How Copper started the legend of Che Guevara
Locals around the Chuquicamata continue to claim that the Ernesto Guevara who visited the location in 1952 was nothing greater than a brawling drunk, using a penchant for one-night stands. If Che had caught the boat to Easter Island, as 1 story goes, “there would have been no Cuban Revolution.” That may effectively be an exaggeration; but a great case could be made for the proposition that the massive open-pit copper mine of Chuquicamata, or Chuqui because it is typically identified in Chile, remained firmly etched inside the psyche of the Argentinean revolutionary proper till his death.
Copper production in Chuquicamata started in 1915, just as German scientific successes inside the quest for artificial nitrates had resulted inside the collapse from the planet market for Chile’s standard export: saltpetre (potassium nitrate). Considering that then copper acquired a pre-eminent position in Chile’s economic climate, and thousands of indigenous workers deserted the floundering haciendas to locate work in copper mines like Chuquicamata, El Salvador and El Teniente, all American-owned until the Chilean copper nationalization plan from the late-1960s.
Initially, it was the plight of those mine workers which shocked Che as he headed north from the historic city of Valparaiso, after abandoning plans to reach Easter Island. But as Che and his companion, Alberto Granado, entered the Chuquicamata mining complex, the full story of Chile’s copper, as well as the planet demand for that copper, started to unfold. Chuquicamata also emerged as a classic example from the relationship between supposedly modern day mining techniques and important function of exceptionally cheap labor on the commercialization of copper.
It was at Chuquicamata that Che learnt, from a mine foreman, the value of copper within the post-war industrialization of North America and Europe. In Valparaiso, a barroom conversation with an American prospector had left Che wondering why ordinary Chileans were obsessed with their copper deposits. “There is an unimaginable quantity of gold and silver riches lying hidden inside the Andes Mountains,” the prospector repeated to anybody who cared to listen. But, as a Chuquicamata foreman explained to his visitors, “there is 1 and only one truth about mining, any mining, along with the gringos will tell you that: concentrate on maintaining the production price as low as possible, let the rest from the world worry about demand and provide cycles.”
The picturization of life around the Chuquicamata within the Motorcycle Diaries left Robert Redford and his guests deeply moved at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival. But Che apparently took away greater than the pictures of intense poverty from Chuquicamata. In later years, he was in a position to view how the United Fruit Organization employed clout and politics to produce windfall profits, year right after year, from its Chiquita bananas in Guatemala. For the duration of an basically failed trip to Africa, to advance the Laurent Kabila-led insurgency, he saw how foreign firms were scrambling for the vast mineral potential with the Congo, and destroying the social fabric with the region within the approach. Ultimately, a few weeks before his death in 1967, Che studied the tin mining sector from the Bolivian economic climate and noted, when once again, that mine owners and traders had continued to produce profits, regardless of boom and bust cycles within the industrialized economies.
Though he by no means returned to Chuquicamata, Che kept abreast from the story of Chile’s copper. And possibly the story of Chile’s copper continued shaping the Che legend. Given that copper constituted a considerable portion of Chilean exports, American mining interests exercised a domineering influence within the Chilean economy. At the same time, illness and hunger continued to cast dark shadows more than the shanty towns about Chile’s copper mine, whatever the amount of international copper costs. Citing copper, Che often warned Latin American governments, at every single offered opportunity, that foreign domination would only compound the issue of impoverishment.
But who was listening? “This continent is full of Chuquicamatas,” said a senior Chilean mining official at a seminar in Havana because the socialist government of Salvador Allende proceeded to nationalize Chile’s copper mines and introduce worker emancipation legislation in 1971. “The mining laws must be revamped urgently. But who has the will, and the muscle?”
President Allende, an ardent admirer of Che, came to energy as a result of the 1970 elections. 3 years later he was overthrown in a military coup; whilst the nationalization with the copper mines was not reversed, trade unionists in Chile’s copper belt had to wait for an additional 30 years to legitimize the demands of these indigenous workers Che encountered along the road from Valparaiso towards the Peruvian border.
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