The great disappearing act: Documentary film and the political work of erasing capital in bolivian mining

• Critical Film Analysis – Examines The Devil’s Miner (2005) and Minerita (2013) to show how documentaries construct narratives of violence, victimhood, and cultural essentialism in Bolivian mining communities. • Gendered Erasures – Highlights the invisibilization of guardamina women’s labor, revealing how gendered contributions are excluded in favor of paternalistic portrayals of women as passive victims. • Colonial and Developmentalist Tropes – Demonstrates how the films reproduce colonialist and patriarchal discourses, reinforcing Western perceptions of mining communities as irrational, impoverished, and culturally bound by machismo. • Obscured Political-Economy – Argues that structural factors—such as transnational mining capital, labor regimes, and systemic violence—are displaced by sensationalized depictions of “mine culture.”. • Implications for Intervention – Contends that these representations risk legitimizing NGO and development interventions focused on individual emancipation, while leaving intact the broader structures that perpetuate precarity. Over the past two decades, there has been an expansion of media portrayals of Bolivian small-scale mining communities through documentary film and international journalism. Taken together, these representations tend to produce a homogenized image of mining communities, emphasizing violence, cultural difference, and social disorder as defining characteristics. This article argues that such representations operate through a power-laden representational logic that simultaneously hypervisibilizes artisanal miners while rendering large-scale industrial mining (LSM) and transnational capital invisible. Drawing on Makau Mutua’s (2001) “Savages, Victims, and Saviours” framework, the article analyzes two internationally circulated documentaries, The Devil’s Miner (2005) and Minerita (2013). It shows how male miners are depicted as culturally dangerous, women and children as passive victims, and mining-related harm as endogenous to artisanal practice rather than as the outcome of political-economic restructuring. This representational configuration forecloses structural explanations of violence and obscures the role of foreign-owned large-scale mining in reshaping extraction on the Cerro Rico. Situating these films within the historical transformation of Bolivia’s mining sector, the article demonstrates that documentary representation does not merely reflect extractive realities but performs ideological work by preparing industrial mining to appear as the unspoken, rational solution to artisanal mining’s perceived failures. In doing so, documentary film actively shapes the conditions under which extractive futures become thinkable.