World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [27]
Bolivia and Other Countries
with Amerindian Majorities
At Augusto’s urging, I visited La Paz in June 2001 along with my husband and two daughters, and gave a lecture at the Catholic University of Bolivia. La Paz is breathtaking, literally and metaphorically. The city rises up out of a gigantic crater, surrounded by the Andes, with the magnificent Mount Illimani towering over the other snowcapped peaks. Despite its stark beauty, La Paz attracts relatively few tourists, in part because its eleven-thousand-foot altitude leaves the unaccustomed with headaches and even the locals with low energy. My family and I were no exception. Arriving in early June 2001, we spent most of the first day resting, as Augusto had advised, downing aspirin and mate de coca (tea from coca leaves), venturing out only late in the day to do some exploring. As it happens, the first souvenir I bought was a dried llama fetus.
Revolting as it may sound, my poor stillborn llama is actually rather cute. Frozen in the fetal position and dried stiff like beef jerky, it has the gentle, smiling face of a camel and plenty of soft, if slightly formaldehyde-scented, fur. I bought the llama fetus partly because it horrified me, but also for educational purposes, so that my eight-year-old daughter Sophia could show it to her class. (She refused to bring it in.)
Bolivians buy llama fetuses to ward off evil in its many guises. Bolivian miners—who, with a life expectancy of forty-five years, basically live their entire adult lives dying—look to llama fetuses for protection against dynamite explosions and the lung-destroying silicon particulates they inhale all day. Downing high-proof alcohol also helps. “The purer the alcohol, the purer the minerals I find,” one miner told me wryly.
Llama fetuses can be found everywhere in Bolivia if you just know where to look. (So can live llamas and, at least in La Paz, llama steaks.) I bought my llama fetus at the Mercado de las Brujas, or Witches’ Market, on Calle Sagárnaga. Like virtually all the market vendors in Bolivia, the person who sold me my llama fetus was an Amerindian woman: in this case an Aymara wearing the distinctive bowler hat and ruffled skirts seen all around La Paz. (Along with most tourists, I assumed that these wonderful hats and skirts were traditional, indigenous costumes; in fact, they reflect early indigenous efforts to look more “Spanish.”) Our vendor was friendly and inquisitive. Her skin was typically sun-leathered—La Paz is the highest, most radiated capital in the world—and to my untrained eye she could have been anywhere between thirty and sixty years of age. She spoke almost no English and a nonstandard Spanish, infused with numerous Aymara words.
Nevertheless, it was obvious that this vendor of fetuses—pig and lamb as well as llama—and other traditional amulets was an adroit entrepreneur. After five minutes of her marketing, cajoling, bargaining, and lifetime guarantees, I eagerly paid the woman twenty dollars (about 8,000 percent the going market price, I later learned) for a souvenir that, it turns out, scares the living daylights out of everyone I know.
Legend has it that Amerindians are famous traders, long used to money and markets. The vendors in La Paz’s open markets work hard, wheedling and charming locals and tourists alike from dawn to dusk. They are frugal and aggressive; one Mexican anthropologist said fifty years ago that they have a distinctly “commercial libido.”
6 Yet, along with the rest of Bolivia’s 65 percent indigenous majority, these Aymaran booth vendors are part of the country’s entrenched, appallingly poor, Amerindian economic underclass. Compared to the West, this ethnic “underclass” is, relatively speaking, huge, encompassing the great majority of the Bolivian people, most of whom have no access to heat—not even in the high plateau areas, where it is freezing cold at night—clean water, or medical care. “Only the rich can afford real doctors,” a Quechuan driver said to me. “For most of us Bolivians, if you get sick, you pray to pachamama (Mother