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South America: home of the greatest, most alluring, most deadly of mining legends – the myth of El Dorado, the golden one. Over the past 500 years, the con-tinent’s mineral riches, real and imagined, have stimulated amazing feats of courage, daring and endurance, conquest, looting, terrible atrocities and appalling oppression.
From the Victorian era on, mining also resulted in what are still breath-taking engineering feats, such as railways through the mighty Andes mountains, complete with chasm-spanning bridges and impressive tunnels. Mining has helped promote at least some economic and infrastructural development in a number of countries, although this has tended to be uneven.
The continent of South America is the fourth largest continent but is composed of just 12 countries (plus the French territory of Guiana on the mainland and the UK self- governing dependency of the Falklands Islands in the South Atlantic). These countries are Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela.
As a result, the continent possesses some of the geographically largest countries in the world, including the fifth biggest (Brazil), the eighth (Argentina), the 20th (Peru) and the 26th (Colombia) – South Africa ranks 25th. Bolivia, which looks quite small on a map of South America, is actually the 28th-largest country in the world.
South America must not be confused with Latin America – the former is a continent, the latter a cultural region. Guyana and Suriname are not Latin countries, while most of the countries of Central America (Anglophone Belize is the exception), some of the Caribbean islands and Mexico (which is part of North America) form part of Latin America. Brazil speaks Portuguese, Guyana and the Falkland Islands English, Suriname Dutch, Guiana French and the rest Spanish.
But in Bolivia and Peru the indigenous Aymara and Quechua languages also have official status, as does Guarani in Paraguay – a fact foreign miners should be aware of and responsive to. Despite the generalisations that follow, it must always be remembered that there are significant cultural differences between all these countries, even among those that, from a distance, seem most similar, such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay. One result is that popular attitudes to the mining industry and its legacy vary enormously from country to country.
Resource Rich
In its most recent publication which includes the continent as a whole (2010 Minerals Yearbook: Latin America and Canada), the US Geological Survey noted that in 2010 “Brazil was the world’s leading producer of niobium and tantalum, the third-ranked producer of iron-ore (gross weight) and the regional leader in the production of bauxite and crude steel”.
Chile was the world’s leading producer of copper (mine output and refined metal), iodine and lithium; the second-ranked producer of arsenic; and the third-ranked producer of boron. Argentina, Bolivia and Peru were also among the world’s leading producers of base and precious metals and industrial minerals. Argentina was the world’s second-ranked producer of boron and Bolivia was the second-ranked producer of antimony. Peru was the world’s leading producer of silver, the second-ranked producer of bismuth and copper, the fourth-ranked producer of lead and the region’s leading producer of tin (mine and metal production).
For the rest of this editorial, click here: http://www.miningweekly.com/article/mining-and-south-america-today-2013-06-21