Photo: Jose Luis Quintana

During Bolivia’s 2003 Gas War, alteños stood up to the neoliberal state, and in the process helped change history in an indigenous country long dominated by white colonisers. But the families of those killed in the conflict, and the wounded survivors, had to wait 15 years for justice.

In October of 2003, El Alto, La Paz’s sister city on the edge of the altiplano, exploded in protest in response to the announcement of then–Bolivian President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s government that it would begin exporting natural gas through Chile to the United States. When the dust settled, some 60 people would be dead and hundreds more wounded; Sánchez de Lozada would resign his presidency and flee to the United States; and the political foundation of Bolivia would undergo a profound transformation, in which indigenous cocalero leader Evo Morales would succeed to the presidency just two years later. The gas deal with the United States would die after the uprising, and a new, indigenous-led political landscape would begin to take shape. But the bereft families of 60 dead alteños, and the wounded survivors who had to begin new lives with debilitating injuries, would wait over a decade before seeing some form of justice – that is, until earlier this year, when Sánchez de Lozada and his former minister of defence, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín, were finally held accountable for the violence and deaths during those fateful days.

On 3 April 2018, a US federal jury found Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín to be responsible for the deaths of nine protesters during the Gas War, and they were ordered to pay US $10 million to the victims’ survivors. The case was brought about by lawyers from Harvard Law School under the US Torture Victims Protection Act, which allows for civil suits in the United States against individuals who, acting in an official capacity, commit torture or extrajudicial killings. Thomas Becker, who initiated the case in 2005 as a student at Harvard Law School and is now an attorney at Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic, explains how he inadvertently stumbled onto the case: ‘I came [to Bolivia] in May 2005…before I started law school, just to learn more about Bolivia and practice my really bad Spanish.’ Demonstrations had erupted in El Alto to protest the presidency of Carlos Mesa, Sánchez de Lozada’s successor, and La Paz was cut off by blockades. Becker was forced to walk to La Paz’s Sopocachi neighbourhood, where he was staying. ‘The city was shut down,’ he says. ‘I had to walk from the airport with my gringo backpack, and I had to walk through tear gas and blockades. And truthfully, that's where I first learned about what happened in 2003.’

Bolivia has a history of protests. As even travellers quickly learn, blockades, in which demonstrators cut off access to cities and towns by obstructing roads with large rocks or felled trees, are a way of life here. Reasons can vary from the prosaic (though still unjust), such as landowners limiting grazing rights to tenant farmers, to the critical, such as when Santa Cruz, the country’s largest city and the seat of its industrial base, was blockaded in late 2008 for weeks due to clashes over the Media Luna’s attempt to achieve greater autonomy.

Historically, these blockades have been a response of the powerless minority to hold some sway over the political elite. Nearly 300 years ago, indigenous revolutionary Tupac Katari led an uprising against the Spanish colonial occupier. His siege, centred in El Alto, lasted six months and blockaded La Paz completely before Spanish reinforcements crushed the insurrection.

And so this spirit of protests, demonstrations, even insurrection is commonplace in the Bolivia of today, and certainly it was 15 years ago, as Sánchez de Lozada’s neoliberal reforms were confronted on the edge of the altiplano.

In 2003, Mónica Apaza was a youth leader of the Federation of Neighbourhood Councils-El Alto (FEJUVE), an alteño social-justice organisation. She’s now part of the Jach’as collective at Radio Pachamama, a radio station in the La Ceja neighbourhood of El Alto whose reporters covered the Gas War extensively. She remembers the events leading up to the conflict: ‘So Goni [Sánchez de Lozada’s nickname] wanted to export gas via Chilean ports… We decided that this shouldn’t happen. We convened all the presidents of the FEJUVE of El Alto and we organised an assembly. We discussed that declaration from Goni, and we agreed that we wouldn’t let this happen.’ The protesters started with three days of blockades, and the demonstrations soon grew to include much of El Alto.

The Bolivian government immediately reacted. It didn’t want a replay of the 1999-2000 Cochabamba Water War, in which protesters managed to expel from the country the US company that was charged by the Bolivian government with privatising Cochabamba’s water company.

Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín ordered the military to contain the protests in El Alto. According to witness testimony at their trial, in meetings they discussed mass killings to suppress protests. ‘They needed to send the military, bring in the military from the east, because the people from the altiplano wouldn't kill their own people,’ Becker says. And, as a witness said at the trial, ‘They need to kill a thousand people to send a message to the social movements.’

And thus the killings began. The military fired blindly into crowds. One of the first killed was an 8-year-old girl. David Inca, a human-rights activist who is also a  member of the Jach’as collective, was helping the injured as the military started its attack. ‘People were screaming: “There’s a fatality! There’s a fatality!”’ he said. ‘It was a [another] kid that had died… The neighbours took me to where the kid had died. The boy wasn’t there anymore, but I met his siblings and the grandma and they showed me where it had happened… There was a lot of blood. I never saw the boy, but they showed me from where he had been shot, from a bridge, Puente Bolivia. What shocked me is that it was very far away, the boy’s house was really far away from the conflict. It was strange, why did they shoot the boy?’

Casualties started to add up: A pregnant woman was gunned down in her house. Even soldiers were attacked by their fellow conscripts. Ela Trinidad Ortega was brutally beaten by the military after she witnessed a high-level officer execute a conscript who refused orders to shoot upon the unarmed crowd in the Río Seco neighbourhood. Another officer ordered her to be executed, which she only narrowly survived because a distraught, crying conscript, not wanting to kill her, begged her to play dead. Fifteen years later, she told her story in the US court as Sánchez de Lozada looked on impassively.

Eventually, the demonstrations subsided in El Alto, and the extrajudicial killings by the Bolivian military slowed and ceased. But the country was in chaos. Popular outrage over the killings eventually forced Sánchez de Lozada to resign his presidency and eventually flee the country. Carlos Mesa, his vice president, continued to have difficulty with mass protests throughout the country, led by one ascendant cocalero. Soon, Evo Morales would be elected to the chief executive position, and a new indigenous-led government would grab the reins of power.

And here we are today. The Bolivian state, despite having weathered several more fractious political confrontations, seems relatively stable, given its past. Justice, in part, has been served to Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín. They remain free in the United States, but they have been found culpable by a US jury in the killings of nine people during the Gas War of 2003, and they are now legally compelled to pay out US $10 million to the survivors. But, as Thomas Becker says, ‘Money isn’t justice.’ Justice would mean that that those that were killed would still be alive, and of course that cannot happen. Frankly, Goni and Sánchez Berzaín should be here, and they should be tried in front of Bolivians,’ Becker says. ‘And the Bolivian people should decide whether they are responsible or not.’ But that isn’t an option, at least for now, as the United States has refused to extradite the two despite repeated requests from the current Bolivian government. Sánchez de Lozada and Sánchez Berzaín ‘chose to go to the United States and use the United States as a refuge,’ Becker adds. ‘So the victims followed them there, which I think is a powerful message, that OK, you can run away, but we’re never going to let you rest.’

Photos: Daniel Maydana

The creature with precious wool that almost went extinct

With Bambi eyes and neat, pointy ears, the slender, tawny vicuña is noticeably more elegant than its shaggy llama and alpaca cousins. It’s hard to believe that this ostensibly delicate creature, robust enough to roam the oxygen-starved altiplano, was once almost a bygone species. In the 1960s, when the number of vicuñas in the world dropped to less than 10,000, the Bolivian and Peruvian governments made an attempt to save the creature. The two governments signed an agreement that made it illegal to hunt the animal and designated protected areas for the vicuña in the form of national parks and natural reserves. The effort certainly succeeded in recovering its numbers. A 2009 census confirmed the existence in Bolivia of around 112,000 vicuñas – 27% of the world’s vicuña population – up from 2,000 in 1969. The challenge now is not only to maintain its population but to find sustainable ways to benefit from this potentially lucrative resource.

It is no secret that the vicuña’s value is as much ecological as it is economic. the silky-softness of the fabric yielded from its wool, treated and conditioned, is more coveted then cashmere in the textile industry. Untreated wool is priced at between $350 and $600 per kilo, and a finished product, like gloves or a coat, can sell for between $2,000 to a whopping $50,000.

Indeed, the rusty-hued hairs of the vicuña may very well be mistaken for threads of gold. This is why the vicuña has historically been a highly-revered creature and, naturally, highly in-demand. In the Pre-Columbian era, its luxurious wool clothed figures of high social status and was treated with a quasi-religious respect. Back then, the method used to obtain vicuña wool consisted in a ritual, called ‘chaku’, that involved gathering and shearing the creatures before returning them to the wild. The arrival of Spanish colonists, however, gave rise to a hunting trend that spelled the vicuña’s gradual demise. With no respect for indigenous beliefs but a fervent desire for the animal’s supple coat, they hunted the vicuña without control nor restriction, with a ruthless frequency that brought, at the end of the 1960s, the species to the brink of extinction.

The vicuña cannot be raised because it resists domestication. The sheer effort of capturing them in the wild was, and still is, enough to encourage hunters to prefer shooting and skinning them over the traditional ‘chaku’ method. Admittedly, the cost of assembling, hiring and feeding a team of 50 to 60 able-bodied people (which is the necessary number for a successful capture) is undeniably high. Added to this, months of careful observation are required in order to determine the best time and place to seize them. Prior to the attempted round up, one must monitor the migration and grazing habits of the elusive camelid herd. The use of a sustainable method, however, although demanding, is key not only to protect the country’s biodiversity, but also to diversify its economy. For the communities, it is profitable socially, economically and environmentally.

This is because the vicuña shares the Andean highlands with some of Bolivia’s rural communities. There are currently 108 communities involved in the vicuña conservation programme. The participation of these communities is essential for the protection of vicuña populations: they take care of and protect the vicuñas according to animal welfare standards defined by the government. In return, the government gives them the right to use and gain advantage from the fiber.

Daniel Maydana, who runs one of these programmes in the department of Potosí, has been working for the conservation of the species. His programme, which is sponsored by the Embassy of Canada, supports 10 indigenous communities in the municipality of Colcha K where about 4,500 vicuñas live in protected areas. The communities are encouraged to protect the animals and develop local capacities to shear the creature at a certain time each year, encouraging the integration of these communities to form cooperatives and stronger corralling teams. The promotion of this method is essential to establish a law-abiding technique to obtain vicuña wool and allow locals to benefit from this resource in a sustainable way.

Though it’s a Bolivian resource with great economic potential, Bolivia doesn’t have its own efficiently-functioning vicuña wool industry. Selling it with value-added rather than as a raw material would greatly increase its economic value. Since the country’s colonisation, however, the techniques for treating the fiber have been gradually lost over the centuries and now 95% of the world’s vicuña fiber is being sent to Italy to be processed. However, Maydana’s project is made possible thanks to the collaboration between the local councils of Colcha K, Los Lípez San Cristóbal, the San Cristóbal mining cooperative, the Embassy of Canada and Conservation International. The local municipality is also supporting the project with 10% of the total budget. Despite not receiving public state funding, these local initiatives are part of a series of governmental policies to protect the vicuña.

Due to this local loss of technical know-how, the vicuña wool that is sold in Bolivia has been previously exported, woven into a product, and then very rarely makes it back into the country. The high prices for these goods encourage poaching and the existence of a black-market that serves certain people who don vicuña wool for occasions such as the festival of Gran Poder, where some vicuña clothing is still used as a sign of prestige and high social status. According to Maydana, most vicuña wool products sold in Bolivia are made from illegally sourced material. Although the punishment for illegal traders is three to six years in prison, criminals somehow seem to slip through the legal net, circumventing the wool certification process. This uncertified wool is smuggled across the border to Peru, where it is often mixed with wool from other camelids to make a cheaper piece of clothing. As a result, there is no guarantee as to the quality and purity of most garments sold locally.

In addition to internal distribution issues surrounding vicuña-wool products, there are also significant obstacles when it comes to accessing the international market. Although the majority of the wool collected in Bolivia is shipped to manufacturers in Europe, the wool must first pass a complex certification procedure to be declared legal and thus exportable. Because vicuñas are a protected species locally and internationally, the certification process can be slow and arduous. From the moment of closing a sale to receiving payment for the wool, a merchant could be waiting for up to 20 months. The processing time was recently reduced to seven months, but last year it climbed back up to 14 months. By contrast, the median waiting time in Peru is no more than three weeks.

‘Banal things such as administrative obstacles and judicial insecurity are holding us back,’ Maydana says. Another bureaucratic hurdle is that sellers have to register as exporters, and their registration (which takes weeks to finalise in the first place) can be annulled for reasons such as not making a sale in a given amount of time. And, since 2017, according to the CITES convention, to be able to use the vicuña brand, industries that produce the final products have to issue a country of origin certificate. The implementation of this measure adds new barriers to commercialisation.

Maydana points out that, ‘There is a need to improve the export processes of vicuña fiber by making it faster and more flexible. This is how communities will end up benefiting economically from it, which ultimately is the main incentive [for the communities].’ He adds, ‘It is a strange thing that happens here in Bolivia, this lack of reliance on, or even awareness of how to benefit from, our resources and the international market. Unlike Peru,’ he explains, ‘which has an established an alpaca wool industry and is a country known for its alpacas. This is a country that’s closed to the world.’

Although there is faith that the number of vicuñas living in Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Ecuador will climb to 400,000 by the next census, it remains to be seen whether administrative improvements will have been made so that the people of Bolivia can benefit from this thriving recuperation.

Photos: Niahm Elain

We clamber, bleary-eyed, onto the minibus that will take us from Cochabamba to our final destination. On the bus’s sliding door, an enormous picture of a roaring Tyrannosaurus rex identifies our destination. We discover that Torotoro, a small village in the centre of the national park with which it shares its name, really capitalises on this brand: giant plastic T. Rexes lurch out from roofs and tower over park benches; one even bursts through the glass doors of the town’s council hall.

A new day dawns and our guiding light is Redi, who will show us the El Vergel route. Behind his sunglasses lie a wealth of Cretaceous knowledge and dinosaur puns. He informs us that dinosaurs roamed the site that is now known as Torotoro sometime before Christ. We ask him when did Torotoro as a village come to exist. Again, he says, sometime before Christ.

After two hours of trekking, we are huffing and puffing. It is time for another break. It is definitely time for more snacks. The next 40 minutes of walking bring us through the canyon and to a misty waterfall cascading down onto enormous rocks, etched with the names of past toroteño tourists. We stare for a bit, we eat another guava each (‘dinosaur snacks,’ Redi calls them). The bravest of us wades into the Edenic pool into which the waterfall pours. Redi comes to sit very close and starts reading facts about dinosaurs to me from what can only be an illustrated children’s book. It is time to leave.

Near the trail’s end, we have a beer (‘dinosaur fuel,’ Redi calls it) in a lone ramshackle café atop the canyon cliff. We take in the breathtaking panorama before heading back to the village.

With the sun flooding the cold, blue mountains the next morning, we start on the long road back home. Or the ‘dinosaur road,’ as Redi would have called it.