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Atrocities?Mass killing, terror, and organized violence with named perpetrators.

The Potosi Mita

Forced rotation labor in the silver mountain

To keep silver flowing from Potosi, the Spanish crown revived and expanded an Andean labor draft. The mita forced indigenous communities to send rotating workers into mines and mercury pits with staggering death rates.

Damage
Forced Andean draft labor fed Potosi silver under lethal mine conditions.

Lives lost
Hundreds of thousands dead or destroyed by mita labor over centuries (order-of-magnitude)

Value lost
World-historic silver extraction for Iberian and European finance

Record Points

  • The mita conscripted men from a vast catchment of Andean villages for forced shifts at Potosi.
  • Underground work and cave-ins, combined with cold and exhaustion, produced very high mortality.
  • Mercury amalgamation at Huancavelica poisoned workers, giving that mine an especially deadly reputation.
  • Whole communities fled or fragmented to escape the draft, disrupting Andean society for generations.
  • The silver extracted this way recapitalized Spanish and wider European finance.

Perpetrator(s)

Spain

Victims

Indigenous Andean peoplesBolivia

Citations