The red ponchos and talk of civil war

The Aymara people, who represent about a third of Bolivia, have a tradition of putting on their red ponchos when they go on a war footing. So any display of this symbol can be interpreted as merely tradition or a threat.

On the day I arrived in Bolivia in September, the vice president, Alvaro Garcia Linera, recalled his days as a guerilla fighter and urged a crowd of indigenous people to have their rifles ready inside their red ponchos to fight against any attempt to divide the country.



He was talking about the eastern half of the country, known as the Half-Moon, which voted last July for autonomy, meaning more local control of its money and government affairs.

Talk of civil war heated up at that time and again in January when President Evo Morales, at a gathering of 10,000 Aymara in their red ponchos, called on them to fight against any attempt to divide the country. (People in the Half-Moon would say they´re not trying to secede, but they do want more autonomy.)



Morales´s Aymara host announced that day that he had 100,000 people ready to take up arms at a moment´s notice if the president wanted. You can imagine what a stir that caused. These images (the one at the top is from La Razon, the other is from El Nuevo Dia) were on TV and the front pages.

Morales, who has a very positive reputation in Europe and the U.S., frequently engages in saber rattling. When he was campaigning for office, for example, he ended speeches with, `Death to the Americans.´

The talk of civil war died down for a couple of months, but tension is growing again because of conflicts between the central government and the Half-Moon about everything from the Supreme Court to foreign trade agreements.

The people you meet in La Paz

In the Plaza Murillo, which faces the Presidential Palace and the home of the Bolivian congress, you see a mix of people in modern and traditional dress.




A military band performs on a Sunday morning on the Prado, the main drag in La Paz. They performed a medley of Strauss waltzes punctuated with a lot of heavy pounding on the bass drum.



This lovely woman was standing outside my hotel yesterday. An hour later, as I was working at a computer in the hotel lobby, she sat down at the computer next to me. During a cell phone call she identified herself as Carla Ortiz. She is famous as the actress in the most expensive Bolivian movie ever made, The Andes Don´t Believe in God. Its budget was $500,000. She was great in it, and I told her so. She was very gracious and friendly. She´s a native of Cochabamba here, but she lives in the U.S., where she appears in TV shows like CSI Miami. This photo is from La Razon newspaper.



Theese men in traditional dress were walking on the Prado yesterday. You more often see women in traditional dress. I followed them for a block or two trying to discretely photograph them. They all hopped onto a big tourist bus.

In La Paz you have much more sense of the indigenous culture of the country. There is a museum of traditional clothing here as well as the Museum of Coca, which chronicles the history of coca in patent medicines (legalized opiates common in drugstores in the last century), toothpaste and modern anesthestics. The coca leaf is considered sacred.

On the street of the witches, ironically right behind the main cathedral, locals come to buy the stuff needed to cast spells on enemies, bring good fortune and guarantee fertility. A typical store is below. Mummified llama fetuses are in abundance in many stores (not this one). Not sure what they’re used for.



Up until 1975, most people in Bolivia did not speak Spanish. The education system missed them. Two-thirds of Bolivians consider themselves to be members of an indigenous group, with 30 percent identifying themselves as Aymara (the group of President Evo Morales) and 27 percent Quechua. About six in 10 Bolivians speak an indigenous language, depending on which source you refer to. Last fall El Nuevo Dia published a language map of the country that showed some 36 languages spoken, but most of these are very small groups and their languages are in danger of dying out.



Mount Illimani looms over downtown La Paz. How high is Bolivia? The western third averages about 15,000 feet. A wall three miles high separates the plains in the east from the capital. Although it’s only 335 miles from La Paz to Santa Cruz in the eastern lowlands, according to my World Book Atlas, a bus ride takes around 20 to 24 hours because of the twisting mountain roads. You´ve probably seen the pictures. I decided not to do it.

Flying is scary enough. La Paz is at about 12,000 feet, and its airport is higher than almost all of the Rocky Mountain peaks. The air is so thin that the takeoff run needed for a Boeing 737 to get airborne is about 30 percent longer than normal, which seems like an eternity when you’re in a passenger seat. The runway is almost twice as long as that of Reagan National.

Bolivia covers 1 million square kilometers, more than 8 times the size of Pennsylvania and 45 times the size of Maryland. Lake Erie has three times the surface area of Lake Titicaca, although the latter is much deeper.

Business note: There are 250 publicly traded U.S. companies that have higher revenues than the gross domestic product of Bolivia, which is $9 billion.

Lake Titicaca and Isla del Sol

Much of the Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca is terraced into plots for potatoes, cereal grains and other crops suited to the altitude of 13,000 feet above sea level. The hills that rise up all around the lake show a similar terracing. This area was part of the Tiwanaku empire 2,000 years ago, an empire I had never heard of. At its peak, it reached into Peru, Ecuador, Chile, Venezuela and Argentina. The island was a cultural and religious center for the Tiwanaku and the Incas who followed them.
Local Aymara Indians still make boats (which they call balsas) from the totora reed, and these on the beach at Yampupata are specifically for use by tourists, two to a boat with paddles. I didn´t have time to indulge.
The terrain is very dry all around Lake Titicaca, whose name comes from two Aymara words meaning puma and stone. My guide, Samuel, speaks Aymara as do most people in the La Paz and El Alto area. Here we´re descending from the peaks on the Isla del Sol. I was short of breath after the climb.



Unfortunately, this double-hulled reed boat pulled out before I could close enough for a good shot. The boat is probably 25 feet long and made completely of totora reeds that grow beside the lake. The prows display stylized puma heads.



Subsistence farming mixes in with tourism on the Isla del Sol, and not always comfortably. Still, a good hotel costs only about $30 night. Food and labor are inexpensive. A great meal of trout, salad and a couple of sides costs about $3.





These stone steps up from the beach on the Isla del Sol are supposed to date from Inca times (the 1400s) or earlier.

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A diary entry from 2006 about this trip

Samuel was my guide for trip to Tiwanaku, a pre-Incan site west of La Paz, and Copacabana, jumping off point for Lake Titicaca and the Isla del Sol.  I found him in a little travel agency behind the church of San Francisco in the tourist area of La Paz.  We talked for an hour about where he would take me, various options. 

In the end, we agreed to a day and a half trip to the ruins of Tiwanaku, a night in Huatapata on the shore of Lake Titicaca, on to Copacabana and the Isla del Sol, an island with Inca ruins.
Meals, hotel, admission to museums, driver, boat trips, ferry, etc., $158.
OK.  I had a driver and private guide. I forgot to ask about the vehicle.

Samuel is 35, speaks Aymara, the language of President Evo Morales, as well as Spanish, and has different ideas about auto safety. The vehicle he picked me up in was a 1984 Jeep Wagoneer, a big thing with terrible shocks and springs, a front end out of alignment, and altogether shaky safety features.  The good thing about it was that it is a 4x4 with monster traction, which proved really important on some of the lousy dirt roads we took to some great sites.  To be honest, my nightmare scenario was seeing the Wagoneer conk out in the middle of nowhere, but it made it.

We went first to Tiwanaku, a huge site with a pyramid, several temples and lots of sculptures from a culture that preceded the Incas.  The Tiwanaku culture, which I had never heard of, sprang up about 1500 BC and at its peak in the early Christian era, it had an empire that reached into what is now Peru, Ecuador, Venezuela and Argentina. Their buildings had many of the astronomical features of the Mayas, that is they were built in a fashion that tracked the important stages of the sun and moon.  Some amazing sculptures on the site. 

The civilization died out in around 1200 AD, probably because of a Niño effect that resulted in a severe drought that lasted for several decades. Samuel hired a special guide, Macario, to take me around the site.  He was also an Aymara speaker.  His Spanish was very fast but very clipped and precise.  Some of the things he told me about the monuments were preposterous, but one of the marvels he showed me was the real thing.  The Tiwanaku had carved a swirled hole through a stone in the temple wall. The swirls were cut to mimic the shape of the inner ear. A priest would put a kind of megaphone into one end of the hole and it created a tremendous amplification effect.  Macario demonstrated to the sceptical journalist, who became a believer in this story.  The idea was that a priest could speak to 10,000 people in the courtyard of the temple and be heard. I believe it, although I don´t believe that sculptures in one of the temples represent races of China and Africa, as Macario said.  They represent different ethnic groups ruled over by the Tiwanaku, scholars believe.


Samuel asked me if I was OK with travelling on a dirt road rather than the highway to our hotel in Huatapata to cut the distance in half.  I said sure.  It´s all subsistence farms in every direction once you´re outside the city.  There are no vehicles and no machinery.  I saw people plowing with animals, either bovines or mules, and working with hoes and shovels.  They raise sheep, cattle, llamas and pigs, and they grow potatoes and cereal grains. The road was really bad in places, and it wasn´t always clear that we would make it through the mud.  At one point we came upon some Aymaras filling up the potholes with rocks.  One of the guys was wearing a Chicago White Sox cap.  I told him they were the world champions of baseball.  He was very amused.  Ball caps from US colleges and professional sports teams are everywhere – used clothing pours into this country from the U.S.

Since no one out here owns a vehicle, people walk, ride a bicycle, hitchhike or catch one of the minibuses.  It was getting dark, the road was really bad and all I could think of was that if the jeep got stuck in one of the mudholes, we were going to be sleeping in an adobe hut with a straw roof that night.

We made it into Huatapata and had a great dinner of Lake Titicaca trout.  The hotel, Hotel Titikaka, is right on the shore.  It was very cold in my hotel room, but it was a good place, $30 a night.

The next morning we rose early because we needed to get to Copacabana before the professional bicycle race (a sort of Tour of Bolivia, which lasts a week) closed down the road. As we came around a curve, we saw a minibus lying on its side in the road.  The driver evidently went into the curve too fast, went off the road, climbed up the hill on the opposite side and rolled over.  As is typical with public transport out in these areas, the bus (really a minivan) was overloaded with about 20 people. One teenage girl had a bloody nose, but otherwise no one was hurt.  I helped about a dozen guys turn the thing upright (of course, the counterfeit batteries I had unwittingly bought for my camera failed and I didn´t get a picture). We took two adults and six kids in the backseat to the straits of Tiquina, where we met another fine example of public transport, the motor launches that carry poor folks (all folks) across for 20 cents. The boats are small and they put two dozen people in.  The boat I was in listed to starboard about 5 degrees, the water was choppy, a crosswind rocked the boat and a 12-year-old was at the tiller.  I was ready to jump.  No life preservers aboard, no safety.  That´s why you read about these horrible accidents involving ferry boats and buses in poor countries.  The people can´t pay much and there is no maintenance or safety.

Copacabana is a corruption of two Aymara words that mean View of the Lake and refers to the high hills on either side of the city.  We had missed the morning ferry to Isla del Sol, so we decided to take the dirt track that follows the edge of the hills to Yampupata, which is much closer to the island.  Along the way we stopped at the stone city of Samaya, which has homes built around 800 years ago, before the Incas, and which the locals are trying to develop as a tourist attraction.   The biggest deterrent is the fact that the road there is pretty scary.  The road hugs the side of a hill for almost all of the 8 or 9 km. from Copacabana, and there is a dropoff of a couple hundred feet if the driver makes a mistake or hits a pothole and loses control.  Samaya reminds me of the abandoned stone village on Achill Island in Ireland and dates to about the same period. 

On the beach at Yampupata, we saw a dozen totora reed boats that the locals rent to tourists for little excursions.  The trip across the strait to the Isla del Sol takes about 15 minutes from here as opposed to the 90 minutes from Copacabana.  The lake has an average depth of 750 feet and looks turquoise and inviting, but it´s very cold. Titicaca is from the Aymara words for puma and stone.  El Alto, which is a city of about 800,000 poor folks lying above La Paz, contributes mightily to pollution of the lake, as does the Peruvian city of Puno, which has 2.5 million people and can be seen from the top of the Isla del Sol.  I had never heard of Puno.

We climbed the Inca steps from the dock up to a village and then on to the highest points on the island which are about 500 feet above lake level and are  above 13,000 feet.  At this altitude, I´m completely out of breath on a climb that would´nt normally have me huffing and puffing. The hills around the island and really all around the lake look to be completely cultivated in terraces (pampas) for cultivation of potatoes or the local grains.

The island has lots of ruins on the north end, but we really didn´t have time to visit them and still make it back to La Paz before dark.


Freedom of expression

In the towns on the Brazilian border, I heard that some journalists accept money for writing stories.  I also heard that they are subjected to pressure from local officials when they report something unfavourable.

The publisher of La Razon in La Paz told me that the newspapers might be engaging in some self-censorship because of threats from the government of controls or of pulling their advertising, which might represent 15 to 20 percent of a newspaper´s revenues.

Bolivian countryside

Subsistence farms are all along the high plain between La Paz and Copacabana. The wall is of cow dung, the home of adobe with a straw roof. In more than 100 kilometers, I never saw a truck, a tractor, a tiller or other farm machinery. Mom, pop and the kids work the fields with hoes and shovels or plow behind a pair of bovines.

This Aymara man helped get the road ready for us on our passage over dirt roads from Laja to Batallas.
This shepherd girl helped us find the right dirt road to our destination.
You can´t wait for the government to come out and repair the road if a downpour washes it away. These Aymara men hauled rocks in to keep the road open.
The Cordillera Real, with peaks of 20,000 feet, is visible to the east.