by Steve Hely
In Bolivia, the women in the market straight-up do not want you to take their picture. This is a shame, because they are wearing tiny bowler hats such as were fashionable for men in Britain in the 1890s, and flowing homemade dresses. Whether they don’t want you to take their picture because of concern for their souls, or they just don’t want to be props for your Instagram, I’m not sure. Ask them and they will refuse. In La Paz, Bolivia, you can buy a dried llama fetus with which to bless a new house.
How to Survive Prison in or Become President of Bolivia
La Paz is at an elevation of almost 12,000 feet, which is ridiculous. Just to cap the whole thing off, I stayed at the tallest hotel I could find. Out the window, I could look down at the US Embassy, a building not warmly thought of by many Bolivians after several decades of clumsy and sometimes murderous Yankee muddling in local affairs.
In the middle of La Paz, on perhaps the most beautiful square in the city, there is a prison, called San Pedro. There’s a hole in the roof of the prison, and out of this hole to waiting messengers in the park are thrown packages of refined cocaine.
The officials of this prison do one thing: Keep prisoners inside. Even that they don’t do very well. But once you’re inside San Pedro, you’re on your own. The first thing you do is rent yourself a cell. If you have money, you can rent quite a nice one. You can eat at restaurants within the prison. If you don’t have any money, you might sleep under the stairs. The prisoners have elections and run their own society.
At one time, the residents of this prison made extra money by giving tours. An Australian named Rusty Young heard about this, went up to have a look, and got a tour from Thomas McFadden, a black Englishman who’d been caught at the La Paz airport smuggling cocaine. He’d ended up in San Pedro, where he eventually figured out the system and organized a half-decent life for himself. He had, for instance, a girlfriend, an Israeli backpacker who’d come and stay with him for weeks at a time.
Rusty Young and McFadden collaborated on a book called Marching Powder, which is incredibly interesting, I recommend it. It’s good to read just as like a manual for how to get along in life. McFadden is a gifted charmer and survivor. He was tossed into prison half-starved, friendless, alone, sticking out, and not speaking Spanish. Everyone wanted to kill him because they assumed he was American. But he made his way, became a prison tour guide, and from what I hear, he is now back in England someplace with an astounding story to tell.
I was taken to see San Pedro—the outside—by a terrific tour guide from Red Cap Walking Tours. (If you find yourself in La Paz, get with these guys.) The guide suggested that while you could maybe still find a way into San Pedro, he did not recommend it due to incidents of rape and stabbing. I decided then and there I had nothing to add to McFadden and to not spend time and energy bribing my way into a scary prison.
The guide walked us, winded, on to the Presidential Palace, and called our attention to the third-story balcony.
“In Bolivia, the traditional way to become the president is to throw the previous president off the balcony,” our guide explained, before pointing out lampposts from which unlucky political figures have ended up getting hanged.
Balcony throwing is no longer the preferred method. The current president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, was elected in 2009. He’s from the Movement for Socialism party, the son of subsistence farmers of the Aymara indigenous people. Of the seven children in his family, only three survived to adulthood. When he was a kid, 25,000 miners in his hometown got put out of work. His family moved to the Andes and became coca farmers. This was in the 1980s, when the United States was providing helicopters to send UMOPAR (it stands for, in Spanish, Mobile Police Unit for Rural Areas) up into the mountains to burn coca farms. These guys were not super cool. Morales says he was present when UMOPAR, with DEA help, massacred twelve villagers at the town of Villa Tunari.
Morales eventually became the leader of a coca growers’ union. He nearly won election in 2002 but got edged out by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, who had hired James Carville and a bunch of other ex-Clinton campaign guys as consultants. The next year, after an economic crisis and protests Morales helped to organize, Sánchez de Lozada had to resign. He lives in the United States now and gives speeches at business schools. Bolivia is trying to extradite him to charge him for deaths during the protests.
As far as I can tell, Morales is fairly popular, though known to be very strange, maybe even a bit mystic. He’s said to rely on omens from his dreams. He plays for a soccer team called Sport Boys. He suggested that Barack Obama’s speeches at the United Nations have been “a discourse of war, of arrogance, and of threats to the peoples of the world. That also is a discourse of extremist fanaticism.” He’s on track to be the longest-serving president of Bolivia since the 1830s.
Everywhere you go in Mexico and Central and South America, you’ll find Catholic images blended with native traditions. The images of the Virgin Mary, say, might look suspiciously like the mountain deities worshipped by local people long before missionaries ever arrived. Halfhearted compromises no doubt settled on at last by exhausted proselytizers who just needed to move souls past the heaven goal line. In Bolivia, they didn’t get very far at all. There’s an eighteenth-century church in La Paz, sure, but carved right onto the outside wall you can see Pachamama, the Andean Earth mother goddess, tits out, giving birth to the world.
Lake Titicaca
What kid doesn’t want to visit Lake Titicaca? If my childhood was any indicator, Lake Titicaca gets mentioned in every geography book for kids, no doubt because they know kids will enjoy the name, perhaps saying the name aloud or luring adults into saying it. I dunno, maybe kids today are more jaded now, what with YouTube and whatnot, but I bet they still like it.
As any kid who dreams of impressing Alex Trebek at the National Geographic Bee knows, Lake Titicaca is the largest lake in South America. It’s the fifteenth-largest lake in the world by volume, although that includes what I consider to be a bullshit lake in Antarctica, so let’s say fourteenth. The lake is almost as big as Puerto Rico. It is also, notably, one of the “highest” lakes in the world in altitude, at 3,812 meters, or two and a third miles, above sea level.
Once you’ve traveled in South America a bit, Denver’s brag about being “the mile-high city” starts to seem pretty lame. Try a two-mile-high city, like La Paz, that is itself encircled by mountains that are taller still! You might as well be in space.
Well, okay, maybe that’s too much, but it does feel like another world, if not another planet. The air is thinner, the colors are crisper, the sun is more intense. It’s a tough place, the people are tough, but it does seem half-magical. Just ask a llama with her half-shut eyes and what looks like a smile on a face that’s either dopey or blissed out.
Bolivia is huge: almost twice as big as Texas. What I saw was a tiny sliver from La Paz to the shore of Lake Titicaca, out a bus window. That alone was plenty to take in.
Bolivia is undeveloped: Twice as big as Texas it may be, but it has less than half the people. I don’t know if you’ve seen Texas, but it ain’t exactly crowded. So imagine Bolivia. True, much of that territory is white salt flats that stretch for miles, or high desert plateaus covered in fine sand, or 20,000-foot mountains. But even up here, in the north, not far at all from the de facto capital, the grass rolls on undisturbed. A tiny farmhouse here and there, many of them that look like they were built by their current inhabitants. Old women in their traditional clothes sit by the side of the road, waiting for a bus or a person or maybe they’re just sitting. And: llamas.
Amerians are always comparing things in size to Texas, while of the windswept portions of the world, they always say, “It looks like Montana.”
Well, the land above Lake Titicaca does look like Montana. I’ve seen Montana. Sweeping plains, barren, that roll out to snow-covered mountains of impossible size.
Except here: llamas.
On the Bolivian shores of Lake Titicaca, there are a few towns. Most tourists who come to the lake come through the Peru side, where you can take a train. There you can visit a floating market of reed boats, even sleep out on a reed island. That’s across the lake, though.
Where I went was Isla del Sol, a short boat ride across the waters of the lake.
A Hippie Theory
A little more than a year after I got back from Lake Titicaca—just yesterday, in fact—it was the Fourth of July. Late at night at a party, I got to talking to a girl who I can fairly describe as pretty hippie’d out. Blond and cute, she had spent some months in India as an actress playing the wrong girl for the hero in Bollywood movies.
“Where’s next?”
“I want to go to Lake Titicaca.”
“Oh, actually, I was just—”
“It’s a magical place,” she said. “There are stone ruins there, and no one knows how they built them. The stones are . . . some really big size. And the further back you go, the more ancient the culture, the bigger the stones were.”
This might be true, I don’t know for sure. I don’t think it’s true. Definitely not worth interrupting somebody at a party over.
“No one has any idea how they built them.”
This is also, I guess, true. I don’t know, though I’ve looked into it a little. The most likely theories seem to be the most boring, like: lots of work and rolled logs. Impressive organization must’ve been involved.
“They didn’t use the wheel. But they had wheels, in children’s toys.”
This: I’m not sure about. The people of North and South America, before Columbus, did not use wheels and axles like they invented in the ancient Middle East. They had round things: calendar stones, millwheels. As for the toys, about this there is some controversy. The best example are some objects that might’ve been children’s toys, or else some kind of funeral offering, found at the Olmec site of Tres Zapotes, now in the Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico. They are animals with a hollow tube that might’ve allowed an axle with wheels to be fit through, to make them roll. The debate about wheeled toys in pre-Columbian America is a hot one. Among the strongest researchers are Mormons, seeking to explain passages in the Book of Mormon, which describes chariots in ancient America.
The last thing I wanted to do at a fun Fourth of July party, though, was discuss the scholarly dispute over the pre-Columbian wheel.
“They had very strong fibers and ropes and wonderful materials,” she said. This is totally true. The Inca and the Maya made rope bridges of impressive strength from the fibers of their indigenous plants.
At this point a guy who was maybe her boyfriend joined the conversation. “Yeah, and hemp. Washington, Jefferson, all those guys were growing hemp. For ropes, but you know they were smoking it. Probably in a blend. The tobacco plant is a cousin to the marijuana plant.”
This I didn’t know but I think it is true. Anyway, we got on that topic for a while.
If she was wrong about the details, she was right that Lake Titicaca is magical. Some hippie-type travelers from around the world have discovered this, but it’s not nearly the thriving bazaar of yoga and meditation retreats that is Lake Atitlán. On the Bolivian side, the feeling of Lake Titicaca is wide emptiness, with water so blue it’s like a color from a wild kids’ cartoon.
On the Isla del Sol, in the middle of Lake Titicaca, not sure what else to do, I walked up and across the island as far as I could, up steep steps from the shore that’re said to date back to the Incas, or even before. I walked past an old church that didn’t look much used lately, and a few farms. On the trail, there were donkeys passing along without too much supervision, knowing and accepting, it seemed, what they were here to do and what paths to follow. Only a few llamas in the walled fields, woolly, kept around for show maybe, or out of deep llama-fondness.
I sat, looked back across the lake. As otherworldly a place as I’d ever seen, but the beauty of it was a touch harsh, the landscape on the far mountains semi-bare, the few boats on the lake almost disappearing on the vastness of the surface.
Welp, I guess that’s Lake Titicaca, I thought.
On the boat back, I sat on the roof with a half-Indian Englishman and his girlfriend who’d biked down here from Colombia.
“How was that?” I asked.
“Quite nice, actually,” said the girlfriend. “A bit exhausting at times as well.”
She stared off, across the lake, and off to the snow-covered mountains of impossible size.
What a very English way to summarize a trip of several thousand miles.
Simón Bolívar
Bolivia is named for Simón Bolívar, the Liberator, a Venezuelan Creole aristocrat who dreamed of a united South America free from Spanish rule. The revolutions he led are turning points in the histories of what are now Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, too.
The career of Bolívar is complicated. In the wild swings of his career he became president of Venezuela twice, first president of “Gran Colombia,” first president of Bolivia, and president of Peru. I can’t say I’m an expert on the man: I have not, for example, read all thirty-two volumes of the memoirs of Daniel Florencio O’Leary, the Irish-born son of a butter salesman who became Bolívar’s close aide. But it seems like you’d be cheated in a book about the southern half of the Western Hemisphere if I didn’t try to round up the facts on the guy who has the most per capita statues of anyone in South America. There’s even a statue of him in New York’s Central Park.
As a boy, Simón Bolívar was raised, mostly, by his family’s slave, Hipólita. The Bolívars had owned copper mines in Venezuela since the earliest days of the country. When he was a teenager, like a lot of South American aristocrats, Simón was sent to Europe for a bit of finishing. It’s claimed in some biographies that he watched the coronation of Napoleon at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris and was inspired to achieve a similar greatness. Like Napoleon, Simón was not a big guy: five foot four, maybe. Other chroniclers say that Simón skipped the coronation because he was disappointed in Napoleon for abandoning the true cause of freedom. Either way, he’d seen an example of a diminutive near-nobody who rose to head an empire.
French military officer Henri La Fayette Villaume Ducoudray Holstein, who served with Bolívar, thought all this time in Paris hadn’t done the guy much good: “He remained a number of years, enjoying at an early period, all the pleasures of life which a rich young man, with bad examples constantly before him, can there easily find.” With disapproval, Ducoudray Holstein says that Bolívar loved to talk about Paris: “His physiognomy became animated, and he spoke and gesticulated with such ardour as showed how fond he was of that enchanting abode, so dangerous to youth. His residence in Paris, and especially at the Palais Royal, has done him great injury. He is pale, and of a yellowish colour, meagre, weak and enervated.”
Ducoudray Holstein didn’t think much of Bolívar in the end. He found him full of “monstrous faults,” like epic womanizing, laziness, and yelling at everybody all the time and making sarcastic remarks about them when they were gone. In his Memoirs of Simón Bolívar, Ducoudray Holstein scoffs at the great-man theory. Instead, in a fantastic phrase, he says that Bolívar was “the sport of circumstances.”
Back in Venezuela, young Simón joined a revolutionary army, and through skill and betraying some of his fellow officers he rose to the top of it. In 1813, he issued the Decreto de Guerra a Muerte, the Decree of War to the Death, in which he announced that any Spaniards who didn’t actively support independence for Venezuela and Colombia could expect to be killed. It’s a pretty dramatic read: May the monsters that infest Colombian soil, and have covered it with blood disappear for good; may their punishment be equal to the magnitude of their treason, so that the stain of our ignominy is washed off, and to show the nations of the universe that the sons of America cannot be offended without punishment.
B
y this time the Spanish Empire was in crumbles. Napoleon was destroying Spain. You can’t help but feel bad for the poor Spanish soldiers who died fighting Bolívar’s armies at the battles of Boyacá and Carabobo, and the Spanish officers he executed. At Carabobo, Bolívar’s loyal dog Nevado got killed, too.
Bolívar himself owned slaves, but after the black president of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion, became an ally, he abolished slavery. “It is impossible to say with any certainty to which human race we belong” was Bolívar’s attitude. He himself was pretty mixed up, racially.
But Bolívar was a big believer in “president for life” type arrangements, and lifetime senates and noble titles. In the nations of South America, he believed, leaders would require an “infinitely firm hand.” He’d hoped to unite all of what he’d liberated into one big nation, but it wasn’t to be. Betrayals and conspiracies undid him. With local rebellions springing up, he divided his dreamed-for republic into present-day Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
Dodging assassination only with the help of his mistress toward the end of his life, Bolívar decided it was time to go into exile in Europe. He died before he made it.
While he was president of Venezuela in the 2000s, Hugo Chávez got into the idea that Bolívar must’ve been poisoned. His body was exhumed to check it out, but there wasn’t much evidence.
In the last line of his Memoirs of Simón Bolívar, Ducoudray Holstein has this to say: “The worst of Bolívar’s acts is the last, where he has impudently thrown off his flimsy mask, and declared that ‘bayonets are the best, the only rules of nations.’ This pernicious example, it is to be feared, will be followed by other chieftains, in the new Spanish Republics.”
The more you read about the founders of other nations, the more you realize why early Americans revered George Washington so much.