Unreported World

Unreported World descends deep underground into Bolivia's silver mines to find boys as young as 13 working long hours in deadly conditions. The thick dust and poisonous gases in the mines mean the children face the near-certainty of crippling lung disease and a life expectancy of little more than 35 years.

The mines are centered around Potosi in the Bolivian Andes, the highest city in the world. Looming over it is a legendary mountain, the Cerro Rico. It has been mined for hundreds of years and is now being exploited by co-operatives of up to 10,000 miners.

Reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Matt Haan meet 14-year-old Jose Luis, who works with 400 other miners at the San Jacinto mine, one of the largest on the mountain. He tells Rhodes that he's working in the mine because school starts in a few days and he needs money for a new uniform. Like most of the 200,000 people in Potosi, he comes from an indigenous Indian background. Although the indigenous people have recently won a decades-long struggle for political freedom in Bolivia they are still poorer than their white compatriots.

Rhodes and Haan follow Jose Luis down a narrow, winding, 200-metre-long tunnel to where his team is drilling into the mountain to place dynamite. All the miners down there are younger than 20 years old. The boys are loading up huge bags with up to 800 kilos of rocks. Jose Luis, chewing coca leaves like the other workers, explains that each group of miners gets one hour with the compressor, which pumps air from outside, giving them an hour of air to breathe as well as power their drilling machines. With the air running out, there's just enough time to scramble towards the entrance of the mine as the fuse is lit on a bundle of dynamite.

Jose Luis tells Rhodes that his grandfather, grandmother and uncle have all mined the Cerro Rico before him. His grandfather is dead, and his uncle can't work because he has a degenerative lung disease. His grandmother, Juana, is desperate for Jose Luis to finish school but says she doesn't have the money to see him through it. She'd rather see him work as a carpenter or do anything in the city to prevent him from working in the mine.

Tunnels in the mines regularly collapse and people are often killed inside them. But it's difficult to find out how many accidents there are because few records are kept. Nicolas Martinez, a former child miner, who now works for a charity that helps mining families, says he knows of numerous cases of people who have come to the mountain, worked for a couple of weeks and died.

Thirteen-year-old Vlad works at the top of the mine-shaft, helping winch up equipment and bags of rock. Vlad tells Rhodes he doesn't like working in the mines. He's not really used to it and finds it very hard work. While he's left behind a life of hard work in the countryside, he faces a potentially much shorter life in the mine.

The team talks to a local doctor and expert in silicosis, a lung disease that kills miners. He explains that if a child starts in the mine at 10 or 11, he can expect to have silicosis by the time he's 20 and be dead by 35. This is the disease Jose Luis's uncle, Gregorio, has. He tells them that his own father died from silicosis too and that he's been given five years to live.

Bolivia has signed international agreements banning under-16s from working in underground mines, but from what the team sees, they simply aren't being enforced. President Morales has said he wants to stop children working in unsafe conditions. However, after four years in office, laws are still being drafted to make that a reality.

Instead of punishing the co-operatives who employ children, the government is trying to get children under the age of 13 into school by offering their parents a 200 Bolivianos or £20 payment, if they attend for a term. But when an impoverished child can earn five times that amount every week down the mine, the future for many of them continues to look bleak.