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No Roads Lead to Bella Rica: A Frontier Gold Mining Town in Ecuador
| Article
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20684 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1992 |
3,640 Words |
| Author
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Teun Voeten
Teun Voeten is a free-lance photojournalist based in Brussels
and New York. A cultural anthropologist, he specializes in
Latin American studies. |
Si Dios quiere." "God willing-we shall hit a precious vein," says Victor Pachara. For two months he has slaved together with his brother and a friend, digging a forty-foot tunnel into the mountain. It is no more than a narrow shaft, really--big enough to crawl into but not large enough to turnaround in. An earlier excavation was a fiasco. Using pneumatic drills and dynamite, Pachara and his partners had cut about three hundred feet into harder rock when the patience of their primary investor reached its limits. The man withdrew, taking all his drilling equipment with him--eight months of backbreaking labor for nothing. Now the men work with chisels and pickaxes.
Not long ago, the Pacharas brought their first month's production to the grinding mill. For two days, they carried hundred-pound bags of ore, three tons in all, yielding one and a half ounces of pure gold. At a price of three hundred dollars an ounce, the three men earned fifty dollars each after paying production costs. A meager wage for a month of drudgery, but the Pacharas remain optimistic: It still is twice the amount Victor made as a bus driver.
While the Pacharas toil inside their shaft, Manuel and his wife, Maria, scrounge outside through the janche, the waste stones. Leftover stones and rocks are dumped outside every mine, eventually forming giant heaps of waste material. Jancheros, the pariahs, of the mines, make a living scavenging through this refuse. Sometimes they are lucky and find stones containing specks of gold. A smart janchero knows where to find good material and can collect enough ore to produce half or even a whole ounce of gold a month. But Manuel and Maria are new in town. Any experienced janchero could tell that the Pacharas' mine produces little good material, let alone waste of any value.
These are the fortune seekers--the Pacharas, Manuel, Maria, and many others--who have settled in remote and rough Bella Rica. In the mid-eighties, gold was discovered in this desolate area at the foot of the western Andes Mountains. Within a few months the region had been invaded by the desperate and the destitute from all over Ecuador. A couple of tiny boomtowns sprouted out of nowhere. Bella Rica, with an unsteady population of three thousand, is one of the largest settlements.
Grey Hell
The newcomer to Bella Rica is astonished by what he sees. Astonished that people deliberately choose to live in this labor camp; astonished at the
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