The struggle for Women's football to be recognised in Bolivia

On the concrete courts of El Tejar, in the North of La Paz, the difference between men and women's football is barely distinguishable. The matches attract similar crowds, the teams train four times a week, and the women play with just as much vigour and skill as the men. The same passion is shown, and even with less egotism involved (at this level, the women don't find it obligatory to dribble up the pitch on their own in a desperately ostentatious alpha-male display).

‘Nobody really cares about gender differences here’, Professor Mario Murillo says, in reference to football in the Bolivian countryside and at a grassroots level. Murillo is a Professor of Sociology at the Universidad Católica in La Paz, and specialises in football. According to him, ‘For both men and women, football is life. It is the next thing to a religion. In Easter, football tournaments take priority over everything else.’

This is unfortunately not the case of football at a professional level, where women struggle to find opportunities and recognition. The Federación Boliviana de Fútbol (FBF) is notoriously incompetent at promoting gender equality in this patriarchal sport. In fact, football officials at the highest levels can even get away with making disturbing sexist comments in public.

This season, for example, Mauricio Soria, who is the coach of Real Potosí, publicly harassed the manager of Santa Cruz side ‘Sports Boys’ during a match, making sexist remarks. ‘Shut your mouth,’ he said to Hilda Ordoñez, who is the first female coach to manage a top flight Bolivian football team. ‘Go wash some pots and dishes. You have nothing to do on this pitch,’ he added.

No structures

One of the main limiting factors surrounding professional women’s football in Bolivia is the lack of existing structures of competition for them. This is clear from Cassandra Camacho’s story, which is deeply telling of the struggle women face in the world of Bolivian football.

As a prominent player and Vice President for the women's club 'Las Ninfas', Camacho has personally experienced gender discrimination in the footballing industry. She has gone out of her way to organise official tournaments in La Paz, but is sadly familiar with rejection – she receives little to no support from the Federation. ‘We were once given two weeks,’ she said, ‘to form eight female teams for a tournament. We managed to do it easily with more than 100 girls on board. Then they cancelled the event, saying there was simply “not enough money or support”.’

Despite the obstacles she has faced as a female player, Camacho talks with great conviction and purpose. She was a former Miss La Paz Model in 2009 and has certainly found it a challenge to climb out of an industry based on delicacy and beauty, into one where she has had to prove herself through physical prowess and athletic talent.

Part of her inner strength comes from her Christian faith. She speaks of the inspiration she has gathered from Old Testament stories, as well as the motivation provided by her ‘dad-slash-coach’, Victor Camacho; a key figure who is constantly helping her to achieve future goals. Her fight to be recognised as a footballer, in spite of her former profession, seems to embody a more general struggle that Bolivian women face: to shed the traditional image of a woman –objectified and limited in career prospects– and become accepted in parts of society where men walk the avenues of influence.

Her first aspirations to play football professionally were met with surprise. ‘Go back to being a model,’ opponents used to shout at her. However, she has turned her past around and she now loves being underestimated.

‘Turning up to a press conference in stilettos and saying you are a footballer was often met with laughter,’ she exclaims. ‘But we would then invite the media to our matches, and they would have a very different impression of us by the end.’

A particular moment she cites was when her team, ‘Las Ninfas’, played at the Hernando Siles stadium in 2012 as a trial to become a part of Club Bolívar. ‘That game really got their attention,’ she says, as she remembers starting to be treated seriously a player, and even being compared to her male counterparts.

The need for role-models

Apart from the lack of structure, some of the female players who show promise are barred from the game given the broader gender obligations of Bolivian culture. ‘We've lost a lot of girls to unplanned pregnancies,’ Camacho recounts, ‘as well as to the conservative thinking of some parents’.

Most of the girls Camacho has encountered don't have a clear vision of how to grow in the sport due to a lack of adequate role models. It seems as if the route to fame in women's football hasn’t been a particularly well-trodden path. Most women footballers don’t even know whether they can be scouted or not.

‘In the States, it’s something that girls have grown up with,’ Camacho explains. ‘The role models are already there. They know the way they can make it to the national team. Here, you don’t exactly have a door that’s open to international tournaments.’

The only way success has been found abroad is through migration. Many Bolivian women now participate in Spanish leagues, especially around Sevilla. It seems fitting, then, that Sevilla was once described by Spanish playwright Lope de Vega as a ‘door between Europe and the Indies’. Bolivian women have reached the fringes of European football, but there is still a long way to go.

Camacho believes her personal struggle can lead as an example for others. Her aim is to show that it is possible for women to succeed at an international level. Camacho is already learning French as part of her dream to play for Lyon, the female team that have won the French league for six consecutive seasons.

‘There are times when it seems hopeless,’ she admits, ‘but I always see a light at the end of the tunnel.’ The next step, for her, is to start a league for women in La Paz that is recognised by the FBF.

Having listened to the shouts of support on the sidelines, spoken to the players about their religious training techniques, and witnessed the intense physical battles that play out on the pitch, it is easy to say women's football at base level is taken very seriously in Bolivia. But what is in store for the future of the profession?

There have been small improvements over time that bring hope to certain aspects of the sport. Aracely Castro, for example, who was born in a suburb of El Alto, has worked her way past international barriers to referee professionally around the world. But improvements like these remain exceptions. In Bolivia, it is a question of transforming entrenched views on football and gender stereotypes. Perhaps this could start with success stories of role models such as Cassandra Camacho, which prove to younger generations that it is possible to chip away at the male dominance of the sport.

As Club Bolívar take on San Lorenzo for the semi-finals of the Copa de Libertadores on 30th July, the longstanding question of an apparent 'altitude advantage' is yet again brought to the surface. This debate has been at the centre of a notorious footballing contretemps between Bolivia and Argentina. Visitors to La Paz’s Estadio Hernando Siles at 3,637 metres above sea level, have had some shocking results – notably a 6 -1 defeat of Maradona's side in 2009. In a recent match where the score ended 1-1, some of the Argentinian side had to call for oxygen masks and performed questionable acts of fainting at half-time to an unconvinced Bolivian audience.

In 2007, FIFA banned international matches played in stadiums situated above 2,500 metres, including La Paz and a number of other Andean cities. Bolivian President Evo Morales reacted with disgust, calling it a 'football apartheid', and organised 1 million letters of complaint to Joseph Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA. Morales even played a historic game on the Sajama Peak at 6,000 metres to prove that it had very little effect on the body. Quite rightly, the ban on Estadio Hernando Siles was overturned a year later. But is this problem really such a myth as many Bolivians would suggest?

‘You breath 35 percent less oxygen up here’, Dr Guillermo Aponte, Club Bolivar’s medical director and a member of the Bolivian Commission for Defence of High Altitudes, remarks, ‘leaving your haemoglobin with less to carry around to cells in your body’. As a result, players coming to La Paz suffer from increased heart rates, and lowered metabolism, with stamina reduced by 25 to 32 percent, according to Dr. Aponte.

However, those living at high altitude have it hard too. When they go down to play at sea level, the symptoms are more severe. The atmosphere is obviously thicker and, while you would think the extra oxygen would act as a saviour, it actually causes the entire nervous system to diminish, slows the heart rate, and causes swelling in the feet (not good for putting on those new football boots). Many Bolivian players record an increase in sickness and fatigue. ‘There are more problems when you go down than when you go up’, Dr Aponte concluded. ‘We don’t have a single international title; if the high altitude really was an advantage, we would be champions every year.’

I then ask about Argentina. ‘The problem with the Argentines is that they have made it a very psychological subject.’ When looking at the international scores in La Paz, it seems like the other South American countries are barely affected. The so-called 'Spanish Reinforcements' (Moya, Capdevila and Callejón) of Club Bolívar who joined a year ago have experienced no problems at all. ‘[The Argentinians] have a special fear of coming to the high areas of Bolívar’, Dr Aponte said. ‘They don’t like the country; they don't like the cold air. They are paranoid and tend to analyse every single aspect of football, and the Argentinian Institute of High Altitude Research thinks that it could be dangerous.’ Dr. Aponte dismisses the claim by saying there have never been any casualties, and explains that it's actually much more dangerous to play in areas of high temperature. ‘Altitude doesn't kill you. Heat is much more dangerous.’ (Congratulations goes to FIFA for choosing a 50-degree Qatar to host the World Cup in 2022. High-altitude matches, bad. Extreme heat, corruption and slave labour, fine. Nice, FIFA.)

Dr Aponte's vehement repetition of 'they' is another articulation of Bolivian-Argentinian attitudes towards each other. He points to the fact that the Argentines started to blame the altitude very late on in the 90s (as if La Paz had been at sea-level before then), just when Bolivia had started to become a footballing threat.

These kind of underlying political conflicts are often reflected in football. Take the war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969 as a famous example, when it took a disastrous football match to act as the tipping point for their relations to collapse. Argentina's history with Bolivia is wrought with racism and mutual mistrust: Bolivians still make up the majority of those who forge a living picking fruit and vegetables around the slums of Buenos Aires. It comes at no surprise that these problems are mirrored in a football rivalry.

So was this 'altura' problem all psychological as a lot of people say? Playing football in La Paz left me gasping and wheezing like a strangled goose. This would have been partly from the lack of oxygen, but then perhaps also from my own brain playing tricks given that I had spent the previous day researching all the effects and symptoms. The scientific evidence cannot be denied, though, it's just up to the effect on your mind to make it a whole lot worse. However, even if there is an advantage, people forget that we are in a beautiful continent spanning from vast tropical rainforests to great mountain ranges. This gives us a range of climatic conditions and different altitudes, extreme temperatures and humidity, and all sorts of other unique characteristics. To adapt physically and psychologically to these particular conditions (as well as to a rowdy home crowd) is one of the great challenges in football, and so incongruous to the unpredictability and surprise of the game.

-Altitude 101

-Who will be affected by altitude sickness really just depends on genetics.

=The adaptive mechanisms will kick in between 38 hours and 20 days.

-The most common symptoms are a headache, shortness of breath, sleeping troubles, and lack of appetite.

-Oxygen is the main treatment, it will eliminate 90% of your problems. Some herbal recommendations include coca leaves, ginger tea, and onion and garlic soup.

-For footballers: the best thing to do is to arrive a few hours before the game and then leave, and so you will not give your body enough time to start the adaptation system. However it will always be a shock to play. Your perception of the ball is different as it doesn’t curve and comes faster at you (bad news for Beckham free kicks if he ever decided to join Bolivar).

Katharina von Sohlern examines recent disputes within Bolivia’s Armed Forces to understand some of the pending reforms missing from Evo Morales’ administration

There’s no doubt about it, Evo Morales has changed the face of modern Bolivia. Since his election as the first indigenous president in 2006, the former coca farmer has been hard at work, rewriting and rebuilding the nation.

First, he nationalised Bolivia’s oil and gas reserves, boosting state revenues and laying the foundations for a rudimentary welfare state. Now all citizens enjoy a small pension and mothers receive special benefits to ensure their children go to school.

Next, Morales pushed through a referendum to reshape the constitution, which was accepted by a popular majority in 2009. He declared Bolivia a plurinational and pluricultural state, inscribing it as such in the preamble to the new constitution which takes consideration of the economic, social, juridical, political and cultural diversity of the country’s citizens. The government has since gone on to promote the suma qamaña, or principle of “living well”, a principle premised on respect for mother earth and living in harmony with all living beings.

Further constitutional changes followed. Quotas were introduced determining the division of parliamentary seats, including allocations for Aymaran women, who in the past would normally be selling coca leaves in the markets and are now commonly seen discussing draft bills.
Going forward, all state employees are obliged to learn one of the 36 official indigenous languages. And, in addition to nationalising natural resources, all large land holdings - the ‘latifundios’ - are being banned.

These are drastic measures for a country that has been dominated and exploited by foreign powers ever since its inception. And they have won Morales recognition and popularity, especially amongst the indigenous population of the altiplano (the highlands), who affectionately call him ‘compañero’ (partner) or ‘hermano’ (brother) Evo.

In villages and cities across the country people are hoping for yet another victory for the president in the October elections — it would be the second since the constitutional change. Messages of hope are scrawled in graffiti for all to see: ‘Evo hasta 2020’ – ‘Evo until 2020’.
But for all the changes there are still some areas of the state yet to see the Evo-lucion. In La Paz I recently witnessed men and women marching through the streets towards Plaza Mayor, waving flags and posters, shouting “Evo lo prometía, pero es la misma porquería” (Evo promised it, but it’s still the same mess). Every now and then I could hear the sound of dynamite ripping through the air.

The protesters were all assembled on the plaza, when suddenly about 200 uniformed soldiers marched into the crowd and took centre stage. It was the first time since the attempted coups of the 1980s that soldiers could be seen protesting in the city centre. They were made up of lower ranking ‘suboficiales’ and ‘sargentos’ and the majority were visibly of indigenous descent. Joining them were their mothers, fathers and wives, and several organisations in support of their cause – the ‘decolonization’ of the Bolivian armed forces.

The traditional hierarchy of the military has led to a distribution of power that runs parallel to ethnic categories and as a consequence, higher ranks tend to be held by non-indigenous persons. One soldier I spoke to explained that this disparity was a result of access to higher education being denied to members of the lower ranks – in order to become an officer or general, one needs a certain degree of education – without it promotion is effectively impossible.

In addition he complained about discrimination in the day-to-day life of the barracks. For example, regular soldiers have to get permission from a ranking officer to get married. He said they had tried to bring attention to their situation through legal avenues, but since the government had not responded to any of their complaints, they saw no other way than to take to the streets.
It is clear from the reaction of army commanders to the protesters, how much these soldiers are risking: over 700 of them have been suspended for leaving their barracks to join the campaign.

But it is also a risky situation for Morales’ government. Another victory in the upcoming elections will hardly be possible without the support of the armed forces, a fact the president is clearly aware of. This may be the reason why he is granting big benefits to the armed forces and in particular the high ranking officers (the military is the single largest item within yearly State expenditure).

Equally, the civilians protesting at the plaza are not to be ignored, as they represent his original voter base. Neglecting the concerns of those who once helped him to victory is just what the opposition has been waiting for.

There are signs Morales is trying to reach a compromise. The press office of the armed forces have published a statement saying that the suspensions would be annulled if the soldiers report themselves back in their barracks within five. Meanwhile, the government and army command have shown themselves unwilling to negotiate. 

Since the writing of this piece first started, a majority of the soldiers have been readmitted to the armed forces. A handful of them who were seen to be spearheading the revolt, however, are being dealt with in military courts behind closed doors. While the future of these soldiers is uncertain, the fate of the rest of the low-ranking officers seems largely unchanged. No significant advances have been announced and the once-prominent protests have been all but swept under the carpet.

However this conflict is finally resolved, it has shown that the ‘proceso de cambio’ (the process of change that started eight years ago) isn't finished by a long shot. Bolivians will continue demanding the ‘evolucion’ to continue – with or without Evo.