Bioethics of Disasters: Miners on the screen

by Lykes, M. Brinton , Michel Fariña, Juan Jorge

To Boris Pinto, with gratitude

One of Colombia’s greatest attractions is undoubtedly the Salt Cathedral. Located in Zipaquirá, an hour and a half from Bogotá, it is a marvel of engineering, a true underground city built in the tunnels of what was once an ancient site in which the Muisca mined salt long before the Spanish colonization of Colombia. In one of the mine’s galleries, 180 meters underground and built with the labor of the miners themselves, there is an auditorium with classic wooden seats and a capacity for two hundred people.

We visited this wonder at the invitation of Boris Pinto, a Colombian bioethicist, musician, and writer. He shared with us beautiful accounts of memorable concerts and cantatas that he had enjoyed in the cathedral’s main nave. Together we entered the underground theater, because Boris also share with us a passion for movies.

The truth is that sitting in one of those seats in that majestic setting, we couldn’t help but remember the Chauvet cave, on whose walls the first animated frames in the history of film had been drawn during the Upper Paleolithic Era – approximately 36,000 years ago. That image, evoked through Werner Herzog ’s film, quickly gave rise to snippets of other films that tell stories of mines and miners.

And surely because we were in the company of a musician, our first association was the second movement of the Concierto de Aranjuez, in a version for trumpet and brass band, which integrates a memorable scene from "Brassed Off". Set in Great Britain during Margaret Thatcher’s government, it narrates the heroic deeds of miners when the coal crisis led to the closure of the mine, which was a source of employment and identity in a small mining town in the north of the country. Could a band made up of miners still exist, in the name of a mine that no longer exists? As Slavoj Žižek wrote, regarding this film, beliefs that the miners’ insistence on continuing to rehearse until they reached London’s Albert Hall is not an abstract commitment to musical forms, but rather a gesture of fidelity to the concrete content of that struggle as a political event.

We recalled similar struggles: "Marmato", the memorable Colombian documentary about the miners’ struggle against a Canadian multinational corporation. Or the tenacious and silent resistance of the miners in "The 33," starring Antonio Banderas and Juliette Binoche, inspired by the 2010 mining disaster at the San José mine in Chile. The San José miners remained for more than two months 700 meters underground, without water, with very little food, and almost no air, offered another political lesson: fortitude and solidarity were not only key to survival, but also the strongest denunciation of chronic corporate and state irresponsibility. And continuing with our free associations, although the San José mine extracted copper and gold, the film was shot in Nemocón, Colombia’s other major salt mine.

Mining in what is today Colombia predates the Spanish conquest and colonization project. Although noted, the wisdom, social organization and practices of extracting salt by the Muisca is scarcely captured in any detail by the film we saw in the Salt Cathedral, a curious observer or descendent of this community could contribute more to exploring the continuities and discontinuities of these Indigenous groups within what is today Colombia. Additional explorations briefly documented in the film record the contributions of salt extracted from these waters and lands to the economic supremacy of the early Muisca. A timeline shared in cathedral´s documentary narrated salt’s importance across XX centuries, including in the supremacy of industrial capitalism and some of the many creative engineering interventions that facilitated that development despite multiple risks to those who mine these sites.

The 1981 Argentine film "Tiempo de revancha", for example, recounts a Mapuche miner who finds the slab under which Federico Luppi ’s character was buried alive, after the mining company recklessly and irresponsibly dynamited the quarry. When the management maliciously questions him about his discovery, the miner responds simply and ironically, "Is it because I’m an Indian?"

For Indigenous peoples, mineral extraction was far from a mere commercial activity. Salt, for example, obtained by the Wayuu using the ancestral method of solar evaporation, or by the Muisca through boiling water containing salt in clay vessels, was a sacred commodity. The crystals obtained, both on the Colombian coast and in the highlands, were considered a divine gift from the goddess Bachué. Although indirectly, Mel Gibson’s film " Apocalypto," spoken entirely in Mayan and starring indigenous Mexican actors, narrates the transcendent value of another stone extracted and valued by the Indigenous people of Yucatán.

According to a legend recounted at the Zipaquirá mine, the discovery of salt originated while a Muisca boy was playing among the rocks. While having fun, he accidentally hit his mouth on a piece of rock, surprised by its unique taste. He brought the discovery to his elders, and the rock became a valuable condiment and medicine, adding to its social utility and the ascendancy of the Indigenous who developed its production, a mystical and transcendent value.

Jacques Lacan once wrote that "truth has the structure of fiction". And these stories live on precisely because of the dimension of truth that film narratives give them. They are true fictional testimonies that immortalize the different forms of miners’ persistence and resistance. And they foster a renewed commitment every time they move us with the magic of light in the middle of a dark cave.

Filmography

Aristarain, A. (Director). (1981). Tiempo de revancha [Film]. Argentina: Aries Cinematográfica Argentina.

Gibson, M. (Director). (2006). Apocalypto [Film]. United States: Icon Productions.

Herman, M. (Director). (1996). Brassed Off [Film]. United Kingdom: Channel Four Films.

Herzog, W. (Director). (2010). Cave of Forgotten Dreams [Documentary film]. Germany: Werner Herzog Filmproduktion.

McEvoy, M. (Director). (2014). Marmato [Documentary film]. Colombia: Ratpac Documentary Films.

Riggen, P. (Director). (2015). The 33 [Film]. United States/Chile: Alcon Entertainment.

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