World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [28]
The same day that I bought the llama fetus, I met some of Augusto’s friends at a dinner party at his apartment. They were an urbane and witty group. Two were descended from former presidents of Bolivia. Several held notable political positions. A cabinet-level minister was there; she was a beautiful woman whose parents had been schoolteachers. Her husband, also present, had been head of a different department in a previous administration; his family once owned what is now an entire neighborhood in La Paz (although at the time, he explained, the land was not valuable). Another guest, a jovial, self-made cement magnate, was a vice presidential candidate in the coming election, who had a few years earlier survived a harrowing kidnap. Not all of Augusto’s friends were well-off. One was a quirky, erudite polyglot, who had cotaught with the philosopher Adorno in Frankfurt for many years. “Augusto and I come from one of the oldest families in Bolivia,” he whispered to me at one point, “but we were not businesspeople, and today we are the poor cousins here.” “I can’t bear this horrible Indian folk music,” he announced loudly at another point, requesting that Augusto put on a different CD. Another guest was a newspaper columnist who made ends meet by acting as a guide for European and North American tourists.
We dined on quail eggs, homemade pâté, and fresh trout from Lake Titicaca, all prepared by Augusto’s Aymaran housekeeper. The conversation was principally in English. Although Bolivians typically stress that everyone in the country has some indigenous blood (“no one is pure white,” as one of Augusto’s friends put it), and although one guest at Augusto’s dinner looked distinctly indio, most were what North Americans would consider “white”—light-skinned, blond and blue-eyed, auburn-haired and green-eyed, and so on. They were also disproportionately good-looking and on average about a foot taller than the indigenous maid and manservant serving us. Most had European ancestors, and not just from Spain. Augusto’s mother, for example, was of Scottish descent.
Characterizing Bolivia’s ethnic makeup is tricky, given the high historical rates of “racial mixing” and phenomena such as “encholamiento,” in which a white man and an Amerindian or mestiza woman (a chola) have a son, who, if successful, marks his success by marrying a white woman. Today, Bolivian society is loosely divisible into three layers. To use the terminology of Bolivia’s census as late as 1976, “whites” make up 5 to 15 percent of the population, “mestizos” make up 20 to 30 percent, and “Indians” 60 to 65 percent. These classifications are of course highly artificial; wealth can turn a “mestizo” or even an “Indian” into a white. As the Bolivian intellectual Tristán Marof wrote decades ago, “‘Whites’ are all that have fortune in Bolivia, those that exercise influence and occupy high positions. A rich mestizo or Indian, although he has dark skin, considers himself white.”
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Nevertheless, the bottom line in Bolivia is this. The country’s Amerindian majority, many of whom lived as serfs until 1952, are largely excluded from the modern economy. Most live in poverty, with no secondary education, no access to sanitation, and terrible teeth. According to the government’s own statistics, 90 percent of rural Bolivians—overwhelmingly Amerindians—cannot satisfy basic necessities.
8 Among the “mestizo” group, economic success is more mixed. But Bolivia’s whites* enjoy wildly disproportionate wealth and status.
Together with foreign investors, Bolivia’s white elite, defining itself through European or North American cultural habits, controls the vast part of Bolivia’s wealth, including the country’s most valuable natural resources and its most modern and advanced economic sectors. Private schools, foreign degrees, international business contacts, and fluency in English (as well as French and German, in many cases) reinforce the market dominance of this minority over Bolivia’s Aymara and Quechua Indian majority, many of whom speak only