Ander Izagirre is a Basque writer and reporter, author of several award-winning reportage books. His work addresses colonialism, poverty, global and local history. He came to Potosí not to stay briefly — not as a tourist with a notepad — but as someone who wanted to understand the city from the inside, through its people and their everyday lives. He spent many months there, descending into mines, living with miners’ families, and tracing the interwoven fates that together compose a portrait of a place unique in the world.

Potosí lies in Bolivia at an altitude of more than four thousand metres above sea level, at the foot of Cerro Rico — the Rich Mountain. Since the sixteenth century, when the Spanish discovered silver deposits here, the mountain has supplied ore that co-financed European imperialism and the beginnings of global capitalism. It is estimated that over the centuries of mining, between several million and eight million miners have died here — indigenous people coerced into labour by the mita system, and African slaves. Their descendants still descend into the same tunnels.

Izagirre builds his story around specific people: Pedro Villca, a sixty-year-old miner with silicosis in his lungs; his family; a young man facing a choice between the mine and emigration; an Oblate priest who has worked with the mining community for years. Alongside these stories the author weaves a broader narrative — about the conquistadors, the forced-labour system, what Che Guevara saw when he passed through Potosí, how the Nazi fugitive Klaus Barbie organised death squads in Bolivia. The history of this place is the history of the global economy seen from below.

Izagirre’s style is committed and precise at once — he does not flee from emotion, but does not let it replace analysis. His reportage is both warning and document: it shows that the extraction of raw materials on which modern civilisation rests has a price — and that price is still paid by the same people in the same places.