how racism keeps Bolivia from growing.

For the first time in more than two years I went again to Isla del Sol, for the coast of Copacabana. I wanted to take new photo´s, because my old ones were on my stolen laptop and I also wanted to check out what you really get during an afternoon tour to this Island. As far as I knew these afternoon tours only give you the opportunity to visit shortly (around 45 and 20 minutes) two places on the south part of the island. In comprehension, you spend two times 75 minutes in a boat to get there and to go back… The famous northern  part is to far to visit in an afternoon, there is not enough time to walk over the island and Copacabana is a pretty village as well, so why should I offer people to go there in the only afternoon we have in Copacabana???

Talking about this with an old captain of a small boat, he told me that there was also a possibility to have a nice walk of about two hours, on the south part of the island, from the staircase of the youth, up to a mirador (viewpoint) on the island and down to the second pickup place, the Inca House of Manco Capac. This sounds like a much better tour, but it has to be private, because the regular tours don´t give you this time, or possibility. All right, I decided to pay this old captain around 40 US$ for my own private tour, let´s see what the possibilities are.

Now at the end of the afternoon we sail back to Copacabana, I´m satisfied with my nice walk on the island and wonder why no tour leader before wrote about this in our general information? My captain told me that for 15 US$ more he will take a group of 15 people and will wait as long as necessary on the island, so now I do have another recommendable and payable option too offer my next groups.

Sitting in this boat on the way back to Copacabana, I used my 75 minutes well with reading the newspaper. Especially the parts about the present conflict in Bolivia interests me, but my eye fell also on an article about discrimination. This was something I already wanted to write about earlier, but now I got a new point of view. The article literally translates: ‘Beauty has racism’. It describes about the raising popularity for looking ‘white’ in Asia, Africa, but also more and more in Latin America. Girls like to blond their hair, which often looks terrible, but that´s my opinion and sometimes even try to avoid sunlight to keep their skin more white. Somehow looking ‘white’ or looking Western seems a guaranty for being more appreciated and getting more attention. You can notice this phenomenon all over Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, on television, in commercials, in cheap ‘newspapers’ with half naked women and on the streets. ‘White’ sells better and companies abuse this. Why? Well we all know that mode changes all the time, what´s pretty now, can be ugly the next year. But why is being white in Africa, Asia and Latin America so popular? I would like to share my theory with you:

Most of these countries have been colonized for centuries, during which time the ‘white’ people who came directly from England, Holland and Spain, were the most important, after them you got the mixed races between western people and locals/indigenous and far behind, the indigenous people themselves, who weren´t worth a dime.

Talking about South America again, now more than 180 year after this colonial period, the countries are liberated from Spain and split into different democratic countries. However, who decided about the border lines and who decided that everyone needs to speak Spanish? I guess this was easiest way, because most people already learned how to speak Spanish. But that´s not really true, because even now some indigenous still don´t speak Spanish, which is mostly because the Spanish speaking people didn´t care much about the indigenous and especially not about the education of them. This last conclusion is significant.

Let´s get back to Bolivia now. In this country, for many years no-one saw the importance of teaching the indigenous, not the Spanish descendents, not the indigenous themselves, because they were to busy working on the land and needed no school to teach them about this job.

However, modern education has changed the world, our way of living and with this our needs and wishes. In this modern world it is often not enough anymore to be able to work on the land, grow your crops and feed your animals. What used to be a normal day-routine is now often seen as hard and boring work, that no-one wants to do. Even some of the indigenous who use to be happy as a farmer, now prefer to look for another job. This looking for new jobs, often comes with new problems, because no matter how eager they are to work hard, the skills they learned from generation on generation from their parents are difficult to combine with the needs in this modern world. Now it becomes clear that if they want to join the modern world and find a modern ‘easier’ job, they have to compete with the decedents from Spain and the other western ‘white’ people. This is very difficult, not because the ‘white’ are smarter, but because they are generations of modern education ahead of most of these indigenous people.

This education difference is feeding the general image that locals are stupid and less successful, which depend more on our point of view. Yes, they are often generations behind with education, but they do have another type of knowledge about the flora, the fauna and how mother earth will tread us well if we do the same with her. Part of them are probably even the descendents of the great Inca´s, who´s remains now attract tourists from all over the world.

Something that´s often missing in Bolivia (Peru and more Andean countries) is respect for the present indigenous culture and their knowledge. Worse even, in general there is not much respect for people who are different, especially indigenous, poor people and people with low paid jobs. The wife of a Dutch friend of my, who lives in Sucre, is still discriminated by her neighbors, because she is indigenous. Not important that she has her own shop and her Dutch husband has a well going travel agency.

The day before I started this tour there was a small protest in Miraflores,  Lima. It were the workers who keep all the gardens and public parks nice and clean and they were asking for respect for their job. They are sick of being treated as second citizens, because they work as gardeners…

These are just some of the many examples of discrimination I see around here in Latin America.

In the end most countries here are still controlled by the rich and descended people from Spain, not because they are smarter people, but because in the century we live now you need different knowledge to survive than centuries ago. Instead of that the more educated people use their knowledge to help the less educated, they often use it against them, to gain more power. Another part of well educated, with a small heart leaves the country, because out there, there´s often less corruption and they can earn far more money. Part of this money will be send back to their families, sometimes even so much that it becomes an important fact in the economy of the Latin America country where they come from…

But would it not be better if the well educated people use their knowledge inside their own countries, to improve the economy from within?

Another bad thing about this non-educated/educated and poor or rich problem is that most of the rich people, as usual, live in the best parts of the country. And now the biggest problem in Bolivia is that the rich, who already have a lot, want to separate ´their´ richer part of the country from the more poor part of the country. Some people are never satisfied.

One of the big ‘fighters’ for this separation is the prefecto (governor) Leopoldo Fernandez of the province of Pando, on his own he owns already 500.000 hectares of good farming ground. Like more rich people who live now in the East of Bolivia, he got this land during an even more corrupt period of Bolivia, when he was friends with one of the former presidents. Now he´s pissed that Evo Morales wants to divide part of this land to the poor. This prefecto was behind one of the biggest causes of the recent violence in Bolivia, partly because he has enough money to buy support.

Wás I said, because he´s now in prison for admitting his contribution in the death of three students during a big protest. I even heard that he dared to say that it was necessary?!

Unfortunately this isn´t a solution from the problems yet, far not…

Yes, at the moment of writing this story it is calmer in Bolivia, but this can be just the silence before the storm. The real intern problems of greed, corruption and disrespect still exist and the negative forces of the USA and Venezuela from the outside, are not very helpful either.

The USA wants to get rid off Evo Morales and therefore their ambassador gave even more financial support to the campaign of the opposition (the USA did this before in Central America as well). When Morales found out about this he send the ambassador back to the USA. I think that in general, this improved his popularity within Bolivia, but this act also gave the USA another reason to put Morales and Bolivia on a black list, which makes it very difficult for Bolivian companies to export their products to the USA. This in turn is bad for the support of the working class towards Morales and also for the already weak economy of Bolivia…

Hugo Chaves, with his big mouth is also not really helping Morales and Bolivia. Because a lot of the more intellectual and better educated people who do care about their country, think that Morales is listening too much to the big mouth of Chaves. Because of this hey don´t really want to openly support their own president. Without Chaves they probably would have supported Evo Morales in trying to do his job well, because most of them do agree that he has some good ideas (not all ideas, but I guess that´s normal). Their only complains are that most of these ideas stay ideas and that their president listens too much to Chaves... Now these intellectuals keep a blank opinion in a time that Morales can use all the support he can get. So Morales, like his colleague Correa in Ecuador, needs to spend a lot of his precious presidential time (and money) in proving himself and gaining support. I´ve asked some of these better educated people: “So if you don´t support your president, but are not really against him either, what do you want? Who should take over the presidency?” They had no answer for that…

I don´t really agree with some of the things Morales does (like not showing enough appreciating for tourism and making my work as a tour leader more difficult), but I do think that, at the moment, he´s the best option for Bolivia to finally become a more stable country. I believe that he has some good ideas and really seems to have the intention to help the country instead of only filling his pockets, like lots of presidents did (do) before him.

If he was only president to fill his pockets, he would have had much easier ways to do this.

A journalist wrote that in one way Bolivia is still colonized by the descendents of the Spanish conquistadores, they try to let everyone behave the same and speak the same language without showing respect for the older cultures. Bolivia is not just one country with one culture and one language. There live over 9.1 million people from many different cultures, who sometimes only speak one of the three official languages. Aymara, Quechua and Spanish.

What if Evo Morales, the first indigenous (Aymara) president, gains more support from within and can really bring these many different cultures in Bolivia together? This would be something similar like the famous ‘Monkey King’ (also the name my travel agency) did in Asia.

Morales has a lot of problems with the USA (but who not?) and should stop listening to Chaves, but he also has something that most Bolivian presidents before him didn´t have. In a special meeting in Chili, of a new South American organization, called Unasur showed most Latin governments that they are willing to support Morales and Bolivia. Unasur is a new organization between 12 South American countries and this meeting, called by president Bachelet of Chili, was the first important meeting in its 4 months existence. Probably their goal is not just to help Morales, but also to secure the safety of some Bolivian gas fields which are important to Brazil and Argentine, but at this moment only their support is already more important than their reasons.

Yes, in numbers Morales now has the support of a big part of Latin America and also from most of the Bolivians, but he´s missing the key support from some of the wealthier, better educated and more powerful people in Bolivia self. For their support he not only has to quite listening to Chaves, but there also have to come some significant changes in the way most Bolivians think.

They all have to start to put more trust in each other (there´s not a lot of trust in Bolivia…), showing equal respect towards each other, un-important their cultural background or low paid job and only then they can start working together, improving their economy.

If the Bolivians from all cultural and social classes start to use their energy in working together and helping each other, instead of protesting and fighting against each other (like I ones wrote before, one of the best organized clubs in Bolivia is an organization that organizes big protests…), they can improve a lot.

Their country will become more stabile, which is interesting for foreign investors. At the moment for example a big Russian company, Gasprom, is interested in investing about 4500 million dollar in exploring and using a new gas field in Acero, the South East and at the moment very instable, part of Bolivia. If all of the Bolivians would work well together and the very well educated use their knowledge to investigate these gas fields on their own, they can also determine if this field is really worth 4500 million dollar, or even much more.

It´s said that Bolivia is a poor cripple on a golden chair, unable to use because the lack of knowledge… What now often happens with these natural treasures in Bolivia and Peru is that foreign companies do all the investigations, tell the government that there is something to find and offer this (corrupt?) government good (but far less than worth) money to explore these natural resources. Even if the government wouldn´t like to agree to such an offer, they don´t have much other options.

Morales tried some time ago to take control of all the gas fields in Bolivia, to be able to gain more profits from them. But soon he had to admit that he needed the knowledge and expertise of foreign companies to exploit this gas. If the Bolivians can now start to work together with this Russian company and their neighbor countries, instead of being robbed by mainly big companies from the USA and Canada, this would really improve their future prospects. Maybe this is what the artist thought who made a new metal statue of Ché Guevara stepping on an eagle, between El Alto and La Paz…

Wow, sounds good no? The Bolivians ‘only’ have to trust and respect each other and then from there on they can improve their whole economy. But how do you get all these different cultures with so much (historical) differences to work together, while some of them don´t even like their own culture or race? First of all it is always important to respect yourself, your own race and culture. Forget about these commercial images, accept that you´re black or white, pretty or ugly and only try to change your looks if you like, but not to gain more respect from others… Next to this it is important to get to know each other. It is very difficult to trust and respect someone you don´t know. Start talking with your indigenous neighbor and find out that you both like to drink coca thee, eat chicken watching television and soccer, so what´s the difference?

Of course also good education about other cultures will help a lot in learning to understand them.

Besides all of this, it can be good if they start to realize how important tourism can be for their economy.

The Peruvian President Alan Garcia said it very well in his speech on the 27^th of September, during the world day of tourism. Basically he said that treating their tourists well, can be very important for the Peruvian economy. He also said that tourism is something very important all over the world, because it can give tourists the opportunity to get to know other places, cultures and people, to find out in that the end we´re all the same human beings. Let this speech be an example for Bush…

Only too bad that in reality Alan Garcia isn´t supporting his own words. He is encouraging the Peruvians to improve their service towards tourists, but his own government isn´t doing much in terms of safety and service. Yes, they organized some great shows in Cusco and Lima, with students and actors dressed in traditional costumes, to show the world how proud they are about their many different Peruvian cultures.

This is a good start. At least now he does show some interest in promoting his country to the world, something Morales and Correa somehow forget. 

But why using mostly student and actors in these shows, instead of inviting the real indigenous to show us who they really are? It was almost funny to see some of these real indigenous people looking full interest at how dressed-up students were pretending to be them…

And what about the service and safety towards tourists? The higher prices in tourism, especially in and around Cusco, not only scares away the average Peruvian from getting to know his country, but they make tourists much more elective in what they do and don´t want to visit within Cusco and surrounding.

Well at least these higher prices should indicate that the service is improving as well, but no, there´s no better service in return either. There is still no good informed and working information service, Machu Picchu and around are very bad organized, the tourist police is often not very helpful and the safety on Huayna Picchu is not important.

It still seems that nothing is really important until it generates bad publicity and until it costs tourists and money.

This is the point where I would like to put myself into this story. This is where I would like to take the challenge to see what the possibilities are for a backpacker and medium Spanish speaking tour-leader. I hope that I can prove that just one person, unimportant where he comes from, but dedicated to his case, can really make a difference.

In Nasca prices to fly are now lower and the tourist is king again, because the travel agencies now need to put more effort in getting their seats full. Probably this story will start over again next year…

At this moment I do still have the unsafe route on Huayna Picchu and the bad service that the Peruvian government gives to its tourists. In an effort to get these things improved I just went to the impressive office of ‘El Comercio’, one of the best Peruvian newspapers. Hopefully I can tell you more about this in my next story…

Within the story above there are only some ‘simple’ thoughts about a huge problem, which is very difficult to solve, but was interesting to write about. I do would like to end this heavy story with something positive:

After starting to write this story from a small boat on Lake Titikaka, I´m now a week further, but I would like to end again with a comment about that following night in Copacabana. This night I went with a group member to an unexpected funny show of two Argentine girls. They traveled around, financing their expenses with telling us in songs, dancing and cabaret something about their lives and about Argentine. They are a fine example of how beautiful it can be to learn about different cultures.

Saludos desde Lima,

Martijn