The Kiss of Death

by Joseph William Bastien

  Figure 31. Disease burden in Latin America in disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), from five tropical diseases. (From World Development Report 1993: Investing in Health. World Bank.)

  Agrarian productivity also has declined in the Altiplano because of environmental and economic factors. Vast deforestation of the Altiplano caused widespread loss of other vegetation and water shortages. Insect populations shifted from wooded areas to houses. Highland peasants moved to lower, more disease-infested regions of the Alto-Beni and Santa Cruz. Bolivian peasants are having problems competing against large-scale commercial farmers. Rural Bolivia lacks electricity, secondary-education facilities, and adequate health care. These factors also have discouraged children from taking over the family farm. As a result, rural-to-urban ratios have plummeted from 74-26 percent in 1950 to 42-58 percent in 1992.

  Life in urban areas is not much better for Aymara, Quechua, and Guarani Indians who go from being independent agriculturalists to becoming dependent and low-paid jornaleros (hired workers). Many are not even that lucky—unemployment in Bolivia is at 20 percent and rising. Bolivia is a poor and unhealthy country.

  Transported pathogens have a distinct advantage with the migration of people in generally being able to colonize and reproduce in new territories. Seasonal migration can lead to a biotic exchange of pathogens between regions, exposing populations to diseases from many regions. In other words, Chagas’ disease, AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria accompany these movements and spread back and forth from home territories to colonized or work areas. Globalization brings colonization not only of humans but of insects, parasites, and viruses. Chagas’ disease in Bolivia provides a microcosmic illustration of what is happening on a global scale.

  Increased Productivity

  Chagas’ disease will likely decrease to the degree that productivity is increased among peasants in Bolivia. This is an axiom seldom considered by health workers, however. Nearly half the population of Bolivia is involved in small-scale agricultural production of various species of vegetables, fruits, and grains; together, they produce large quantities of produce. Small-scale production is a feasible economic alternative along the valleys and mountainsides of the Andes. Large-scale farming has not been economically feasible in many of these regions.

  Productivity can be increased by utilizing the capacity of peasants to produce on a small scale. Small farm and cottage industries are the basic productive units in Bolivia. Bolivia’s cities are being fed to a large extent by market women who sell foods and produce from sidewalk stalls and markets. There is an economic system involving planter, harvester, trucker, and vendor, these roles frequently being filled by relatives and members of the household. Productive units are the family, relatives, and community; they function on small scalessales are small and profits are little. Combined, however, these smaller units have considerable economic leverage and resources. Their economy is held together by religious fiestas, reciprocal exchange, and community bonds. A similar situation is found in the production of goods. Cottage industries produce clothes, foods, various goods, and jewelry. Bolivia has been called the land of free enterprise.

  This productivity of rural and urban peoples is the basis for economic development in Bolivia. Small-scale productivity can drive a country’s economy if it is used to produce specialty goods that cannot be found elsewhere. Bolivia’s farms and cottage industries produce items in demand by many countries, such as cañiwa and quinua (France imported 150,000 tons of quinua in 1996). Peasants farm plots on mountainsides too steep for plows in order to produce these high-protein native cereals. Chifleras (women herbal vendors) in Oruro sell $1 million worth of medicinal plants throughout the world. A naturalist and a chemist in La Paz export herbal medicines to other parts of the world. They work with peasants in many communities who grow the herbs in gardens, providing them with seeds, medicine to sell, and profits. The two also teach the peasants about the prevention of Chagas’ disease.

  Politicians frequently overlook the importance of smaller productive units in the economic development of Bolivia. Small-scale producers need less credit, generally amounts from $500 to $1,000, with annual interest rates below 13 percent. Presently many peasants cannot get loans; for those who can, interest rates often are so high (up to 50 percent) that many cannot repay them and are kept in debt peonage. Farmers need credit to maintain operations during an unproductive year as well as to buy tools, improve seed crops, and purchase livestock. Their children need school supplies and clothing. Some sell their produce in the cities; but they are unable to do this at municipal markets without licenses (RUCs), which are expensive, so they end up selling their goods on the streets. One credit union in Sucre provides farmers with credit so they can purchase licenses and sell at markets, where they have increased sales in a shorter amount of time. Community members individually took out loans to jointly buy a truck in which they could transport their produce to market without having to sell it to a middle-man trucker who formerly made most of the profit.

  Six neighboring families in the Tomatita barrio of Tarija co-signed for one other as guarantors to repay the loan if another fails. Individual families have then invested in production: one woman purchased a refrigerator and a television set for her household store and lounge to better serve neighborhood clientele. She makes more money than her carpenter husband, who is frequently unemployed.

  An example on a larger scale: three families took out separate loans to purchase a taxi for U.S. $3,000, which they operate between them. The taxi’s monthly income is U.S. $400. Half is budgeted for expenses, so that within two years the car will be paid for, and the owners plan to buy other taxis until every participating family has one.

  Cooperatives have been mentioned a number of times as very adaptable to Andean economics. Cooperatives fit into concepts of aynisiña (labor exchange), turqasiña, and the fiesta system. Cooperatives add an institutional and economic framework that fits into the formal economy of Bolivia. Housing cooperatives have been very successful in Puno and Lima, Peru, with more than 5,000 houses being built. The housing cooperative in San Lorenzo has enabled more than sixty families to build homes. These and other cooperatives have also served to provide loans for capital investment in the production of goods.

  Cooperatives, credit unions, neighborhood associations, and the new “Laws of Popular Participation” provide Bolivians with ways to increase production. These measures are better solutions for rural peasants than is large-scale industrial farming, which takes the land away from the peasants and reduces them to migrant workers.

  Land Holdings

  Productivity is linked to land holdings, which present longstanding problems for peasants. Like Chagas’ disease, the issue is environmentally and historically complex, with no easy solution. Presently, small-scale production has become even smaller because land holdings are being divided into smaller plots, going from the minifundio to the surcofundio (furrow farm). After the agrarian reform of 1954, many land holdings went from the latifundio (hacienda) to plots of several acres, allotted to each peasant family who worked as peons on the hacienda. These three-acre plots then gradually decreased as the land was subdivided to provide for offspring of the landholders. In the eastern lowlands of Bolivia there still exist pre-agrarian reform conditions of pongeaje (peonage), where native peoples have to work for free for owners of large land estates. Until 1960, Chiquitano Indians were held as slaves in some lowland areas.

  In contrast, members of free communities continued to hold land in common, and every year leaders allotted parcels to households according to their needs. This long-existing pattern of communal land distribution has never been very popular with Western reformists, many of whom equated it with communism and socialism. Eventually the passage of Las Leyes de Participación Popular in 1994 required that members of free communities register their land as private property, with the provision that, if they don’t, this land will revert to the municipalities to be sold. This created a traumatic situa
tion for many peasants who were unsure of how to divide the land and under which families to register it. Certain communities refused to declare their land as private property and are vigorously fighting confiscation. Pablo Regalsky, director of CENDA, has supported their endeavors with notable success. Peasant unions have united in this endeavor, which has solidified Aymara and Quechua Indians throughout Bolivia in a common cause. As a result, peasants have entered the political arena with notable success, electing an Aymara speaker as vice-president in 1994. Since his victory, however, he has done little to assist them.

  According to the agrarian reform laws of 1954, members of free communities and individual peasant property owners are not required to pay taxes if they work the land. Individuals with large land holdings are required to pay taxes if the land is productive. To avoid paying taxes, some large land owners leave land fallow, although, also according to the same laws, unworked land should be distributed to the neighboring peasants. Rarely, if ever, has this happened with large tracts of fertile land lying fallow, however. Now, in fact, some of these landlords are selling the land to private corporations. After these corporations begin to farm, they gradually take over more land, inducing neighboring peasants to sell their land and then work as farm workers on the larger farms.

  A strong indigenous peasant movement has arisen in Bolivia affecting land tenure and productivity. Beginning in 1982 indigenous peoples participated in the making of a law that was finally passed in 1996 INRA (Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria) which guarantees the sovereignty of indigenous people and their land holdings. Foreigners are not permitted to enter their land without permission. Many tribes in eastern Bolivia occupy regions east of the Andes that include vast plains and tropical forests. Parts of this land have been altered from tropical hardwood forests to grassy savannahs for cattle raising. Thousands of acres of forests were cleared to farm soy beans which were never grown, leaving dusty flatlands.

  Theoretically, the new laws protect native peoples, who are proven caretakers of the forest preserves; however, one problem is that many Bolivian people have not been socially trained to understand these laws. They also have few means to enforce them, as is also the case with Bolivia’s environmental laws. Organizations would do well to teach Bolivians about their laws and help them use modern technology to enforce the laws. Lowland tribes have been given laptop computers to help them communicate with networks of environmentally concerned groups that can help them survive against miners and loggers.

  Another favorable aspect of Las Leyes de Participación Popular of 1994 is that it provides government recognition of territorial units as municipalities. Previously, the government strongly favored urban areas, now it has decentralized in favor of regionalization. There currently are 380 municipalities, and these municipalities provide increased flexibility in regard to addressing cultural and social factors, climatic and agricultural conditions, soil conditions, and community problems. Most importantly, federal funds are now being distributed to the municipalities for agricultural and community development.

  Environment

  Bolivia has perhaps the greatest biodiversity and beauty of any country in the Americas. It is a gem of the world, noted for its beauty and wealth. From the top of the Andes to the Amazon basin, Bolivia has climatic and ecological zones that are equivalent to those from Alaska to Panama. From La Paz, one can travel up to a 17,000-foot pass with its near arctic conditions and then down to tropical forests housing parrots, monkeys, and snakes. Bolivia has more species of birds than any other country in the world, and it is still possible to visit areas where the animals are unaccustomed to humans, such as the Noel Kempf Preserve, a 2-million-square-mile preserve accessible only by helicopter.

  Bolivia’s natural resources have been among the most exploited in the world. Its gold, silver, tin, and antimony mines have made others rich. Its eastern Andean slopes have been stripped of large, elegantly flowered chinchona trees in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to provide quinine bark to treat malaria throughout the world. In the twentieth century, the United States has virtually destroyed Bolivia’s coca crop and other vegetation in its effort to win the cocaine war at home. Amazonian forests have lost trees slashed for rubber, Tajibo trees stripped for bark to fight cancer, and palms bled for their resin to treat AIDS. Centuries-old mahoganies are cut down in a day and transported across roads that erode forest floors to urban centers of the world to build desks. Vinchucas and T. cruzi are also part of the equation.

  In The Coming Plague, Laurie Garret (1994:619) sounded a warning call: “Human beings stomp about with swagger, elbowing their way without concern into one ecosphere after another. The human race seems equally complacent about blazing a path into a rain forest with bulldozers and arson or using an antibiotic “scorched earth” policy to chase unwanted microbes across the duodenum… Time is short.”

  Ecosystem disruption and subsequent loss of species have profound implications for human health (see Grifo and Rosenthal 1997). Damage to the ecosystem has caused changes in the equilibria between hosts, vectors, and parasites in their natural environments; for example, T. cruzi has switched from animals to humans as its primary host. In addition to global warming, acid rain, and pollution, Chagas’ disease warns us of a potential huge epidemic.

  Chagas’ disease has increased as biocultural diversity has decreased in Bolivia. It may be part of the environment’s barometer indicating rising pressure upon the forests. Bolivian natives recognize this, and they attribute many sicknesses to ecological abuses of animals and plants. Andeans have an environmental wisdom that sees humans, plants, animals, and land as ideally in balance. Andean Indians have rituals to feed the earth, the mother. Traditionally, they refer to alpacas and llamas on the same plane of existence as humans, the only difference being that humans now speak and herd them, whereas formerly it was the other way around. A major deity of Andeans is Pariya Qaqa (Igneous Rock), a god who became a rock, the mountain upon which they live. To native Bolivians, then, the earth is sacred; it is to be fed with ritual foods and worked in such a way that it continues to produce. They have developed elaborate systems of rotating fields and crops for three years and then letting them lie fallow as herd grounds so they will be fertilized. This has been practiced for over 1,000 years. Highland Andeans and lowland Indian tribes remain guardians of the mountains, valleys, and forests of Bolivia.

  Huarochiri legends were recorded in 1608 by Father Francisco de Avila, and they reveal prehispanic religious traditions. These legends unfold a landscape alive with diverse sacred beings, mountain deities, and prophetic animals. They express the sacredness of animals, plants, and land. The following myth relates how overpopulation caused hunger in ancient times. The brocket deer reproduced until food became scarce. The conditions of their life became a problem.

  Now, in ancient times, brocket deer used to eat human beings.

  Later on, when brocket deer were very numerous, they danced, ritually chanting, “How shall we eat people?”

  Then one of their fawns made a mistake and said, “How shall people eat us?”

  When the brocket deer heard this they scattered. From then on brocket deer became food for humans (Huarochiri ms., Chapter 5, 71, ed. and trans. Salomon and Urioste 1991).

  This myth illustrates the closeness of Andeans to animals. At first deer ate humans; but, after a fawn made a linguistic mistake, humans ate deer.

  The following myth discusses a time when this world wanted to come to an end, but Andeans and animals were saved by the prescience of llamas:

  In ancient times, this world wanted to come to an end.

  A llama buck, aware that the ocean was about to overflow, was behaving like somebody who’s deep in sadness. Even though its owner let it rest in a patch of excellent pasture, it cried out and said, “In, in,” and wouldn’t eat.

  The llama’s owner got really angry, and he threw the cob from some maize he had just eaten at the llama.

  “Eat, dog! This is some
fine grass I’m letting you rest in!” he said.

  Then that llama began speaking like a human being.

  “You simpleton, whatever could you be thinking about? Soon, in five days, the ocean will overflow. It’s a certainty. And the whole world will come to an end,” it said.

  The man got good and scared. “What’s going to happen to us? Where can we go to save ourselves?” he said.

  The llama replied, “Let’s go to Villca Coto mountain. There we’ll be saved. Take along five days food for yourself.”

  So the man went out from there in a great hurry, and himself carried both the llama buck and its load.

  When they arrived at Villca Coto mountain, all sorts of animals had already filled it up: pumas, foxes, guanacos, condors, all kinds of animals in great numbers.

  They stayed there huddling tightly together.

  The waters covered all those mountains and it was only Villca Coto mountain, or rather its very peak, that was not covered by the water.

  Water soaked the fox’s tail.

  That’s how it turned black.

  Five days later, the waters descended and began to dry up.