When Being a Good Parent Means Going Away

My apologies for the paucity of posts. I have been absolutely swamped at work. One of our communities is having a leadership conflict, which was substantial setback for us. So I’ll share some of what we’re working on. These issues just scratch the surface.

Migration is globalization at its most intimate. Displaced and dispossessed by the neoliberal economic system, unable to make ends meet, families are forced to make difficult choices.

Bolivia has high levels of both internal and external migration. When the mines were privatized in the late eighties and early nineties tens of thousands of workers were laid off and migrated from Potosi and Oruro, primarily to Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. With the second round of agrarian reform and the encroachment of huge estates, during the same era, many people lost their landholdings and migrated from the altiplano to El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.

The prospects for work aren’t much better in El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. The official unemployment rate is 70%, and the underemployment rate just as high. Most people work in the informal economy, as street vendors, day laborers and domestic employees. Education seems to have little effect. Taxi drivers often have university degrees. Even the employed don’t earn enough to feed their families. Minimum wage works out to about $70 a month. With such bleak prospects in Bolivia, many go abroad.

Approximately 30% of the population lives abroad. About a 1.5 million Bolivians have migrated to Spain, and a million more to Argentina, and half a million to the US, leaving around eight million people in the county. There are smaller communities in Chile, Brazil and Italy, and pockets in Peru, Ecuador, Israel and Japan. Approximately 50% of the population is expected to live abroad by 2020.

Families see migration as an investment for the future. They will borrow huge sums, up to $10,000, to travel abroad. Sometimes the investment pays off, and the migrants save enough to send their children to school, to provide for their families, to build new houses, and eventually, to invest in small businesses, taxis, and rental properties. Other times the migrants are unable to find work or adapt to life abroad, or, in the case of illegal immigrants, are deported, and the investment, plus interest, is lost.

Migration’s effects on families are the most marked. Last week I was interviewing a woman in her garden while her two year old son played nearby. Every time a plane passed overhead he would point and say "Papa!" An eight year old boy I talked to told me that he didn’t have a father, even though his had only been in Argentina for a year. The effect is even more pronounced when mothers migrate. Since most of the Spanish demand is for domestic workers almost 60% of Bolivian migrants are women. They are forced to leave their families behind, in the care of relatives, or in a few cases, alone. I interviewed one sixteen-year old in charge of four siblings. I’ve meet other teenagers who live alone and receive remittances from their parents. In these cases, children have little incentive to stay in school and on the straight narrow. As a result, Cochabamba has high rates of teenage drug and alcohol abuse and pregnancy, and child abuse and molestation.

Migration also has huge effects on communities. In the barrios where we work we often see huge houses, made of brick, painted bright colors, with one-way glass windows, red terra-cotta roofs and tile floors. They stand in stark contrast to the other one-room casitas, constructed of adobe, with scrap tin roofs and dirt floors. Unfortunately, the nice new houses are often empty, their owners abroad, while families of six or seven squeeze into the more humble houses. Returned migrants also invest in their communities. Migrants sponsor schools, churches, health centers and parks. Oftentimes, this is a huge help for the communities. Other times it’s conspicuous charity, benefiting the donor more than the community. When the migrants return for fiestas like Carnaval or Independence Day they’re often the patrons of lavish parties, with abundant alcohol, food and entertainment, which last for days on end. These parties can also create competition and division within the communities.

The most damaging is the brain drain phenomenon. Migrants are generally younger, closer to middle class, more educated and competent, and most able to improve their communities. I talked to one returned migrant, who had a college education, but moved to Spain to pour cement because wasn’t able to find work. Losing their best and brightest slows Bolivia’s development even further.

It remains to be seen, the benefits of migrant’s remittances will outweigh the costs of their absence. It just seems so unfair that some of us are forced to make such difficult choices.

This picture was taken in La Paz, of an internal migrant from Achacachi.

Saving the Rainforest and Avoiding Rabies

Despite its chronic instability, the Chapare is an absolutely amazing place. Villa Tunari has a lazy, laid back feel, with abundant cold cerveza and swimming holes. For me, the main attractions were the national parks and tiny villages outside of town.

Getting to the Parque Nacional Carrasco proved a challenge, because it’s a few miles out of town and I couldn’t find a taxi. Luckily, the owner of my hotel lent me his moto. A gringa, riding a motorcycle through the countryside, skirt and long hair flying, stirring up dust and scaring everyone’s chickens, made for quite a sight, but it was super fun. Getting inside the park was also an experience. There’s a huge river between the ranger station and the protected area, which we got to cross in a zippy little cable car contraption.

Parque Nacional Carrasco encompasses over 600,000 hectacres of cloudforest, starting in the altiplano, plunging down the steep Andean hillsides into the rainforest river basin. The tiny bit I explored was home a rainbow of birds, reptiles and insects. My favorties were the blue morpho butterflies, which are impossible to photograph, and the bullet ants, which indigenous communities used to use to punish people guilty of serious crimes. They would tie them to a tree and stir up the ants, which would kill most people in a few hours. My guide also insisted on surprising me with “algo super cool,” in a cave, which turned out to be vampire bats. He was a little taken aback by my response to the bats, running screaming out of the cave. I was more interested in walking around the rainforest, just taking the unique jungle smell and the cacophony of crazy bird, bug and snake sounds.

While the part of the park we explored has had more human impact, the interior of the park is so impenetrable that it’s still pristine. Jaguar, tapir, peccary, tropical bear, giant anteaters and thousands of other species live in the biodiversity hotspot. Its home to over a hundred species of orchids. There are even reports of an uncontacted Yuracaré tribe in the interior. Unfortunately, the edges of the park are quickly being eroded by logging, hunting and settlement. Enforcement is virtually impossible with a few dozen rangers for thousands of hectares. The threats come from all sectors, from major multinational corporations to subsistence farmers trying to scratch out a living.

Corporations are an easy culprit. In the Chapare, they’re really only involved in hardwood logging. In the Beni, Pando, and Santa Cruz, soybean cash cropping and cattle ranching are bigger issues. In Santa Cruz and the Chaco, hydrocarbon exploration and extraction cuts huge access roads through the forest, never mind the effects of oil spills from poorly constructed and cared for pipelines.

In the Chapare, poor people are often the unwitting culprits. In many cases, the parks are created around communities who live in or off of the forest. In other cases, migrants from the altiplano, desperate for a little scrap of land, illicitly settle in the parks. Some are modern hunter-gatherers, poaching plants and animals that fetch high prices. Others are farmers, whose slash and burn agriculture and grazing animals contribute to deforestation. Once cleared, the nutrients in rainforest soils are quickly depleted and the settlers have to clear more land, creating a cycle of deforestation and the eventual loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, disruption of the water cycle and climate change, making cultivation even more difficult. The tensions between sustainability and subsistence for those on the edge were aptly illustrated in Parque Machia and Villa Tunari.

Parque Machia is a refuge for rescued animals that have been poached and kept as pets. The better part of the park was closed, damaged by the recent rains. Fortunately, the park’s monkey population had relocated to the ranger station. Since they’ve had so much human contact, they actually wanted to be closer to humans. They were super inquisitive and sociable. The squirrel monkey pictured here was absolutely adorable, until he stole my sunglasses. When I tried to take them back, he bit me! Fortunately, it didn’t break the skin, and he finally agreed to swap my sunglasses for some grapes.

Back in Villa Tunari I went to a local comedor for lunch. As is the norm, there was no menu, just a special of the day. After a few bites, unable to identify the animal, I asked what it was. I was eating jochi, or agouti, an endangered animal akin to a guinea pig. The next day I went to a different comedor asked what the special was. “Taitateu,” I was told. When I asked what kind of an animal it was the proprieties claimed it was chancho, or pork. Unfortunately, when the plate arrived, it was clearly not pork. “Chancho de monte,” the woman clarified, which is peccary, an endangered wild pig. After that I finally wised up and just asked for fish.

There’s a new picasa album up with more pictures. Unfortunatly, they, like playing Amazon Trail as a kid, can't quite do the jungle justice.

The Chapare and the Coca Conflict

I decided to take a weekend during the week, since we work on Saturdays and Sundays, and venture out to Villa Tunari, in the Chapare region. The Chapare has gained notoriety for its coca crops. While the coca of the Yungas is widely chewed and central to the Andean cosmovision, the bigger, bitterer leaves of the Chapare are generally processed into cocaine for first-world consumption.

In the Chapare coca is grown by peasant campesinos. Then it’s bought by narcotraficante networks, and collected in clandestine labs deep within the Chapare and Beni rainforests. There it is processed with ether, hydrochloric and sulphuric acid into a paste. The coca paste loaded into light planes and flown from hundreds of hidden airstrips to Colombia for more processing. Finally, it’s smuggled into the US, where it sells for a thousand times more than the cocaleros’ take.

Ironically, the US inadvertently encouraged coca cultivation for cocaine production. In the 1970s USAID monies built the Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway, opening the Chapare to colonization. In the 1980s, thousands of miners were laid off in neoliberal labor-flexibilization programs promoted by the US and their multilateral interests, and as many altiplano campesinos were displaced by neoliberal land reform that dispossessed them of their lands. Encouraged by the government, many of them migrated to the Chapare, where they found the perfect new cash crop. Coca grows well in the Chapare’s poor soils (since most of the nutrients are stored in the standing rainforest), provides immediate returns, requires little work, and has a high price.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when structural adjustment was in full swing and the economy in shambles, illegal coca export earning equalled or exceeded all legal export earnings combined. Two-thirds of all cocaine snorted by yuppies stateside came from Bolivia. Cash from coca crops kept thousands of campesino families from starvation. By all accounts, Bolivian governments, democratically elected and authoritarian alike, benefited from their blind eye to the coca boom. The city of Santa Cruz was by and large built with drug money by cronies of President Banzer.

In the late 1980s, under pressure from the Regan administration to fight the War on Drugs, the Bolivian government made an abrupt about face, and began going after coca growers. Originally, they paid the cocaleros to eliminate their crops, but the policy had little effect, as people replanted their crops. Alternative development projects have been equally unsuccessful. The government began eradication without compensation under the paradoxically named Plan Dignidad. In response, cocaleros organized to defend their meagre livelihoods. They organized mass protests and blockades, paralyzing the region. A number of unarmed cocaleros were killed in clashes at blockades in blatant violations of human rights. As such, some cocaleros have become more militant, killing a number of DEA agents with booby traps. The situation has improved somewhat with the election of cocalero Evo Morales, evidence of their influence. The Bolivian army and DEA agents have backed down a bit, and are now uprooting coca crops by hand. It's a particularly painful example of the stupidity of supply-side economics.

After my run in with the Aymara militants, I was concerned about meeting cocaleros while hiking in the isolated Parque Nacional Carrasco, which is also a popular coca smuggling corridor. However, the cocaleros’ syndicato was kind enough to write me a letter, affirming that I was not a DEA agent and stating that I was friend to all campesinos and cocaleros, which they signed and stamped with their official seal. I never needed to show it, but it makes an excellent souvenir.

I did see some more obvious signs of the coca conflict, like the highway checkpoints. There the police search for precursor chemicals for cocaine coming into the Chapare and unauthorized coca coming out. They make everyone get off the bus and show identification, while they search it top to bottom with absolutely un-Bolivian thoroughness.

The next sign I was in coca country were the blockades. While blockades in the Chapare have been scenes of violent standoffs between cocaleros and police in the past, the one we ran into was not a big deal. The protesters had left for lunch, so all the passengers helped remove the rocks and tree trunks from the road, and on our way we went. The driver assured me that after a siesta, the protesters and their blockade would be back, which was very Bolivian.

The effects of the coca boom were especially apparent when I arrived in Villa Tunari. The town has seen better days, before the eradication campaign. Most of the people in the outlying areas are desperately poor, living in small shacks, subsisting on small kitchen gardens and sporadic hunting. In town there are huge houses, built in a narco-baroque style, which have since been abandoned. All the fancy hotels and nice restaurants, which used to cater to narcotraficantes, now depend on DEA agents and occasional tourists for their due. The residents are trying to turn Villa Tunari into a tourism destination, but with the incredible political instability, it seems unlikely. All they have to show are a bunch of signs proclaiming Villa Tunari a Pariso Ethnoecoturistico.

For more information about the coca conflict, please check out the Acción Andina website. It’s run by my amazing boss, Theo Roncken, who has filled books on the subject.

Swingin'

Bolivians don't do Valentines Day, but in honor of the occasion, I though give a little anthropological account of another courtship ritual, La Festival del la Wallunk'a. Wallunk'a marks the commencement of the rainy season, celebrating fertility of the fields and the vitality of the community. It's commonly associated with the Day of the Dead, since they coincide in early November.

Wallunk'a means swing in Quechua. Giant swings are are constructed of eucalyptus trees and cured leather straps. Entire indigenous communities come together to construct them, with pre-Colombian engineering. They're blessed and bedecked with wreathes of flowers.

Young Quechua women from the Cochabamba Valley take turns showing their daring and prowess on the swings, soaring twenty to twenty-five feet off the ground at their apex. Bunches of flowers and baskets of food and other prizes are put just out of reach, forcing the women to swing higher and higher. With short skirts and long braids flying, it makes for quite a sight.

Suitors stand below, serenading the women. One ballad starts with "Sobre mi sombrero, ay palomitay, una flor rojita, por vos viditay," or "Over my hat, little dove, a little red flower, for you I live." The suitors encourage the women to swing higher, until they can't stand it and they scream stop. Then they're received by their suitors, and the courting and celebrating continues with abundant chicha.

Thanks to Arnd for the photo of a more modern Wallunk'a

Political Participation, Bolivian Style

Missing Super Tuesday and the Washington State Caucuses made me a little sad. Instead, I've been participating in Bolivian politics, which is almost better. Besides, Barack didn't need my vote.

Political participation here borders on pathological. Everyone, from taxistas to campesinos, priests to professors, is endlessly discussing Evo, the constituent assembly and the Santa Cruz autonomy movement. While Bolivians love to talk politics, but they're even more disposed to participate, as the 2000 Water War , the 2003 Gas War and the current conflict aptly illustrate. While the protests are striking, they're actually less impressive than the local popular participation.

Bolivians are very well organized, out of necessity. Historically, indigenous communities were organized into kinship-based ayllus, and all land was held and labored communally. After the republican revolution labor unions played an important roles providing for families and protesting for change. The 1994 Ley de Participation Popular formally decentralized planning power, transferring 20% of the government budget to over 15,000 Organizaciones Teritoriales de Base. Still, in the outlying urban and rural regions, if you want something done, you need to do it yourself. Neighborhood groups dig ditches for pipe, put up light posts and pave their own streets.

Attendance at the weekly block meetings is mandatory. Absentees are fined about $1.50, a day or half-day’s pay for poorer people. Most meetings start at 7am on Sunday mornings. In many communities they're held in the street, rain or shine. There are also emergency meetings, summoned with gunshots. We don't have to go to our block meetings because we rent. Instead, I go to the block meetings in our informant barrios. At the meetings, they organize community events and work projects. When they have more pressing issues they appeal to the president in personal letters. If that fails they plan protests, often storming the municipal buildings a thousand strong.

The meetings can become somewhat militant. In one of our communities there’s been a clash over leadership. They had a vote of no-confidence and kicked out their dirigente, but they’ve been unable to elect a new one. They’ve been discussing it for weeks now. Most meetings degenerate into arguments in Quechua and one evening fistfights even broke out between rival factions. Ironically, the factions are almost idegoligically identical. Most everyone in our barrios are MASistas, or Morales supporters. Some of them also identify themselves as Trotskyites or Anarcho-Syndicalists. They refer to me as Compañera Allison, the equivalent of Comrade Allison, which amuses me to no end.

This mural was painted by the Marxist Front of Universidad Mayor San Simon, a lovely reminder that we are living in a revolution.

El Milagro de Mira

I finally put up some photos up on Picasa. I just couldn't do Carnaval justice describing it. There are just a few favorites because my dial-up is super slow. Again, after all, this is Bolivia.

Fire for the People

I had an amazing experience today. A moment where my time here in Bolivia, if not on earth, made complete sense.

I was sitting in a cafe, working on my laptop, listening to some Seattle hip-hop, the Blue Scholars. A lustrebote approached me and asked to shine my shoes. I declined, but he stuck around, trying to strike up a conversation, as they often do. After chatting for a bit he pointed to my laptop and demanded "Let me listen”. He put on the headphones, listening tentatively at first, then smiling at the strange words, slowly swaying back and forth. ”What does it mean?” he asked when it was finished. So I translated:

50k deep, and it sounds like thunder when our feet pound streets. ● Cincuenta mil profundo, y suena como trueno cuando nuestros pies golpean las calles. ● Still demanding a share, refrigerator’s bare, they wanna see trade get free and not fair. But we are not far, we are not there, we don't got time left to spare, to not care.

His face lit up. “Are they talking about El Alto?” he asked. “What?” I replied, a little taken aback. As it turns out he was referring to the 2003 Gas War, and the overthrow of Goni, the hated neo-liberal puppet president.

A bit more background:

Like the Water War before it, the Gas War was by and large about neo-liberal structural adjustment policies, especially privatization. In 1996 President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, or Goni, privatized YPFB, the state hydrocarbons authority. It was broken up and auctioned off to private investors, who were required to pay 50% royalties. In the late 1990s he renegotiated many of these contracts by reclassifying them, lowering royalty rates to 18%. The cost of finding and developing a barrel of gas averaged $8.58 worldwide, $5.66 in Latin America, and just 40¢ in Bolivia. Gas revenues, the primary government revenue, decreased seven-fold. Paradoxically, privatization and structural adjustment widened budget deficits in Bolivia.

In 2003 Goni supported a $6 billon plan to build a pipeline through Chile, where the gas would be processed and shipped to California. There is a lot of bad blood between Bolivia and Chile because Chile permanently annexed Bolivia’s only coastline in the 1880 War of the Pacific.

Anger over petroleum privatization, the pipeline, US imposed coca eradication policies, the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), the suspension of community justice and representation systems, the absolute poverty and inequality and other injustices came to a head in October 2003.

My small friend and his family, along with thousands of other campesinos, industrial and mining unions members, indigenous ayllu members, urban alteños and university students marched on La Paz, demanding the repeal of the 1996 Hydrocarbons Law, a popular referendum on hydrocarbon revenues, and the convocation of a constitutional assembly. When Goni refused to negotiate with their leadership, they escalated the situation.

Blockading the roads to the south in El Alto and the north in Villa Fatima, they besieged the La Paz. In one instance, hundreds of men, women and children dragged train cars several kilometers, before shoving them off the tracks and onto the main La Paz’s-El Alto arterial. Not even tanks could get through. The uprising spread to the countryside. In the altiplano Aymara community militias, armed with slingshots and guns from the 1952 National Revolution drove the army and police out of Sorata, Achacachi and Warisata. Eventually, over 300,000 people marched on La Paz, and hunger strikes numbered in the hundreds. In a country of only eight million people (and four million llamas) this is astounding.

In response, Goni declared a state of siege. In El Alto twenty-eight unarmed civilians, including a number of children, were massacred. In the ensuing protests, another thirty-nine were martyred, on civilian and state sides.

Eventually the protests became so large and state control so small that the security forces refused to suppress the populace. The Vice President, most of the cabinet and all of the neighbouring countries withdrew their support. With the US as his only ally, Goni was forced to resign and flee to Miami, where he still lives in impunity.

My new friend, Calixto, was just a little kid during the 2003 protests, six or seven years old. But he remembered the experience so vividly, and recounted his role passing out cups of coffee with so proudly.

Eventually, I explained that the song was about a protest in Seattle, in solidarity with Bolivia. "People in America care about Bolivia?" He asked, amazed. I was so pleased that I could honestly answer that some of us care. I even found a photo of the WTO protests. "It looks a lot like El Alto" he told me. And while Seattle is usually a world apart from El Alto, they sure felt close together today, while we sat, listening to the Blue Scholars, having lunch and talking about our lives.

This famous photo was borrowed from Reuters.

Caray for Carnaval!

I didn’t think holidays could get any cooler than Alasitas, and then along came Carnaval. A UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, it mixes tradition, religion, humor, heavy drinking and indiscriminate water fighting into one crazy fiesta.

It’s held in Oruro. Oruro is usually a miserable, cold and gray altiplano mining town, but once a year its population triples and it’s transformed into a riotous, rollicking party city. Steve and I, and thousands of others, made the five hour pilgrimage by bus to sleep on someone’s floor in subzero weather. And it was well worth it.

Oruro Carnaval is a reincarnation of the Pre-Columbian Ito festival, celebrated by the Uru people. When the Spanish outlawed Ito, the indigenous people co-opted Carnival, mixing indigenous traditions and Catholic spirituality. Today the parade is dedicated to the Virgin del Socavón, patron saint of the mineshafts. Dancing in the entrada is considered a religious duty and requires a commitment of three years and thousands of Bolivianos.

While Carnaval festivities began months ago, and continue for another week, the main event is the entrada, or parade, held on the Saturday before Lent. The entrada includes upwards of a hundred of floats festooned with silverware, over 20,000 elaborately costumed dancers and more than 10,000 musicians, spread over four kilometers and eighteen hours. All of the troupes do one of the same six or so dances, each interlacing myth and tradition, imbued plenty of satire and snark. A little about them:

Las Diabladas wear huge masks with bright bulging eyes, twisted horns and long hair tangled with serpents. Temptresses with lascivious masks and short skirts dance alongside them. They represent the Christian struggle between good and evil, as well as the Pre-Colombian god of the underworld, known as Huari or El Tio.

Los Doctorcitos wear silver masks with hooked noses, warts and long white hair, glasses and pipes, tailcoats and tophats. They satirize Spanish mine owners, bowing and shaking hands as they dance.

Los Caporales wear bright velvet and sequined suits, knee-high boots with bells up the side and carry a whip in one hand and a hat in the other. Alongside them there are young women in equally bright and bouncy skirts, thigh-high boots, evening gloves braids and feathered hats. They represent the Spanish overseers, stomping, clapping and cracking their whips as they dance.

Las Morenadas and Los Negritos, pictured above, wear grotesquely exaggerated masks with big bug eyes, huge lips, and bushy black beards. They are encumbered by huge costumes, which force them to stumble stupidly down the parade route. They are the stereotype of African slaves brought over by the Spanish.

Los Tinkus wear long rainbow colored robes, adorened with sashes and capes. The men wear raw cowhide hats, shaped like the Spanish Conquistadores’ helmets, and adorned with feathers and bells. The women wear bowlers with feathers sticking straight up, like some sort of avian fountain. They act out ritual combat that still occurs between rival altiplano communities.

Los Suri Sicuris wear gigantic hats-halos of feathers, three to five feet in diameter. They wear equally oversized breastplates, which makes them look like birds. The do less dancing, more bowing and dipping their heads, barely able to right themselves.

Las Llamaderas wear traditional altiplano costumes, including polleras, bowler hats, sashes and carry slingshots. They do a very traditional altiplano dance, accompanied by little llamas.

Las Tobas wear brightly painted faces, huge, elaborate feathered headdresses, fur cuffs and ankle adornments, bare chests and midriff baring outfits, and carry spears and slingshots. They are supposedly the indigenous peoples of the orient.

The entrada is about as well organized as the Fremont Solstice Parade. There are gigantic gaps in the parade, during which huge water fights break out. The madness, which has been mounting for weeks now, included water balloons, supersoakers, buckets, and spray foam. Unfortunately, about halfway through the parade Mira, my Canon Rebel and constant companion, was hit by a water balloon and stopped working.

I felt a little like I had been shot. I was standing on the sidelines, struggling not to sob, when one of the dancers saw my expression. She invited me to dance with her troupe to cheer me up. Having watched different incarnations of the same dance for the past six hours, I had it down and was feeling better in no time. However, I did not have the awesome outfit, as pictured below. I’m planning to buy myself one when we get back to Cochabamba.

The parade continues into the wee hours of Sunday morning, when some of the dancers breathe fire, and most of the spectators are so drunk they can no longer sit in their seats, jeering at the dancers, singing and dancing in the streets, fighting and peeing everywhere.

On Sunday afternoon the dancers do the entire parade over again, hung over or still drunk. They stagger and stumble along the parade route, half-costumed, leaning on one another, occasionally dropping out to throw up.

Update: After drying out, Mira is fine. After drying out, Ally has an incredible headache.