by Norman Lewis
The letter breathed the sentiments of humanity, and warned of the holocaust that awaited South African whites once black majority rule became a fact. Mr Sean McBride, High Commissioner for Namibia at the UN, was quoted as having said that Namibian whites would have to abandon the country. ‘There is no doubt that the factors of a catastrophe are imminent,’ Dr Strauss wrote. Motives of national self-interest were also touched upon. Bolivia’s economically under-developed, underpopulated areas cried out for the drive and the technical skills of the energetic South Africans. He also made the claim that Britain, the US and France between them were ready to put up 2,000 million dollars to indemnify white Rhodesians, ‘who would be unable to resist the process of Africanisation.’
Adverse reaction to this colonisation was to be expected, and was led by the Catholic Church, the only body in Bolivia prepared to stand up to the dictatorship. A conference of religious leaders was held last July and a declaration followed listing numerous objections to the plan. What clearly disturbed the Church was the prospect of apartheid in Bolivia. Presencia was permitted to publish the criticisms. I quote from two paragraphs only:
The South African immigrants, with their violently racial mentality, condemned even in their own countries, could import the principles of apartheid into those under-populated areas where they would form compact groups. Bolivia, as the South Africans write so often in their newspapers, is the richest of the Latin American countries, requiring only an advanced technology for the exploitation of its raw materials… ‘three-quarters of its population are illiterate natives’. This is a point of view echoed by the contemptuous remarks of some of our own authorities who say, ‘The Indians cost more to keep than animals. They have to be fed, and work less.’
The well-meaning objections of the Church, and of so many liberal Bolivians, are as naive as they are creditable, since in some ways apartheid already exists in a purer and more extreme form in Bolivia than the version professed by the racists of South Africa. This, a visitor to the country quickly discovers.
La Paz, at 12,400 feet is, the highest capital in the world. The plane lands on the edge of a plateau high above it, engines screaming in reverse and wing-flaps clawing at the thin air. A few hundred yards from the runway’s end, the abyss awaits. The city lying below is crammed into a monstrous crater. Here, in this hole in the earth, its original Spanish builders, who went there to mine gold, huddled out of reach of the terrible wind that whines like a persistent beggar at every turn. From the almost infernal vision beneath, one turns back to that of the flat world of the Altiplano, almost all of it over 13,000 feet.
This is the homeland of the Aymara Indians, whose grandiose civilisation preceded that of the Incas. They have been forcibly Christian-ised, and enslaved over four centuries, and they are still tremendously exploited. But somehow they have survived. Now, with the Church turned benign, they are no longer compelled to carry priests in chairs on their backs, or scourged for persisting in their ancient worship of Pacha-mama, the mother-goddess, and Tío, the Devil, who is also, appropriately, god of the tin mines. In their honour the Aymara sacrifice innumerable llama foetuses and get drunk whenever they can. Their distrust of all whites has become instinctive, and can be belligerent. At best one is ignored, and at worst hustled away. Whites who insist on fraternising with Aymaras in their state of holy drunkenness may even find themselves attacked.
Bolivia is a poor country; its per capita income of about £200 a year putting it at the bottom of the league of South American nations. Its adult literacy is about thirty per cent. Oil revenues have brought about some increase in prosperity in recent years, but this has been diverted to a small sector of the population and largely spent on non-essential consumer goods. Far from bringing comfort to the peasant majority, the new prosperity has in fact done the reverse, for while the prices of agricultural produce have been rigorously held down, almost everything else is imported and subject to the inflationary process.
National poverty and under-development formed the theme of Under Secretary Guido Strauss’s argument in favour of mass immigration of whites from South African countries when I interviewed him in La Paz. He was communicative and direct, a man with a reputation for not mincing words. Occasionally he is indiscreet, and is widely quoted as having said in public, ‘They [the white immigrants] will certainly find our Indians no more stupid or lazy than their own blacks.’ He confirmed to me with enthusiasm all the details of the project so far published, whether or not they had been denied elsewhere, and added to these a little fresh data.
Bolivia, Dr Strauss explained, a country twice the size of Spain, had a population of five millions. Such people as it had were crowded into the semi-barren Altiplano and a number of upland valleys, leaving the vast and rich territory of the eastern provinces virtually unpopulated. Through lack of development of its agricultural wealth, the country was even obliged to import food. When, therefore, discreet international moves had been set afoot to discover possible areas of resettlement for whites whom it was believed would sooner or later be forced out of Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, Bolivia had recognised that its acceptance of such refugees might provide a partial solution to this problem.
Dr Strauss said that approaches had been made (through the German Federal Government) not only to Bolivia, but to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela. Brazil and Venezuela had agreed to accept a limited number of technicians.
Only Bolivia had been ready to take on immigrants of all classes en bloc. Dr Strauss said that any white settler would be given, free, a minimum of 50 hectares of first class agricultural land, and would also receive social, technical and economic assistance. Those who wished to engage in ranching would receive ‘very much more’, together with ample low-cost labour.
Dr Strauss handed me a copy of the Bolivian immigration laws, which also stressed Bolivia’s demographic predicament, and the inducements offered to immigrants who could contribute to its solution. Settlers from all countries would be welcomed with open arms, but, he said, a special and natural sympathy predisposed Bolivians in favour of persons of European origin, who shared with them a common heritage of culture and religion.
Asked how many immigrants from the South African countries had already arrived, Dr Strauss said that some ‘spontaneous’ immigration had taken place. He believed that this trickle would soon become a flood, an inundation which could be expected as soon as black majority rule becomes a fact. The infrastructure, including the building of roads in areas where the colonialists were to be settled, was complete. Bolivia for them, Dr Strauss said, is a promised land.
One question remained. Forty-one Indian tribes, with a total population of about 120,000, are recorded as living in the nominal emptiness of Eastern Bolivia. Some of them occupy precisely those areas shown on Dr Strauss’s map as designated for development. What was to become of them?
This was a question which Dr Strauss did not feel competent to reply to. If I wanted to know anything about Indians, and the nation’s plans for them, he suggested that I should go and talk to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the largest of the group of North American evangelical missionaries working in Bolivia. This I did.
The mildness of Mr Victor Halterman’s personality came as a surprise after learning something of his formidable reputation as head of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. With the exception of Under Secretary Strauss, who was naturally obliged to keep his thoughts to himself, I never met a Bolivian who did not regard the Summer Institute of Linguistics as the base for operations of the CIA in Bolivia; possibly in South America itself.
Mr Halterman’s reticence and modesty were reflected in his bare office in a ramshackle building. Shoved into a corner at the back of the cheap furniture stood a splendid object of carved wood and macaw’s feathers, an Indian god, said the missionary, that had been joyously surrendered to him by some of his converts. The other decoration was a coloured photograph of a Chácobo Indian wearing handsome nose-tusks, and a long gown
of bark.
The presence of these reminders of the Indians’ uncivilised past came as a surprise, because, in the mood of the Pilgrim Fathers, most missionaries frown on all such things, banning personal adornments of all kinds (unless produced in a modern factory) as well as outlawing musical instruments, and jollifications of any kind in missionary compounds. Mr Halterman was more liberal in his outlook. Indians might dress up as they pleased, and even sing and dance, but only in a ‘folkloric’ spirit, in other words as long as such activities were stripped of any possibility of a hidden ‘superstitious significance’.
Among the innumerable North American religious bodies devoted to the spiritual advancement of South America are three main missionary groups: the New Tribes Mission, the South American Mission, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, all of whom concern themselves with the capture of Indian souls. Of these the SIL is possibly the richest and most powerful, with thirteen active posts throughout the country. Not only does it have the government’s support, but one learns with surprise that it comes under the Ministry of Culture and Education, of which Mr Halterman is an official.
It may be in acknowledgement of this official co-operation that the biblical text that features most prominently in the SIL’s well-produced promotional literature is Romans 13:1, offered in Spanish and eight Indian translations. The Institute’s text is at variance both with that of the English Revised Version of the Bible, and its Spanish equivalent. ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers’ becomes ‘Obey your legal superiors, because God has given them command’, while the SIL quite remarkably re-translates ‘the powers that be are ordained by God’ as ‘There is no government on earth that God has not permitted to come to power.’ (Could General Banzer, who seized control of the country in 1971, have had a hand in this linguistic exercise?)
Mr Halterman agreed that the SIL, as well as the two other evangelical missions, were religious fundamentalists, and therefore ready with a tooth and nail defence of every line of the Holy Writ, including the world’s literal creation in six days, and Eve’s origin as a rib from Adam’s side.
Fundamentalists also believe that all the non-Christians of this world, including those who have never heard of the existence of the Christian faith, are doomed to spend eternity in hell. As the printed doctrinal statement of the New Tribes Mission – with whose theology Mr Halterman said he was in complete agreement – puts it: ‘We believe in the unending punishment of the unsaved.’ It is this belief that inspires so many missionaries to save souls at all costs, often with disregard for the converts’ welfare in this world.
‘We have a very limited medical programme,’ Mr Halterman said, and one could be sure he meant what he said. It is this indifference to anything but the act of conversion that explains the almost incredible experience reported by the German anthropologist Jürgen Riester in an encounter with a missionary who in 1962 had been entrusted by the Bolivian government with the pacification of the Ayoreo Indians.
‘The missionary allowed more than 150 Ayoreos to die in cold blood, after establishing contact with them. The Indians were dying of a respiratory disease accompanied by high fever, and the missionary held back medicine, using the following argument: “In any case they won’t allow themselves to be converted. If I baptise them just before they die, they’ll go straight to heaven.”’
Mr Halterman agreed that a certain number of Indians remained at large in the forest areas designated for future occupation by the white immigrants. It was a matter for regret, he thought, and he seemed to blame himself and his brother missionaries for incompetence in this matter. The Indians could be dangerous, he said, mentioning that only two days before, a member of an oil exploration team had been shot to death by arrows. However, there were still souls to be harvested, and he described with quiet relish the methods used to entice the occasional surviving Indian group from its natural environment so that this could be accomplished.
‘When we learn of the presence of an uncontacted group,’ said the missionary, ‘we move into the area, build a strong shelter – say of logs – and cut paths radiating from it into the forest. We leave gifts along these paths – knives, axes, mirrors, the kind of things that Indians can’t resist – and sometimes they leave gifts in exchange. After a while the relationship develops. Maybe they are mistrustful at first, but in the end they stop running away when we show, and we all get together and make friends.’
But the trail of gifts leads inevitably to the mission compound, and here, often at the end of a long journey, far from the Indian’s sources of food, his fish, his game, it comes abruptly to an end.
‘We have to break their dependency on us next,’ Mr Halterman said. ‘Naturally they want to go on receiving all those desirable things we’ve been giving them, and sometimes it comes as a surprise when we explain that from now on if they want to possess them they must work for money. We don’t employ them, but we can usually fix them up with something to do on the local farms. They settle down to it when they realise that there’s no going back.’
‘Something to do’ on a local farm is only too often indistinguishable from slavery. Mr Halterman, whether he knows it or not, is the first human link in the chain of a process that eventually reduces the Indians to the lamentable condition of all those we saw in Bolivia, and there are many hundreds of missionaries like Mr Halterman all over South America, striving with zeal and with devotion to save souls whose bodies are condemned to grinding labour in an alien culture.
While the North American missionaries have become – often officially – the servants of such right-wing military dictatorships as that of Bolivia, opposition in the name of Human Rights is frequently organised by Catholic priests and members of the religious orders. Their efforts, although at best hardly more than an attempt to alleviate harshness and cultivate compassion, involve them in some risk, and shortly before we arrived in La Paz gunmen murdered two assistants of a priest who had been troublesome. We were told that such gunmen could be hired to assassinate someone of small importance for as low a fee as one hundred pesos (rather less than £3).
A number of our informants were churchmen of a staunchly liberal kind, but it is not possible to mention them by name, or even identify the organisations to which they belong. One of them described the current Banzer regime as a confident and therefore fairly mild form of Fascism. Unlike Chile, which had lost all self-respect, it valued its good name. When, in January 1974, the peasants in Cochabamba showed too spirited a resistance to its authority, it had not been above sending in planes and tanks and killing a hundred or so, but for the moment it had fallen like a digesting crocodile into a kind of watchful inactivity.
In the meanwhile, the Church had cautiously involved itself in the formation of peasant groups that could bypass the fraudulent government-rigged trades unions. He expected that eventually the crocodile would show that it was far from asleep. Future repression, he thought, was certain.
It was a priest who introduced us to some of the facts about the abundant labour promised by Dr Strauss to the new white immigrants, and he took us to see cane-cutters at work on an estate near Santa Cruz. Some 40-50,000 migrant workers are brought in to deal with the cotton harvesting and the cane-cutting. These are all Indians, the majority from the Altiplano. Of the two groups, the cotton pickers seem marginally the worse off, being housed in dreadful barracoons in which they sleep packed in rows, sexes mixed, thirty or forty to a hut.
The working day is from just before dawn until dark. Altiplano Indians, accustomed to the cold, clear air of the high plateau, suffered dreadfully, the priest said, in the heat of the tropics, and also from the incessant attacks of insects, unknown in the highlands, but which made life unbearable to them here. It was difficult to estimate how much a worker earned, but, allowing for loss of working time through bad weather, the priest estimated that this might average out at fifty pence a day. But this was far from being the take-home wage. Various deductions had to be made, including the co
ntractor’s cut.
All the estates employed agents who scoured the country in their search for suitable labour. The plantation owners paid them fifty pence to two pounds fifty for every man, plus a percentage deducted from the worker’s pay.
There were other drawbacks. The migrant worker would be forced to buy his supplies from the estate’s stores, where prices could be three or four times those normally charged. Jürgen Riester noted in his work on the Indians of Eastern Bolivia that a kilo of salt might be charged up in this way at ten times its market price, and a bottle of rum at twenty times normal cost. Thus the average daily wage could be reduced from fifty pence to twenty pence, or less. Worst of all, said the priest, almost all migrant workers were debt-slaves, and the debts they had been induced to incur went on mounting up every year, so that they were bound for life to a particular employer; their children, who would inherit the debt, would be bound to him, too.
The cane-cutters we visited were on a sugar estate about twenty miles from the city. They were Chiriguano Indians, from Abapó Izozóg – one of the two principal areas designated for the new white settlements. These men worked a fifteen-hour day, starting at 3 a.m., by moonlight or the light of kerosene flares, except on Sunday, when thirteen hours were worked. The two free hours on Sunday were dedicated to a visit by lorry to buy supplies at the estate owner’s shop in Montero, the nearest village. They were paid about fifty pence a day. Although their contracts stipulated that water, firewood and medicines would be provided free, there was no wood, two inches of a muddy brown liquid in the bottom of one only of the two wells, and the only medicine given was aspirin, used impartially in the treatment of enteritis, tuberculosis (from which many of them suffer), and snake-bite. Every woman over the age of eighteen had lost her front teeth as a result of poor nutrition, leaving the gums blue and hideously swollen.