[5] It is said that revolutionary hero Simon Bolívar once waved a flag from the top of this monumental mountain in a historic moment that symbolized the founding of a new nation.

[6] Just a year later, congress decided to change the colors to yellow-red-green and include a coat of arms featuring the iconic condor, alpaca and Cerro Rico mine.

Due to poor worker conditions, such as a lack of protective equipment against the constant inhalation of dust, many of the miners contract silicosis.

[citation needed] As a result of centuries long mining, in 2011 a sinkhole in the top appeared and had to be filled with ultra-light cement.

[16] The work of historians such as Peter Bakewell,[12] Noble David Cook,[17] Enrique Tandeter [18] and Raquel Gil Montero[19] portray a more accurate description of the human-labor issue (free and non-free workers) with completely different estimates.

After centuries of brutal Spanish extraction and forced labor, decades of foreign control and private investment in the late 20th century, and the failure of the state-run mining company COMIBOL led to the displacement of 25,000 miners following plummeting mineral prices in the 1990s, "informal, self-managed associations" began selling "unrefined product to private operators".

[20] FENCOMIN (National Federation of Mining Cooperatives in Bolivia) was a vital player in insuring the successful popular election of Evo Morales and also functioned as one of the leaders in drafting Bolivia's new constitution establishing a plural mining economy (state, private, and cooperative).

In 2006, state miners and cooperatives clashed at Huanuni leaving 16 dead leading to the firing of Morales' first Mining Minister, a member of FENCOMIN.

Most recently in 2016, Bolivia's Deputy Interior Minister Rodolfo Illanes was tortured and killed, allegedly by Bolivian cooperative miners.