More reading on Bolivia

A few more links on Bolivia that you may find interesting to read. Some may be a little out of date now – I meant to be writing more this week but have been ill. I’ll keep adding to this as I find more over the next few days.

BOLIVIA:”Twenty Families Are Obstructing Governability” By Franz Chávez. Some background and analysis of possible solutions.

It is precisely this avalanche of votes, the greatest proportion won by a president since the restoration of democracy in 1982, that raises questions for sociology Professor Joaquín Saravia, who told IPS that “The government appears insecure, because it has overwhelming social and political support, but this has not translated into real control of the country, which is alarming,” he said.

The head of the governing Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) parliamentary group, César Navarro, said that democratic changes being promoted by the government are resisted by the elites, who are accustomed to lives of privilege and benefiting from the state.

Elite Backlash, by Nick Buxton. Commentary on Monday’s conflict, including a translation of an account from Bolivia.

What they nearly always fail to mention are any of the following facts:

– that the opposition is led by business elites and big landowners who have spent vast amounts of money, tactics of intimidation, and violence to push the message that regional autonomy will improve people’slives
– despite this fierce campaign and the almost complete absence of central government, the opposition’s popular support is still limited to the cities whilst the central government’s support grows ever more
– that the central government’s nationalisation more than doubled the revenues for the Eastern regions
– that the Right who fought the Constitutional Assembly for a year saying everything had to be approved by two-thirds suddenly don’t want any further popular votes now that two-thirds backed Evo in a referendum in July

Definitely worth reading, this is the reaction of the Center for Juridical Studies and Social Investigation, the organisation whose building and records were destroyed on Monday. “Violent Groups Take Over Human Rights Organization In Bolivia”.

The offices of CEJIS, along with its personnel, were attacked more than 15 time in the last five years. In the last months the institution suffered two attacks with molotov cocktails (in November 2007 and last August). In its 30 years of work, CEJIS has provided legal assistance to indigenous, landless and peasant organizations in the process of titling their lands and territories. It has been a permanent ally of the social movements in the legal codification of their rights in national legislation, and advised and accompanied the progress of social organizations in the Constituent Assembly. This work has implied a permanent risk on the personnel and offices of CEJIS, threatened by the sectors of power that have historically controlled the region of Eastern Bolivia, who now feel menaced by the advance of the rights of the most marginalized sectors of our society.

As always, for ongoing analysis check out Jim Shultz in Blog from Bolivia (in the links to the right). In particular he reported last night on one piece of good news and potential hope for a solution other than civil war:

Tarija’s Governor Heads to La Paz for Negotiations with Morales

The one good piece of news today is that Tarija Governor Mario Cossío announced that he was headed to La Paz this afternoon to open a negotiation on the current crisis with the Morales government. Radio Erbol also reported that Santa Cruz Governor Ruben Costas has endorsed the negotiation effort. “I am completely convinced that this is the last opportunity to begin a process of reconciliation and leave behind the process of confrontation,” Cossio told reporters.

His piece from yesterday (Friday 12th) is worth reading in its entirety.

The Gringo Tambo blog reports on “8 dead in Pando overnight”, giving a brief summary which links to an article in Spanish:

Again according to La Razón, eight people were killed in Pando in “armed clashes” between autonomistas and masistas. Venezuela is threatening to intervene. Brazil and Argentina have said that they will “not tolerate” a coup and that they fully support the Morales government. Meanwhile, Evo is mobilizing military and police troops. No word yet on what is happening today. From what I understand things in Santa Cruz are tense but calm, with members of the UJC still occupying buildings.

Following that, there is more historical background on these clashes from the political scientist blogger Miguel Centellas.

The sad thing here is that these are not military units, which should be the forces (along w/ the police) used to restore state authority. The consequence—assuming they actually do march on Santa Cruz & other opposition-controlled areas—will be a higher casualty count. For all their bravura, Ponchos Rojos (like the UCJ) lack military discipline & training. That means their clashes will be bloody, like the clash in Pando that left at least 8 dead & 80 injured.

Miguel’s summary post from this morning is also very useful, describing the Bolivian military’s reaction to Venezuela’s ‘offer’ to send their army into Bolivia to defend Morales at a time when the US ambassador has been forced to leave the country for interference in Bolivia’s affairs.

 

The problem of Bolivia for the radical left

Last night I went over to my friends’ house, and saw TV for the first time in months. She had heard about blocados up in El Alto so was tuned to the news to work out if the rumours were true. But all we saw was reports on Santa Cruz. For the last few months I have been repeating what everyone in La Paz knows – things are calm and peaceful in the highlands because all the violence this year is in the South. But for the first time I actually saw what this looks like.

Each channel we switched to was showing the same thing. Crowds of young men dressed in shorts and t-shirts, some with surgical mask on their faces but many with nothing covering their wide grins, attaching buildings with sticks and stones. The sound of glass breaking and clouds of curling black smoke above, a tear gas canister being kicked down the street by a teenager who gives it one last aim at a small huddled group of riot police. The rocking camera follows the shouting young men into the building, into an office. It picks out groups pulling stacks of paper out of filing cabinets, yanking computer screens off desks, ripping even the chairs and the telephones out and carrying everything into the street. The beam of the camera rests on two young men, perhaps in their late teens but certainly no older than 21, as they lean over an opened computer on the desk, pulling out wires at random. Their backpacks bounce on their backs as they run out to join their friends, and somewhere in my head I wonder whether the bags show they came prepared or just straight from school. Behind them a boy of about 12 is riffling through a cabinet in someone’s desk.

Outside in the street again. Everything is set alight. Desks, screens, telephones and endless stacks of paper make up the bonfire. A shot of the outside of the building, and half its windows are broken. Out of them more paper flutters to the ground through the rising smoke. The crowd is cheering and shouting and suddenly the camera picks out another young man, but this one is in army fatigues. He is curled up on the floor with his hands around his head as a growing crowd takes it in turns to kick him till the blood runs. His uniform is torn, and as he is dragged to his feet and turns to the camera we see a blank expression of fear and utter confusion. His soft brown skin traced with blood stands out in the sea of white faces around him, but like them he is barely out of his teens. The camera cuts to three men marching through the streets, green and white flags held high and one with a gun slung over his shoulder. The crowds part to let them pass through, cheering them on as they hold their heads high and faces stern for the mass of television cameras.

The building being destroyed was a government building responsible for dealing with land reform. In the same day other government buildings were destroyed in the same manner, along with the offices of Entel (a telephone company), and Canal 7 (a television station). Soldiers in Bolivia are conscripts, but the rich can usually buy their way out so they are predominantly young, poor men from the countryside. The young men attacking the building are members of the Santa Cruz Youth Movement, the ‘Autonomy’ movement’s foot soldiers. The green and white flag is the flag of Santa Cruz, in contrast to the red, gold and green of Bolivia.

What other images did we see?

Older men with round white faces standing in the plaza talking fast and furious into the expectant microphones. Morales is a dictator he says. We are men and women standing up for our freedom. We will stay here in the plaza all night holding our peaceful vigil. Another reporter shouts out a question and he turns. We go back to the studio, and then cut to another plaza a long way away. Outside the presidential palace in La Paz another crowd is gathered. Trilby hats and darker faces – the men have come from the highlands to the city to tell Evo he needs to use a strong hand against the right-wingers in the South. At the bottom of the screen they are described as ‘indigenous vigilantes’. The camera pans to the large crowd standing on the steps of the Plaza Murillo, facing the palace and chanting “Strong Hand! Strong Hand!”

We cut back to images of youths in the streets of Santa Cruz. They are kicking a police motor cycle in the street, eventually setting it alight. Then we go to an interview with someone who says that the governor of Santa Cruz has been paying the police not to intervene. Another cut to lines of people queuing in El Alto to buy cooking gas. The department of Santa Cruz contains the gas supplies, and their blocados are finally taking affect. There is not enough gas in the cities for people to cook with. A minister appears who says that his aim is to have gas lines connected directly to people’s houses to avoid this problem in the future. He asks for patience for another year – after all, in the previous 25 years of government no-one even considered this idea. I make a mental note that we only filled our gas canister a week ago, but that the previous one had had a leak and run out far too fast. We need to be more careful. My friend sitting next to me suddenly notices the minister is wearing a Che tie.

I’m watching all this with my two good friends: Anna, who is a liberal and a passionate Obama supporter from the US, and her long time boyfriend, Eduardo, a Bolivian anarchist. Anna is furious. Why aren’t they doing anything? What is Evo doing? Why don’t they send the army down there to arrest those men? How can they get away with doing this so blatantly, so publicly? It’s all there on the camera!

We wait, along with the camera men and the crowds looking up at the lights in the windows of the presidential palace, hoping to catch Evo Morales’ speech in reaction. We wait, and nothing happens. We argue backwards and forwards about what he could do, but eventually Anna is frustrated and asks us to turn the television off. We go out to eat.

Over pizza we discuss the options. The governor of Santa Cruz is paying off the police, so Evo should send the army. If he sends the army then he will be accused of acting like Goni, the last president, who sent the army against the crowds of protesters trying to throw him out of office. People died, and Evo can’t be seen to be comparable. Anna thinks the international community should get involved – if the soldiers are from another country then he won’t face that accusation. Eduardo disagrees. He has to use the army. He is the state, and this is what the state does to enforce it’s will – it uses violence. But Evo is reluctant, because he wanted to do be different, or maybe because he knows he is in an impossible position. Could they dialogue?, Anna asks. They say that the last time Morales and Ruban Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz, met, Costas ripped up a cheque Morales was giving him in an official meeting and threw it in his face. He calls Morales a monkey. They say his personal land ownings are larger than the entire department of La Paz. How can you ‘dialogue’ with that kind of racism, that kind of entrenched interest in maintaining the status quo?

Anna is frustrated because to her it makes no sense that there can be no reaction. But for me, and I think for Eduardo, there is something more complicated going on. We all have reached a point of stalemate – Evo can’t react with force against the violence without replicating the reaction of Goni and being accused of being the same.

The images I saw on television were familiar. Riot porn. We on a particular part of the left have seen similar images before and have viewed them as resistance and rebellion. Indeed, in 2003 and 2005, when it was campesinos and miners marching through the streets of La Paz and overthrowing Goni, we cheered it as a great victory of the people over the oligarchs. I still believe it was, but the absolutely crucial problem now is that the oligarchs are using the identical tactics to achieve the opposite politics.

Where does this put us on the left, those of us who have supported Evo? I would never have though I would find myself in the position where I would be distressed by the burning of the government, sympathising with the riot police, and advocating sending in the army. This is a very weird position to find myself in.

The paradox of Bolivia, Eduardo argues, is that we have seen it as a revolution when it is not. I also am beginning to see it as this. Evo took power through the ballot box, and although he is indeed a different type of politician, he sought power through the existing system and became the state. The power of the state comes through the use of violence, and the legitimation of elections. While 68% of the country support Evo, there is still a minority, and if they don’t accept the rule of law then the state has no means to enforce it other than through violence. We believed in Evo as if he were something different, and by his reluctance to send in the army perhaps he is proving he, too, still sees himself as different. He still thinks he is not the state. But he is, and ultimately he will only be able to keep hold of his power by using the weapons of the state.

There is one last piece of pizza, and I let Eduardo and Anna split it. Anna thinks that they should let Santa Cruz burn. If they want to destroy their infrastructure, let them! The international community will not support them, and Bolivia relies on Brazil and Argentina to buy its gas. Isolated and without infrastructure, cut off from their customers, they will soon give in. Eduardo dismisses the idea. They would build new institutions. It would serve as an accusation that Evo was trying to starve the people. Evo wanted to be head of state and he is – now he must act like one and crush his opposition. This is not a revolution – whether on the left or the right, he still has to act like an overseeing power that imposes its will on the minority who don’t agree. Anna gets angry. Anarchism is not a viable solution, she says. You really think that is the answer?

And here is where Eduardo and I are stuck. We believe in anarchism, but support “realistic” alternatives in the belief that it is unlikely that we are going to be able to bring about the kind of world we would rather see. So we supported and still do support Evo. But now the opposition are using the same means of resistance to the imposition of state power that the left used 3 years ago, and we have a problem. Evo is the state – he sought and gained power through the existing systems of electoral politics backed up with the legitimate use of violence. The fact that he gained power through acts of violence that directly challenged the state’s monopoly on violence only complicates the matter further, in that now he is trying to be a state at a time when the legitimacy of the state remains in question.

The cracks are beginning to show. We have supported compromise in order to be realistic, but the compromise is not viable. We have looked to Bolivia as an alternative, as a place where radical and positive change can really come about through the ballot box. We have swallowed all our objections and criticisms to this form of politics in the hope that it would work. Now when that support involves us advocating sending in the army to crush the resistance, when the only way we can convince those who oppose us is through violence, it causes prickles of unease. That unease is only going to grow. Can we – must we – go back to believing another world is possible?

 

65%

By now you have no doubt heard that Evo won, and won spectacularly. If you haven’t, then take a quick trip over to the Blog from Bolivia for the news. I keep looking at the figures, but its still hasn’t quiet sunk in for me… I mean, this election has shown that he really does have an unprecedented level of support. 65% is… incredible.

To put that in perspective, Labour won at the last election in the UK with 35.3% of the popular vote. Even in the department where Evo has the least support, Santa Cruz, he got more than Labour won with: 38%.

I’m usually a cynical bastard when it comes to elections, verging on support of the eat-your-ballot campaign. As far as I’m concerned anyone who makes it far enough to get their name on a ballot paper has to have abandoned everything that would have made them a decent human, just to get (or to want to get) that far, long ago. But I don’t think I’m just being romantic when I say that this situation feels different, and that Evo is a different type of politician. Sure, he’s obviously still a politician, but for the first time it seems like there really is a choice between two substantially different entities.

 

All is weirdly quiet on the streets of La Paz

Its slightly eerie in La Paz today. I noticed it immediately I woke up. Usually I get woken by the sound on traffic outside, even though I live on the 16th floor. But this morning I was woken at 7:30 by a military style band blasting out a rousing little number, then promptly stopping and leaving behind a deathly silence. Lying in bed listening to the rather disconcerting sound of nothing whatsoever, I eventually got curious enough to drag myself to the window. Outside the streets were deserted – barely a single car and hardly a person on the streets as far as I could see (and from the 16th floor I can generally see pretty far).

Its been like that all day. The only vehicles out are taxis with official looking notices on their windscreens, and they mostly seem to be ferrying officials and journalists between the municipal buildings and the newspaper offices.

I took a walk down town in the afternoon to see what was going on, if anything. Its oddly quiet in the city without any traffic. Nearly all the shops and cafés are closed – the single fast food joint open, Dumbo’s, was packed, while the Starbucks-esque Alexander’s Cafe was still only serving its loyal crowd of American ex-pats sucking on over-priced lattes. The usual Sunday cultural events on the Prado were cancelled, but there was something of the holiday feel in the air as families and couples strolled up and down the street. The parks and plazas were packed with children playing and lovers cooing. Even in Plaza Murillo, where the governmental palace is, there were still the usual crowds of tourists snapping pictures and small children feeding/stomping on pigeons under the doting eyes of their parents.

The peaceful holiday mood clashed somewhat with the high police presence in the city, particularly around places where people are voting. That strange and exotic feeling of being able to meander through the middle of what ought to be a hectic thoroughfare was broken every now and then by a convoy of police on bright red motorbikes racing their way through. Given that (once they have voted of course) no-one has anything better to do today than wander the streets, I guess its not surprising that I came across at least one big fight in the street. Outside a church on the Prado a middle-aged woman in a pink sun hat and holding an ice cream in her hand was berating a group of embarrassed looking young men. As they traded insults a crowd began to form, occasionally heckling or joining in. Two giggling women who looked like mother and grown-up daughter got into the mood by sitting down on the church steps and shouting slogans for either side, much to the amusement of the onlookers. But others were far more serious, not least the women who seemed to have started it. A young man in a MAS jacket seemed to be the prime target of the women’s rage. He got eventually dragged away by his friends to the hooting jeers of the crowd, but by this point enough people had joined in for the argument to continue a good while longer. There was something a little surreal about seeing the peaceful Sunday strollers meandering up the Prado get to the church and suddenly launch themselves into a political street brawl. A few police eventually came by and pulled aside a man still holding the hand of his young son while shouting red faced at the old woman with her ice cream.

By the time I got home an hour or so ago the crowds of reporters outside the municipal building where they are counting the votes had thinned a bit. This morning they had been camped out on mass on the pavement (or, to be more accurate, queuing round the block for the hot-dog stand opposite the municipal building with one eye on the food and one eye on the big gates in case anything happened). What’s going on inside that building will determine whether things remain this quiet over the next few days, weeks and months.

 

Its just a joke…

I’m interested in the debate going on about Katy Perry, the new trying-to-be-Lily-Allen popsicle. Her first two singles are both accused of being anti-gay. The first was called “UR so Gay” and is all about an ex who was too metrosexual for his own good, while the second is called “I Kissed a Girl” and, well, its about her kissing a girl. The musical value of the songs aside, she’s pissed a lot of people off. But the daughter of two Christian Pastors and the latest product of Capitol Records seems herself to be blithely ignorant of the offence she has caused.

This fantastic interview with her and its subsequent discussion in The New Gay magazine is wonderful. As one of the commentators points out

“The interviewer just keeps asking, over and over, “Why are you such a homophobic cunt?”

The subject keeps responding, “The songs are personal, the themes are open to interpretation, I don’t have a government-mandated obligation to be politically correct.”

The songs each play on tropes of homophobia that are common in daily life but considered to be ‘harmless’. The first being the use of ‘gay’ as an insult akin to ‘stupid’ or ‘sucky’, the second being the idea that (pretty) straight girls kissing is hot as long as its aimed at turning on men. The first is one of my own personal rant buttons, and I have on several occasions got into huge blazing rows over it (most recently with my little sister – the one who also thinks that Muslims are evil). “But I don’t really mean gay as an insult, its just a word. It doesn’t mean gay like that“: the excuse of the fucking ignorant. The second idea that lesbians are hot seems to have a whole lot to do with porn. I always wondered why it was that lesbians were so popular in porn for men, given that you’d assume there would be nothing there for them. But I figured eventually that its probably because most straight men are so homophobic that they aren’t even comfortable seeing another guy naked in porn, so if you just eliminate the guy and put in two women it solves the problem. Which is of course reinforced by the fact that you would never see a butch lesbian, or in fact a lesbian, in ‘lesbian’ porn aimed at straight men. So Katy Perry’s funny little jokes reinforce the idea that lesbians only exist as male sex objects, and that men (gay or straight) who don’t fit in with established sex/gender roles should be punished for it. Catchy!

I was thinking about writing this post last night while in a gay bar in La Paz, and talking to my friend who took me there. My friend, Diana, was pretty uncomfortable but trying really hard not to show it. She had been nervous about whether she ought to mention the fact she was going to the bar, and had kind of ‘sounded me out’ on how I would react before inviting me. She is straight but was going because an old friend of hers who is gay was organising the event. Diana’s reaction was really interesting – although she was obviously very uncomfortable and probably quiet unhappy about her friend being, as she called it, ‘abnormal’, she was really trying hard to understand and to open her mind to the idea. She wanted to go to the bar to support her friend in an event she was organising, and I think in general to show her friend that she still supported her altogether. We had a good night out (till the curfew interrupted us) and made plans to see the Miss Gay Bolivia candidate through to the competition next weekend. Diana talked about how dangerous it is to be openly gay in Bolivia – at the gay pride event earlier in the year people attacked and sprayed gas on the people marching. We talked in the taxi home about the Katy Perry song “UR So Gay” and she was far more shocked than I had been.

In a way its a bit like the racist comments I was talking about before. Ed, for example, considers himself to be progressive and would probably describe Diana as homophobic because she is uncomfortable with the idea of her friend being gay. But Ed regularly makes the kind of locker room jokes with his male friends about being ‘so gay’, and I can only imagine the look of fear that would cross his face if we had offered to bring him along last night to the drag show in a gay bar. Diana lives in a country where being gay really is considered to be ‘abnormal’ so her opinion is understandable – I think its a bit much to assume that individual people can throw off their habitus overnight after one contact with the ‘liberal west’. In fact it’s this idea that we are more liberal in the west that makes us able to become comfortable with our own prejudice. What makes Diana more tolerant that Ed is that she is actively trying to change her opinion and broaden her mind, and that she understands that such ‘causal jokes’ are part of the day-to-day reinforcement of oppression that keep her friends underground and, at times, in fear of their lives.

 

Under curfew

So I was out earlier this evening at a support gig to raise money for the costumes for a drag queen contestant in Miss Gay Bolivia 2008, and discovered that there is a curfew in place tonight! We had just finished enjoying a rather fine belly dancing act from Miss Jubilación, when the bar owner came round to inform everyone they had to leave by 11. At that hour all bars, clubs and restaurants across the city had to be closed by law. What’s more, by midnight a city wide curfew would be in place, so no pedestrians, cars, buses – nothing! – allowed on the streets. The election is on Sunday, but it seems the government is taking no chances. Damn it, the populace will be sober when they vote, and sober for two days beforehand while they think about it!

I asked my friend about the election – apparently its not mandatory to vote, but if you don’t it becomes very difficult to get anything done bureaucracy wise. I’m not sure exactly what the deal is, but as she explained it you get some form of ID card when you vote that you then have to show whenever you interact with things like banks or the government or employers. So to miss out on voting and not get the card means being screwed until the next election comes around.

At a rough guess, I’d say that its likely no bars at all and few shops are going to be open tomorrow, so I think I’ll get some beers in for the weekend. And while I’m at it I might stockpile on some food in case there are any blockades. There’s a chance that things in Bolivia could get ‘interesting’, so to speak, over the next few days. Thought to be honest no-one seems to know what’s going to happen. Everyone I ask throws their hands up in the air – the only thing certain is that its bound to be worse in the South where anti-Evo sentiment is vicious, rather than here in the highlands where he has most support. But I just found out what the big fancy government building right next to my apartment that they have been renovating for the last two months is: its the municipal building where they count the votes.

So that’s nice to know, it being so close and all.

As we left the bar to enjoy our last hour of freedom walking the streets, we were reminded by the bar owner that we had to walk in pairs only. No groups allowed on the streets for reasons of security – and a group counts as more than two. In a devious act of rebellion we celebrated our last hour of freedom by walking in a pack of six.

 

I heart La Paz

Today is Bolivian Independence day and its a big fiesta. In celebration, I’ve been thinking about all the things I love about La Paz. Here in no particular order is my top 5 reasons to love this city:

1) The traffic zebras. The first time I saw these guys I had no idea what they were doing. Dressed up in big zebra costumes (or occasionally as other furry four legged friends), they dance, juggle or strut about in front of the cars and buses at traffic lights. Sounds weird? It’s genius. La Paz like many cities used to have a problem with people not obeying traffic laws. Traffic police didn’t seem to be working, so someone came up with the idea of the traffic zebras. If a trigger happy taxi driver or over zealous bus driver tries to jump a red light, the traffic zebras pounce on mass and *mock* the driver into stopping. Its easy to shout abuse at a traffic cop and look tough, harder to argue with a teenager dressed as a zebra and save face, especially when everyone else starts to laugh at you too. It worked – no one runs down a zebra. They have expanded recently into other forms of traffic control, but with the same tactic – tough-guy drivers that want to break traffic rules may not fear the police, but they do fear a crowd of watching pedestrians and drivers laughing at them as they are clowned at by a zebra.

2) An honest war memorial. The memorial to the unknown solider in La Paz used, I think, to be the usual kind of marching, earnest young thing, off to die gloriously for his country. Now the memorial shows the solider dead on his face in the dirt.

3) Active street art. La Paz is covered in street art and commentary, from graffiti to murals and everything in-between. For some reason a lot of the graffiti all over the city is written in a beautiful copperplate handwriting. As someone once told me, graffiti is the sign of an active political life in a city. And La Paz certainly has that in abundance. Some of the graffiti stays around for years as a reminder of struggles past – I came across some anti-Goni slogans a few days ago. Others become the focus of protracted exchanges between different paint wielding commentators, and whole conversations come and go on the street for passers-by to see. There are also a large number of official murals, one of which has been in the process of being painted on the main street down town over the last few weeks.

4) Its possible to buy anything under the sun on the street. Walk long enough and you’ll eventually find a little old lady selling it. From the latest season of your favourite TV show to ironing boards, from dolls house furniture to military grade binoculars, school books to love potions – whatever you need someone will be able to sell it to you. And they will probably have all the above in the same stall.

5) The Prado on Sunday mornings. The Prado is the main street downtown, a long avenue that runs right through the centre of town. Every Sunday morning they shut down the busy traffic running in two directions and the street turns into a pedestrian cultural zone. Bandstands appear with classical, folk, and rock/pop music evenly spaced out so as not to disturb each other. Chairs are arranged for the fairly considerable audiences that arrive to listen. Whole sections are turned over to children’s activities – bouncy castles, go-cart racing, skipping competitions, puppet shows, drawing and puzzle areas, story telling and so on. Its all free, and whole families turn up to join in. Booths appear from various cultural organisations – the Hari Krishnas rub shoulders with the likes of the Bonsai society, Origami makers, and old Aymara men reading coca leaves. People wander up and down the length of the Prado all morning, watching and being watched, listening to the music, taking it easy. By mid-afternoon it all closes back down again for the week.

Of course there are many other things I could mention, but that’s just my selection for today.

 

10th August elections

Confused about what the hell the upcoming election in Bolivia is all about in August? Well here’s a handy guide from Jim Shultz at the Blog from Bolivia! Its about the clearest explanation I’ve found so far, with a dash of Jim’s lovely sense of humour thrown in.

(Just in case you’re wondering about that bit at the bottom about street-fighting being imminent, yes I will still be here in August, but we are planning on being in La Paz so at least we will get stuck in rather than out of the city if there are blockades…)

 

Random acts of contradiction and racism

You don’t have to look too hard, here in Bolivia, to find examples of casual day to day racism. Of course, the not-so-casual form is in over-abundant supply as well, but somehow its the little incidents that tend to bring me up sharp. Outside my apartment in Sopacachi, a posh neighbourhood in La Paz, sits one of the many small kiosks selling snacks and cigarettes late into the night. This one also has a set of telephones that can be hired by the phone call. Several nights in the last month my friends and I have stopped by on the way home to buy drinks and sweets off the middle-aged owner. A few weeks ago a gaggle of rich, drunk teenagers got there just after us. Leaving aside the usual teenage lack of social skills, this lot were an obnoxious bunch – hassling the woman when she was already busy, stealing sweets behind her back, knocking the phones off the hook in stumbling attempts to call their girlfriends. The kiosk owner was dressed in the style of indigenous women who live in the city – her hair tied in two thick plaits that fell down her back in long parallel lines, a shin-length gathered skirt, and a long cotton apron over her woollen jumpers. It was late, and she seemed tired as she climbed out of her kiosk to go unlock the one just a little further along, but she raised no protest as the kids pushed her around.

As we waited, another customer came along, a middle class woman with big bouffy hair bouncing round her head and her plump body squeezed into high heels and a skirt suit. She grabbed one of the phones and, to catch the attention of the kiosk owner as she walked past, reached out and gave one of her plaits a sharp tug. The owner barely reacted, only waved to indicate she could use the phone. But my friends and I stared in amazement. It had happened in a moment, and everyone else acted as if it was perfectly normal. I turned to the others and asked in English “Did that women really just pull her hair?!”

As we walked home we ended up having one of many conversations about racism in La Paz and Bolivia in general. As we talked one of my North American friends described another ‘racist incident’ that had happened to him in the smaller town of Tiwanaku a few years ago. My friend – lets call him Ed – had been working there all summer as an archaeologist, and become fairly friendly with the men from the town that he worked with. Indigenous men in the highlands of Bolivia tend to wear Trilby hats (also known as Fedoras) on most occasions, and Ed wanted one. So on a recommendation he went to a hat shop in town to buy himself a hat. On walking into the shop and surveying the hundreds of different hats arranged on the shelves, he asked the elderly Indigenous man who owned the shop for help. The owner looked him up and down and told him “We don’t have any hats here.” Well, Ed was a little taken back. He stepped out of the shop, thought for a bit, then went back in. “Look”, he said, “I’m not a tourist, I just want to buy a hat. My friends on the archaeological project told me to come here.” The shop owner looked at him straight in the eye, and told him “We don’t have any hats here Buey.”

Now, ‘Buey’ is not a nice word in Bolivia. In Mexico, I’m told, its the equivalent of something like ‘motherfucker’ (in the US) or ‘arsehole’ (in the UK), and more usually used by teenage boy messing about with each other. It literally means ‘castrated bull’, but in Bolivia its never used in such a casual manner, and means something much stronger and more insulting along the lines of ‘evil white devil’. Anyhow, Ed got the message and left immediately. As Ed has described this story to me on several occasions, the man in the shop was being racist towards him because he was a white American. I don’t know what to make of this story. Does Ed’s experience of once being denied service in a shop compare with the experience of someone who has been subjected to so many large and small acts of daily belittlement and insult that another woman pulling her hair seems normal?

I like Ed. In our brief friendship, he has always seemed like a nice guy. Like pretty much all North American anthropologists I meet here he deplores the racism inherent in Bolivian society, avoids the diplomatic ex-pat set who never leave their gated communities in the Southern Zone of the city, and tries whenever possible to make ethical decisions about where he shops, eats, and fraternizes. He would think of himself as actively anti-racist – and yet a few days earlier he and some other friends of ours had been having a long and animated conversation about ‘gypsies’ and what a scourge they are on Europe. Like many North American and European liberals Ed is able to berate white people who won’t vote for Barack Obama and white Bolivians who lynch effigies of Evo Morales, and in the same breath describe all Roma, Cinti and other ‘gypsy’ people as ‘dirty thieves’. All of them – every single gypsy. Even though he’s never met one in his life, he knows a guy who knew a woman who once got robbed by someone she knew instinctively was a gypsy, and that means all gypsies everywhere are dirty thieves. Obviously. His conclusion to the conversation, that he ‘would have no problem with gypsies if only they would just settle down and live properly like we do’, would revolt him if the word gypsy was only replaced with Indian, Black or Jew. Or, probably, if it had been “Buey”. Like a good anthropologist he knows that its wrong to believe that anyone who lives differently from you is sub-human, but somehow he – like many others – stops being a good anthropologist when it comes to gypsies. Casual acts of racism come when you least expect them, and are contradictory by their very nature.

As a foreigner and a white woman, I rarely find myself on the receiving side of racist encounters. Such moments when the colour of my skin, my nationality, or my ethnicity are the subject of differential derogatory treatment are rare – and I would find myself uncomfortable describing them as ‘racism’ in any case. The first time I came to Bolivia a upper-class Bolivian woman came up to me in a bar, ran her hands over my skin and congratulated me loudly and admiringly on how beautifully white my skin was. I found it a startlingly experience. But as uncomfortable as it made me, her racism was not directed at me but at everyone – perhaps even including herself – who wasn’t like me. What made me so uncomfortable was the sudden realisation of my own place in her world view, and the kind of world view it implied.

Having lived in the US a few years and had such experiences in South America, I occasionally used to think back to how few of these daily reminders of racism I encountered when I lived in the UK – and I used to think this was because there is less racism there. But such thoughts are pathetically naive. A recent report about inter-racial adoption brought up the uncomfortable idea that white middle class couples, no matter how loving and well intentioned, will never be able to understand the racism that their adopted child is subjected to. Like my white British friend, who said he never realised how racist Cambridge was until he saw how people treated his Peruvian wife who they mistook for Asian: white people don’t see racism until it stumbles into their own day-to-day life, but it doesn’t mean its not there. Racism is a matter of creating hierarchies, of putting some people at the top and others at the bottom. Some of us are lucky enough to be at the top, looking out at a clear blue sky all around us. No matter how graciously we pull some of those under our feet up to our own level, there will always be someone else down there in the shit. Its only by trampling those people down further that we are able to get high enough to look around us, smile, and enjoy the wonderful liberal world we live in.

 

Evo outshines the Sun

Its ironic, somehow, that I only come back to the city for 24 hours a week to check email and do my interneting, and that the last two weekends the internet has not been working for about 23 of those hours. It feels very 2005 to be sitting in an internet cafe again, trying to work out the Spanish key board. Though I´m glad to see the prices are lower and the connection better than last time I was in this position.

Last weekend I too exhausted when I was back here to drag my sorry arse even out to the internet cafe. I spent Sunday lying in bed watching James Bond movies and eating a large box of chocolates. The emergency suspension of my otherwise strictly kept diet plan and internet needs was due to having spent the entire previous night awake, celebrating the solstice in Tiwanaku. When a girl´s been up all night getting her yearly dose of cosmic energy, she´s likely to be too exhausted to do much else the next day.

I´m becoming a bit of a solstice tourist, I´ve realised. Last year it was the Inti Rami in Cusco, and the previous two years I was at Stonehenge soaking up the summer sun. This year in I stood on the top of a big mound of earth freezing my arse off with 40,000 hippie backpackers and middle-class Bolivians from La Paz in search off their roots. I´m not sure the cosmic energy was worth the near frost bite – this is fucking winter in the Altiplano, after all – but it was certainly a cultural experience. The best bit, I have to say, was that Evo Morales turned up in his helicopter, just before dawn, though sadly the rumours that “Tío Hugo” would be coming too proved to be unfounded. To be honest, Evo was the main attraction, and he absolutely out-staged the rising sun. We had been standing around shivering in our spot on the top of the archaeological mound, overlooking the reconstructed courtyard part of the site where the main ´ritual´ was going on, for about two hours. The crowd around us was as freezing as we were, generally murmuring to themselves and occasionally huddling over to a fire further down the hill. A military band down on the plain below us played rousing marching numbers every now and then, which kept spirits up, but then suddenly someone spotted the chopper coming over the horizon, and the crowd went crazy. A chant of “EVO!! EVO!! EVO!!” went up – the kind you generally hear at football matches – and everyone started waving and clapping. Us gringos jumped up and down with the rest of them, trying to pick the president out from the crowd running around him as he landed. I have a photo I´ll post later on when my internet access is better. [Edit 13th July: Got it! look below, or see the original photo and others here.] You can just about spot Evo by his khaki trousers and casual jacket in the middle of all the media and the military. The national anthem was played (it goes on for ages, and by the end even the gringos knew and were singing along with the chorus); a llama was sacrificed; people cheered and shouted. And somewhere in all the excitment the sun came up, and most of the crowd remembered in time that this was what they were meant to be looking at and turned round to hold their hands up to the cosmic light. And then it was all over. We crawled back to bed for an hour or so, Evo went off in his chopper after doing a few circles over the town, and the new winter sun shone down on the remnants of a long night of 40,000 people drinking and puking.

A friend of mine, the anthropologist Clare Sammels, has written a far more ethnographically and politically nuanced analysis of the solstice celebrations at Tiwanaku than I could muster. Having read some of her accounts, I was interested to see the event for myself. We had been warned repeatedly by both Bolivian and other archaeological friends that it would get messy. The town of Tiwanaku is tiny. Its the kind of place where if you walk in the street for more than a ten minutes you will bump into someone you know to stop and pass the time of day with. I love the fact that *everyone* greets each other in the street with “good morning” or “good afternoon” as they pass, to the point that conversation as you stroll on your way is constantly punctuated with greetings to passers by. Its a town that is growing rapidly, as the expected and gradually realised tourism brings new construction, but also as the changing mood in Bolivia results in growing investment in municipal buildings, school and university infrastructure, and general public works. But its still a tiny place, that for one night of the year suddenly gets utterly transformed as thousands of extra people arrive. As we got closer to the date, there was a palpable sense of the town preparing itself. Extra trucks arrived with beer to the restaurants, new hotels and cafes appeared that were otherwise closed all the rest of the year, people put bollards outside their doors and moved their animals out of harms way, and the museum and the public buildings acquired a fresh coat of paint. Then the night itself, stalls selling food, drink, tourist tat and folk art popped up everywhere. Spaces you hadn´t even noticed existed before suddenly sprouted old ladies selling té con té (alcohol of some sort in hot spicy tea), woolly scarves or various versions of street meat. A stage was erected in the plaza next to Eiffel´s band stand (yes, I mean *that* Eiffel. He went to South America and built things there too, including Tiwanaku´s band stand) that was soon filled with a succession of cheesy rock bands that kept the freezing cold crowds dancing through the night. An art exhibit from the local university was put up in the church courtyard, and a line of folk crafts stalls took over one of the streets. As we wandered through the crowds that night, it was strange to feel so suddenly lost in a town that usually felt so small and homely. But the we found a stall selling fireworks. Ethnographic musings and cosmic energy don´t stand a chance against the sudden prospect of hundreds of cheap Chinese explosives. We brought nearly the whole of the guy´s stock for about $30, and the next hour or two was spent indulging in pyromania in the courtyard of our house. Its amazing we even stopped in time to get up to the site for the sun/Evo.

The next morning the town was one giant rubbish heap of puke, trash and fighting/vomiting tourists. I had planned to stay there and sleep off the night without dealing with the drive to the city, but even as gangs of old women were out sweeping the streets clean again I couldn´t take the mess and caught the bus back to La Paz for 24 hours of recovery. The whole event had an unreal quality to it. Tiwanaku makes a lot of its money each year from the solstice, and a lot of those tourist dollars that are cleaning the town up are generated on this one important night. This weekend is the festival oif San Pedro and San Pablo, which is another big event. But its event for Tiwanaku itself, rather than a tourist money generator. We will be eating, drinking and dancing all tomorrow and Monday with the community we work with, and its going to be great. No choppers, no fireworks – but also no strangers puking in your patio and accidentally burning your fields. Hopefully next weekend my internet will be working properly, and I´ll send a comparative description of more Tiwanku festivities then.

 

The ferretería story

Ferretería – one of my favourite Spanish words. Its means Ironmonger, but whenever I go past one I get images of a shop full of ferrets and ferret paraphernalia that makes me giggle. The ferretería that I was in yesterday with my three other gringo friends was a cornucopia of delights, despite there not being a single ferret to be seen. Row after row of shiny steel tools covered every wall, and great big metal clunking things hung from the ceiling. We had some fun trying to guess what things were – tools that manage to look both sleek and ponderous at the same time, massive chunks of worked metal and handy gadgets that make you desperately try to think of an excuse to purchase. We got a bit carried away at the sight of a huge drill – the drill bit was nearly a meter long and 3 cm in diameter. Sure, sure, there’s something a little phallic about getting excited by a massive powerful drill… but it was kinda cool.

My friend asked the guy in the shop for some callipers – our reason for going there in the first place. “Sure, sure”, he says, “I have plenty. What size do you want, I’ll get some to show you”. “Oh”, she says, “fairly big”.

My friend is a rather petite, very pretty little North American girl. Us lot hanging around in the back were a mottly assortment of gringos, drooling over the machinery on the walls and the huge phallic symbols. Casually, he asks my friend what she wants it for. “Ah”, she says. “Its a bit strange. For measuring bones”. He looks at her and laughs. “Oh, you want a calibrador!”

The guy had thought she was asking for a “caliber” – as in, a revolver. He had been about to sell us a weapon, and just wanted to know what size. More to the point, he had a whole selection ready to show her there and then, which is more than can be said for his stock of callipers (we had to go elsewhere).

Ferreterías. Strange places. They can’t sell you ferrets, and they can’t sell you callipers. But they will sell you automatic weapons.

 

Signs of revolution (or not)

Wandering around La Paz this morning, before the weird temporary blindness incident, it seems there have been a lot of changes in the last year. Buildings are being renovated, a huge new pedestrian bridge has been built over one of the busiest and most dangerous intersections in the centre of town, and new flower beds have cropped up in the centre of the main street downtown. These may seem like small things, but to my eyes they seem monumental – the city feels like someone is starting to take care of it and invest in its infrastructure in some way. Its still chaotic, noisy and polluted, but there are little signs here and there that there is some investment in making it a more pleasant place to live.

One of the things I always notice here in Bolivia is the graffiti. There is a healthy sense of public politics and the expression of popular sentiment though the ubiquitous graffiti and slogans written on every vertical space all over the city. Being the north of Bolivia, most of it is pro-Evo, and recently I’ve noticed that these seem to be expressing an awareness of the change in the infrastructure as well. “Thank you brother Evo for the telephone lines” and “Health used to be for the few, now health is for everyone” being two that caught my eye this morning. As we get closer to the vote in August, though, there had been a proliferation of graffiti referring to the separation movement coming from the South. Little maps of Bolivia coloured in the green, yellow and red of the national flag pop up everywhere with the words “United Bolivia” above. More direct is the one I have put a photograph of here though – “Sucre, the capital of Racism”.

Otherwise, its hard as a visitor to really feel the changes and the politics that are going on, though I wonder how much any ‘normal’ person living day to day would feel it anyway. I see the day to day lives of the people I live with, and mostly they don’t involve intense speculation about political events or revolution. They involve discussion of things like the local gossip, or the coming San Pedro fiesta, their family or the weather. On one side, I know what is happening in Bolivia at the moment is hugely significant, but on the other I’m beginning to realise that revolutions can only really be seen from a certain perspective. In the price of bread perhaps, but more commonly only in the newspapers or the ‘big’ events of history. Take for instance last Monday – we had been told by the family whose house we live in that Monday would be a bad day to come back to Tiwanaku from La Paz, because there was probably going to be a blockade. Various speculative rumours suggested the blockade was about the contraband issue I talked about last week, but the ‘meaning’ of the blockade for us and for our friends was that we would plan to come back on Sunday night rather than Monday, and that we ought to make sure we were stocked up in food just in case it lasted longer than expected. Only yesterday, when we got back to La Paz again and read on Jim’s blog that the blockade was about the failure to extradite Sánchez Berzaín did it take on any other significance. I find myself wondering about revolutions… how do you know when one is happening? What does it look like? What does it feel like to have the world watching you and waiting for you to do something spectacular, when all you’re really thinking about is what to make for dinner that night or whether you ought to marry the boy next door.

 

Weirdness in La Paz

Ever heard the Tom Lehrer song “Pollution”? That could have been written about La Paz. Don’t drink the water and don’t breath the air indeed. I’ve been feeling a bit queezy each time I come back here, but having said that, it doens’t seem to be the pollution that’s the problem. I wonder if I’m cursed. I’m beginning to think it would be better for me if I stayed in the countryside. All three weekends I’ve come back to La Paz since I arrived in Bolivia I’ve got ill in some way. Not you’re normal stomach problems and altitude sickness, mind you. But fricking weird feeling-odd-for-no-discernible-reason ill. Last weekend I got cold in the same way one usually gets hot with a fever. I had been sitting indoors all morning, and got colder and colder to the point I was shaking all over even though the temperature wasn’t really that low. I went home and got into bed with all my clothes on and covered with 5 blankets, and still felt so shivery I began to feel sick. In the end I went over to a friend’s apartment, and sat in her little patio garden for three quarters of an hour trying to warm myself up in the sun. After that I felt better. But who ever heard of someone feeling nauseous because they were cold?

Then this afternoon, our second weekend back from the campo, it was even weirder. I was with my zooarchaeologist friend in a shop in the witches market, waiting for her to buy a dried llama foetus for her comparative collection, when I noticed that there were big spots of light in my vision – like when you look into the sun, except that I hadn’t and it wouldn’t go away. It continued like this after we left the shop for about 20 mins, and began to get really annoying because I couldn’t see anything properly with these big blobs of light in my vision all the time. Especially as I was trying to buy a rug, and kind of wanted to be able to see what colour it was before I handed over cash. Anyway, after a while it got worse, and then I began to loose all depth perception and most of my peripheral vision in one eye. At this point I freaked out because I couldn’t see to walk properly and the streets are very steep and crowded, so I got in a taxi and came home. A few hours later, my vision has come back but left me with a headache and a very garishly coloured rug. La Paz isn’t healthy for me, obviously. I need to get back to the campo where I just get food poisoning and sprained ankles like everyone else.

 

Back in Bolivia: Let them eat donuts

I’m back in Bolivia, and its good to be here. But things seem to have changed considerably since my brief trip last year, and its not just because my Spanish has improved so that I now have a better grasp of what’s going on. Everyone is talking about how much food prices have risen – some say prices are four or five times as much as they were a year ago.

While in the US I was beginning to notice that it now takes $40 to fill the tank of my car while less than a year ago it took $30, I hadn’t begun to notice the rise in food prices much except for a small sign in the bread section of a supermarket explaining why they had rise their prices by 50 cents. Here in Bolivia it is glaringly obvious everywhere we turn. The supermarket near my apartment in La Paz has a big sign over the front door saying “Solidarity against inflation! Buy rice here!” (and this, by the way, is the very posh neighbourhood where people actually shop in supermarkets rather than in street markets). In the rural town of Tiwanaku where I am doing most of my work there are bread shortages. Usually the archaeological project I am working with eats a lot of bread – for breakfast, accompanying each meal, and at ‘tea’ in the afternoon. This year we were told no-one was selling bread in Tiwanaku any more. Elsa, the woman who used to make and sell bread each day in the plaza, had to give up because wheat prices were too high for her to make it affordable. The project cooks suggested they make us Buñuelos, a kind of deep fried donuts/pancake instead. I can’t stand them (I’m a crepe purist), but even those that like them as an occasional treat are baulking at the idea of having them everyday for breakfast. But while we will have to make do with deep fried non-wheat alternatives for a few months, Elsa has lost her business and the rest of Tiwanaku are probably having to change their eating habits for good.

Not quite a donut. Not quite a pancake. Certainly not toast.

 

Everywhere prices are higher, and wages are slow to catch up. Having put in grant applications for research a year ahead of when they plan to do field work, several anthropologists I know are finding that when the money comes through its already not enough. The airfares have doubled, the cost of living is three times as much as they budgeted, the wages they were going to pay assistants are not engouh. What with the dollar falling even against the boliviano money doesn’t go as far as it once did, although living in Bolivia as a foreign will always be very cheap in comparison to Europe or the US. I’m beginning to worry about when I go to Chile next year though. The cost of living in Chile is comparable to the US already, limiting the amount of time I can afford to do my research in by the limits of the grants I can apply for. Speaking to members of the project I will be working with there next year, they are saying that this year they already can’t afford to run their vehicles and are having to cut back on food costs.

I am only feeling this so directly because I have just left the US and am in South America. Other than gas prices, are we feeling this crunch in the “West”? Is it affecting us on a day to day basis, so that our eating habits are changing as dramatically as they are everywhere else in the world?