners work in unsafe, unventilated mines and have been the mainstay of production since the nationalised industry collapsed – but the unionised miners look down on them.
The fact that they’ve come together to stand under a pewter sky and lob dynamite into the road for entertainment is a minor but symbolic problem for Evo Morales. Evo’s government will not use force to stop protests like these – the armed police at the picket are there just to watch.
Lighting and lobbing a stick of dynamite is done carefully, even by those who have used the two days on the picket line to take on board large quantities of home-made hooch. The onlookers stand a good 10 metres away and the dynamitero lobs the lighted charge with a graceful underarm motion. It does not fizz like in the movies, but eventually there´s a loud thump. It does not echo – the wide plain damps the sound down and the rain damps the cloud of black smoke that swirls up after the bang.
“What will you do if Evo does not deliver what you’re asking for,” I ask them. They are not excited by this question: in truth, beyond the mining region the political clout of the union is not great. But just like the coca growers, they’re looking to the Constituent Assembly in July to guarantee their right to organise and exist. If it does not deliver we will have to consider what to do, says Chavez.
By nightfall negotiations have started, and at 2100 there is an agreement: the local authorities will appoint 28 new teachers, and Evo Morales has issued a statement saying 3,000 new teaching posts will be created – paid for by abolishing various ambassadors he thinks the country does not need, together with other civil service posts he believes are mainly decorative.
As we leave the blockade, speeding along the deserted road to Oruro the entire scene becomes a speck against the magnificent Andean plain, the peaks, the thunderclouds. It’s been like a meeting with Bolivia’s past – what it means for Bolivia’s future is not yet clear.