Monday, September 12, 2005
Viva la Insurrecion Popular!!
La Paz is known for it´s protests, they can happen at anytime and last from days to weeks, the roads get blocked with large rocks and nothing moves, the airport shuts. There were large protests earlier this year, over regional autonomy for the South- East and the nationalisation of the gas industry, which led to the resignation of the president. It´s now peaceful and elections have been called for the end of the year but there are still plenty of signs on the streets of the troubles. This sign reads ´new elections, new constitution, long live the popular revolution´ I think.
This is nothing new in Bolivian politics. I´ve been reading a book on the history here, and the last 200 years has had so many regime changes - it reads something like this (many times over)...republic, military coup, peasant revolt, dictatorship, elections, miners revolt, junta, revolution, more elections etc etc. You get the idea. Politics is a dangerous game here, there´s a tradition of political assassinations, Villaroel (president at the time of the revolution in 1946) was dragged from the palace and hung from a lamppost by the populace. The military seem to be very politicised, on both left and right wing at different times, and have put down workers revolts in the past by shooting the protesters. It´s easy to see why the country has made so little progress economically and socially (it´s the poorest in S.America) with so many regime changes. The US and China / the USSR also both made heavy invesments here in the cold war to attempt to prevent the country turning to communism / capitalism respectively. Because of the dependency on foreign investment a lot of money from mining has gone overseas to mutli-nationals which is partly the reason for the call to nationalise the gas fields.
As in other Latin American countries, corruption is endemic. A small example of this happened today when we had to go to the Instituto Geografico Militar to buy a map for the trek (a mission in itself to find it up some blind back alley in downtown La Paz). The guy found the map sheet we needed. We were supposed to pay at a cashier desk and bring the receipt back to collect the map, but the guy said it cost 35 Bolivianos and asked us for the money. We found 30 and were fumbling for the other 5 but he just grabbed the 30 and pocketed it and said it was OK. Nice little earner. Unforunately our Spanish wasn´t good enough to ask for an explanation and anyway it´s best not to argue with the military here.
The Coca museum was fascinating. Coca here is used in it´s leaf form and chewed to form a cud. This releases the proteins which have anaesthetic and stimulant effects and can help with acclimatisation (speeds up breathing). We tried it and it´s not really nice (chewing dry leaves). The miners use it to work up to 48 hours straight in some cases. As an aside, work here is really really
hard - we saw these guys digging up the road with hammers and chisels. Anyway, back to coca...the information we read likened it more to alcohol in western terms. Coca is integral to traditional Andean society, it´s used in every religious and social occasion (like wine or beer in the west). The UN said that Coca was the cause of poverty in Bolivia in the 1960´s and declared war on it, which seems hypocritical since Coca-Cola still use it to flavour coke (by the way they only stopped putting cocaine in coke in the 1930´s). It´s only with western chemicals, skills, and financial institutions (to launder the cash) that it´s possible to make cocaine from the leaves so it´s hard to see Bolivia (or other countries) here as the root of this problem. The peasant farmers are just regular people producing a cash crop like any other. The drug problem itself is created by the demand (largely in the US). The farmers here also don´t get a price which reflects the street price - all this goes to the drug cartels. Bolivia is cracking down on illegal coca growing and jungle chemical factories though it´s hard to know how effective it´s being.Anyway, sorry this is all so unstructured - just wanted to get some of it down while it´s in my head. I´d be interested to get some comments on this if anyone has any views.
Pete
# posted by Pete @ 12:38 PM 
