As per usual, it’s been an interesting month, and I’m excited to share it.
I want to talk about street culture here, because much of the developing world, and Bolivia in particular, has an entirely different take on things outside the house. To employ an overused adjective, Cochabamba’s streets are ‘vibrant’. To say the least. As with many things here, I have a love-hate relationship with the streets—they can be dangerous, and it gets exhausting having to always be on the lookout for people who want to rob, jump, flash, grope, or otherwise impede your peaceful progress through the day. But the streets are so alive, there is life leaking out everywhere, and lovely little interactions taking place on every corner.So, let’s start with transportation. I live on my bike because it’s a lot more practical, but getting to work and back can be a colorful experience in and of itself, and I periodically really enjoy riding the bus through the market and watching a million small-scale dramas unfold before me. If you take any of the popular routes you have plenty of time to observe said dramas, because traffic is such that ‘gridlock’ doesn’t even do it justice.
Bus/trufi lines are franchised, so you have your own bus or car and buy into the system. If you’re like most trufistas, you’ll paint your vehicle wild colors and adorn its interior with all manner of dangly or colorful things, everything from CDs to crucifixes to inspirational quotes to pinup girls to stuffed animals to curtains that look like they’ve been ripped out of a bordello. To this day I’ve yet to see a woman trufista. You can flag public transportation down anywhere along the route and get off anywhere you like by yelling from the back for the driver to stop, and at the right times of day they stuff an unimaginable number of people into those busses (though not quite as many as the Dominicans do). Unlike the Dominican Republic, however, there are mechanisms for quality control that take the form of women or children sitting under tarps on various corners, getting paid a few cents an hour to punch timecards. I’ve often thought that punching timecards must be the most miserable job ever. Women take their young babies to work with them, and around many of the control points you’ll see a bunch of kids playing on the sidewalk.
There are two types of paros (blockades) here, paro de transporte, which means that the trufistas blockade and there is no public transportation, or paro civicos, in which groups or communities blockade for political reasons. If you try to drive your car or motorcycle around in either of the above situations you run the risk of having your tires popped, but bicycles and people are usually able to move fairly freely. The transportistas blockade when they feel that the government hasn’t been responsive to their complaints about road quality, and they feel this way fairly often. In their defense, the government has not ever been terribly responsive to the road issues…they seem to have other issues on their plate. I’ve heard stories that in the paros of the past people came out into the street and played soccer and hung out—like a snow day, for those of us from New England—but with all the tensions of the last year or so, they have been getting dangerous. Some men from a rural community on a cocaine route killed a few policemen in a town not so far from Cochabamba, and everyone is sort of holding their breath, waiting to see what happens…
Street food: I know I wrote a lot about food and food culture in my last blog, but street food, as most will agree, is different. A buck will get you greasy repast to last you all day from one of the millions of stands all over Cochabamba. Las Islas is one of my favorite places in the city, something between a park and a highway divider that comes alive at night with food vendors. They sell tripe and hamburgers and sausages and choclo and tacos, and people come and sit at the rickety tables and eat dinner and relax, and it’s noisy and companionable and reasonably clean (you don’t last long around here with a delicate stomach).
Used-clothing vendors also appear en masse in the evenings along the main streets, with piles of sweaters that they buy in bulk from US exporters who are making a mint (by the way, Planet Aid—those big yellow boxes in parking lots—doesn’t donate. It resells, to a bunch of aproned women trying to eek out a living hawking people’s old nightgowns). Informal commerce picks up considerably after dark—the market in La Paz is never more active than it is a ten o’clock at night. Prostitution is legal here, and women line Avenida Aroma selling their services, or stroll from beer den to beer den, pausing outside just long enough for the men playing dice inside to take a good look.
Bus stations are also favorite places of mine, because of all the activity at strange times. The country travels at night, because it just doesn’t make sense to spend twelve hours on a bus during the day, and the amount of food vending, diaper-changing, peeing in corners, laughing, fighting, and stealing that happens at bus stations in the evenings is enough to blow your mind. I love it; I love the chaos. Women appear with large pots of api (a sweet, hot, blue-corn drink) and fried pasteles, little greasy turnover things, and all kinds of unidentifiable things to eat and drink. Enterprising folks will climb aboard the busses at checkpoints and give very compelling schpiels about why we should buy this remedy or that lotion, or who will regale us with sad stories about how the truck importing their stock crashed in the mountains, and only these eighteen bottles of perfume survived and they are willing to let us buy one at half, ladies and gentlemen, but half of their normal cost! Speaking of performance art…
Public bathrooms, in bus stations and beyond, typically charge one Boliviano for the privilege of peeing in their overflowing holes. Not surprisingly, most people just squat wherever they can get away with it. Your one Boliviano will buy you a little fold of toilet paper and a paper ticket…perhaps if they did away with the paper tickets we could get in for fifty cents? Toilets in these banos publicos are the stand-up kind, with two foot supports and a large hole, and they are characteristically uncared for and smelly as shit, no pun intended. An artist could do a hell of an installation based on the graffiti found in bathrooms here, plenty of your typical Diego-I’ll-love-you-forevers, but a few that I have written down. My favorite: Paredes limpias, mentes en blanco (clean walls, blank minds). Walls, in bathrooms and all over town, are an accessible and much-used propaganda tool, and if I were to list the slogans…well, there are a lot of them.
Cleferos are children and youth who live on the streets. They are huffers. There is a huge number of them here, clef (glue) being the cheapest and most accessible drug and, one would suppose, the cheapest way to forget about hunger and thirst. Those kids are very sad cases, and often violent. They periodically attack in bands, and even adults can’t really beat of a dozen ten-year-olds bent on relieving them of their valuables. Clef is toxic enough to cause very severe brain damage, especially when applied to young bodies and developing nervous systems, and most cleferos, if they reach even adolescence, are suffering bad and irreversible physical and mental effects as a result of huffing.
In the same vein, but not quite as sad, are the kids who come from café to café at night selling candy, flowers, and or cigarettes. Most of them aren’t homeless and most of them are well-fed, but often their parents are sitting right outside. They send their children in because they think the appealing young faces will garner more business; it is manipulation of the worst sort, and it makes me furious. The kids create good relationships with the café owners and the regulars; sometimes they sit down and play cards with us; they don’t steal, and are typically just doing what they’re told, but they ought to be at home in bed. In my humble opinion, any adult who is healthy enough to prod their kids from café to café ought to be selling the damn gum themselves.
Also going from café to café at night are the mochileros, backpackers from Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile who make enough selling their jewelry to keep travelling. I’ve seen some of the most beautiful earrings in the world dangling off improvised screen exhibition panels, and these folks are easygoing and chatty. I guess you have to be, to survive in that business. You’ll also get musicians, who’ll come in and ask the café owners to turn off the music, and they’ll play a song or two and come around with a hat. As might be expected there’s a lot of terrible, fingernails-on-a-blackboard-and-ice-on-you-neck stuff, but a lot of really lovely, skillful playing as well. I’ve seen jugglers, fire-eaters, and belly-dancers all come through—it’s a pretty good system for everyone involved. Café owners rarely hire live entertainment, people can donate or not as they choose, and artists have can make as much as 300 Bolivianos in a night. Unfortunately, the kids don’t make nearly as much. Perhaps what I like about the artists is that there’s not the air of desperation that poverty lends the little children, or the air of manipulation.
And one last comment, related less to the street and more to the general state of affairs: the more I travel, live, or hang out in the world, the more I begin to think that there is something fundamentally wrong with how men and women interact, and a basic lack of respect and understanding between genders that I find very troubling. This month has included a few run-ins with flashers and exhibitionists, many more still with professional machismo, a couple with personal machismo, and some very interesting conversations with other women about their takes on it all. I have to remind myself to stay angry—that sexual and gender violence is not okay under any circumstances, that it’s not okay to let it slide as ‘part of travelling’, and cultural relativism be damned. How we deal with issues like these requires thought and nuance and cultural context, yes, but the result of a few difficult weeks has been my very clear understanding that things need to change here in Bolivia.
This type of thing is very typical of international attitudes towards Bolivia. I find it absolutely repulsive and socially irresponsible. As I consider which way my career will go, I am less and less inclined to take organizations like USAID seriously, if the ‘work’ that they do actively undermines the only successful, democratic leader that Bolivia has ever seen. I find this very telling, both of the Bush Administration’s objectives, and with US imperialism that has caused so many problems. Please take a minute to read the article below.
Undermining Bolivia: A Landscape of Washington Intervention
Written by Benjamin Dangl
Sunday, 10 February 2008
A thick fence, surveillance cameras, and armed guards protect the U.S. Embassy in La Paz. The embassy is a tall, white building with narrow slits of windows that make it look like a military bunker. After passing through a security checkpoint, I sit down with U.S. Embassy spokesman Eric Watnik and ask if the embassy is working against the socialist government of Evo Morales. “Our cooperation in Bolivia is apolitical, transparent, and given directly to assist in the development of the country,” Watnik tells me. “It is given to benefit those who need it most.”
From the Bush Administration’s perspective, that turns out to mean Morales’s opponents. Declassified documents and interviews on the ground in Bolivia prove that the Bush Administration is using U.S. taxpayers’ money to undermine the Morales government and coopt the country’s dynamic social movements—just as it has tried to do recently in Venezuela and traditionally throughout Latin America.
Much of that money is going through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). In July 2002, a declassified message from the U.S. embassy in Bolivia to Washington included the following message: “A planned USAID political party reform project aims at implementing an existing Bolivian law that would . . . over the long run, help build moderate, pro-democracy political parties that can serve as a counterweight to the radical MAS or its successors.” MAS refers to Morales’s party, which, in English, stands for Movement Toward Socialism.
Morales won the presidency in December 2005 with 54 percent of the vote, but five regional governments went to rightwing politicians. After Morales’s victory, USAID, through its Office of Transition Initiatives, decided “to provide support to fledgling regional governments,” USAID documents reveal.
Throughout 2006, four of these five resource-rich lowland departments pushed for greater autonomy from the Morales-led central government, often threatening to secede from the nation. U.S. funds have emboldened them, with the Office of Transition Initiatives funneling “116 grants for $4,451,249 to help departmental governments operate more strategically,” the documents state.
“USAID helps with the process of decentralization,” says Jose Carvallo, a press spokesperson for the main rightwing opposition political party, Democratic and Social Power. “They help with improving democracy in Bolivia through seminars and courses to discuss issues of autonomy.”
“The U.S. Embassy is helping this opposition,” agrees Raul Prada, who works for Morales’s party. Prada is sitting down in a crowded La Paz cafe and eating ice cream. His upper lip is black and blue from a beating he received at the hands of Morales’s opponents while Prada was working on the new constitutional assembly. “The ice cream is to lessen the swelling,” he explains. The Morales government organized this constitutional assembly to redistribute wealth from natural resources and guarantee broader access to education, land, water, gas, electricity, and health care for the country’s poor majority. I had seen Prada in the early days of the Morales administration. He was wearing an indigenous wiphala flag pin and happily chewing coca leaves in his government office. This time, he wasn’t as hopeful. He took another scoop of ice cream and continued: “USAID is in Santa Cruz and other departments to help fund and strengthen the infrastructure of the rightwing governors.”
In August 2007, Morales told a diplomatic gathering in La Paz, “I cannot understand how some ambassadors dedicate themselves to politics, and not diplomacy, in our country. . . . That is not called cooperation. That is called conspiracy.” Bolivian Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera said that the U.S. Embassy was funding the government’s political opponents in an effort to develop “ideological and political resistance.” One example is USAID’s financing of Juan Carlos Urenda, an adviser to the rightwing Civic Committee, and author of the Autonomy Statute, a plan for Santa Cruz’s secession from Bolivia.
“There is absolutely no truth to any allegation that the U.S. is using its aid funds to try and influence the political process or in any way undermine the government,” says State Department deputy spokesman Tom Casey. USAID officials point out that this support has gone to all Bolivian governors, not just those in the opposition. Despite Casey’s assertion, this funding has been controversial. On October 10, Bolivia’s supreme court approved a decree that prohibits international funding of activities in Bolivia without state regulation. One article in the law explains that Bolivia will not accept money with political or ideological strings attached.
In Bolivia, where much of the political muscle is in the streets with social organizations and unions, it’s not enough for Washington to work only at levels of high political power. They have to reach the grassroots as well. One USAID official told me by e-mail that the Office of Transition Initiatives “launched its Bolivia program to help reduce tensions in areas prone to social conflict (in particular El Alto) and to assist the country in preparing for upcoming electoral events.”
To find out how this played out on the ground, I meet with El Alto-based journalist Julio Mamani in the Regional Workers’ Center in his city, which neighbors La Paz.
“There was a lot of rebellious ideology and organizational power in El Alto in 2003,” Mamani explains, referring to the populist uprising that overthrew President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. “So USAID strengthened its presence in El Alto, and focused their funding and programs on developing youth leadership. Their style of leadership was not based on the radical demands of the city or the horizontal leadership styles of the unions. They wanted to push these new leaders away from the city’s unions and into hierarchical government positions.”
The USAID programs demobilized the youth. “USAID always took advantage of the poverty of the people,” Mamani says. “They even put up USAID flags in areas alongside the Bolivian flag and the wiphala.”
It was not hard to find other stories of what the U.S. government had been doing to influence economics and politics in Bolivia. Luis Gonzalez, an economics student at the University of San Simon in Cochabamba, describes a panel he went to in 2006 that was organized by the Millennium Foundation. That year, this foundation received $155,738 from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) through the Center for International Private Enterprise, a nonprofit affiliate of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Gonzalez, in glasses and a dark ponytail, described a panel that focused on criticizing state control of the gas industry (a major demand of social movements). “The panelists said that foreign investment and production in Bolivia will diminish if the gas remains under partial state control,” says Gonzalez. “They advocated privatization, corporate control, and pushed neoliberal policies.”
That same year, the NED funded another $110,134 to groups in Bolivia through the Center for International Private Enterprise to, according to NED documents, “provide information about the effects of proposed economic reforms to decision-makers involved in the Constituent Assembly.” According to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by muckraker Jeremy Bigwood, the NED also funded programs that brought thirteen young “emerging leaders” from Bolivia to Washington between 2002 and 2004 to strengthen their rightwing political parties. The MAS, and other leftist parties, were not invited to these meetings.
The U.S. Embassy even appears to be using Fulbright scholars in its effort to undermine the Bolivian government. One Fulbright scholar in Bolivia, who wished to remain anonymous, explained that during recent orientation meetings at the embassy in La Paz, “a member of the U.S. Embassy’s security apparatus requested reports back to the embassy with detailed information if we should encounter any Venezuelans or Cubans in the field.” Both Venezuela and Cuba provide funding, doctors, and expertise to support their socialist ally Morales. The student adds that the embassy’s request “contradicts the Fulbright program’s guidelines, which prohibit us from interfering in politics or doing anything that would offend the host country.”
After finding out about the negative work the U.S. government was doing in Bolivia, I was curious to see one of the positive projects USAID officials touted so often. It took more than two weeks for them to get back to me—plenty of time, I thought, to choose the picture perfect example of their “apolitical” and development work organized “to benefit those who need it most.”
They put me in touch with Wilma Rocha, the boss at a clothing factory in El Alto called Club de Madres Nueva Esperanza (Mothers’ Club of New Hope). A USAID consultant worked in the factory in 2005-2006, offering advice on management issues and facilitating the export of the business’s clothing to U.S. markets. In a city of well-organized, working class radicals, Rocha is one of the few rightwingers. She is a fierce critic of the Morales administration and the El Alto unions and neighborhood councils.
Ten female employees are knitting at a table in the corner of a vast pink factory room full of dozens of empty sewing machines. “For three months we’ve barely had any work at all,” one of the women explains while Rocha waits at a distance. “When we do get paychecks, the pay is horrible.” I ask for her name, but she says she can’t give it to me. “If the boss finds out we are being critical, she’ll beat us.”
***
Benjamin Dangl is the author of “The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia.” He received a 2007 Project Censored Award for his coverage of U.S. military operations in Paraguay. Email: Ben(at)upsidedownworld.org
After a year here and then a month back in the States, I was not surprised to feel an unmistakable twitch of homecoming when I got back to Bolivia, although it’s a remarkable difference in the air. Coming back into the country is literally like walking into a wall of tension—not all necessarily negative tension—but an entirely different energy.
By some unbelievable stroke of luck I wound up spending the last two weeks of January sailing in the Bahamas with some friends and family, and a major theme on that boat was food. Vegan versus vegetarian versus omnivorism, health benefits versus sociological implications, etc. Very well. I read a book called the China Study, which essentially makes a bulletproof case for a vegan lifestyle from a health perspective, and spend a lot of time mulling over how food is so very integral to peoples and cultural identity—as an old man in Cochabamba’s only vegetarian restaurant said the other day, ‘food is like religion’.
So let’s talk about food in Bolivia. People here eat a lot of meat, and they eat a lot, period. Maybe it’s the altitude, maybe it’s the farming tradition, but a Bolivian lunch typically consists of an entrada (salad or some kind of shredded vegetable), sopa (soup, in an almost vat-sized bowl, with some piece of meat or gristle floating around in it), segundo (which is the main plate, a mountain of rice, plus an additional mountain either of meat or meat gloop), and postre. It’s widely believed that if you haven’t had meat on your plate, you haven’t really eaten. As such, it’s very difficult to find anything on the street without meat, or at least cheese in it. Since refined sugar hit the market soda, cheap chocolate, candy, and other things like that have appeared en masse on the corner s. Yu can’t walk a block without running into a little tarp-covered stand whose six-year-old attendant is hawking potato chips or cookies at the top of her young lungs. There must be a subsidy that I don’t know about, but sugar is cheaper than some of the fruit that is grown locally.
Food is sold in the markets. There are a few ‘western’ ( I can’t stand that term) supermarkets floating around, but everything in them is way out of the price range of a typical Bolivian family. Meat is sold out in the open air, and you can find pretty much any cut or any entrail that you could want, from cow tongues to guinea pig (a local specialty) to intestines and liver and things that I don’t even have names for. In the spirit of not wasting anything, everything that’s left over is ground up and dyed red and called ‘chorizo’—the only thing here that has had me on my knees puking.
Eating ‘locally’, something that requires some work in the States, is the default here. Bolivia is essentially inaccessible—we’re in the middle of the Andes, the roads are terrible, and the economy isn’t strong enough to have developed a taste for imported French cheese, so we eat what we make, and what can make it over the treacherous roads from the Chapare region. The market is a riot of color at all times of the year, even though the colors and the produce rotate. The peach crop has taken a hit this year because of all the flooding, but on any given day there are avocados half the side of your head, big broccolis and carrots and more varieties of potatoes than there are names for. Milk, soymilk, soda, wine, and beer (essentially the only drink options) are produced nationally. Quinoa, which is just beginning to appear on the international markets, has been a longtime staple in this country because it’s one of the few things that grows well at high altitudes—it’s a kind of cereal that can be boiled like couscous, or ground and used like flour.
And surprisingly, there’s a fairly strong organic foods movement going on. Food that’s grown on the outskirts of the city is at risk of contamination, because septic waters are used to irrigate, and some folks are beginning to have the time, educational tools, and financial resources to object to that and to work towards new standards. Furthermore, Bolivia’s exportation gets significantly more valuable when it’s organic, whether it’s coffee or quinoa. There are a number of little organic stores scattered around the city; they all do fairly well.
And water: water is glacial runoff which, not surprisingly, presents some concerns as global climate change melts the glaciers. One of the things we’re working on at the mARTadero is an artificial wetland that will filter the water that we use as an institution, making it, if not drinkable, at least usable in other contexts. The Water Wars put Cochabamba on the map in 2000, and it still surprises me that, even though water is such a charged issue here, it’s so poorly cared for. The city’s only river is a stinking mire of trash and feces, and usable—though not potable—water is trucked into poor parts of town at the outlandish price of a buck a barrel (outlandish when you consider that the average per capita income in that part of town is about $700 annually). There are no real water harvesting systems in place to take advantage of the rainy season. At this time of year it rains thrice daily and there is severe flooding all over the country, but I don’t know of any institutions that are trying to collect some of this water for the eight months that we will be without rain.
So I had lunch yesterday with a woman who is in the Peace Corps here in Bolivia, and who, incidentally, went to preschool with me. Apparently her mother ran into my godmother at the library—Meghan and Ann are both in Bolivia, etc. etc. and so there we were, 8,000 miles away from home eating at Cochabamba’s one vegetarian joint talking about social change. As a side note and before I continue: she mentioned that Bolivia has the highest rate of Peace Corps rape in the world. That is surprising to me, but not surprising—I feel like I’ve reeled off this factoid before, but 7 out of 10 Bolivian women have been raped. I’m veering into gender territory again (my favorite subject J ), but as it relates to development, so bear with me here.
Anyway, her initial project was to be working with farming cooperatives (the men) developing better ways to market their products abroad. She spent four months being frustrated that not one of them ever showed up to their own meetings, and that when a few of them finally did all they wanted was a tractor—as she saw it, a handout. She decided to go to the women of the community and see if there was anything that they needed. And they did—so now she’s knee-deep in a basic sanitation project which is up and sprinting, not only because the women are into it, but because they’re the ones teaching the children what’s what. Now, I realize that we need to dissect this scenario from a number of different perspectives. There’s a lot of conversation around here about the role of NGOs, services, and traditional charities that create cultures of dependency instead of self-sufficiency, and that is certainly evident in some parts of Bolivia. I don’t think too highly of the Peace Corps because they are known for doing exactly this: sending a young white woman into a group of men in a culture where neither womanhood nor youth is held in very high regard professionally, and expecting them to do a lot of community organizing without necessarily having the community context to do so. But what’s interesting to me about this (and this hasn’t been the first time this has happened) is that by working with the women of any community, Ann is effecting the quickest and most lasting change, simply because of their impact with the kids and the fact that they manage the inner workings of the household. This model is starting to be recognized elsewhere, and it seems to me a good one, however, my gripe with development as a whole is that it is subject to whatever whim hits the development community. Bolivia, Haiti, Africa, all these places patiently (or not) endure whatever new scheme the brains in Washington and elsewhere cook up. I’m in the development field, and I’m going to go back to school to study it. But I keep wondering how we can make it more responsive, when we’ve already created (and many times imposed) structures that promote anything but lasting change. I am part of a very charged, and historically very irresponsible field, and I know that I need to pay extra attention to everything that I do. How can I make it better? Any input would be greatly appreciated.
Again, we’re reaching epic and unreadable length, for which I apologize, again. It’s Wednesday, which means it’s market day, which means that Cochabamba as a whole is an ungodly tangle of traffic and people and honking and colorful bundles and wheelbarrows full of bananas. When it starts to rain, we will add ankle-deep mud and slop and slip to the mixture, but when the sun comes out again the Andes will turn green and soft and the air will be fresh, and I will wonder again at the odd combination of filth and beauty that is our life.
