Michael Batson

Copper accounts for almost one-third of all Chile’s foreign trade. At one time the figure was a massive 75 percent. These days Chile produces about 450,000 tons of copper per year.

Not for nothing then is copper known as “Chile’s salary”.

Mines come complete with their own cities to house the workers, their own water and electrical plants, schools, stores, railways, and even in certain cases their own police forces. Miners worked for the company, shopped with the company, were housed by the company, and the kids got educated by the company. If you lost your job with the company, you were screwed.

The biggest mine of them all is Chuquicamata, which despite being worked for over 90 years has produced 29 million tonnes of copper. The mine is a conventional open pit operation with truck-and-shovel on a massive scale.

After Bingham Canyon Mine in Utah, “Chuqui” is the biggest hole in the world.

The owner, Codelco, organizes bus tours that give a glimpse of this industrial masterpiece.

Nearby Calama is the jumping off point for the mine. Calama is one of the driest cities in the world with average annual precipitation of just 5 mm, so the only reason to bring a coat is for the cold desert climate given the town’s elevation.

The town of Chuquicamata which housed the miners was dismantled in 2003. Conditions were grim, disease was rife, and mortality high. Twenty thousand lived in dour terraced houses shrouded in sulphur dioxide, and poisonous reservoirs dwarfed by slagheaps. The residents of Chuquicamata must have been relieved hear of resettlement 16 kilometres away in Calama.

Gus and David were French-speaking Swiss from Basle. “The French make fun of us” they said. “It’s because of our accents. They think we talk funny.” David also spoke German. His brother would phone and he would talk in German and David would answer in French. He told me this in English and thought nothing of his linguistic dexterity.

Starting in Mexico three months prior with no Spanish, they were now pretty fluent, or so it seemed. “We get by, basic stuff.” The Swiss version of “basic” seemed to mean being able to converse rather effortlessly in street slang with the miners and locals of Calama.

Codelco runs guided tours of the mine. Book a visit to the mine and be overwhelmed by everything that is huge: the pit, the trucks, the factories and the slag heaps. For every ton of copper produced, three tons of waste product accumulates.

The mine is five kilometres long, three kilometres wide and one kilometre deep. Wear long sleeves, long pants and shoes. Transport is by bus.

The first thing you notice is that the traffic lights are about 10 metres tall. When you see the dump trucks and other assorted monster machinery you’ll understand why.

Giant Liebherr and Komatsu dump trucks run back and forth, up and down the pit 24 hours a day, everyday, 99 of them. Seven of the trucks are used as water tankers running regular patrols keeping the dust down in the second driest landscape on Earth.

Sitting on the bus, the axle of one of these beasts comes up to eye level. The trucks carry loads over 300 tonnes and cost US$4-5 million each.

As a security feature smaller vehicles carry a tall flag on top and a light (for night use) to prevent the vehicle from being run over by the massive trucks, previously a regular occurrence.

Maintenance is a bitch. Wheel rims are blasted off with plastic explosive. Engines run to 20 cylinders, displace 90 litres (5,500 cubic inches in old speak) and produce 3500 horsepower. When in operation, they consume two to three litres of diesel per minute. The diesel tank holds 4,000 litres. Despite their weight, they can still manage a top speed of 60 kph.

600,000 tonnes of deposits are transported per day, one third of which has copper-containing minerals. Extracted side products contain a toxic amalgam of hazardous substances including iron and sulphur. From Chuquicamata the copper is transported by train to Mejillones

Engineers were preparing to blow thousands of tonnes of rock, known as overburden, to make the mine even bigger. For ten minutes the sirens, like an air raid warning, cried out across the vast pit. The trucks, beginning their journey at the bottom, dwarfed by the mass of the mine walls, made their way slowly to the top, out of range.

The suits were on show. Americans in suits, distinguished by their threads and towering height watched not far from the tour party. When it comes the explosion is muffled. Such is the distance across Chuqui, the sound of the explosion is delayed before reaching the onlookers.

The exposed ore is scooped up by large power shovels load 15-25 cubic metres in a single bite. Then the trucks roll back down into the yawning chasm, and the process starts all over again.

Codelco is currently the largest copper producing company in the world.

In 1971 the foreign owned copper companies were nationalised.

Under the then Allende government full ownership of all copper mines and copper fields in the country were transferred to Codelco. Ironically, the creation of the Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile, was only formalised by decree in 1976 by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

The history of copper mining at Chuquicamata dates back centuries to about 550 A.D. But mining on any scale did not start until the late 19th Century following the rather grandiosely named War of the Pacific (1879-1884) when Chile annexed parts of neighbouring Bolivia  and Peru, including Chuquicamata.

There then followed a flood of miners into the area attracted by “Red Gold Fever” (La Fiebre del Oro Rojo). Soon Chuquicamata was covered with mines and mining claims, several hundred at one point. Miners lived in squalid and lawless ramshackle towns around the mines. These shanty towns were veritable dens of wretchedness and vice racked by alcohol, gambling and prostitution.

Murder was an almost daily occurrence. As late as 1918 the army had to be sent in to keep order.

Early capital to develop Chuquicamata came from the world’s richest people, including the Guggenheims who backed the Chile Exploration Company (Chilex) to do the mining. Chilex bought out industrialist Albert Burrage who lacked the financial clout required to operate large-scale mining.

Chilex took to their task with impressive mechanical capabilities for the time, including massive steam shovels purchased from building of the Panama Canal. Infrastructure built included a port and oil fired power plant, and an aqueduct was constructed to bring water in from the Andes.

In 1923 the Guggenheims gave up control of the mine selling a majority share to Anaconda Copper, and a few years later sold them the rest. Chuquicamata cost Anaconda US$77 million, and was the largest copper mine in the world.

Anaconda hailed from Butte, Montana and the “Richest Hill in the World”. Early on it was backed by George Hearst (father of Randolph), and later the Rothschilds, during an attempt to control the world copper supply. Later the Rockefellers got involved, and together with Standard Oil formed one of the largest trusts of the early Twentieth Century.

The Great Depression hit Chilean copper hard. Two-thirds of Chilean miners were out of work, the rest led a piecemeal existence. Their lives were briefly depicted in The Motorcycle Diaries, when Ernesto “Che” Guevara and his offsider, Alberto Granada, encountered the harsh conditions of migrant workers. It was among these experiences that led Guevara to his revolutionary destiny.

Anaconda ran the mine until the 1960s until the “Chilenisation” of Chile’s chief assets by President Eduardo Frei. In 1971 the mine was nationalised by Frei’s successor Salvador Allende, and in 1976 incorporated into Codelco.

Tampering with Chilean copper proved fatal. Allende committed suicide in a violent military coup which overthrew his government. Frei died in 1982 his death shrouded in controversy. Rumour has it he was poisoned by Chile’s secret police, the DINA.

One day the Chuqui’s trucks will be gone. It’s no longer profitable to keep digging deeper. Instead, horizontal tunnels extending 1,500 kilometres will be dug to further tap the copper deposits, and from 2018 the deposits will be transported by electrically steered conveyor belts. Chuqui will still get bigger the tunnels deepening the mine by almost 800m and merging with Codelco’s adjacent copper mine “Mina del Sur” until production ends around 2060.