Jason is somewhere behind me, his back seizing up. Blind and shaken, I trawl the swamp at my feet with my hand. I think of the mountain opposite this one, the hill called Huakajchi. For the Inca, the spring water gushing from its slopes suggested tears.

Somehow I find my glasses. Then I bash my hard hat with my fist, and the light miraculously returns. We rush on. Ten minutes later, we find Julio resting in a small nook carved into the wall of rock, the first hiding spot in La Negra. “In through your nose, out through your mouth,” he says. At nearly four kilometres above sea level, every breath in Potosí feels frantically wrung from the air.

The mountain begins to rumble. A clang sings out from the air compressor pipe, and Julio’s face stretches into a smile. As the trolley careens past, chased by three young Indian men cloaked in grey dust, their cheeks packed with coca leaves, I sneak a peek down a side shaft and glimpse a familiar red figure.

“Not yet,” says Julio, reading my mind as he disappears into the darkness. “We must go deep before we visit the devil.”

Last week, shortly after Jason and I arrived in La Paz, the city’s streets erupted in demonstrations. Labour strikes, riots, and roadblocks swept through many of Bolivia’s eastern departments, the unrest reaching its climax when at least three protesters were killed in the city of Sucre. La Razón, the most widely read newspaper in a country all too familiar with strife, called special attention to these events by dubbing the spreading crisis Black November, a reference to the violence of Black October in 2003, when sixty-seven people, most of them indigenous, were killed in El Alto in confrontations with the army.

Three years ago, in a profound break with history, Bolivia elected its first fully indigenous president. Evo Morales is an Aymara Indian, a former bricklayer, a trumpet player, a cocalero (coca leaf grower), and a darling of the radical left. He won an absolute majority, securing over half the vote, and immediately set to work on a mandate to “refound” the Bolivian Republic after years of corrupt neo-liberal leadership. “Capitalism is the enemy of the earth, of humanity, and of culture,” Morales told Benjamin Dangl, an independent journalist and the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia. “If the nineteenth century belonged to Europe and the twentieth century to the United States, the twenty-first century will belong to America, to Latin America.”

Morales — along with his political hero, Hugo Chavez of Venezuela — fast became a figurehead of the populist New Left wave sweeping across a politically reinvigorated South America. As the leader of the mas, or Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism) party, his stated goal is to empower the nation’s historically oppressed Indian majority. “The poor don’t want to be rich,” he said after casting his vote in the historic election. “They just want equality.” His platform promised to redistribute land to poor campesinos, assist coca growers in their struggle against a mendacious war on drugs, reject US-backed free trade policies, nationalize Bolivia’s natural gas industry (which he did in 2006), and convoke a constituent assembly to rewrite Bolivia’s constitution.

It was this promise of a new constitution — the country’s seventeenth in under two centuries — that led to the most recent round of violence. Bolivia’s age-old divide between the privileged, post-colonial elites and the impoverished farmers and miners who suffer the legacy of the Spanish Conquest has once again been thrown into high relief. The deadline for delivery of the new document to congress is December 14, a few weeks hence, when it will be subjected to a national referendum.

The morning after the killings in Sucre, Jason and I saw hundreds of Aymaran women wearing long black braids, pleated pollera skirts, and black bowler hats scurrying down Avenida 16 de Julio toward the Plaza del Estudiante in La Paz. Firecracker blasts echoed off the walls of the surrounding Choqueyapu canyon, and we felt the will of Bolivia stir. As thousands of miners and their campesino brethren marched up Avenida Villazon to join the women — arms linked, chanting slogans of solidarity, the imposing visage of Mount Illimani behind them — we realized that the mines of the Cerro Rico might have something extremely pressing to say about the country and its perpetually tenuous future. The next night, we boarded an overnight bus bound for Potosí.

Four hundred years ago, the Cerro Rico, or “Rich Hill” of Potosí, was the richest silver mine in the world. At a time when all of Latin America was about to be transformed into one big mine — a bottomless bank account for the royals of Europe — the extraordinary wealth of the Cerro became the chief economic engine for the Spanish Conquest, and arguably the first real swig of mother’s milk for young Western capitalism.