Raw Materials

I have spent the past couple of days in Chile's extreme north, visiting the places where the country's wealth is (or was) extracted in mineral form. The profits are then diverted straight to Santiago, where they are then redistributed by the State to the rest of Chile. I guess it could be worse: at least Codelco, the State copper company, is State-owned, meaning that its profits remain in Chile. In many other countries, foreign mineral companies rip out the minerals, pay a modest tax to the country they're in and then their profits go back to the developed world. And actually, this happens a lot in Chile as well, since some of the mines are privately-owned, and in the past, all of them were.
I guess I am struck more than anything by what I now see as a veneer of gentility that we use to cover up the real sources of our wealth. And by "we," I'm talking about Chilean elites in Santiago just as much as elites in the developed world who make their profits off the extraction of raw materials in poorer countries. We sort of tell ourselves that we are living in nice, comfortable surroundings because of our own merits, our own abilities. But really, it's thanks to a bunch of dudes working in pits, often for very little wages and in crap conditions (although that's not the case for Codelco miners, who make tons of money, they do almost invariable die very young, shortly after retirement: "un minero sale de la mina pa' puro morirse," goes the saying).
Hope the same thing doesn't happen to me (I figured out how to put up my photos!):

As I toured Chuquicamata, the world's largest open-pit copper mine in the world--it's a little outside of Calama, where we last left off on this little travelogue--I was struck by this. It was almost like seeing the man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz: now I know what really goes on behind the scenes. So this is how we got everything to be so nice in Santiago. Ah.
Not that the place isn't impressive in and of itself. The mine is 1 km deep and 5 km long. It has a spiral of roads going down into it. There are 6 trucks with hoses that drive around all day and all night (it operates 24 hours a day) hosing down the roads so the dust doesn't blow up over Calama and pollute everything. There are massive earth moving machines (for every massive rock, like a little speck of copper gets produced) whose tires alone cost US$12,000 each. It is a massive operation. I took a tour that started in the actual town of Chuquicamata, which is right next to the mine. From there we got on a bus that took us to the edge of the pit, which was awesome. Chuiquicamata itself had to be evacuated of residents about 5 years ago (everyone got moved to Calama) because it was too polluted. All around the town, and the mine itself, are literally mountains of "sterile" earth that has been stripped of all its copper. I guess they'll just leave it there, I don't know.
This is what Chuqui looks like (this is not my photo):

By the way, Chuquicamata was started by the Guggenheim family in the early 1900s, before the copper mines got nationalized by the State. So I guess that's where a lot of the money for their museums came from. Maybe they should put a museum in Chile?
After Calama, I went to Tocopilla and am now in Iquique (inexorably northward). Both Tocopilla and Iquique got their start as cities by the boom in nitrates and saltpeter that could be mined in the northern pampas here. The problem was that the US figured out how to make synthetic nitrates, which left Iquique and Tocopilla pretty much SOL. So now there are a bunch of nitrate mines, called oficinas in Spanish, in these far away areas that are just abandoned.
Today I went to the best-preserved oficina, which was about 45 minutes inland from Iquique. It's called Humberstone, named after this guy who invented a new method of processing nitrates (I think). Humberstone, at its height, must have been pretty cool (for a town dedicated exclusively to mining and miners). It had a swimming pool, schools, a general store, a hotel, a lit soccer field, a rail transit system, a huge theater, and housing for workers and their families. All set up by the company to provide workers with good (or, good enough) conditions so that they wouldn't unionize. Now Humberstone is a little long in the tooth, but you can still go around and get an idea of how it was. Plus it was just named a UNESCO Heritage Site so it's undergoing a process of preservation now.
So, between the copper and the nitrates, it was cool and educational to see where the money for my salary came during the two years I worked as a Chilean Government functionary.
Tomorrow, I'm off to Arica: Chile's northernmost large city. From there: Bolivia!