Indian Uprising – Bolivian Lament

An opinion column in today’s New
York Times throws the spotlight
on Bolivia. Soundtrack: Lamento Boliviano by the Enanos Verdes:

MY taxi is stuck behind Indian roadblocks. Three hundred farmers, many
of them Quechua in colorful ponchos, just took control of the only highway
near this small town in central Bolivia, right below a jaguar-shaped
Inca temple. I can escape neither east to the sweltering boomtown of
Santa Cruz nor west toward the windswept Andean capital, La Paz, where
tens of thousands of Aymara Indians are on the march. I get through,
but only after abandoning my taxi and making my way on foot.

For three weeks, the country has been paralyzed by blockades and protests;
a few days after my experience at the roadblock, the uprising forced
the president, Carlos Mesa, to resign. The protesters want to nationalize
Bolivia’s vast natural gas reserves, South America’s second largest;
BP has quintupled its estimate of Bolivia’s proven reserves to 29 trillion
cubic feet, worth a whopping $250 billion. The Indians are in a showdown
with the International Monetary Fund and companies like British Gas,
Repsol of Spain and Brazil’s Petrobras that have already invested billions
of dollars in exploration and extraction. (by William
Powers)

Of all the countries we have visited, Bolivia is the wildest, the most
neglected, and the most inaccessible.  It is also the most Indian.  With
about 2/3 of the population self-identifying as Indians, it is the poorest,
least developed country in the western hemisphere. To a degree exceptional
even in Latin America, global champion in inequality, power in Bolivia
is in the hands of a few elite families with European roots and their shadowy
cartels. These same families have been running things in this corner
of the globe for the past 500 years, since the Conquistadors wrested
control from the Incas.

We can never forget our first visit to Bolivia, as an aspiring ethnographer,
coming overland from Cuzco in a complicated train-bus-boat combination
involving an overnight stay at a hotel on stilts over Lake Titicaca,
the highest navigable body of water in the world, and a strangely disconcerting
and nauseating trek across an island of intertwined vines growing over
the surface of part of the lake.

Entering Bolivia was like entering another dimension.  In part,
it was like being on another planet, with austere lunar landscapes and
freakish flora and fauna, and in part it was like taking a time machine
back about 150 years, to about the time Butch Cassidy and the Sundance
Kid tried robbing banks down here.

In La Paz, second highest national capital in the world if you, like
the Dowbrigade, consider Tibet to be a nation, we were astounded to see
the erect and distinguished elderly Germans gathering at the Hotel Roma,
looking every bit the fugitive Nazi’s they were rumored to be. As we descended
into the Bolivian Amazon from the frigid Andean redoubts, the vegetation
became more tropical and the ambiance more savage, as civilization and
contact with the outside world faded in the rearview mirrors of a succession
of trucks, busses and collectivos.

Until we arrived at Santa Cruz, the end of the line, the legendary White City half-hidden
in the Eastern extreme of Bolivia, hot, humid and indolent, shrouded in conspiracy and continually
fighting off the encroaching overgrowth of the hothouse plant life of the upper Amazon.  This
is where Che Guevara found his revolution at the wrong end of a gun, betrayed
by a local warlord and hunted down in the jungle by a CIA hit squad.  It
is a land without law, ruled by the whim and impulse of a series of strongmen,
colonels mostly, although their nominal rank in the Bolivian military has
little to do with the true extent of their absolute power and corruption.

Santa Cruz was also known as "The City That Never Sleeps"; on multiple occasions we
were approached on the streets by twitchy, furtive individuals
and handed small paper packets, which on closer inspection contained several
grams of pure Bolivian flake and a phone number.  It seems that Gringos
were so rare in the city, except for officially sanctioned international
drug smugglers, that they couldn’t believe that even an obtusely intellectual
social scientist would be so stupid as to wander in.

Of course, as responsible scientists our only interest in the packets
was as a cultural and economic phenomena, and we quickly destroyed the
contents. We were forced to abandon Santa Cruz after three or four days
when Jane, our girlfriend at the time, became convinced there were people
on the roof our our hotel at night, watching us.

Unfortunately, there are only two ways out of Santa Cruz in the direction
we were going (Paraguay): the Santa Cruz Airport or the Train of Death,
and we decided the Train of Death sounded like fun. But that’s another
story for
another
time.
Besides, this whole episode happened almost thirty years ago, so things
down there may have changed.  But we doubt it.

Bolivia, together with Peru, Ecuador and Guatemala, the only countries
with native American majorities, are the last battles in a 500-year race
war which one culture has turned into its creation myth, and another has
quite correctly taken it for the End of History. However, like the State
of Israel, the Indian rebellion in Bolivia is an eloquent reminder as
to how difficult
it is to really erase a people, a culture, a race. Genocide is not a
simple thing to accomplish.

Despite centuries of neglect, destruction of all cultural context or
support, ethnic discrimination, starvation, cultural domination, religious
conversion, racial bigotry,
lack of education
and
health care, economic exploitation and destruction of their environment,
the Andean Indian culture survives, smoldering in hearts and minds, towns
and villages, streets and plazas. There now appears to be no alternative
to giving significant power to the people in the streets, the native
Americans.

This is no guaranteed palliative. Examples abound of Presidents elected
or imposed in the above-mentioned countries, with varying degrees of Indian blood or electoral support,
but in every case they turned out to be puppets or sell-outs, adopted confederates
of the elite, corrupt in that way that only lost souls who have sold
their souls to the enemies of their people can be.

Will this revolution be any different?  Will the temptations of
power and privilege, the siren song of the Global Elite, seduce another
generation of indigenous leaders? Unfortunately, in our opinion, the only
way to prevent that from happening would be the creation of a completely
anti-Multinational, anti-IMF revenue-sharing government which would distribute
the billions in gas money honestly to the people by sponsoring immediate
massive programs in education, health, rural development and social support.

This would obviously be unacceptable to the United States, which would
condemn the emergent Native American state as socialists, anti-American,
and a treat to hemispheric security. We have a lot of experience in putting
down native uprisings.