Photo: William Wroblewski

Finding death in hidden bars across La Paz

The windows are curtained, boarded-up or papered over. A black iron shutter covers the only door at the entrance. In front of the brown brick building a market sleeps its way to closing time. The average paceño passing by would barely glance at the seemingly run-of-the-mill house. However, behind the shutters, curtains and boards, in the semi-darkness and filth, purportedly sit unknown numbers of drunkards fulfilling the most macabre of urban legends: El Cementerio de Elefantes.

Made famous by multiple films and books, these cemeteries are places etched in La Paz lore. Across the city, unexceptional buildings house these clandestine bars, often with only one purpose: to offer Guabira (96% proof alcohol) mixed with yupi or water to alcoholics until they expire. Since the customers are often afflicted with constant tremors due to long term drinking, they are not even offered bottles or cups. Instead, as detailed in a short story entitled ‘Los Cementerios de Elefantes’ by Victor Hugo Viscarra, they are given a bucket filled with alcohol and a dipper. They then sit in their room, often unlit, sometimes communal, and wait for the the process to kill them.

Some cemeteries have fronts as normal bars, with an upstairs room for clients who have no wish to leave. Others exist with this as their sole purpose. It can take days or weeks for the end to come. Housed in a room with a straw mattress, given to the clients to try and sleep away the pain, and have a smaller bucket to relieve themselves. When the end does mercifully come, it is often after an agonising experience of destroying an already almost broken liver, with the drunk delirious from dehydration.

Such sites have inspired artists for decades. Depictions of the cemeteries in art are different in style but universal in message. Tonchy Antezana’s film ‘El Cementerio de Elefantes’ is a grim reflection on a drunkard’s life, whilst Viscarra’s cuento on the same theme takes a dispassionate view of the subject but is still no less morbid. Viscarra fails to condemn the actions of the owners, preferring to offer a description of the grisly events within. Manuel Vargas, Viscarra’s longtime friend and editor, says there was some invention in his story, but ‘he wrote from experience’, having spent a lot of time in the bars and hostelries in the areas known for cementerios.

In most areas of present day La Paz, knowledge of these establishments is patchy. Near one of the most recently closed cemeteries, known as Putunku, near La Paz’s main bus terminal on Calle Montes, a local zapatero, Fernando, says he has no knowledge of these things. Pressed, he finally says, ‘Go ask the young people about it,’ keen for me to leave him alone. A local police officer, Humberto Lopez, also seems nonplussed. ‘I don’t know the real stories,’ he told me.

In a different area more renowned for the cemeteries, on and around Avenida Buenos Aires, a sucrense taxi driver, Felipe Quispe, told me a cemetery story. ‘My friend went and killed himself in one a couple of months ago,’ he said, keeping his eyes on the road. Going along the Avenida, near Mercado Felix Hinojosa, he points to a pharmacy. ‘There’s one of them. Three floors,’ he points out. Again, a single black shutter denotes the entrance. On the top floor, children’s laundry is hanging. Often, according to Felipe, cementerios are embedded inside average apartment blocks.

He shows me another building, a cemetery apparently named ‘El Timbre’ or ‘The Doorbell’, that sits up a hill with a beautiful vista over La Paz. According to the Intendencia Municipal – the local authority that oversees all major issues in the city– it has been raided and shut down, but Felipe is certain that it is still open. A third cemetery lies just off Plaza Garita de Lima and is apparently called ‘Las Ventanas’ due to the number of windows on its front. There is a certain irony to its location, as it lies opposite a hospital.

When pushed further on his friend, Felipe waxes philosophical: ‘It’s better that he died. Now his wife doesn’t worry about him.’ There is a tone of derision in his voice. ‘He lost everything: his wife, his children – his eldest is only 14 – and for what?’ This sentiment is not unique. Even Viscarra, who socialised in alcoholics’ bars, probably rubbing shoulders with those on the verge of committing themselves to such an establishment, seems to be even faintly critical. In his cuento ‘Los Cementerios de Elefantes’, the author describes the drunks as ‘having the shakes of recalcitrant masturbators’.

The police response to these places is limited. ‘For the police, these types of establishments provide something like assistance,’ writes Viscarra. According to him, this is one explanation for their continued existence. Another, provided by the Intendencia, is that there simply are not enough resources to prevent the emergence of cementerios. ‘We have a task force,’ says Paola Valdenassi Flores, Manager of the Intendencia’s office at Avenida Camacho. ‘But this is not the only issue we deal with.’ Raids on these establishments are rare. She says that on average the Intendencia tips off the police to shut down a cemetery three to four times a year. However, when the police go in, they often get it right. As recently as early March the police raided a site near Calle Linares, finding a cementerio.

""Depictions of the cemeteries in art are different in style but universal in message.""

The effects of such raids on proprietors and clients are unclear. Cynically, Felipe says the owners pay off the police and go on their way to continue their grim business, often at one of their other properties. Paola seems hazy on this subject, saying it is not her purview to oversee the enforcement of justice against the owners. ‘The police throw the drunks out on the street,’ says Felipe, with disgust. ‘We chuck them out,’ Paola confirms, ‘It’s a personal choice to recover.’ The onus is on the sufferer to cure himself, with little State support for these suicidal individuals.

Urban legends are often proven to be untrue. They are dismissed as nothing more than sensationalism and speculation. For a while, Los Cementerios de Elefantes were viewed in such a light. Indeed, Viscarra’s story was ridiculed as a piece of pure fiction. Travelling around La Paz, you can see why. These places seem to be nothing more than closed storefronts, run down houses, background details in the patchwork architecture of La Paz. However, this only adds to their mystique. Behind every steel shutter, every curtained-off window, there could be more than meets the eye. Elephant cemeteries may inspire artists, but they are more than just fiction. In reality, they are anything but art.

Photo: Flossie Wildblood

The Famed Landscape Is Matched in Intensity by the Neighboring Natural

We arrive in Uyuni at 6am, with the hesitantly blue morning sky above us and the muddy road beneath us. The four slow hours we spend in this southwestern town are enough to demonstrate that it is, for the most part, defined by the otherworldly landscape that surrounds it. Hordes of uniformly dressed tourists add colour to its bland streets, so much so that they seem incongruous, yet at the same time these streets are lined with tour companies, all advertising the same iconic voyage.
The road is bumpy as we leave the waking city, headed to the village of Colchani, home to an oasis of shops all selling identical tourist paraphernalia. We eat quinoa and muse on how the Salar, our next stop, actually begins: does this 10,500-km salt flat just appear completely out of the blue? Soon enough we’re back in the car and it has started. Milton, our guide, drives the 4x4 straight into what appears to be an exceptionally large, grimy puddle and we look skeptically at each other, but are soon semi-gliding through a seemingly indefinite expanse of water. This water sometimes gets so deep that the mountains in the distance, the only real reference point, are totally submerged and drivers en route to the Salar completely lose their way.
The horizon gradually disappears as the ground becomes piercingly white and flawlessly smooth, and the sky and honeycomb tiles of salt below merge together. The toy cars and miniature people in the distance seem suspended in the air; apart from them, there’s nothing but luminous blue and white for miles. Lukewarm surface water swirls around my feet as we wander around this ethereal landscape. Later, they are covered entirely by a translucent layer of crystallised salt.
Drops of rain pixelate the view through the front window of the car as we leave the Salar behind us. We drive through seemingly endless countryside, past quinoa plantations and dormant volcanoes shrouded in ghostly mist, and then finally resting llamas and elaborately decorated cemeteries to the town of San Juan. We sleep here for the night, in small rooms built entirely from salt. The floor is piled with large granules, which get in our shoes and our beds, and parts of the ceiling chip off periodically, but we drink cinnamon tea and talk about the idiosyncrasies of Russian cinema with our new travelling companions before sleeping right through the night after a long day.
The next day is also long: dawn is still breaking when we leave San Juan, but sunlight bathes the viewpoint for the Ollague volcano when we arrive mid-morning. Its porous, rocky terrain rises and falls like folds of crumpled paper, and there’s an unavoidable stillness with no plants to sway in the gentle wind. The only vegetation is a few scattered shrubs and unearthly, fluorescent green moss covering certain boulders. Revitalised by the fresh air, we gaze upwards and into the distance at the volcano itself.
We soon pass through a handful of lagoons – one pastel green, one an immaculate reflection of the mountains that lean over it, almost every one home to more than one species of flamingo, tinted pink by the algae they eat. We tiptoe over marshy ground, which seeps into our shoes, to the edge of the water. Thousands of tiny flies hover over the spongy grass underneath as we get a closer look at the curious hues within each lagoon and at the entirely oblivious flamingos that wade around the water’s surface. The air is thick with sulphur when we get out of the car at Laguna Hedionda, our final stop before a lengthy crawl through the desert. This is a drive which strangely brings both an unshakeable sense of isolation, and also an awareness of the hundreds of others following a similar trail. Ours is just one of the paths etched into the gritty sand; others vary only slightly.

Soon we've entered the Eduardo Avaroa Andean Fauna National Reserve. Milton chews coca leaves as we ascend higher, eventually reaching the final lagoon of the day, mere minutes from where we’ll spend the night. The altitude has already left us in a dazed state, and the fact that Laguna Colarado surpasses the others in both scale and appearance intensifies this. Its banks are home to idle, grass-chewing alpacas, and are so vibrant that their colours appear almost saturated, unreal. Looking down at where the blue water and verdant grass meet is like looking at the earth from space. The varying hues – pink, red, white, blue – within the lagoon itself make it seem as if someone has dropped ink in this huge stretch of shallow water.
The next day we rise at 4am and embark out into the unbroken darkness. The night before was filled with shooting stars and radiant electric storms illuminating the mountains from behind, but this morning is coal-black. After some erratic off-road driving, we see an enigmatic plume of smoke silhouetted against the nearly sunrise in the sky. It’s just one of the many billowing natural geysers we meet on our way to swim in the aguas termales. We reach these mere minutes before carloads of others, and at this point they are unparalleled in their tranquility. Steam emanates from the water forming a mystical layer over the rocky ground, and the boiling natural heat soothes our weary bodies while the frosty air blows sleep from our eyes.

The Ollague volcano’s porous, rocky terrain rises and falls like folds of crumpled paper.

Our next stop, the nearby Dalí desert, was named because of its similarity to the one portrayed in Salvador Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, but the landscape we see later that day is more like a collage. Mountains and desert share the same space. The shadows of the clouds above provide the only real definition on the sandy ground, a quasi-union of the sky and the earth. We drive through luscious green valleys, and then in no time at all meet landscapes so rocky, misty and desolate that they appear Martian. We see rocks shaped like dogs and parrots in the Valle de Rocas, and drive straight through thick grey cloud all the way to where the national park meets Chile, and back again to the miniature city of Uyuni.
In Uyuni, you drive for hours through immense landscapes, occasionally passing through tiny human settlements, which seem inconsequential compared to their surroundings. Travelling here brings with it the realisation that this is an enormous and varied world.

Gastón Ugalde: An Artistic Ode to the Andes

Only through art and architecture can we transform societies and build a better life.
—Gastón Ugalde

The face is distorted but strangely familiar. The vivid streaks of yellow, orange and blue are set against harsh geometric angles and piercing red eyes. The chamán comes to life through colours and patterns reminiscent of traditional Andean textiles – and it is so much more than just a face on a page.

Upon a first glance at the work of Bolivian artist Gastón Ugalde, its striking diversity is inescapable. Despite being widely known as a pioneer in the field of Latin American video-art in the ’70s, Ugalde has spent the time since experimenting widely with various media, including performance art, land installations, painting, photography and sculpture. His body of work explores various sociopolitical themes, principally focusing on social movements and local agrarian or cultural festivals. It is intriguing, bizarre and modern work, firmly rooted in Bolivian cultural tradition: inextricably bonded with the land of its creator.

With a career that has spanned decades and has included 81 individual and over 160 collective exhibitions, Ugalde’s immense artistic success stems from a passion he discovered as a child. ‘My first works of art were those that I made the first time I grabbed a pencil,’ he says. ‘The intention behind my work has always been the same: to capture my experiences. I never stopped being a child.’

Ugalde’s ethereal Salar de Uyuni photographic series, set against the landscape of the altiplano’s salt flats, showcase his concern with the interactions between light and colour in desolate spaces. ‘My constant source of inspiration is Bolivian territory and Andean light,’ he explains. Asked to describe his work using just three words, he simply responded, ‘land, colour and stone’. The result of this cocktail of simple ingredients is an oeuvre composed of truly stunning photographs. Fabrics, geometric shapes and human figures bursting with vivid colours slice through the cosmic emptiness of the natural backdrop. ‘Owing to the temperature of the light in open Andean territories, I can capture brilliant colours,’ Ugalde says. ‘When these participate alongside objects and people, I’m strengthening my study of the theory of colour and time within these spaces.’

Ugalde’s series of collages using coca leaves and his chamanes, surreal depictions of the human face inspired by shamanism, are further examples of his work interacting with its uniquely South American environment. The artist himself says these colourful visages are the product of ‘having had close encounters of the third kind with shamans during my Andean and Amazonian travels’. Forming a bridge between ancient traditions and modern artistic techniques, in their own way the chamanes are a true reflection of contemporary Bolivia – combining the best of the old and the new in a riot of colour. The coca leaf art includes images of dollar bills, John Lennon and Coca-Cola, a powerful statement of cultural exchange and interference.

Ugalde’s inspiration is limitless and his media varied. By using the photographic lens, amongst other things, to capture what he describes as ‘dust and disorder’, his diverse art reflects a spectacularly diverse country.