Bob Haldeman Interview (27)

So we engineered a scheme wherein we went from the valley

floor and ran a thirty-kilometer tunnel. We would go right

underneath and hook it up and bring the ore out to almost the

valley floor, with a concentrator there. Our smelter was an

antiquated thing; it's still working today, but it was a

shambles . We would put in a modern smelter that would capture

the gas, acid, and so on, at about the 3,000-foot elevation,

very close to the mill. We would walk away from all the town

sites, all paternalism. From that town of Codegua to Rancagua,

which was a large open city, we would build government -financed

housing. We would put up the money, the workers would assume a

long-term mortgage, and then they would pay the government. The

thing was a very nice way to get out of your housing problems up

there.

"Our smelter was an antiquated thing . . ." (click for larger image)

It would take you about thirteen minutes to travel by bus

from the city to the tunnel at Codegua, another thirty minutes

into the mine, five minutes up the shaft. In fifty minutes,

you're at your working face. As it was then, it took you four

hours just to get from the city down, and from the working face,

five-and-a-half or six hours. Because of the concentration of

people of up there and the limited ability to move passengers on

that narrow-gauge railroad, we calculated that every family had

an opportunity only once a month to leave the camp. We just

didn't have any more transportation facilities. When there was

a snow slide, we were locked in for three or four days until we

dug it out.

We presented that plan to Mr. Alessandri in 1959. One of

the conditions we required was that we had some guarantee, say

for a twenty-year period- -they call them an ad referendum

contract, in which you sit with the government and say, "I want

nondiscriminatory treatment on exchange rate, pay the same taxes

as the Chilean companies." In other words, don't discriminate

against me; let me get into the community here and pay the same

as everybody else pays, guaranteed for twenty years. If taxes

go up for everybody, I'll go up; if they go down, I go down.

Sewell as parts of it were being demolished

Index to Haldeman Interview