Baking Bread

I baked bread today for the first time since I got to Bolivia. When I lived in Vermont, all those years ago, I baked at least once a week. I’m still surprised at the lessons that baking bread have to offer.

The first thing bread taught me was the organic nature of redemption and growth. I kept a starter in the fridge – a foul smelling, yellow soup of sugar and yeast. I marveled that you could take this bubbling, rotting stew, add flour, let them rot some more, and this somehow yields marvelous results. In my university days, organic processes of rotting – making bread, making beer, making compost, planting tomatoes – offered a solution to the waste that I saw around me in American life, and gave me perspective about my own personal growth.

When I moved to Vermont, I learned to love how it tasted. I loaded each loaf of bread with butter and buttermilk. I made cinnamon rolls that even my granny wouldn’t have wanted to butter. I baked apple pies that relied entirely on the quality of Vermont’s apples and the butter in the crust. I worked hard, kept a garden, played in the long summer days, skied and camped in the bright winter snows and baked rich, savory loaves of bread every couple of days.

Last night, among the idas and venidas of my life in Bolivia, I made a pair of loaves and a pizza, using packaged dry yeast. The result was a loaf of bread that, while it lacked a little flavor, had a nearly perfect texture and color. It toasted well. I ate a piece with butter and honey while I listened to Johnny Cash sing “If We Never Meet Again.” Bolivia is a country where people move to chase economic opportunities wherever they may appear. Cortadores and lomeadores who I met in the Alto Beni last month go where there is work cutting and hauling wood. I know people who haven’t seen their own brothers for years and who don’t know where - or whether - they are living.

Suddenly a depression era hymn promising reunion with your loved ones faraway on that beautiful shore – and faith in another meeting place in heaven – seemed more lovely and appealing than it ever had before.

Fresh, homemade bread, without preservatives, doesn't keep. By tomorrow morning, the bread I baked yesterday will be to stale for anything but french toast.

All's Fair in Love and Politics

A couple of weeks ago, I had, oddly enough, a moment of solidarity with the ex-ambassador, Philip Goldberg. My ex girlfriend sent me an email declaring me persona no grata in her house, expressed her desire to deposit my things on the curb and conclude that she sincerely desired to have a friendly relationship with me.

I'll let you all draw your own conclusions ...

Tit for Tat

A few quick comments on the situation in Bolivia. The first and most obvious topic is the political tit for tat of ambassador expulsions and declarations of non-compliance with the drug policy.

Actually a question. What would have happened if a foreign ambassador to the US met with armed groups who later attacked US government facilities? Suddenly being declared persona no grata seems trivial. It's an important question because we tend to measure our actions in foreign countries by a different standard than the actions of foreign countries in the USA. We tend to forget that a place like Bolivia is a sovereign country with a democratically elected and very popular leader, whether you like him or not.

And in a context that ambassadors past never met with Evo before he was president, one can't just say the ambassador's job is to meet with everyone. Meeting with the opposition leaders is a definite and aggressive act.

Not that I think the Bolivian government played their hand wisely - a whole range of escalating pressures on the US State Department might have achieved the goal of getting the US to back down on its support for the opposition, without as much drama. But it was justified, and Bolivian politics are all about the drama.

btw, I sent a complaint to American Airlines asking why they had taken a political stance on the social unrest and what their position had been in 2003 when Goni was thrown out of office - whether that was also the government's fault. I haven't heard back from them yet.

American Airlines condemns the Bolivian government

I got stuck in Miami. I seem to be the representative barometer for political tensions in Bolivia. When I travel, somebody will take over an airport. (or forget to buy jet fuel, but that's another story).

So I wasn't that surprised my flight to Bolivia was canceled due to civil unrest - we'll use the neutral term rather than say because "armed protesters took over the Bolivian airport." But I was a little surprised that the airline took an overtly political position on it.

Three separate employees told me (and I heard another tell another customer) that it was the fault of the Bolivian government. Now four people in three separate locations on two different shifts did not make that up on their own. Somebody told them to say "It's the government's fault."

Now, I wish I could remember what they said when the cruceños took over the airport, installed their own manager and the manager promptly tried to charge American Airlines an extra $2,000 airport fee in cash that morning (American, properly, pays through bank transfers), but they can't possibly prefer that kind of treatment to Evo's treatment.

And I was pretty damned annoyed that they would insult my political perspectives out of the gate as a company policy.

Why it's shocking

I think I've put together a piece of the puzzle about why I find my (re)introduction to the US so jarring every time I come back here. Airports are one of the places where most of us (at least most educated white people from rich backgrounds) are most exposed to the repressive aspects of state apparatuses (uniformed guards who look at our bags and our shoes and our medicines). Take out your computer) and constantly reminded to be afraid of the "terrorists" - through announcements about your bags, and parking and all of that stuff.

Where else would it be okay for uniformed government employees to strip off our shoes and jackets. It's not. It's precisely the kind of government oppression that we cite in other countries as evidence that they are repressive dictatorships. Leaving aside the questions of why "they" need to keep us fearful and what that does to us, why smart people who I respect seem to have drunk the cool aid, how long the history of using some imagined threat to keep us scared, how deeply the what other groups have been used to represent that threat (communists, blacks, drug-dealers, etc), I realized that this is always my first and last impression of the US whenever I travel here.

Sure, I managed to watch the television nightly news and catch a short allergy season report - complete with labcoated experts and biologists pointing at plants - about someone who was scared because she was walking down the street and started sneezing heavily - sandwiched between pharmaceutical company adds - and get my daily dose of fear.

But I can turn that off any time I want to. I can't leave the country - or come back should I want to ever - without the heavy message that I am at risk and that the government is hear to protect me. "They" pepper me with this message of fear every time I walk in or out the door, lest I forget to be afraid while I'm in Bolivia. It's literally the first and last thing I see when I travel to the states and that's' part of the reason it's so jarring.

Perspectives

Went to see a movie with a great friend from high school. We saw a documentary about the french guy who tight-rope walked between the twin towers in 1974, when they were finishing up the construction of them. Wild story. Beautiful documentary.

What struck me though, is that my friend, who lives a yuppy life in DC and is working for the government, etc. and I had such different reactions to it. I think it says a lot about where each of us is, not just in our personal lives, but also where each of us lives and what we see on a daily basis ... what advertisements we see, what news filters into our heads, how the people act around us and all of those intangibles that are around us all the time.

I saw the film and I saw a story about aging, about moments in our lives that we can never go back to, about changing, and, to a certain extent, about healing. I saw a blueprint for dealing with our national sorrow and reaction to the attacks on the twin towers and a path for healing.

He saw a blueprint for planning a terrorist attack.

It may not be a conspiracy, but it's no coincidence.

One of Life's Mysteries

So, I may not have realized when I worked so hard to achieve this privelege, but ....

Having spent weeks of my time, having visited offices all over la paz, and finally having achieved the privelege of bolivian residency, I arrived at the airport only to discover that the privelege of Bolivian residency afforded me the opportunity to pay fifty dollars more leaving the country than I used to as an illegal.

There are two things I can't figure out. One is why Bolivians pay more than tourists to use the airport. The other, and I am still working away on the book about anthropology of the state, hoping it offers some kind of insight, is why the fees associated with operating legally are higher than the penalties for operating legally.

I am not even saying that it's cheaper to bribe officials, I am saying that the full penalties, completely transparent, are higher. One of life's little mysteries.

No News is No News

The much anticipated referendum to revoke the mandates of Bolivian President and the departmental prefects went off yesterday with many fewer hitches than Florida or Ohio has been able to manage for the last 8 years. And nothing has changed in any way. Okay, a handful of the most corrupt prefects lost their jobs, but aside from that, the basic division of power is the same today that it was Saturday.

The highlands back Evo, and the East is against (to oversimplify drastically). There are a lot of reasons for that, but the most important may be that the government is presented, and in fact presents itself, as a government of the indigenous poor, which feeds right into the right's strategy of amplifying Santa Cruz's non-indigenous self-perception and feeding racism.

So the referendum confirms exactly what we already knew, that the country is in a stalemate, with two regional poles of power that still haven't figured out how to compromise on anything.

One other tidbit

I am, after how many years as a wetback in Bolivia, finally a legal resident. The tramite for my residency visa was, as I have noted earlier, a pain in the neck and a little absurd.

Nevertheless, having vanquished the beast, I have to admit that there is something of a sick pleasure in tramites. It's like a game. It rewards persistence, patience and, especially, good humor. It helps to remember that nobody on the other side of the desk is in any way obliged to help you, but they might if they like you. That joke you tell them in the first thirty seconds might make all the difference.

Still, though, You never know when you're going to get stuck with starting over ten spaces back, or jump five spaces ahead. You step into an office, and you never know what office they will send you to next, or whether that will be the right office. What it is, really, is a twisted, real life game of shoots and ladders.

Where I've been the past two months

I've been out of touch for a while. I just got back to La Paz after a trip to the Alto Beni, where we were working on a doc about the indigenous group the Mosetenes. The Mosetenes are the owners of the a large communal territory, which is one of the largest and most accessible forest reserves in Bolivia. This should put them in a position to be able to manage their forest resources for the benefit of the whole community, providing a source of income and work opportunities.

But, as you know by now, Bolivia is more complicated than that. For a range of cultural, economic and historical reasons, the Mosetenes find themselves trapped in a cycle of debts owed to the merchants that buy wood from them. The system works like this:

The merchant and the Mosetén agree in advance on the price for a certain amount of wood. The Mosetén almost certainly doesn't have the capital available to extract that wood, so the merchant delivers goods from his (or her) store at inflated prices. These goods include chainsaws, food, gasoline, transport by boat and anything else that the Mosetén might need to extract the wood.

When the Mosetén delivers his wood to the merchant, he usually finds that he owes more than he earns. The merchants are obviously well aware of this.

So the project aims to explain this system of debt enslavement.

Protest in La Paz

La Paz is a very misnamed city. Today I went out to film a march on the US Embassy. Carlos Sanchéz Bersaín was the Minister of Defense in the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. The Bolivian Government and powerful social movements would like to see Sánchez Bersaín stand trial in Bolivia to take responsibility for the deaths that occurred during the social unrest of October of 2003, but on Thursday he was awarded political asylum in the US.

The first reaction to this would be that this is a typical project of President Bush... protecting right wing politicians from prosecution in their home countries, under the argument that foreign countries don't have a fair system of due process. right. never mind the logic of whether the U.S. has the moral authority to determine what counts as due process.

But a little investigation and you figure out that one of Sanchéz Bersaín's lawyers is Gregory B. Craig, who is a major bundler for Obama, and an early defector from the Clinton camp. Read more about Craig in the New Yorker. Craig has something of a checkered past, with a list of controversial clients.

Obama is frequently seen from these parts - that is countries with significant anti-US sentiment - as a president who would likely be much more open to dialogue and much more likely to pursue joint interests. But this begs the question whether that is really the case.

Video of the protest coming shortly.

Palos Blancos

I took a three day break from tramites to come to Palos Blancos to visit Daniela were she is doing her field work. Palos is, well it's a hole. the town itself that is. It's a market center for the agricultural towns around here and for the sawmills that process the hardwood harvested illegally in the territory around here. It is populated by migrants from the altiplano, whose vision of what the landscape should look like is based on the arid deserts and grasslands of their homes. as a testament to that, somebody just cut down the last three trees next to the main intersection. So much for shade.

The colonists who have arrived from the altiplano have brought with them, not only their love of open spaces without trees, but also their frugal economy, their windowless brick houses and heavy, warm clothing. The whole town feels out of place in these hot, forested tropics.

Which all changes the minute you get out of the town and out of the colonies and into the Original Community Lands of the Moseten indigenous people. The Moseten TCO (from its Spanish acronym for "Tierra Comunitario de Origen) just has a different feel. I remember it from the first time I visited here almost three years ago. I barely spoke Spanish, but the moment I set foot in the first Moseten community, I felt something different from all of the other towns around here. It had to do with a different pace of life, with a sense of economy that is adapted to their surroundings. But I couldn't know that at that point. It just felt like a community of people who were at peace in their environment and surroundings.

"Special" Forces

My task this morning involved presenting three documents to the FELCC, or Fuerza Especial para la Lucha Contra el Crimen .... the Special Force for Fighting Crime.

That the police decided to create a "Special" Force for Fighting Crime says a lot about what the police do (or rather don't do). All over El Alto, in the poorer sections of La Paz, in hundreds of communities throughout the country you will see effigies hanging from light poles, trees, houses, anything. They are graphically depicted, bleeding and all with painted with the word "ladron" or "thief".

There are advertisements taken out in major newspapers that implore people not to engage in lynching, saying it is not "community justice," but rather a crime and a human rights violation that should be prosecuted. In several instances, under murky circumstances, several police have been kidnapped and lynched in remote communities.

So given all this, if the "Special" Force for Fighting Crime occupy themselves with wasting peoples time with paperwork, creating a denigrating and disrespectful environment and taking people's money for the pleasure, then what exactly is it that the rest of the police do?

an accomplishment

so I achieved something in my continuing struggle with the "tramites" for residency in Bolivia. I accomplished the first step.

I knew that I needed to leave the country, go to a consul's office and get a "visa de objeto determinado." No dice at the consul in Puno. But my neighbor had gotten hers done with almost no trouble at another consul's office. So I went their, and after realizing that they had forgotten to ask me for my work contract. I gave them the contract that I had invented with some friends, and ten minutes later they returned my passport with a visa for 60 days, 30 more than they should have.

The secretary's comment was, "most of these things are just designed to make your life difficult, so we won't ask you for them." Which is really interesting, given my anthropology of the state readings.

And since I got back last night, I've been jamming on the rest of my tramites...

State Aparatuses

so I'm trying to get my residency done, which according to everyone I know except the consul in Peru, requires leaving Bolivia to the nearest consul's office (in Puno, Peru). At any rate I've been stymied

But it's given me the chance to read some of the Anthology of Anthropology of the State that I recently copied from a La Paz city council member, I'm currently on the reading an Essay by Luis Althusser, who is talking about the difference between Ideological State Aparatuses and Repressive State Aparatuses. Repressive State Aparatuses being things like police and army and courts and most of the things that one usually thinks of as the State, and Ideological State Aparatuses being things like family, religion, trade unions, political parties, etc.

Haven't gotten to the part where he gets into what might be behind the Ideological State Aparatuses, but I have an idea or two.

So I've been taking advantage of my time here in Puno, walking around, being a tourist. I walked up Condor hill, where there is a very good and lifelike statue of condor on one side, and a big blue glass cross on the other. From there I strolled down through the old section of town, where the nice old houses are and to the church, which is an enormous and intimidating cavern with a hugh ceiling and dome. imagining what sort of awe you were meant to feel when you walk into a building like that. The whole time pondering relationships between the various kinds of state aparatuses and contemplating the question that has been plaguing me for some time, namely whether the government of Bolivia wants me to get out of the country or to get married.

Corrupting Logic

So I am working (slowly and reluctantly) on legalizing my residence here in Bolivia. It's a pain in the neck. One office sends me to the next office, which sends me back to the first office, and then to another office, then back to the first office, etc....

But it brought back a memory from when I first got to Bolivia. I was at a party at a gringo friend's house and met a Bolivian neighbor from the same condominium complex (who spoke English - I wasn't yet able to meet anyone in spanish). The subject of corruption came up because someone had stolen the brain of his car out from under the nose of the security guard outside the complex.

After a good several minutes of railing against the corruption and how upset he was that the guard had been obviously bought off (which seemed a logical reason to be angry), he changed course (it should be noted that his father was in the military and active in politics during the dictatorships). He finally concluded that maybe corruption isn't such a bad thing and gave the following example:

If you want to open a factory that will employ a hundred people, and you can either take six months to get the paperwork to wind it's way through the bureaucracy or pay a thousand dollars and get it done tomorrow, then corruption is obviously better for Bolivia.

Which is an interesting argument.

What I find even more interesting is that if I tell this story in mixed company, i.e. Bolivians and gringos, only one of those groups laughs ....

Scramble

My mother just sent me an email asking about my legal status in Bolivia. This was my response:

At migrations they told me I need a NIT (tax ID number) to get residence, and at the Tax office, they told me I need a residence card to get a NIT. Fortunately the fine for overstaying your welcome for a year is less than the cost of the paperwork for a yearlong residency....

- chuck

Back on the Horse

So, it’s been a good bit of time since the last post, and frankly it’s been a discouraging couple of months for this particular project. I headed to the states last October with high hopes that a few leads would pan out into at least a few more leads.

It wasn’t to be.

On the bright side, I’ve had a fair amount of work since I got back from that trip – a couple of short pieces for Plaza Sesamo (the Spanish language version of Sesame Street), a video for the International Organization for Migrations, and a video for the largest cement company in Bolivia.

And I’ve got a handful of shorts in the works also.

And I’m picking up a few more leads for A Miner’s Luck. It’s going to be a lot of work, but it’s time to pick up the torch again on this project. So I’m off in search of a few small family foundations.

Wish me luck.