‘SUPPOSING that Truth is a woman—what then?’ are Nietzsche’s enigmatic opening words in his preface to Beyond Good and Evil. As 2013 comes to an end, living in La Paz has led us to ask ourselves, with the utmost seriousness: ‘SUPPOSING that Truth is a chicken—what then?’. We are gradually coming to the unsettling realisation that chickens and eggs are a more powerful symbol for the country and its inner workings than is commonly understood. Encroaching on territory once occupied by the Illimani, monoliths, the coca leaf and cholitas, chickens have been gradually taking over the collective consciousness, as well as the diets of locals. From the erstwhile and fallen-from-grace president Jaime Paz Zamora (otherwise known as ‘el gallo’, or ‘the rooster’), to the juggling feathered family who, dressed as chickens, have been dominating several traffic lights across the city; the extent of this avian invasion is hard to overstate. Perhaps it all started when our current president proclaimed that eating chicken causes ‘deviations’ and baldness in men. Or maybe these birds have been pecking their way into our subconscious from early childhood, through nursery rhymes and songs such as ‘Los Pollitos’ and ‘La Gallina Turuleca’. There’s no way to know for certain. All we have learned so far is that eggs are getting larger and more nutritious, people are starting to keep hens as house pets, and that rooster-shaped fireworks can be filmed at 60 frames per second to create photoessays which facetiously capture the cruelty inherent in most of our relationships with these feathered reptilian descendants. Several chickens were severely harmed during the making of this issue, though not necessarily by us (apart from the pyrotechnic rooster).