Alcoholism in Bolivia: from social pastime to social illness.

A group of teenagers giggle as they line up outside the club. Still in school, they’re not yet legally allowed to buy or consume alcohol legally, but that won’t pose a problem for them. Walking straight past the bouncers, they rush in excitedly, making a beeline for the bar and placing their orders, then throwing back tequila shots and brightly coloured cocktails. When the club closes, they take a taxi to one of the numerous other clubs that stay open past legal hours. There’s no shortage in the city, and they all come well stocked with alcohol. Tomorrow, August 6, is a holiday, which means they can sleep off their hangovers. Stumbling home, one of the girls trips and begins to retch violently. Her friends help her up, but it’s not long before she stumbles and vomits again. This is the next generation of Bolivians, already caught up in the festival culture that characterizes the country and the alcohol that accompanies it.

Visit La Paz on any given day of the year, and you’ll have a good idea of why it was named as one of the top 10 ‘ultimate party cities in the world’ by Lonely Planet. There’s nearly a festival for any given day of the year, with vibrant music, local costumes and exotic street food. There’s also an excess of alcohol. And although drinking is enjoyable, the drunken bawdiness can get out of control.

Alcohol is cheap in La Paz, with a bottle of wine costing as little as 20 bolivianos (about £2) and a bottle of singani, a grape-based spirit not dissimilar to brandy, costs a mere 30 bolivianos (£3). This, together with the great variety of bars and clubs on offer, means that more and more Bolivians are relying on alcohol to enjoy themselves.

One of the members of the La Paz chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous sees alcoholism as a growing problem and cites a mixture of the old and new as the reason for its growing prominence. He says that alcoholism is a problem ‘because there is a lot of tradition and because the youth search for more excuses to drink . . . There is no party without alcohol. You can’t have a party without tea [té con té, a drink made from hot tea and singani]. It is the mentality.’ While Bolivia’s average annual alcohol consumption – 5.8 litres for those 15 years and older – isn’t remarkably high, the World Health Organization predicts that the rate of consumption will grow in the coming years.

La Paz, having a party atmosphere to rival the most outgoing cities, also sees more and more young people becoming dependent on alcohol to enjoy a night out. One partygoer, when asked how often he goes out clubbing and drinking, replies: ‘Five times—every day from Tuesday through to Saturday.’ Another claims that he spends at least 500 bolivianos on alcohol every couple of days.

This excessive alcohol consumption also pervades Bolivian culture. El Cementerio de los Elefantes is a well-known Bolivian film in which the alcoholic protagonist goes to die in a so-called ‘elephant cemetery’ in La Paz, where alcoholics leave their lives behind and drink themselves to death. These ‘cemeteries’ offer an extreme example of alcoholism in La Paz, and according to the AA member these are people ‘who don’t have direction’ and ‘no longer serve a purpose’ – they’re the exception in La Paz. However, their existence in Bolivian society indicates the overwhelming presence of alcohol.

Victor Hugo Viscarra, one of Bolivia’s most famous writers – and one of La Paz’s most infamous drunks – was living on the streets at the age of 15. He became the chronicler of the street drinkers, documenting the language and culture, most famously in his dictionary of coba, or slang words, and his short story collection Alcoholatum y Otros Drinks, which depicted the alcohol-fueled underworld. In addition to documenting the drinking lifestyle, Viscarra lived it, and at the age of 48, in 2006, died due to alcoholism-related complications. His writings reveal an understanding of the outcasts of Bolivian society – whom he identified with – most notably the alcoholics. He showed how the insidious presence of alcohol affects many in Bolivia, from the fringes of society to the margins of the cultural elite.

A tradition of celebration brings colour and excitement to Bolivia, but it also gives visitors and locals alike the opportunity to drink in excess. While most Bolivians know how to have a good time without descending into alcoholism, alcohol permeates the culture, and in addition to lubricating social interactions for the many, it is powerfully addictive and destructive for the few. Add to that a permissive attitude toward drinking – which makes booze (among other things) easy to obtain, even for an underage crowd – and it’s easy to see why La Paz is known as a top city in which to party, and all too often to get wasted.

The poète maudit (accursed poet) of La Paz

As I walk through the streets, taking in the sights and sounds of the city, I begin to wonder about him. A lot must have changed about the city since his time, these streets must look different now, these buildings so tall and so new. I walk alone; as the sun begins to set on La Paz, the night starts to come to life. I can see why he was so inspired by this city. I’ve walked down the same alleys and corners he would have walked and tasted the vibrant electricity of the La Paz night. I’ve walked in the steps of Bolivia’s most famous and almost mythological writers Jaime Saenz, the accursed poet of La Paz.

Jaime Saenz Guzman was born on the 29 October 1921 in La Paz. A city in which he would spend the majority of his life, La Paz’s vibrant and colourful nightlife provided the perfect canvas for Saenz to explore his creativity. An immensely gifted writer, Saenz had an overwhelming, almost suffocating ability to wield the truth and to delve deep into the depths of the human soul. A drinker at the tender age of 15 and an alcoholic by his 20s, the truths told were of his own tortured existence.

Saenz’s tale is a strange and sad one, accounting for an incredible life, full of strange twists and turns. It was a life filled with contrasts: a reject of conventional society, Saenz found himself to be an outcast, a drunken romantic haunted by his vices, a rebel poet obsessed with death, a bisexual Nazi sympathizer who wed a Jewish woman and showed an incredible sympathy for the oppressed, even going as far as to fight besides the working class against the right wing dictators who long controlled his country.

Finding comfort in the night and the ears of the deceased, Saenz spent many hours in their company. Visits to the morgue were a common feature of his life, and that’s where he spent much of his time carefully meditating the parallels between life and death, the links between this world and one beyond it. In The Night, the poet’s final and probably most famous work, Saenz brilliantly brings together all the elements of this strange life he lived, this curse that beckoned to death to come closer with every swig of the bottle. The Night is divided into four parts: ‘The Night,’ ‘The Gatekeeper,’ ‘Interval’ and ‘The Night’. The poem accompanies Saenz’s mind as he watches the motions of his pen writing. We gain unbelievable insight into his overuse of alcohol, and his experiences and insight into death.

‘Now, the other side of the night is a supremely esoteric realm, and alcohol has conjured it. Not anyone can pass to the other side of the night; the other side of the night is a forbidden dominion, and only the condemned enter there. What is the nature of the night’s other side? To put it bluntly, it is the nature of the night’s other side to sink into your spine and colonize your eyes, to see through them what it can’t see on its own.’

Working Through the Day, So He Can Stargaze – and Make a Little Money – at Night!

The question ‘What do you do?’ is fairly innocuous, but for 30-year-old Gabriel Flores, there is no simple answer. Convention dictates he tell you, in response, that he leads mountain mountain-biking trips on the infamous Death Road. To be fair, that is what takes up most of his daylight hours. In high season, he tends to be assigned four or five trips a week, and with a start as early as 6 am, his hours are as long as those of a typical office worker. Outside of June through September, however, the number of times he gets paid a week is more variable – business can get quite slow.

So Gabriel also referees motorcycle races. And he also designs company logos, publicity pamphlets, book layouts. ‘Whatever needs to be done,’ he says, ‘I do it.’ With the number of day jobs he has – sometimes all at once – you would think his nights would be reserved for rest, for friends, for curling up with wine and a book. But Gabriel regularly gives up his weekday nights, sometimes even the football Mondays he’s set up with buddies, to work yet another job. And for all the variety of his days, his nights are uncharacteristically occupied by a single mission.

Three months ago, with friends Coco and Christian, Gabriel set up Moonlight Trekking, a company that offers, among other guided treks, one that takes tourists up a mountain at dusk. Around each full and new moon, Gabriel and his two partners climb what they call Tata (‘Grandfather’) Achumani, a mountain near the Achumani district near Zona Sur – ‘It probably has an official name . . . I don’t know it,’ he says – on a route they devised through their own treks, and watch the sun set over El Alto. By the time they reach their campsite, it is completely dark and the city below is at its glittering finest. Christian busies himself with grilling burgers, and Gabriel and Coco set up the telescope. All three are self-proclaimed ‘fanatics’ of stargazing, but it is Gabriel who does most of the explaining. He points out Alpha Centauri, and tries his valiant best to join the dots, with his finger, of the ‘shopping cart’ that I have trouble seeing.

A systems engineer by training, I ask how Gabriel how he got interested in astronomy. ‘Did you take a course?’ I venture, ‘or was your father an avid stargazer, perhaps?’ ‘No, no, no,’ he shakes his head. ‘I have a very nice book.’

He shows it to me. Published in 1978, it is full of brightly coloured drawings and diagrams, and instructions for DIY experiments for kids: Make Your Own Moon Crater! Construct ‘The Star Spy’! ‘My mother bought this when I was little,’ he says, as he flips through its pages. ‘This one,’ he says excitedly, pointing to a step-by-step guide to constructing sun binoculars with everyday items, ‘I’ve done.’ I am about to ask him if his parents encouraged his experiments back in the day when he adds, ‘Yeah, did it last year.’

At age 10, Gabriel purchased his first telescope. ‘Once you see through a telescope you say, “Wow, I want to do that again.”’ And so he did: He taught himself about the skies with voracious reading, abundant use of the Internet (‘That’s all we need, isn’t it?’) and visits to a planetarium. Years later, in the Netherlands, he was over the moon when he chanced upon a telescope he’d been coveting for a long time at a whopping 75 percent off.

So he already had the equipment. But while setting up the company, a lot more had to be done. Gabriel and his partners had to explore different trails – could emergency vehicles access the route? Was there enough light on the path? – procure safety equipment, make and distribute flyers for publicity and pool some money to fund the bonus T-shirts they provide to their clients. All this work was undertaken in their spare time, at nights and on weekends.

Right now the young company is still getting off the ground, and after dark they’re still busy working out the kinks. They’re in talks with a minibusero about a transportation contract so Gabriel doesn’t have to keep borrowing cars, hailing cabs or getting his aunt to drive customers to and from the mountain. They’ve just begun the arduous journey of navigating the paperwork that comes with registering a company in Bolivia. On full or new moon nights with no customers, they go out anyway, hunting for new routes, concocting plans for new stargazing options: ‘Once we’re more settled, we’re thinking moonlight biking, moonlight hiking . . . ’ They’re working on generating more publicity. And of course, their first priority is to procure another telescope – they’re channeling all Moonlight Trekking income into a new one they estimate can be purchased in three months, but if that fails, Gabriel’s birdwatcher mother has one he intends to steal.

Gabriel still bikes the Death Road on a regular basis, and despite how much fun every ride is, juggling that with his new company is no walk in the park. Moonlight treks tend to end around or after midnight, and if there’s a bike trip the next day, he is expected at the company workshop to load up equipment at 6:40 am. ‘It’s tough,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you’re very tired, but you just have to put on a happy face and keep going.’

But it is clearly worth it. His fervent appeals for me to ‘tell all your friends about us’ and to ‘remember to like our Facebook page’ reveal the high hopes Gabriel has for his fledgling company. Presently they’re getting about ten customers a month, but in six months they’re hoping to hit that same number per week. When that happens, Gabriel will have successfully turned his amateur passion into a thriving business, and plans to halt his daytime pursuits. ‘If I want my company to rise, I have to put all my focus on it,’ he says. Then, there’d be no more holding down six different day jobs, no more leading biking trips on five hours of sleep. It would be a dream.