Free Wisdom Online: Samaipata

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On Saturday (Day 3 of our trip) we all (the of us plus my friend's
family) went to a nearby town called Samaipata, about 3 hours away by
car.  (We went there by a special taxi that charged Bs. 120 / US$15
for 4 adults and 2 kids.)  We stopped a bit before Samaipata in a
little private park called Las Cuevas that had a series of waterfalls.
It was set among pretty mountains and bathing under waterfalls was
quite a bit of fun.

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I found it noteworthy that Las Cuevas was a _private_ park.  It seemed
like yet another case where the private sector was providing services
that I would have normally expected to be offered by the state.  This
came up on several occasions later.  It made me remember Miguel
Centeno's "Blood and Debt" that read in one my classes last year.
Centeno aims to explain the weakness of the state in "Latin America,"
and thinking about Brazil (where the state is _very_ present) his
premise seemed a little strange.  After Bolivia, I can sort of see
what he had in mind.

Then we took a local bus to Samaipata, a small city with a
surprisingly large ex-pat population (German's running restaurants,
Austrian's running tour agencies, etc.)  Our night in Samaipata and a
good chunk of the next day were spoiled by an ideological conflict
between our stomachs and the last night's dinner (we suspect the water
in the lemonade was to blame).  We end up getting some pills in the
local pharmacy (sold individually - the guy cut out exactly the number
of pills we wanted) and by 3 p.m. we were ready to continue our
program (well, sort of).  Luckily this was the only time during this
trip that we had this problem.

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2005-12-04-a-samaipata/20051204_010_9693 Tuto Quiroga's election campaign
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Note the red house in the pictures.  Bolivian elections were coming
up, with two main candidates being Evo Morales (the socialist leader
of Bolivian coca farmers) and Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga - a "conservative"
former president.  (Note, of course, that Tuto could just as
accurately be described as "liberal" - in the same way as The
Economist.)  Strangely (or perhaps cunningly), Tuto picked red as his
campaign color, a star as his symbol, and "Podemos" ("we can") as the
name of this block.  So, the house painted red with a white star is an
example of _anti_-socialist propaganda, of which one could see plenty
around rich Santa Cruz.  As is the case with the painted house in the
photo, much of the campaign followed "X con Tuto" formula, where the
names (or faces) of various Podemos candidates were paired up Tuto's.
The effect was particularly amusing when you saw a sequence of nearly
identical billboards: "X1 with Tuto", "Y with Tuto", "X with Tuto"
with faces of minor politicians photoshopped together with the same
photo of Tuto.

As we later moved towards the Altiplano we passed through areas
roughly balanced between Tuto's red and Evo's blue-white-and-black.
(In many cases the campaign advertising was reduced to just painting
roadside stones with appropriate colors or putting up colored flags.)
Closer to La Paz Evo seemed to have more support.  BTW, we planned our
trip to be out of Bolivia before elections, to avoid any potential
complications, so we only heard the results from Peru.  Evo Morales
won with a clear margin, becoming Bolivia's first indigenous (or, more
politically correct, "Andino") president.

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