Chuquicamati the Money Pit

Chile is the closest country in South America to the First World. It’s practically there. That’s thanks to free trade agreements with many rich countries and a hearty export industry of essentials: fruit, wine, salmon, and copper. As an aside, Chile is essentially laying waste to its environment to harvest all these exports, but I suppose they just shrug their shoulders and ask someone to define the price of progress. You see some evidence of vineyards and salmon fisheries, and they seem quaint. But only in the case of copper do you really feel like you are witnessing the machine that keeps Chile’s economy moving.

Not far from San Pedro, in the heat of the Atacama, is the world’s biggest open-pit copper mine, Chuquicamati. That means it’s a hole in the ground (as opposed to a mine tunnel) where trucks remove rocks and by a variety of methods, extract and refine the expensive metallic contents within. The numbers alone are staggering. Copper accounts for almost 50% of Chile’s exports, and 30% of the world’s copper comes from Chile. The mine is 5 km long, 3 km wide, and 1 km deep. The trucks that climb up the endless ramp with 2 tonne payloads of rock have tires 6m high. Each rock contains 1% copper, which is eventually refined to 99.7%.

Even if you’re not an engineering grad, it’s an amazing sight. The only way to understand the size is to spot the enormous trucks, nothing more than little specs on the other side of the canyon. The roadways descend in a neverending spiral along the wall’s edge. Dust is everywhere. And the whole time you feel the giant gears of revenue grinding. Chile expropriated this mine (and a few others) from foreign companies in the 1970s, and I imagine foreign investors weren’t too happy about that. But now Chile controls its own destiny, a destiny tied inextricably to copper.
The company town of Chuquicamati sits at the entrance gates to the industrial area. Both mine and town expanded over the years and eventually the proximity became too serious. The town was abandoned only a few years ago and is now shielded from the public by chain-link fence with a certain sad, lonely quality. We were allowed to walk around a little bit, to look at the school and central square and the art deco movie house, buildings silently hiding the happy memories of an age past.
Afterwards, I killed some time in the mall in Calama, a bigger town only ten minutes away. In Chile, a mall really is like a mall back home, and if I was seriously interested in Bata shoes or a flatscreen TV I’d have plenty of options. As it was, I was able to watch Star Trek (awesome), eat Chinese food (not nearly as hot as the servers led me to believe), and get accosted and photographed by a bunch of high school girls (“Hello! We love you!”). All in all, a pretty good day.