Bolivia: The High, Hard Land

Outside of the Himalayas, the highest country on earth is Bolivia, which nestles in the Andes, landlocked in behind Peru and Chile. Since the altitude of La Paz (pop. 350,000) is 11,900 ft., visitors are warned to get used to the thin air before taking a cocktail or attempting anything so athletic as trotting upstairs. At the airport, 1,400 ft. above the city, no jets come in; Panagra’s prop pilots sometimes take a whiff of oxygen during stopovers. Yet 4,000,000 people inhabit Bolivia; 75% are on the altiplano (high plain), a vast, barren Andean plateau averaging 12,000 ft. in altitude. Of the 75%, a few tin miners produce the nation’s major export; the rest, mostly Quechua and Aymara Indians who cannot even speak Spanish, spend brief lives struggling to scratch a living from the stony soil.

Potatoes for Survival. Last week Bolivia’s President Victor Paz Estenssoro, 56, flew to the U.S. for a state visit. Most inhabitants of the altiplano—who don’t even know what goes on in La Paz—were unaware that he had gone. It is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Indians are plowing and planting. As their ancestors have done for centuries, those fortunate enough to own oxen bedecked the horns with white streamers and draped their backs with magenta cloth to bring luck. Those without animals simply tore at the grey earth with metal-tipped wooden poles. Women in derbylike hats stooped to plant potatoes, their basic staple of life.

When—and if—the potatoes ripen, the Indians will eat some of them fresh, save others for seed, and turn the rest into chuño. Chuño-making begins when the temperature at night falls below freezing. Potatoes are left out to freeze, then thaw when the sun rises. Barefoot Indians tread out the moisture, leave the potatoes to freeze again, tread some more. After a fortnight they have chuño—a dehydrated potato that, with luck, will last all winter.

Of an average family’s ten or eleven children, only four or five survive infancy. Life centers around the mud-brick cook hut where feeble fires of roots, sticks and llama dung struggle in the thin air. Indians who make it through childhood live to an average age of 32—without taking a bath, without taking a pill, without sleeping on a real bed. Most are solemn and docile, apparently cowed by their environment, except when there is an excuse for a fiesta and they can gulp caña (a potent, sugar-based liquor). Then, a missionary says, “a young Indian will start dancing with a girl and they will wander off. After a week they will come back to the community and announce they want to get married.”

President Paz has given land to the Indians; schools are being built. For the first time, glass is going into window spaces long open to the winds of winter. An occasional Indian pedals the stony paths on a bicycle. A rarer one carries a Japanese transistor radio. Signs of hope are scattered, but visible—much of it owing to President Paz.

Two Senses. A onetime lawyer, soldier and economics professor, Paz is short and swarthy, with gentle brown eyes and a friendly humor. Yet in 1952, he led a social revolution that emancipated the population from virtual serfdom and crushed the power of the army. In its early days, like Mexico’s PRI in the first stages of the Mexican revolution, Paz’s National Revolutionary Movement operated with a heavy hand, sending its enemies to concentration camps or into exile. Today, though it is plagued by entrenched party politicians (“Tammany Hall,” Paz calls them), the party probably speaks for the majority of Bolivians. Its greatest problem has always been transforming Bolivia’s land and mineral wealth into a workable modern economy.

The revolution threw out the “tin bar ons”—the Patino, Aramayo and Hochschild families—and nationalized the mines that provide 90% of Bolivia’s exports. Under state management, however, payrolls became featherbeds and machinery wore out. The once-rich mines now lose an average $8,500,000 a year. Only lately has Comibol, the government mining company, reached an agreement with the U.S., the Inter-American Development Bank and West Germany for a $38 million modernization of the tin industry—provided Comibol reduced its padded 27,000-man payroll. Last August, when the first 1,015 workers were laid off, the Communist-infiltrated tin workers’ union staged a nationwide tin strike. Paz refused to bend; after 13 days the strikers capitulated.

The victory left Paz in firm control of Bolivia. Violence is still possible; Paz rides to the palace each morning in a bulletproof Cadillac and keeps a tommy gun in the car. But he is the odds-on favorite to win the party’s nomination for another four-year term in the presidential election next June.

Looking Down. In between a White House state luncheon, a State Department dinner, and two hours of talks with President Kennedy last week, Paz asked for special delivery U.S. aid for a project that goes far beyond the tin mines. Already Bolivia gets more U.S. aid per capita than any other Latin American nation. Bolivia is so poor (per capita income: $114, only slightly better than Haiti) and so afflicted by nature that the strongest hope for progress rests in a vast scheme to open up fertile eastern lowlands beyond the Andes and relocate large numbers of altiplano Indians. In the past two years, some 100,000 people have gone down from the airless plateau to new farm areas near Santa Cruz, Cochabamba and Caranavi. Over the next eight years, Paz plans to spend about $120 million on new roads. He wants to resettle 380,000 more people around hospital-school community centers, advance them tools, seed and food (eventual repayment will come to $1,345 per family), give them technical advice and turn them into productive farmers. “The old Bolivia is up there on the altiplano,” said Paz last week. “The new Bolivia is down below.”