Annie's recollection of our "Ten-day Weekend" inspired me to dig out the following e-mails to family and friends that I wrote during our first Bolivian coup:
October 13, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
Happy Columbus Day! It’s hard to believe that it was just a year ago that my family and I took the holiday and visited the various museums around La Paz. This year Columbus Day has been really something else, but I’ll get to that at the bottom of my letter.
October has kicked off with a bang, literally here in Bolivia where we’ve been in the convulsions of serious social unrest for weeks now – I imagine that you may not have heard the news, unless you subscribe to CNN en Español. I mentioned in my last Boletter that classes were canceled at the American School one day in mid-September due to security concerns, and things haven’t settled down since then. So, after returning to La Paz from my trip to the Dominican Republic I actually spent a whole week at home waiting for things to settle down before braving the roads back down into Yungas. But things only seemed to be getting worse, so we decided to take a chance and head on down to the project on the 29th, even though all the locals (outside of those working in our office) advised against braving the roads during so much violence – “wouldn’t be prudent” they said. But, “Damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead” is our motto (not mine personally, mind you.) And, as it turned out, on that particular day things in the direction of Yungas were totally quiet and all the roads were clear. Apparently all the blockades and riots happening on that day were in the other direction, up in the high plains.
At least on this trip to the Yungas I had a companion, David, who is one of my company’s long time employees. He’s an agricultural engineer and has always worked in our program helping farmers learn how to best utilize their newly delivered electricity. But in recent years there’s been precious little funding for “productive uses” development, so David has had to shift gears into the power line engineering field. In fact, he worked with me for the two weeks of my last trip to the DR, where I taught him about line design and staking. His purpose on this trip was to learn the nuts and bolts about power line construction, supervision, and inspection. David’s always a welcome addition to my team – he picks things up faster than anyone else I’ve ever trained. He was born in Bolivia and raised in the Yungas to American missionary parents, and educated in foreign boarding schools, getting his University degrees at Texas A&M. He’s one of the few truly bilingual people that I’ve ever met, and really knows Latin culture. It was really interesting and timely to hear him tell about all the military coups in Bolivia that he lived through while he was growing up – there were nine in one two year period in the early 80’s.
It was good that I spent my two weeks down at the project, sticking my fingers into the mix – the contractor that we’ve hired was trying to cut corners on the construction of my power lines (what a surprise) and needed a severe wake-up call to bring him back into line. Things were complicated when our contractor hired a new project superintendent and it turned out to be an engineer that we had interviewed for the position of project inspector, but didn’t hire. Needless to say, he brought an element of animosity into the mix. Things finally got to the point where we had to shut down the construction for a day to get the contractor’s attention. It seemed to work and things finally got back on track, construction-wise. Of course, things were finally settling into “normal” the very day before we received the instruction from USAID to evacuate the Yungas – but I’m getting ahead of myself again.
Working on construction projects in the tropics in the springtime is just as one would expect – hot and humid and a bit rainy. Of course, working out in the rain you don’t actually get any wetter than you already were before it started raining. I was really jealous of Leslie when I called home one particularly muggy night and she told me that it was cold in La Paz – sounded good to me. And then there’s always the old one-two combination of chiggers hitting you low and mosquitoes hitting you high. The gnats were so bad that my arms looked like I had chicken pox. Ooh, and on the subject of bugs, one evening I was taking my towel off the laundry line and David, who was raised in the Yungas, told me never to leave anything out after dark because after dark there’s a moth called the “boro” that comes out after dark and lays its eggs in any type of fabric (such as towels.) Then he told me that this moth’s eggs stick onto the skin of any animal the happens to rub against the fabric (in this case me) and then the slugs burrow under the skin to live and apparently they’re the dickens to get out even after they get big. Now there’s a story you don’t hear everyday.
For the two weeks that I was down in the Yungas, we watched the TV news each night to see what was happening around the country, to see what was happening where our families were, and to see if we were going to be affected down in the Yungas. And sure enough, on day five of our trip, the coca growers went out and blockaded the road into (and out of) Yungas. I have to confess that I didn’t relish the thought of either having to camp out permanently or of having to hike out of Yungas via the old Inca trail (I hear it’s much better to hike down off the Andes rather than up and over.) On day six of my trip there were clashes between truckers, with produce rotting and cattle dying in their trucks, and the blockaders. The number of trucks parked on the road out of the Yungas exceeded 400, all lined up end to end. Then the president, in a press conference, stated that he couldn’t quit his job because his wife wouldn’t let him – she enjoyed being the First Lady too much. !?! Did he think that was funny? On day seven the blockade was expanded to include every highway in Bolivia, including the little roads down where we were working, which limited our movement to only one sector of our project. On day eight we ran our local blockade, and went to check up on the progress of the construction on the other side. That same day the Vice-minister of Alternative Development and the Governor of the department (state) of La Paz drove down to the site of the main blockade on the road into Yungas to see if they could negotiate with the blockaders, and were taken hostage. But before the end of the day they escaped and are reputed to have crossed the Yungas and driven to Rurrenabaque, the town in the Amazon with an airport, to fly back out to La Paz.
It was interesting to watch the evolution of the disintegration of the social structure in Bolivia on the nightly news – first the unemployed folks from the country started blockading the roads, then the farmers decided not to ship their produce to market, then the national labor union called for a general strike (which mostly affected the miners since the professional truck, bus, and taxi drivers decided to ignore the strike), then the butchers decided not to sell their beef, then the retirees held a hunger strike, and eventually even the teachers and doctors joined in. Things only got worse when the coca cartel leader got back from his fund raising trip to Libya (with Nelson Mandela, he says) and announced that the coca growers were going to chime in too (that’s when they blockaded the Yungas.) It was interesting to listen to the rebellion leaders speak on television – they all have various excuses for their actions: we’re blockading the roads because we don’t want the government to sell natural gas to other countries (specifically the USA,) we’re striking until the army stops patrolling the highways, now we’re blockading the roads until the government lets our “brethren” (who were arrested shooting at the police) out of prison, we want the government to support the families of the men killed by the soldiers when they rescued the group of foreign tourists being held hostage by blockaders, we’re rioting until there is a complete change of government, etc. etc. But what they never say is that “we’re just plain mad at all the corruption and theft that goes on in our country and we want it to change.”
Speaking of theft and corruption, another interesting news item during this same period was the discovery that all the “bullet-proof” vests that the government recently bought for the police at a price of $80 each, supposedly from a manufacturer in the USA, were really fabricated in La Paz for about 80Bs (~$10) each. What makes this interesting is that, number one, someone in the government pocketed the $70 difference in the price of the vests, and number two, the knock off vests don’t actually stop bullets. Another example is my own Bolivian ID card which is stuck in mid-process at the government official ID documents office – it was actually finished once, but had to get sent back because it had the wrong USAID project identified on it. But then it got stuck in its second round when the whole documents department got shut down because they got caught selling Bolivian passports. It’s no wonder that all the Bolivians, especially the rural poor, are mad at their government – it seems that everything that their government does or says is wrong. And it’s not just this particular set of governors – it’s every government that’s ever been in power in Bolivia – and that’s been a lot since an independent Bolivia was first founded – more than one per year on the average.
It’s not only the rebellion leaders who are stirring things up on television – the local newscasters do their best to aggravate the situation too. I was appalled to see one segment of the news where they displayed a split screen, showing riots and protestors in downtown La Paz on the left hand side, and calm quiet streets with well dressed ladies shopping as usual in the Zona Sur on the right hand side of the screen, with the caption below stating “One Bolivia?” I believe that the newsmen on that particular channel were inciting the protestors to move their business down to our neighborhood.
It’s not just the threats of attacks against our neighborhood that weighs on one’s soul while one is in the international development field – it’s also the personal attacks against one’s character. The opponents of “Alternative Development” (re: the cocaine cartels) have railed against the “corruption” of the foreigner advisor/consultants who come into their country with their huge salaries and fancy vehicles and who suck money out of “Bolivian” projects. Of course, they fail to mention, that the “Bolivian” projects are all paid for with foreign money, and without the consultants from the donor country to make sure that the donated money gets spent properly, the donor countries wouldn’t be willing to donate money and there wouldn’t be any projects at all (case in point: the only major project in Bolivia currently is USAID’s Alternative Development in Yungas.) What’s more, without decent vehicles the consultants couldn’t function on the Yungas roads, and without the incentive of a decent salary, no consultant would ever choose to leave the comforts and security of home and put up with the headaches of international development work. So there!
When we’re down at our project in the Yungas we stay in a little town called Sapecho that’s central to the area currently under construction. In Sapecho we stay at a little residential “hotel” named “Poly” for the matriarch that runs the place with her kids. The family are black – descendants of African slaves imported into Bolivia hundreds of years ago by the Spaniards. The Spaniards brought in slaves from Africa to work in the mines up in the mountains, but the climate is so opposite to what the Africans were used to, being so cold and arid and at such a high elevation, that the Africans died off like flies. A few that didn’t die did manage to escape and make their way down into a more “hospitable” region – the hot, humid Yungas. “Ah, just like home” they must have thought. So now down in the Yungas there are whole villages of African descendents who have been Bolivians for four hundred years. This family that we stay with are really industrious and have prospered. Not only do they have their little ten room hotel, but they also have banana, cocoa, and rice plantations. Needless to say they’re not happy having their produce rotting on the backs of trucks at the blockade on the road out of Yungas. When the increase of problems was announced the mom shouted “How long will I have to suffer these Indians?!”
And speaking of Indians, the Sunday that we were in the Yungas we called a public meeting (after mass) in the little village of Covendo. Covendo is an Indian village, as opposed to most of the little villages in Yungas that are populated by settlers from the Alti Plano (the High Plains.) The village of Covendo was founded in the 1600’s by Jesuits when they paddled upstream and founded one of their famous missions. Anyway, we held our public meeting to explain to the people about the benefits and costs of having electricity and then they all voted to join in our project. So we spent the rest of the morning there signing people up to our project.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Calacoto, Leslie reported an unusual number of military police in full riot gear patrolling the streets in our neighborhood. Still, quite a contrast from the raging riots being staged around the rest of La Paz. All the strikes and blockades did have their effect on life at the American School. The second week of October is usually when Leslie and all the kids in the secondary school have their “Classroom Without Walls” field trips. Leslie would have been going down to the jungle (just up river from Rurrenabaque), where Colin Jr. went last year. Colin Jr. would have been going to the old Jesuit Missions circuit, where Leslie went last year. Annie would have been going down to Sucre and Potosi, where I went in June to survey a new project. Even Katie would have had a day trip somewhere this year (they don’t do extended field trips until the 6th grade, when they go out to Lake Titicaca.) But with all the social unrest around the country the US Embassy/American School decided to postpone the field trips until next April.
Colin Jr’s Eagle Scout service project was able to get rolling during the two weeks I was out of town, under Leslie’s supervision. Leslie reports that the work is back breaking, as they’re digging trenches to pour the concrete foundations of the room they’re building. She says that it’s also frustrating to keep kids working – apparently these rich kids aren’t used to doing any actual work. But things are progressing, if slowly. It’s also a bit dicey getting back and forth to the orphanage where they’re working, since there’s often been a blockade between here and there. But for the past two weeks at least, the road has been open on Saturday mornings.
On day eleven of my trip in the Yungas, the miners entered into the riots in La Paz with dynamite and people started dying. USAID called a meeting there in La Paz of all their Yungas project managers (I was unable to attend personally) and announced that we were instructed to evacuate all of our personal from the Yungas since the army was coming down on the following Monday. It turns out that that was the worst kept secret in the Yungas – everyone in town knew the army was coming way before we heard it from USAID. So we spent the rest of that day gathering our employees and packing up our field office and checking our options for getting out of Yungas with the road blockaded. The office in La Paz suggested that we could drive to our side of the blockade and hike about twenty kilometers with our suitcases, backpacks, and laptops past the blockade to the other side where they would pick us up. That didn’t sound like a particularly good idea to me, especially since we’d heard from the locals that if you want to walk past the blockade you have to take two lashes from a whip as a toll (“whip” was a new Spanish vocabulary word for me.) So we started investigating the possibility of driving over to one of the small airports down in the Amazon. As it turned out, there were only two seats left available on the little plane out of Rurrenabaque – that’s because I had called our office earlier that morning and had our secretary reserve me and David two seats, just in case. There were seats available for the rest of the crew, my seven local engineers, on the following Monday and Tuesday – so we would have to fly out in three shifts. The idea was that everyone, besides David and myself, would drive out of the Yungas on Sunday and then be free to fly out on their designated flight.
On day twelve David and I packed our bags and shook hands goodbye with everyone – “We’ll see you in La Paz next week.” We drove the 200km to Rurrenabaque without incident, although it was interesting to see all the wildlife that ran across the road in front of us as we got deeper into the Amazon basin – most spectacularly there were giant lizards, the size of small alligators, and giant guinea pigs, the size of beavers. But the real action started when we got to Rurre and we found out that all flights in and out had been cancelled for the day due to bad weather over the mountains between Rurre and La Paz (Leslie says it was clear and sunny in La Paz itself.) What’s more, it looked like it might rain that night, which would make the dirt airstrip in Rurre impassable. “We’ll let you know if we manage any flights tomorrow” they told us. So we found a hotel for the night and got dinner – our first meal in two weeks that wasn’t a tough strip of beef on a bed of plain white rice (which is the standard menu in the Yungas.) That evening the TV news showed that things were going from bad to worse around the country. They showed that the press itself was attacked and stoned in the blockades, the gasoline refinery was besieged by the campesinos causing the city La Paz to run out of gas, the campesinos attacked the water and power plants which caused the government to bring in tanks and secure the strategic utility and refinery installations around La Paz. Then I saw the leader of the campesinos directly threatened to attack and isolate the Zona Sur. When the newscaster interviewed the mental health expert who testified that prolonged civil unrest was unhealthy for everyone’s mental health, all I could say was “duh!” Perhaps the most interesting segment was about how that day, October 10, 2003, was the 21st anniversary of Bolivia’s return to democracy – their comment was that even though their democracy was now 21 years old, it was still not mature enough to “wear long pants.”
Sometime that night I was awoken by the pounding of monsoon rains on the hotel roof – I figured that that meant that we were going to stay in Rurrenabaque another day or two. But early the next morning I got a knock on my door telling me that there was a van waiting to take me to the flight if I wanted to go. So I made a flurried pack up of my things and we headed to the little sod airstrip to attempt the flight to La Paz in our little Amazon Airlines 12-seater airplane. It was interesting to see that the pilots pulled out oxygen masks when we got up above the clouds, but there weren’t any for the passengers. Oh well, if anyone was going to pass out for lack of oxygen from flying at 18,000', I didn’t want it to be the pilots. On the flight I started chatting with the gringo next to me, who turned out to be a doctor from Ireland on a round-the-world tour. He was desperate to make a connection in La Paz to Cuzco that morning, but I didn’t see how he could possibly make it. He asked if I could help him at the gate since he didn’t speak Spanish, and I agreed. There at the airport in La Paz the plane to Cuzco was still boarding, but they were on the other side of immigration and there was no way they were letting my Irish buddy through. At one point the ticket agent switched to English to try to short circuit my translation efforts, at which point the Irish doctor tried bribing the ticket agent. She was righteously indignant and refused to help him at all after that point. The best I could do for him was recommend that he go check with the travel agent that had sold him his tickets to see where he could go to reconnect with his other flights.
The drive down from airport was a bit tense – the roads to the airport had been blockaded but were recently opened by the riot police that we drove past. There were also gangs of road workers clearing away all the rocks and logs that the blockaders had placed in the road. When we got down to Calacoto in the Zona Sur I was impressed to see that there was a pair of policemen walking a beat on each and every city block – I’ve never seen so many policemen in one neighborhood. There was still no gasoline to be had in La Paz – apparently the government had been unable to get the tanker trucks into town. What’s more, shortly after David and I slipped into town the blockaders retook the roads down from the airport and several flights into La Paz had to turn back to their destinations. That evening the news reported more rioting and more deaths and then gave time to the coca cartel leader who predicted that a military coup was imminent. When cross-examined he said he wasn’t “encouraging” such a coup, just stating that if some soldiers decided to defend their country from the current government, he was sure that the “people” would protect them.
The next day was Sunday (the 12th) and everyone at church expressed their relief to see me back in La Paz safe and sound. There were also quite a few people who said, “I told you not to travel during these days.” We also heard stories of people trying to get up to the airport that morning that were taken out of their vehicle and beaten and their vehicle set on fire. I’m glad I’m not going anywhere soon. But at least the government did manage to shove a few tanker trucks into town via tank (the military type, with treads) escort – we’ll see how long the gasoline lasts now. The public transportation drivers (bus and mini-bus) and the bread bakers called a three-day strike starting on Monday.
On early Monday morning we were awakened by the buzzing of helicopters flying circles overhead. I had heard that helicopters couldn’t function at this altitude but I can now testify that that’s incorrect – they’ve been in the air all day. Then, on my drive into the office, the roads were almost abandoned. At the office I read in the newspaper that the military had taken the city of El Alto (the half of La Paz up by the airport) by force with tanks on Sunday evening, causing over two dozen deaths in the process. They’ve declared Martial Law in that part of the city. But even the military isn’t enough and the airport is closed and all flights into La Paz have been canceled. That leaves my local engineers all stranded down in the Amazon until things clear up. At the office this morning, as I was trying to catch up from being out of town for two weeks, we got word that the rioters had overwhelmed the police and were streaming into the Zona Sur and we were all counseled to get home while we could. So I gathered up Leslie from the American School (where she was grading papers) and Katie (who was playing at a friend’s house) and we’ve battened down the hatches. Thank goodness we have food storage, as opposed to most folks who plan to go to the store every day, because the stores are all boarded up tight. Heaven only knows how long this will last, but on the TV news this afternoon the president made an announcement that he had no plans to resign.
When I went down to the American School I noticed that they’ve welded steel plates to the ironwork on the fence around the campus – that should help with security. So far the school trips abroad this week are still a go – depending on whether or not things clear up by Saturday. Next Saturday, on Colin Jr’s 16th birthday, he’s scheduled to leave Bolivia for his band trip to Rio in Brazil. That same day Leslie is scheduled to head to Buenos Aires for another curriculum development seminar (to follow-up her seminar in Denver, Colorado this past summer.) We’ll see if the airport is open by Saturday.
Anyway, it’s been quite a month so far and there seems to be some interesting days ahead – I’ll let you know how it turns out. Hope all is well with you wherever you are. Drop us a line and fill us in.
Love, Colin.
October 14, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
We’re now in day two of being homebound and so far so good, mostly. I’m working at home with a stack of work that will last for at least a month, Leslie’s grading papers and translating Primary songs, Colin Jr’s on the internet chatting with all his friends and comparing views of the protest marches, and Annie’s reading. Katie’s having the hardest time amusing herself – she’s rollerblading around the house with the telephone trying to find a friend whose parents will let them come over here to play, since we’re not letting Katie out. Leslie found the following poem just for Katie:
Today Is Very Boring, by Jack Prelutsky
Today is very boring,
it's a very boring day,
there is nothing much to look at,
there is nothing much to say,
there’s a peacock on my sneakers,
there’s a penguin on my head,
there’s a dormouse on my doorstep,
I am going back to bed.
Today is very boring,
it is boring through and through,
there is absolutely nothing
that I think I want to do,
I see giants riding rhinos,
and an ogre with a sword,
there’s a dragon blowing smoke rings,
I am positively bored.
Today is very boring,
I can hardly help but yawn,
there's a flying saucer landing
in the middle of my lawn,
a volcano just erupted
less than half a mile away,
and I think I felt an earthquake,
it’s a very boring day.
What’s more, our sentence is being gradually extended – we just got a phone call that school is canceled again tomorrow – we’ll probably be at home all week. We’ve already got word that all flights have been canceled all over the country at least until Friday. Besides the phone calls from the folks at school to see if we have food, we’ve also been called by folks at work and church. It seems like everyone is taking care of each other. Luckily we have a good storage of food and water – the TV news is showing most of the residents of La Paz wandering the streets looking for bread or eggs or anything.
Les and I have been going out for evening and morning walks, just to see what we can see. Last night we found that the main road through our neighborhood was blockaded just five blocks up from our house, with tires still burning and no police to be seen anywhere. But we were impressed to see that there were no broken windows or signs of looting in all the shops up by the blockade. This morning on our walk we found some ladies just down the street selling off their produce before it all rotted and so we bought as much fresh fruit as we could carry. Both yesterday and today all the stores were shut down and the roads are practically empty – totally devoid of vehicular traffic.
Anyway, it’s been quite a week so far and it’s only Tuesday and there seems to be some more interesting days ahead – I’ll keep you posted. You can read today’s news about Bolivia from CNN at: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/10/14/bolivia.reut/index.html.
Hope all is well with you wherever you are. Drop us a line and fill us in.
Love, Colin.
October 15, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
It’s now day three of our staying home and laying low. I’m still working on various engineering tasks, Leslie’s still grading papers and making lesson plans, Colin Jr’s playing on our home computer, Annie’s re-reading the whole Harry Potter series, and Katie managed to get a friend to come over to play. None of the parents of Katie’s American friends would let them out of the house, as we’ve done with Katie and Annie, but one of her Bolivian friends got permission to come over and keep Katie company for a couple of days. And even though the news is continuing to report on raging gun battles up in the city as protestors stream in from Oruro and the Yungas (the news on TV showed 3000 coca growers now marching in La Paz), we are actually starting to see a bit of auto traffic around the Zona Sur.
As we have been doing, Les and I did a reconnaissance around the neighborhood early this morning. Although there were more people and cars on the streets than we’ve seen in recent days, there weren’t any shops open. Then at 10:30 this morning our houseboy came up to the (home) office, where Les and I were working, to inform us that the radio had announced that our neighborhood stores had opened their doors. They were going to sell stuff until their stock was all gone – there’s no new stock coming in through the barricades. So we decided to dash off to augment our family food supplies. When we got to the store there was a line a whole block long, waiting to take their turn to get inside the store. We considered not wasting our time waiting in line, since we already have enough supplies to last a month, but then we got worried that this might be the only lull in an upcoming storm that could last a long time. So we stood around in line for an hour and a half to get into the grocery store. The atmosphere standing in line was very relaxed and congenial – everyone is in the same boat, most much worse than ourselves. There were even ice cream and cotton candy vendors walking up and down the line doing a hopping trade. The store and their patrons were guarded by a dozen policemen in full riot gear, just in case. Once inside the store we found that all the meat and dairy and eggs and bread and yeast were already gone, along with most of the fresh fruits and vegetables. Leslie did manage to find a couple of baseball-sized cauliflowers and we were able to get a few essentials, such as powdered drink mix, to cover up the taste of Clorox in the water, and powdered chocolate milk flavoring, to cover up the taste of powdered milk. Then we started to look for other things: TP, dish detergent, canned food, and so forth. From what there was, we managed to fill up a shopping basket.
This afternoon we got a phone call from the American school – there will be no classes at least until Monday. My children (and spouse) were so disappointed (not.) Apparently half of the faculty and staff of the American school are trapped in outlying neighborhoods blockaded out of the Zona Sur, or even in other towns around Bolivia, since they’d flown out last Saturday to take advantage of the long weekend, and haven’t been able to get back since all flights have been shut down since last Saturday. The real disappointment is that Colin Jr’s band trip to Rio has been canceled. We’re still waiting to hear whether or not Leslie will be going to Buenos Aires next week (but we’re not holding our breath.)
I interviewed our gardener a bit this morning. He lives a couple of neighborhoods away (in Chasquipampa) and he told me that things are pretty rough up in his neighborhood. He reported that the neighborhood “directors” are mandating that all inhabitants take a turn manning the barricades and marching in the protests, whether they want to or not. To make things worse the police are using real bullets in that neighborhood and people are getting killed. I’ll tell you, it’s one thing to get killed marching and rioting for a cause you believe in, and it’s a whole other thing to have to get killed for something you were forced into to.
Anyway, it’s been quite a week so far and it’s only half way over, but we’re all still fat and sassy at our house – I’ll let you know if that changes. Hope all is well with you wherever you are. Drop us a line and fill us in.
Love, Colin.
October 16, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
It’s now day four of our staying home and laying low. Actually, I guess we can’t really claim that we’re “laying low” except for the fact that I’m not going into work and Les and the kids aren’t going into school or over to friends’ houses. Yesterday afternoon we got stir crazy enough that Leslie and I went down to the American School and played a few games of tennis – we had the courts to ourselves. Then we made our regular evening prowl to see what we could see and we found that one of the neighborhood supermarkets, the Hypermaxi, was open for business. So we bought a few more bags of food. On our way out of the store we bumped into my USAID project manager who reiterated the US Embassy warning to stay away from the office all of this week. When we got home we got a phone call from the school reporting that the rebels had blown up the water supply. So we filled our bathtubs and all available pitchers with water, just in case. It turned out that the rumor, however stressful, was false.
When Les and I went on our morning prowl we found that another of our local grocery stores, Ketal, was open for business. So again we picked up a few sacks of groceries. Of course, there is no meat or eggs to be had in all of La Paz, and they’re only allowing two liters of milk per family and ten pieces of bread per person, but they did have a few squishy tomatoes and some lettuce. I realize that it may seem ridiculous to stop and buy groceries at every opportunity, but you never know which trip to the supermarket will be your last for a while. I find that in a crisis you spend half your waking hours scavenging for food and the other half worrying that you don’t have enough. We also made sure that our overhead water tank was full of water. (It is; green and opaque though it is.)
This morning, while we were waiting in line to get into the grocery store, we bumped into the LDS Mission President and his wife, who were also stocking up on groceries. He told us that his dozen or so gringo missionaries up in El Alto are having to hide out. Apparently the mobs are coming around to look for the “gringos” – apparently Americans aren’t popular in this current crisis. The President told us that he’s having his missionaries hike down to a common gathering point later today (at 3:00AM) to be picked up and stashed at the mission home.
Here in the Zona Sure there is some vehicular movement in the streets today – on Monday and Tuesday there were no vehicles moving at all, on Wednesday there were just a few, but today there were quite a few. One would almost think that things were getting back to normal except that on the TV news at noon they showed live shots of the demonstrations up town – there were at least 50,000 people demonstrating. The other cities around Bolivia are faring the same. The Bolivians that I’ve talked to tell me that they’re concerned that this conflict will now turn into a full-blown class-war. The lower classes in Bolivia are finally unwilling to put with their lot in life. Last night Bolivia’s president held a press conference with his coalition partners – so far the coalition remains intact even though the Vice-president has withdrawn his support from the administration (but hasn’t actually resigned his post) – the president stated that they’ll hold a referendum vote prior to any sale of natural gas to foreign countries, but the people are already so stirred up that they continue to strike and blockade and march – they say they won’t quit until the president resigns.
The good news today is that our seven local engineers were finally able to get out of the Yungas last night. The military was moving one of their planes from the jungle up to El Alto and they hitched a ride. The tricky part came when they had to walk across El Alto, with all their luggage, dodging the marauding gangs of armed vandals. Then they had to hike the ten miles down from El Alto to their homes in the Zona Sur, taking only the footpaths and avoiding the major roads, which are all blockaded.
Anyway, that’s our news to-date – I’ll let you know if anything changes. Hope all is well with you wherever you are. Drop us a line and fill us in.
Love, Colin.
October 17, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
It’s now day five of our staying home and laying low – kind of. This afternoon I went into the office to meet with my top local engineers to discuss what we should do with our contractor who is performing so poorly. It’s so frustrating because I don’t have any hope that any other construction contractor in Bolivia would do any better. Towards the end of our meeting we could hear helicopters flying overhead – we looked out the window and saw that they were the green DEA helicopters. (Speaking of helicopters, I learned that these are special units because normal helicopters don’t function at this altitude.) We checked the news on the radio to see what was happening – why on earth would DEA helicopters be flying in La Paz? - and the rumor is (according to the radio) that the presidential palace was swarmed by campesinos and the president had to be evacuated by the US helicopters. As I was walking home from the office, as I crossed the main street two blocks from our home, a protest march streamed by. They were taunting the police officers stationed at the grocery store yelling that their president was a coward who had fled and that the “people” had taken control of Bolivia. Since then I’ve tried to confirm that rumor via the TV news, but they’re not reporting any such thing, so we’re a bit in the dark.
This morning there was supposed to be a meeting with US Ambassador at the American School but he couldn’t come because the roads between here and there were blockaded. So a security agent spoke to us and told us that we can’t be evacuated now because it’s safer to be in our homes than to try to run to the airport. The embassy will notify us if it becomes less dangerous to try a run to the airport. Some embassies have already evacuated, such as the German and Peruvian. The security agent also told us that the food getting into to our supermarkets is being flown in on US government planes and then snuck past the blockades in the early morning hours. During his question and answer session one silly woman asked what the US government was doing to help the poor people in the Bolivian hospitals that don’t have supplies, such as medicine, oxygen, or food – what was really irritating was that she adopted such an accusatory tone. Anyway, we got a call this evening telling us that the Ambassador had rescheduled our meeting for tomorrow morning – maybe we’ll get news then. We were also informed that classes at the American school are canceled until further notice.
And speaking of news, I called the LDS Mission President earlier today. I was told that they successfully evacuated all the missionaries from El Alto last night. Apparently they just have one gringo missionary still trapped in an outlying town with no way to retrieve him just yet.
The situation in La Paz has gotten serious enough that the news of the revolution in Bolivia has finally clawed its way onto the front page of CNN and BBC. Usually you have to dig really deep on CNN to find insignificant stories, such as revolutions outside the United States – their typical homepage is too full of really important stories, such as Pamela Anderson urging a boycott of KFC or a boy naming his two-headed snake Mary Kate and Ashley. Anyway the latest news on CNN is found at: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/10/17/bolivia.president/index.html. BBC this morning had: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3198778.stm. CNN had another article this morning: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/americas/10/17/bolivia.unrest.reut/index.html. As I read the various articles I am spurred to make several comments:
- The US-funded anti-coca program, of which I'm a part, is the only significant foreign aid coming into Bolivia at this time. CNN fails to mention that the current anti-coca programs are NOT simply to go in and chop down the coca plants, as they have been in years past. They ARE development programs that include significant investment in infrastructure, which will allow the farmers to do BETTER than they were with just the coca crops. Overall the USAID program includes nine different integrated components, such as electricity (that's my part), potable water, roads and bridges, schools, health services, college scholarships, and agriculture training on alternative crops such as cocoa and citrus fruits. NO farmers have been deprived of their livelihoods in the Alternative Development program - the CNN reporter was simply misinformed. The only people protesting against the "Alternative Development" program are those bought and paid for by the drug lords from Colombia. None of the people who actually live and work in the targeted project area, many of whom I have spoken personally, are the least bit against the Alternative Development program. Now, whether or not the US government should attack the demand for cocaine rather than the supply is a whole different debate.
- The riots and police mutiny in February took place after the President announced an income tax. He was goaded into an income tax by the European Union. The series of events was this: the current president was elected on August 6, 2002 on a platform of creating jobs and income through an ambitious program of public works. After he got elected the new president had to find funding for his proposed program. Funding for public works is hard to come by in Bolivia because they have essentially no exports and they have no functional tax system. So the president went to the US to look for aid, and was told that the anti-narcotics help was all he was getting. The president then went to the EU, where he was told that they wouldn't give him their tax money until he was collecting some tax money of his own. So the tax "increase" mentioned in the article was an increase from the current rate of 0%. But when he tried implementing the novel concept of an income tax there was open rebellion in the streets by mobs and policemen alike. People in Bolivia have no comfort level that their tax money doesn't just go to build a bigger Swiss bank account for the politicians.
- The resistance to the sale of natural gas to other countries (the US, Mexico, and Brazil) isn't the first time the country folk of Bolivia have taken this stance. A few years ago lithium was discovered in Bolivia and a foreign company offered to mine and export the lithium. The people protested and that potential source of income went away. So Bolivia still has all the lithium that they can eat. The problem with Bolivia is that the people are partly right and the government is partly right. The government is correct in saying that Bolivia can't have anything - not public works, not prosperity, not even education - if they don't have anything to sell to generate income. The people are also correct in saying that if the country starts selling its resources, only the rich politicians will benefit. The working classes almost never benefit more than a dollar or two per day of labor - the rest of the money goes into the pockets of the superrich elite. I don't know how they're going to solve the problem of the redistribution of income and resources without a major revolution.
All this isn’t to say that the current administration is necessarily any good – they’ve shown a complete lack of governing ability this past month. But I don’t hear anyone proposing an alternative solution.
So far at home, Leslie is still refining the ideal sourdough bread recipe, but the starter does seem to be solving the problem of our lack of yeast. Katie is managing to scrape up visits of her closest neighborhood friends; Annie has in the last week finished I don’t know how many books, including the entire Harry Potter series; Colin is burning up the internet with the high schoolers’ support/chat group. Next week, all the secondary teachers will begin assigning lessons via the internet, so classes will commence even if school can’t.
Hope all is well with you wherever you are. Drop us a line and fill us in.
Love, Colin.
October 18, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
After I sent off my Boletter last evening, the TV news finally broadcast the resignation of the president of Bolivia. Prior to fleeing the country he’d left behind a video taped message to congress stating that he was willing to stay if they’d support him, or he’d resign if they’d prefer to support his vice-president. Congress took the easy way out of the current conflicts and voted 90 to 30 to support the vice-president who was then sworn in by congress at the same time the ex-president was taking off for safe haven in Miami. It was a sad day for the country of Bolivia. The major problem I see with this solution is that even though this will calm things down in the short-term, this whole process will repeat itself when the people realize that their lives aren’t any better. I predict that there will be another come-apart by next February, and every time I’ve said it out loud to one of the Bolivians they’ve agreed with me. But for now La Paz has to start the process of rebuilding and repairing all the damage left behind by the riots and road blocks.
All day today there has been a solid stream of helicopter flights from the Military school across the street from us – I hear that they’ve been evacuating all the stranded tourists – ferrying them from the Zona Sur to the airport in El Alto via helicopter. Our maid, Zenobia, said that airplane flights of various evacuations kept her up all night last night – someone was definitely getting out of Dodge, I don’t know if it was rich Bolivians or certain expat communities or both.
This morning we finally had our meeting with the US ambassador down at the American School. He just had an hour to spend with us before having to dash off to meet with the new Bolivian president, (about whom the Ambassador said was “up on a high wire without a net”) but he had enough time to tell us what was going on and to answer a few questions. He mentioned that the Israelis had evacuated their 20 people, the Brazilians their 50, and even the Germans their 200, but he wasn’t sure how the US Embassy could ever manage to evacuate the 1000-2000 US citizens currently working and living in Bolivia, if it had gotten to that. In the question and answer session I was able to confirm that the US government still plans to maintain their Alternative Development program, assuming the new government is willing. To someone else’s question the Ambassador stated that the United States has a responsibility to Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, as the world’s largest consumer of cocaine. But, because of our interdiction efforts, none of Bolivia’s cocaine now makes it to the US – it only gets as far as Brazil and Spain. That same silly woman from yesterday was there again, asking what the US government was planning to do to help the poor Bolivians in the hospitals. The Director of USAID actually said that they were poised to restock all the hospitals just before the government fell yesterday, and were now having to wait to find out with whom they had to coordinate in the new government.
After the meeting with the Ambassador, the American School principal told us that classes would restart on Monday and that the teachers who had planned to go to Buenos Aires this morning were still going, flying out on Monday morning. Unfortunately the band trip to Rio was still definitely canceled. So Leslie stayed at school all day preparing stuff for her substitute to do with her classes next week while she’s in BA. Colin Jr. celebrated his 16th birthday by spending the day at the climbing wall with his new best friend (actually, I think she’s been his best friend for a month or so now.) Katie played over at a friend’s house – finally. So I decided to take Annie on a walk around the neighborhood – we found that everything is open again, including Burger King, just like normal. Everyone is so glad to be out and about again. One thing that’s not back to normal yet is the trash collection. Here in La Paz there are no dumpsters, everyone just puts their bags of trash out on the sidewalk each day and they get picked up each morning. But now there’s a week’s accumulation of trash on the sidewalks – ripped open and scattered by the stray dogs – hopefully it’ll all get cleaned up on Monday.
And so, that’s the news from Bolivia today. It looks like things are back to normal, at least until next February. Thanks for all your prayers and well wishes. Your phone calls and e-mails have been very welcome.
Love, Colin.
October 19, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
Here at the Jack’s house in Bolivia, we’ve moved our DEFCON down from Orange to Yellow – we let the water out of the bathtubs and got the car out of the garage today for the first time in a week. At least we never quite slipped up to Code Red, which some people did, which would be to pack our bags and look for a way to the airport. Speaking of airlines, the Bolivian airlines started a few normal flights today – American Airlines is waiting until Tuesday or Wednesday before risking a flight into La Paz.
At church today we were on an abbreviated one-hour meeting schedule, as set prior to Saturday’s return to “normalcy.” It was interesting to hear the different Bolivians talk about this past week. Most feel that this is all going to happen again – predictions vary from in three to six months. Some were prepared with food storage, the rest wish they had been and have vowed to get prepared. One sister spoke about how we should be prepared spiritually to return to our Father in Heaven because you just never know when you leave your house in the morning if you’re going to make it home at night – a particularly pertinent point after so many people were killed this past week. It was especially interesting to hear one sister speak, who was the press secretary to the former first lady – she said that even though the ex-president made many mistakes in handling this crisis, she still felt that he was a good and honest man and she prayed for his wellbeing.
I’ve tried looking at the news to see what the country’s temperature is, since we’re planning on returning to work and school tomorrow, but I can hardly stomach a single newscast anymore. First, every politician that talks on the news refers to the rioting hooligans as patriots and then liberally uses the word “massacre” as if the police hadn’t operated with total restraint in the face of flying rocks and dynamite. And then, to add insult to injury, one station is even holding a telethon to raise food and blankets for all the rioters who are now in La Paz far away from their own homes. I have lost all respect and hope for Bolivia as a whole if that’s the way their collective mind actually works. I know it’s not the way the people that I know think, so I’m hoping that what I see and hear on the news are an aberration.
Anyway, that’s the news from Bolivia today. Since things are back to normal, at least until next February, I’ll stop burning up the e-mails for a while. Thanks for all your prayers and well wishes.
Love, Colin.
October 27, 2003
Dear Family and Friends,
Early Monday morning of last week, Leslie headed to Buenos Aires for her curriculum development conference. She reported that the road to the airport was open, but the sides were littered with rubble and rock that evidently had been used to blockade the road, including an 80-ton boxcar from the train station (now that we know that if a bunch of campesinos can move an 80-ton mass for miles just to blockade a road, we also know that that’s how the pyramids were built.) Also, the tollbooths were shattered and gone again – just like they were in February. While in BA she visited some favorite places in town and enjoyed some delightful Argentine steaks – I’m jealous – my work takes me to Yungas and hers takes her to beautiful Buenos Aires. Anyway, she’s back home again now and getting back into the swing of things in the classroom
I started work again on Monday of last week – it seemed a bit weird to be back in the office after two weeks in the field and then one week at home. One of the first items of business was to sit down with the senior staff members and review the new ministers of the new government. “Who do you know?” was the operative question. All the people with whom we’d developed relationships over the past year and a half are now gone – some even fled the country with the ex-president (taking 11 kids out of the American School.) The new cabinet, like the new president, is made up of all “independents”. But, almost everyone on our senior staff knew at least one person in the new cabinet – although no one knew the ministers that we’ll actually be working with. Actually, it turned out that even I know one of the new ministers, the Minister of the Presidency. I’ve seen him around the American School – he has a daughter in Colin Jr’s class – and he and his wife accompanied Les and I on one of our evening prowls during the siege week before last.
It was also interesting to debrief my local engineers who had to walk across El Alto, through the rioting mobs, week before last. They described for me how the vandals were being directed by leaders who had megaphones and who used spotlights connected to generators. It was obvious from their descriptions that this particular “popular” revolt took a lot of planning and funding – this was no spontaneous combustion. I guess when the ex-president, when speaking to CNN en Español from Miami, said that he was overthrown by narco-syndicates with foreign funding, he was probably right.
On Tuesday of last week we flew my local engineers/line construction supervisors back down to the Amazon to gather up our autos and drive back to the project, to check up on what the contractor had done in our absence. They weren’t able to do as much checking up as we’d have liked because there was no gasoline to be had in the Yungas after so many weeks of blockades and our gas tanks were already run dry from the drive into the Amazon and back out. But after a couple of days, trucks were running back into Yungas like normal.
The new president of Bolivia spent his whole first week in office pandering to the Indians, the coca growers, the union leaders, the “landless”, and every other special interest group in Bolivia. In fact, the “landless” have been so emboldened by the new administration that they’re openly taking over ranches and other lands that belong to the cabinet members that fled the country with the ex-president. There’s no way that the new president can deliver on all the “promises” he’s made to the special interest groups AND maintain support from congress and the military and the foreign donors. The US Ambassador has already publicly reminded this administration that all US aid to Bolivia is conditioned on the limitation of coca crops. The country is already broke and having rejected all forms of export is in desperate need of pleasing the foreign donors. The military have been eerily quiet throughout. Congress hasn’t decided whether or not to support the new president at all, since he and his administration are all “independents” – the various political parties are all trying to decide who’s “in power” and who is the “opposition”. It was a huge task for the president to appoint all new regional governors this past week, trying to find governors who would have the approval of everyone. This is going to be an experiment in government by consensus and referendum. I don’t hear anyone saying that this government will last six months anymore – the most I hear these days is 90 days. I’ve also been hearing people say that the only solution that they see is the resurgence of a military dictatorship. Hopefully the inevitable future transition won’t be too painful.
Every conversation for the past week has started off with a discussion of how one fared during the week of troubles and what’s coming in the future. I asked our Bishop what he thought of the news and he said he couldn’t stand to watch the news anymore - he said that it was too painful. I’ve heard several people say that the real solution to Bolivia’s problems is to do what the United States and Chile and Argentina did – kill off most of the Indigenous people and then lock up a token remnant on a reservation somewhere far away from the capital. In fact, I’ve heard that particular solution proposed so often now that I’m beginning to think that it must be printed somewhere. The most reasoned response I got was from the father of one of Katie’s friends who said that the only solution was to educate the Indigenous tribes, but that the benefits wouldn’t be enjoyed for at least a generation. I think he’s right.
And speaking of the local Indigenous tribes, the largest tribe on the Altiplano (as opposed to down in the Amazon) is called the Aymaras and they take great pride in the fact that they weren’t conquered by the Incas nor eliminated by the Spanish. I learned this past week that there is no future tense in the language of the Aymaras. They can say “I’m here” but they can’t say “I’ll be here tomorrow.” I think that goes a long way toward explaining Bolivia’s problems and why it’s so poor in spite of all its natural resources. I see that same root problem at home too with our maid Zenobia. This past week I gave her the week’s shopping money and she said that we didn’t need any groceries because we were so well stocked. I tried, but I don’t think I ever succeeded in explaining to her that I wanted to keep the stock of groceries and water in the pantry for the next round of sieges and that I wanted her to shop for this week’s stuff as usual. I guess the real solution will be for Les and I to do our own grocery shopping for the duration because Zenobia can’t conceive of having more than a few days’ worth of groceries on hand.
Looking back at the week that we were trapped in our house you’d think that we’d have gotten more stuff done – but we didn’t. It's hard to describe what a protracted social upheaval does to your mind. You end up spending your days watching the news on TV or listening to the radio, thinking about what's going on and what could happen, and wondering how long it's going to last and whether or not you have enough food stored and whether or not you should leave, and if so, how. During the week that we were homebound with riots going on around us I managed to get about one day's worth of work done - I don't think Les got that much. For some reason it's not the same as having five days free at home to work on whatever you want to, because for some reason you just can't focus your mind on work.
On the lighter side of life, one morning last week, as I was in the kitchen preparing breakfast, the cats had taken up their usual position in the next room eating the dog’s food, when all of a sudden they shot through the kitchen like a streak and went into hiding in their bedroom (the pantry.) I couldn’t imagine what had happened since neither one of them is the least bit afraid of our miniature poodle. Then Katie walked into the room saying “Do you like my hat?” She was balancing her giant (1 meter long) stuffed leopard on her head. I almost fell over laughing when I confirmed my suspicions and looked in the pantry and saw the two cats staring with four oversized alert eyes at the leopard on Katie’s head. It really made my day.
And that’s the news from the Jacks in Bolivia for now.
Love, Colin.
