A Global Phenomenon. El Mundial. The World Cup. Le Coupe Du Monde. For one month every four years the world is overcome by football fever and Bolivia is no different, despite the fact that the last (and only) time the national team qualified for the World Cup was in 1994. A poor showing of 10th in the South American qualifiers meant transferring support to some of their continental neighbours – but only for the duration of the competition.

Unfortunately for many, the games were only showed on cable TV, a priviledge still only available to a small fraction of Bolivians. Nonetheless, opportunities to watch the action live weren’t lacking, particularly in public places, and people did almost anything to see the games. Across La Paz, four giant screens were erected by Samsung with every match witnessing tighly-packed crowds sitting and standing on every imaginable surface. Paceños also had the chance to watch the games in the small screens of buildings such as the Correo Central and certain banks, giving people the opportunity carry on with their everyday lives (albeit much more slowly).

Many people who were unable to abandon work just to watch the football were invariably reduced to listening to it on the radio, relying on the excitable voices of the Bolivian commentators. The cinema, with a better atmosphere, bigger screen and slightly more committed fans, was another popular viewing site, the only price for entry being at least half an hour in a queue to guarantee a seat. During one of the quarter finals the crowd was so engrossed in the match (supporting Paraguay) that when a small infant started crying, everyone, without turning their eyes away from the screen, hushed the child to such an extent that the parent hurried outside in embarrassment. Examples are abound of people taking matches too seriously, perhaps the most extreme of which was the fight that broke out between two German tourists and a Bolivian who took exception to their celebrations, ensuing in police intervention and participants being roundly booed for interrupting the match. In spite of the absence of Bolivia from the competition, most people found a surrogate team to back through most of the competition. While locals largely supported participating South American teams, a line was drawn at Argentina, the likely cause being the perceived mistreatment of Bolivian immigrants in this neighbouring country, as well as their infamous Porteño arrogance. Many Bolivians could be found cheering for whoever was playing against them. The extent of this animosity was felt during the quarter-final between Germany and Argentina, when German flags were handed out near to the giant screen by the UMSA, creating a mass of black, red and yellow. Celebrations became more and more exuberant as each German goal went in and the potential for an Argentinean comeback diminished. However, with the elimination of Uruguay in the semi finals (the last remaining South American contender), Bolivia was left to choose a new team to follow. Miguel, a builder who had taken one of his ten days of yearly leave, watched the match between Uruguay and Holland with his twelve year old son Christian. He nutshelled the general sentiment by proclaiming “now we can just relax and watch good football without worrying who will win.” Though for him (as for many others in the crowd), this meant following Spain, the team which they could presumably relate to most easily. Unsurprisingly, however, there was also considerable support for Holland in the Final, as the scar tissue from the Spanish conquest lives on 500 years later. Some closely followed one big favourite: “Germany wouldn’t be so bad. They score a lot of goals” according to Javier, a student at Universidad Catolica who had brought some work to do at half-time.

Unfortunately, not everyone enjoyed direct access to the football. While even some of the poorest people have makeshift televisions at home (visit any dwelling in El Alto for evidence of this), the majority don’t have access to cable TV, a luxury costing upwards of $20 a month. Exclusive deals with these companies left millions of Bolivians without a chance to watch the action from their homes. The serendipitous outcome of these social inequalities is the mass confluence of paceños at the large Samsung screens, which can attract crowds of up to 800 people. I was fortunate enough to watch the Final in a comfortable apartment in the Zona Sur of La Paz. With a pretty even split between Dutch and Spanish supporters, it was a very social affair: beer flowing, jokes flying back and forth, and everyone trying to outdo each other with knowledge about anything and everything that was remotely related to football. This just reinforced the impression I had already formed; that Bolivians follow football with a raw passion for quality and magic, thousands of miles away from the money and glamour that have tarnished the game in Europe. Official-shirt-clad or wearing abarcas, clutching a pocket-radio or a can of beer, football fanatics in this country will take any opportunity to revel in 90 minutes of sweat, glory and frustration, especially when the whole world is watching.

About 70 km from La Paz, a field of coca plants clings to the steep slopes of Las Yungas. This transitional zone between dry highlands and humid lowlands provides the ideal climate for the most stigmatized of plants. Many of the leaves harvested in the field will be sold in Bolivian markets to be chewed or made into tea. The majority will be taken to clandestine labs where one of their alkaloids will be extracted and purified to make cocaine. Some of the leaves will go into toothpaste and shampoo, and a tiny, select proportion will be shipped to a chemical plant in Maywood, New Jersey, working for The Coca-Cola Company. 

Coca-Cola was first formulated in 1886 by an American pharmacist, who described the product as a “brain tonic and intellectual beverage”. At the time, its two key ingredients were pure cocaine and caffeine. The name comes from the coca plant and the kola nut, a caffeine-rich plant native to the tropical rainforests of Africa. Today, the basic taste of “cola” products comes mainly from vanilla and cinnamon; distinctive tastes among various brands are the result of trace flavorings such as orange, lime and lemon and spices such as nutmeg. // However, Coca-Cola’s formula is still a closely kept secret, known only to a few executives. According to the Bolivian newspaper Los Tiempos, there may be a good reason for this secrecy. Every year, the Stepan Company imports about 100 metric tons of coca leaf from Bolivia and Peru. At their plant in New Jersey, they supposedly remove the cocaine alkaloid from the leaves and sell the cocaine-free leaf to Coca-Cola for use as a flavouring. This is all “legit”: in fact, Stepan Company’s plant is the only one authorized by the US Federal Government to import and process the coca plant.  But Los Tiempos raises three interesting points:

1. Coca-Cola specifically uses Erythroxylum truxillense, or coca de Trujillo, the variety of coca leaf that contains the highest levels of cocaine alkaloid.
2. According to research done in Bolivia, it’s almost impossible to recover flavour from the coca leaf once it has gone through the cocaine-removal process.
3. Access to Stepan Company’s plant in New Jersey is said to be more difficult than the Federal Gold Reserve at Fort Knox.

Coca-Cola is everywhere: present in more than 200 countries, its banners can even be found in small African settlements that don’t have access to water. But, Coca-Cola is not actually bottled on the production site, the company only sells the
concentrate. This potent mixture is shipped to plants around the world, where water is added and the solution is bottled. Buy a bottle of Coke in Bolivia and you will notice it tastes slightly different: it is bottled in La Paz, using Bolivian water. The most recognised brand in the world, Coca-Cola has become a symbol of America and Western values. For some, it represents American imperialism and threatens cultural identity. //To defend themselves, certain communities have produced alternative cola: Mecca Cola, Corsica Cola, Cola Turka, Qibla Cola, Virgin Cola, Parsi Cola, Breizh Cola, Afria Cola and Kitty Cola are but a few in a long list of brands that are challenging their dominant parent.

Here in Latin America, , the Peruvian drink Inca Kola seems to be the most successful alternative to Coca-Cola. Its main flavouring is lemon verbena, a plant native to the Andes. Inca Kola is the most popular drink in Peru; its slogan is “El Sabor del Perú”. But in reality it’s not a true alternative cola: it’s 50% owned by The Coca-Cola Company. Bolivia has three brands of alternative Cola: Coka Quina, Mendocina and the most recent, Coca-Colla. The latter is also the most controversial. Produced by Ospicoca (Organización Social Para la Industrialización de la Coca), it is meant to restore the coca leaf to the position of honour it held in Andean culture, a cause championed by Evo Morales. But Bolivian newspaper El Deber notes that it has never been confirmed whether the leaves used will be cocaine-free. If not, the drink could be lethal if mixed with alcohol, and we may have another variant to add to our list: Coca Killer.

AN INTERVIEW WITH LA CASCADA....
How was Coka Quina born?

La Cascada is a family enterprise started in El Alto by José and Angelina de Eid 45 years ago. They developed Coka Quina’s secret recipe and came up with the name. Quina refers to a root used for centuries by Andean people to fight malaria – one of its alkaloids is quinine. At the time, everything was done manually by La Cascada’s 23 employees…

And today…?

The original bottling plant in El Alto employs 150 people and output is much greater thanks to mechanisation: each production line outputs 50 bottles per minute!

What makes La Cascada special?

Our mission is to make Coka Quina the drink of Bolivia thanks to its incredible affordability: glass bottles are returned to the factory to be refilled (after having been cleaned, naturally), so when you buy a bottle of Coka Quina, you only pay for the liquid! What’s more, we don’t waste a single drop: instead of throwing away bottles with skew labels or faulty caps, we save the liquid and donate it to orphanages.

I forgot to mention it but thought it was worth adding...

We’re committed to quality too: we use pure sugar from Santa Cruz and no colourants. Coka Quina is sampled and tested every 8 minutes during the production process and the mixing room is sterilised every 20 minutes.

…mission successful?

Certainly! Coka Quina is the most popular drink in El Alto and can be found as far as Colombia, even though it’s not officially exported. The emblematic deer printed on the bottles enables the real Coka Quina to be recognised by all. The drink is so popular that some people drink it warm for breakfast!

As a student in the UK, I’m more than mildly aware that for the majority of eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds there, university is the next logical step after college. For many, university is about moving away from home, making new friends, extracurricular activities (for the more enthusiastic), realising their gap year didn’t make them half as sure of themselves as they’d thought, and, of course, having the freedom to pump themselves full of all things bad and beautiful so they can forget how little work they did the day before. No prizes for guessing that in Bolivia, this is different.

 Having just begun a year abroad, I hardly expected to return to higher education so quickly; but this month I’ve been doing a little research to see just how different university in La Paz is from the world I only recently left behind. For the majority of students in Bolivia, university isn’t as great a leap as it seemed to me in England. For starters, most students don’t leave home. One of my interviewees, Claudia, studies Engineering at a well-known public university in La Paz, the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (and if this doesn’t roll off the tongue, try UMSA). “My family is very traditional,” she tells me. “Normally, women don’t leave home until they get married, so my parents didn’t want me to leave.” 

Ivan, a recent graduate from a private university, the Universidad Católica Boliviana (or UCB), asserts that “it’s just not the done thing. People don’t leave home. University is a lot like school; in some ways, there isn’t really much of a change.” Of course, if students come from far away – like from Santa Cruz or Cochabamba – they live in student accommodation; but evidently these are few and far between. None of the people I talked to knew anyone living away from home. Living at home obviously has financial benefits, too, although that’s not to say university is expensive, especially not for the public students (although costs vary depending on course – the UMSA website tells me that dentistry, for instance, costs six hundred bolivianos, whereas most humanities degrees cost about half of this figure). 

Nonetheless, in general it’s the UMSA students who decide to take jobs while studying, and for reasons aplenty. Sharoll, who studied Business Administration at UMSA, suggests that, given the pressure to marry to avoid illegitimacy, some students already have families to support. “The public university students tend to have a lower income,” Ivan tells me, unsurprisingly. European students are no stranger to just how much all the little things – and at times the most important ones – can cost; from pencils and pads to sports gear and other unmentionables, there are plenty of things to drain any student loan. However, the time constraints imposed by working and studying simultaneously can have serious consequences: many students are forced to limit the number of modules they study per year in order to juggle university with a job – and there are very few part time offers – which extends the time taken to complete their degree. (I struggle to imagine just how many years I’d be at university if I added a few months for every essay or half-arsed translation I’ve handed in late). Again, this is generally a public university phenomenon, Ivan explains; he himself has an UMSA student working in his office. UCB students can choose the number of hours they study per week – Ivan suggests an average of twenty four – meaning they can complete their undergraduate studies more quickly. Because of this, whereas a UCB student can complete his or her course in four to six years, a degree at UMSA can take anything from four to fourteen to thirty years (resist the temptation to imagine a Bolivian version of Van Wilder, please). 

 The sheer effort it can take to complete a degree at UMSA means that in many circles its graduates are held in high esteem; nevertheless, it’s the Universidad Católica that’s thought to be the best, Ivan insists (though there’s a chance he’s slightly biased...). With more money, it has better facilities and more space; indeed, one of the principal issues Claudia has with UMSA is that there isn’t enough space to study or relax and the university is slightly run-down. “The main problem is a physical one,” she states. Her department, engineering, is excellently equipped for the job, but teaching and facilities vary from subject to subject; both medicine and literature, Sharoll tells me, are very well taught, whereas the much less popular anthropology is aptly considered a weaker department. But how do all of these issues – accommodation, employment, space – affect the student community? 

Sharoll, Claudia and Ivan all agree that there is little interaction on a university level, given that clubs and societies are virtually non-existent, but much more on a departmental one. At UMSA, the student community is strung together by a board of student representatives called the Centro de los Estudiantes, though the knot is not well tied: neither Sharoll nor Claudia seems sure of exactly what the Centro does. The elected students are meant to look out for the student body as a whole, Sharoll explains; Claudia adds that at first they are eager to show their support, but their enthusiasm soon dwindles. Ivan doesn’t even know if a Centro-type organisation exists in the UCB, which goes to show how significant it is (or would be). “No-one is interested in that sort of thing,” he says, “there’s no motivation. It’s a waste of time.” Ivan’s final comment makes me wonder: just how important is university today in Bolivia? He guessed that only around sixty per cent of people go to university in La Paz, and it’s very likely this figure is much smaller outside of the capital; for many, particularly those who come from and will remain in an agricultural background, higher education is neither a logical nor helpful step towards the future. 

The lack of a Centro type organisation at the UCB, and its inefficacy at the UMSA, point to a political apathy in students’ lives that seems to reflect the current state of affairs in England. It is perhaps telling that, as Ivan adds, there is a growing tendency amongst private university students to put studying on the back burner and prioritise all the sex, coke, and cumbia that have become such common components of university life in England.