Bolivia: The High, Hard Land

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Outside of the Himalayas, the highest country on earth is Bolivia, which nestles in the Andes, landlocked in behind Peru and Chile. Since the altitude of La Paz (pop. 350,000) is 11,900 ft., visitors are warned to get used to the thin air before taking a cocktail or attempting anything so athletic as trotting upstairs. At the airport, 1,400 ft. above the city, no jets come in; Panagra's prop pilots sometimes take a whiff of oxygen during stopovers. Yet 4,000,000 people inhabit Bolivia; 75% are on the altiplano (high plain), a vast, barren Andean plateau averaging 12,000 ft. in altitude. Of the 75%, a few tin miners produce the nation's major export; the rest, mostly Quechua and Aymara Indians who cannot even speak Spanish, spend brief lives struggling to scratch a living from the stony soil.

Potatoes for Survival. Last week Bolivia's President Victor Paz Estenssoro, 56, flew to the U.S. for a state visit. Most inhabitants of the altiplano—who don't even know what goes on in La Paz—were unaware that he had gone. It is spring in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Indians are plowing and planting. As their ancestors have done for centuries, those fortunate enough to own oxen bedecked the horns with white streamers and draped their backs with magenta cloth to bring luck. Those without animals simply tore at the grey earth with metal-tipped wooden poles. Women in derbylike hats stooped to plant potatoes, their basic staple of life.

When—and if—the potatoes ripen, the Indians will eat some of them fresh, save others for seed, and turn the rest into chuño. Chuño-making begins when the temperature at night falls below freezing. Potatoes are left out to freeze, then thaw when the sun rises. Barefoot Indians tread out the moisture, leave the potatoes to freeze again, tread some more. After a fortnight they have chuño—a dehydrated potato that, with luck, will last all winter.

Of an average family's ten or eleven children, only four or five survive infancy. Life centers around the mud-brick cook hut where feeble fires of roots, sticks and llama dung struggle in the thin air. Indians who make it through childhood live to an average age of 32—without taking a bath, without taking a pill, without sleeping on a real bed. Most are solemn and docile, apparently cowed by their environment, except when there is an excuse for a fiesta and they can gulp caña (a potent, sugar-based liquor). Then, a missionary says, "a young Indian will start dancing with a girl and they will wander off. After a week they will come back to the community and announce they want to get married."

President Paz has given land to the Indians; schools are being built. For the first time, glass is going into window spaces long open to the winds of winter. An occasional Indian pedals the stony paths on a bicycle. A rarer one carries a Japanese transistor radio. Signs of hope are scattered, but visible—much of it owing to President Paz.