by Norman Lewis
A contractor hung about, keeping his eye on us; a sleek and smirking young man in a big sombrero, a digital watch strapped on his wrist and a transistor to his ear. Part of his duties would be to keep a look out for cane-cutters who were obviously not long for this world and ship them off back to their villages where they could die out of sight. All these cane-cutters were debt-slaves. It should be stressed that the estate was not specially singled out for this investigation, but was chosen at random, largely because it was easily reached from the main road. It was almost certainly no better nor any worse than the rest.
The current fight championed by the Church on such estates is for the elimination of the contractor and the abolition of a system by which twenty per cent of wages are withheld until the end of the harvest to prevent desertion. Even when, despite this precaution, workers do cut and run, they may be brought back by the police as absconding debtors. Little objection is seen from above to controlling labour by brute force: a mentality inherited from the days before 1962, when estates were bought and sold with their workers.
In 1972, at the time of the cotton boom and the trebling of cotton prices on the world market, workers were forcibly prevented from leaving the cotton fields, and troops sent to the Altiplano to recruit labour, while in Santa Cruz schools were closed so that the children might be free to help out.
The following news-clipping from Excelsior, dated 23rd June 1977, gives some idea of labour conditions that can still exist in odd corners.
Slave Camp Denounced in Bolivia
La Paz, 22nd June. The unusual case of a slave camp’s existence was denounced here today. The denunciation was received in the labour office of the town of Oruro against the owners of the Sacacasa estate alleging this to be a slave camp. Apart from harsh treatment received by both adults and children, they are forced to work from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. for a daily wage of ten pesos [twenty-five pence]. The slaves are threatened with firearms and brutal floggings to compel them to submit to this exploitation.
The migrant workers I have described are classified as Indians integrated into the national society. They have, in some cases, been in painful contact with white people for several centuries. They dress as whites, are nominally Catholics, and often no longer speak an Indian language. The Chiriguano cane-cutters were descendants of those who survived the wholesale exterminations of the great rubber boom of the nineteenth century, when Indians who were dragged from their villages to become rubber tappers had no more than a two-year expectation of life, and could expect punishment, which might include the amputation of a limb for failure to produce the expected quota of rubber. There exists a class of even cheaper and more defenceless labour. These are ‘nonintegrated’ Indians, who have only recently been driven or enticed from the jungle. They are at the bottom of the pyramid of enslavement.
On 16th October 1977, two days before our arrival in Santa Cruz, Presencia published an account of the kind of misadventure that can befall a forest Indian – in this case one of a band of refugees who escaped from a mission compound – who happens to follow a road and arrive at the end of it, dazzled, bewildered, and quite unable to make himself understood, in the streets of a boom city.
This Indian, an Ayoreo named Cañe, was washing his clothes in the River Piraí, a few yards from the Santa Cruz main railway station, when he heard screams coming from a parked car in which two men were attacking a girl. Cañe ran to the girl’s aid, and the two men drove off, but they soon returned with a police car. In this, after a thorough beating, Cañe was taken to the police station, where, being unable to give any account of himself in Spanish, and in the absence of an interpreter, one of the policemen simply drew his gun and shot him through the head. The bullet entered the right side of the head, low down, behind the ear, and exited, astonishingly, without damage to the brain.
What is unusual about this story, besides Cañe’s miraculous escape that got him into the newspapers, was that he was then taken to hospital. In Latin America it is unusual for an ambulance ever to be sent for an Indian.
This happened on 9th October, and on 20th October, learning that Cañe and the rest of his fugitive groups were still to be seen on a piece of waste-ground outside the Brazil Station, we found an interpreter and went in a taxi to talk to him. The taxi-driver had some reason to know just where the Ayoreos were to be found, because he mentioned that the Ayoreo women had been driven by starvation to prostitute themselves for five pesos (thirteen pence) per visit. He himself had had intercourse with one of them several days before, copulation having taken place at dusk, in the open, by the side of the well-illuminated and busy road. He now awaited with anxiety the possible appearance of dread symptoms.
We found approximately twenty Ayoreos on waste land by the side of the new dual carriageway. Cañe was among them, and we examined the still raw wound in the back of his head. He told us that a number of ribs had been broken in the beating he had been given, and that an attempt had been made to break both his wrists, using a device kept at the police station for that purpose.
Cañe, a magnificently strong young man, had put up such resistance to this that the policeman had had to give up his efforts, and then in frustration had drawn his gun and shot him instead.
The Ayoreos are the proudest of the tribes of Bolivia, making a fetish of manly strength and courage, particularly as demonstrated in their hunting of the jaguar. To acquire status in the tribe and marry well, an Ayoreo must be prepared to tackle a jaguar at close quarters, in such a way that the maximum amount of scarring is left by the encounter on his limbs and his torso.
For these Ayoreos the days of hunting the jaguar in the Gran Chaco were at an end. They had gone through the mission, been deprived of their skills and been taught the power of money. As a last resort, since food had to be bought, they sold their women. Cañe remembered being taken by a missionary as a boy from the Chaco. Since then he had slaved for farmers, being paid with an occasional cast-off garment or a little rice. In the end, he and his companions could stand the life no longer, and had just wandered away following the road through the jungle, and then a railway track until they reached Santa Cruz.
We learned that the mission from which the Ayoreos had decamped was a South American mission station in the jungle some twenty kilometres from the village of Pailón. Deciding to see for ourselves what were the conditions that could have caused this apparently hopeless headlong flight into nowhere, we visited the mission on 22nd October, in the company of three Germans, one of whom spoke Ayoreo.
The scene, when we arrived in the camp, was a depressingly familiar one: the swollen bellies, pulpy, inflated flesh, toothless gums and chronic sores of malnutrition, the slow, listless movements, the eyes emptied by apathy. Here, 275 Ayoreos, a substantial proportion of the survivors of the tribe, had been rounded up with their jaguar-scarred chief, who presented himself, grotesque in his dignity, wearing a motorcycle crash-helmet. We inspected a deep cleft in his forehead where he had attempted to commit suicide, using an axe.
The only signs of food we saw was a bone completely covered by a black furry layer of putrefaction, being passed round to be gnawed, and a cooked tortoise being shared among a group. With our arrival a commotion began, led by some weeping women, and we soon learned the reason. Here in the tropics, at the height of the dry season, the water supply had been cut off by the missionary in punishment for some offence. The Indians, several of them ill, and with sick children in the camp, had been without water for two days.
We saw the missionary, Mr Depue, a lean shaven-headed North American of somewhat austere presence, who confirmed that he had ordered a collective punishment he believed most likely to be effective to deal with a case in which two or three children had broken into a store and stolen petrol. There was to be no more water until the culprits were found, and brought into his compound, there to be publicly thrashed.
The situation was a difficult one because, as Mr Depue explained, in all the years he had spent as a missionary, he had
never heard of a single instance of an Indian punishing a child, which was to say that the conception of corrective chastisement seemed to be beyond their grasp. Mr Depue spoke of this aversion to punishment as of some genetic defect inherited by the whole race. It had now come to be a trial of strength, and he could only hope that the deadlock would soon be resolved. He took up an ‘it-hurts-me-as-much-as-it-hurts-them’ attitude, assuring us that he had decided to share the general discomfort by ordering the water supply to the mission house to be cut off as well. It occurred to us that he might have prudently arranged for a reserve, because we happened to arrive when the missionary and his family were at lunch, and both water and soft drinks appeared to be in reasonable supply.
Mr Depue happened to have read the newspaper’s account of Cañe’s misfortunes, and remembered that he himself had ‘brought him in’, during a pacification drive in the Chaco. Three or four youngsters, including Cañe, had become separated in the panic from their tribe. ‘I kept out of sight and sent Ayoreo-speaking Indians to offer them a better life, and to persuade them to come in, and they did.’
It was by chance on our way back from this expedition that we saw our first criada – a Chiquitano Indian girl who had been ‘adopted’ by a white family, and happened to serve us in her foster-parents’ bar. The criada system is far from being exclusively Bolivian, and exists under different names in backward rural areas in most Latin American countries where there are groups of depressed and exploited Indians.
In the hope that they will receive some education, and an economically brighter future, Indians give their children away to white families. The little Indian – usually a girl – becomes a Cinderella no prince will ever discover. She will be put to unpaid drudgery from the age of four or five, be traditionally available for the sexual needs of the sons of the family, and will not be able to marry, although she will be allowed to have children, who in their turn will become criadas.
Our German friends knew this girl well, but having lived for some years in Bolivia, and become accustomed to its institutions, they were not horrified, as we were, that such barely disguised forms of slavery could exist.
A criada, they informed us, could be lent or given away. They had no rights of any kind: rural untouchables of Latin America, whose existence went unnoticed. There was no saying how many there were in Bolivia, they said. In some parts of the eastern provinces almost every farm kept one.
Santa Cruz is a boom town, a little dizzy with quick profits, and displaying its wealth as best it can. It has a new Holiday Inn, full of American oilmen in baseball caps, and possesses no fewer than four ring-roads. Among its leading citizens are Germans, the most successful and affluent of the foreigners in Bolivia. There are about 300,000 of them, and it is said that President Banzer, who is a descendant of one of the older German families, came to power through a military coup financed by the German colony.
The powerful Dr Strauss, in control of immigration, comes of German forebears, and Teutonic surnames are scattered liberally through the lists of directors of the country’s leading enterprises. Near Abapó Izozóg, immediately adjoining the nominally empty area (save for a few thousand Indians) that Dr Strauss proposes to people with Rhodesians, South-West-African whites of German descent and refugees from South Africa, the Germans occupy a colony about the size of Holland. They have founded other vast colonies at Asención de Guarayos in the centre of the country, and at Rurrenaháque, in the north, and they have sunk fortunes into building roads and costly irrigation schemes.
A high percentage of German immigrants arriving since the war had remained loyal to Nazi political philosophy, and recently neo-Nazi groups had also emerged. The Bolivian government appears indifferent to this phenomenon, and has pushed its neutrality to the lengths of resisting the extradition of at least one war criminal. Neo-Nazi journals imported from Germany, and such militaristic publications as Soldaten-Zeitung, find avid readers.
Our own brief experience of martial nostalgia was to be warned at our hotel of an impending dinner for some 300 Germans, to raise funds for the German school (the best in Eastern Bolivia). With some embarrassment it was hinted that many of the guests were ex, or actual, Nazis and that we might find some of their old wartime drinking songs offensive. We listened to the clamour but kept out of the way. Most extraordinary of all, to us, was to be assured that German Jews in Bolivia had sunk their differences with their old Aryan persecutors, and now fraternised at such gatherings, joining to chorus the ‘Horst Wessel’ along with the rest.
Our final conclusion was that Dr Strauss’s justification for the plan to bring in whites from the South African countries – i.e. economic necessity – was not quite the whole story. Bolivia is potentially one of the richest of South American countries, since apart from other largely untapped timber resources in the east, aerial surveys have indicated that the Amazon Basin it shares with Brazil contains one of the most valuable and diverse mineral profiles in the world. It is also among the weakest of these countries, with a population of five millions, many of whom are illiterate and subjugated Indians, contributing little to the country’s muscle. With these human resources it must be ready to defend the thousand miles of frontier it also shares with Brazil, which has 110 millions.
At the moment, Brazil is fully engaged in gobbling up its own resources, but it can be imagined that sooner or later it might turn its eyes westwards with renewed appetite and in a mood for expansion. Brazilian roads have either been built or resurfaced by Army engineers to take the heaviest tanks. One such road points to the heart of Bolivia through Corumbá, after which, crossing the frontier, it dwindles to dirt. Also, through foreclosures, Brazilian banks already own much land along Bolivia’s eastern borders.
Almost imperceptibly, Bolivia has been a country bleeding to death. In a series of wars fought and lost over the past century it has seen its territory whittled away by victorious neighbours: first the nitrate-rich Atacama Desert and the port of Antofagasta to Chile; then the Acre Territory to Brazil; then three-quarters of the Chaco to Paraguay. Always these losses have been the result of its failure to fill ‘empty’ spaces occupied by the Indians, who do not count.
Seeing into the future with Dr Strauss’s eyes one might be tempted to agree with him that, from his viewpoint, and that of the Bolivian government, the problem of filling this territorial vacuum is urgent. Strauss has to have his immigrants, and sooner or later he will probably get them, as the intransigence of the South African whites stokes up fuel for the fire tomorrow.
Together with the powerful German-Dutch minority already in place, these newcomers could transform Bolivia into a strong, white-dominated, ultra-right, anti-Communist state in the heart of Latin America. This vigorous transformation would discourage the future covetousness of neighbouring states, and it would delight the United States by laying forever the ghost of Che Guevara – himself once attracted to empty spaces in Bolivia.
16
Seville
THERE ARE FEW HOTEL BEDS to be had in Seville when it acclaims the Spring in its inimitable fashion. I found a place to stay out of town, dumped my baggage, and travelled in by taxi. At the San Telmo bridge over the Guadalquivir we ran into snarled-up traffic dominated by a woman policeman with a dark, ecstatic face. She ran, leaped and cavorted, unmeshing and directing the crawl of cars with competence and with artistry, and the drivers wound down their windows to shout their applause. ‘That’s a gypsy,’ the taxi driver said. ‘She used to dance at the Arenal. If we pull over and wait till the traffic clears, she’ll do a seguidilla for us.’ But the policewoman snapped her fingers at us and threw back her head, and we joined the queue on the bridge. There was another jam on the further side and the driver had a suggestion. We turned left into the wide and relatively quiet Avenida Colon that follows the river, then stopped and he pointed to a narrow street entrance across the road. ‘Why don’t you do the rest on foot?’ he asked. ‘The centre’s only a couple of hundred yards up there.’
; I walked up the Calle Dos de Mayo, as directed, a calm and almost countryfied street of white walls, and windows draped in sumptuous folds of baroque plaster, picked out in sober yellow. Orange blossom bespattered the cobbles, and there was a champagne sparkle of May in the air. A victoria of the most fragile elegance – a ‘milord’ of the kind introduced by Edward VII – passed with a clip-clop of hooves and a soft rumble of wheels. Blind white cubist shapes were piled round a Moorish battlement at the end of the street, and above and beyond, the Giralda Tower, once the greatest of all the minarets of Islam, possessed the sky. A wall panel in ceramic tiles showed the Calle Dos de Mayo as it was nearly a century ago, and there has been little change. The panel was put up by a soap-maker and it is one of the many magnificent advertisements for such things as the first Kodaks, for gramophones with horns, cough mixtures, mustard plasters, and forgotten motor cars that decorate the city’s walls. All the products promoted in this charming fashion have one thing in common: they no longer exist.
At the end of this short cut to the centre, I was confronted with the grey, fortress shape of the Cathedral. ‘Let us build a church so big that we shall be held to be insane,’ a member of the Chapter urged as soon as the great mosque had been levelled and the building of the Cathedral began. The Emperor Charles V, most human of the Spanish monarchs, who gardened and kept parrots in his modest quarters in the Alcazar nearby, would not have approved; but he was too late upon the scene, although in time to abort a similar operation on the Mosque at Cordoba. ‘You have built here what you or anyone might have built anywhere,’ he said, ‘but you have destroyed what was unique in the World.’
The Cathedral of Seville is vast, high and very dark, with visitors wandering a little apprehensively in the gothic twilight, like travellers lost in a foreign railway station. Light invests the gloom from a side-chapel in which a Madonna with the tear-streaked face of an unhappy fourteen-year-old girl broods over piled-up church treasure. A thousand candles flicker and the great organ crashes and booms.