La Salitrera

Antofogasta. Desierto del Atacama. The names of far places can magnetize the imagination, inducing a lifelong attraction. So when asked to accompany a friend to the Pedro de Valdivia and Maria Elena mines, 200 km West of Antofogasta in the Atacama, I responded to an old mental magnetism and accepted immediately. It is a land of extremes, as is all Chile. To the North is Chuquicamata, the world’s largest open pit copper mine. In the altiplano to the Southeast is Lago Chungara, the world's highest navigable lake whose slightly saline water attracts myriads of flamingos. In the spine of the Andes mountains is Ojos del Salado, a few feet short of being the highest mountain in the Western Hemisphere. The fertile valleys which produce our imported winter fruit lie a thousand km to the South, with the Peruvian border far northward. There are places in the Atacama where no rain has been recorded. Yet beneath a sterile surface lie vast extensions of sodium nitrate. This naturally occurring mineral is water soluble, and it is a simple matter to scoop up the "caliche" or"salitre", grind it into a powder, and leach the mineral out with water. There are no gardens or lawns in Pedro de Vadivia, not only because water is very mineral laden and scarce, but because surface water disappears down into the porous soil, and on reaching the 2 meter-thick nitrate-bearing layer below, eats the soil away leaving a sunken pit.

Sodium nitrate was once the principal mineral fertilizer for the world, as well as a basic for gunpowder. During WWI it was found that nitrogen for use in ammonia-based fertilizers could be more economically extracted from air. Within a few years, most long-established desert nitrate mining towns were abandoned. Yet for the next 50 years, populist Chilean governments kept two mining communities alive at great expense. Uniform dusty dreariness, desert isolation, harsh and silicosis-producing working conditions, marginal housing, education and health care promoted a strong, almost tribal spirit of community and tough pride among the populace. Succeeding generations of miners never left the desert until lung disease forced them out, and when they left, their desert-hardened sons and daughters stayed on.

But things changed fast with privatization. The former communistically oriented government employees were given a portion of the stock in the new company, with the condition that it could not be sold for seven years. New management, realizing that potassium nitrate was much more marketable than the natural nitrate, modified the process to produce the better product, and marketed aggressively. (There has been a SOQUIMICH office in Sacramento for more than ten years now.) The stock began to pay dividends and to rise sharply in value. The neo capitalists were astute, and bought additional shares on margin, until they now control around 20% of the stock. For the first time, worker-owned cars could be seen in Pedro de Valdivia. The company sold residences to the employees, something the government had never been willing to do. On the other hand, the world opened for children of miners who began to drift away; more money brought with it formerly unaffordable asocial behavior.

Privatization was not limited to the mines. Both the social security and health systems were changed to allow private insurance options. The 7% mandatory social security deduction from wages could be placed in one of twelve competing mutual funds, where the account was owned by the worker, pending retirement; and the mandatory 7% deduction for health care could be channeled to an HMO-like organization owned and operated by those who contributed to it. Most people elected the IRA type social security option, and the effect was a sustained infusion of investment capital which has contributed greatly to the past 15 years of economic prosperity. Furthermore, as mutual fund managers of the retirement funds controlled more and more stock, they coordinated their votes and obtained seats on the boards of directors of most major stock corporations.

The salitrera mine employees elected to establish their own HMO organization. Not only could they determine how their money would be spent, but the law provided that funds remaining at the end of any year could be used for expansion of services or as a dividend to users. The former government operators of the mines, under the pressure of unions and local politics, had built and staffed a hospital to serve 11,000 people at the Pedro de Valdivia mine, and a second one to serve the Maria Elena town and mine nearby. While major cases were shipped out, OB GYN, general surgery, and most medical hospital admissions were cared for in the local hospitals. As might be imagined, the medical staff was not excessively busy nor enthusiastic about their two-year desert assignment in partial repayment for medical training.

When the employees, new owners of the HMO, discovered the cost of such hospitals, they wanted to explore other alternatives. My contribution to their deliberation was to encourage abandonment of the hospitals to the desert, where they could be preserved along with the opera hall unused for 50 years. I recommended they establish a periodically renegotiable capitation-type relationship with a group of physicians in Antofogasta who would provide hospital and specialty care, as well as 24-hour urgent care services in the community; that the two communities should join forces for HMO purposes; that they provide their members with public transportation to Antofogasta several times daily; that they later consider expanding membership and services by allowing other employed people in Antofogasta to join their pre- paid plan; and lastly, that silicosis was too expensive and cruel to be acceptable as the inevitable consequence of crushing rock, (or distilling iodine, a lucrative byproduct of the operation).

I believe there is no travel so enjoyable, nor so edifying as that which allows us to do something useful, drawing on our own interests or talents. As it turned out, my visit didn't lead to any ongoing consulting with the mine, in part due to politics, but also because I gave away too much information for my own benefit. Yet I would happily do it again. I received more intangible goods than I gave in return.