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Travel Discovering the Limits of Liberty in Bolivia by William E. Merritt Any line of
thinking can be taken only so far. For some, the outer limits of liberty can be
found in a shower stall in La Paz.
Today, Bolivia seems like paradise to a libertarian. In
1981, the junta then in power waved adiós and a 22-party democracy rushed in
to fill the vacuum. The surprising thing to a North American is that it seems to
be working — or not working, which is a good deal more agreeable to
libertarians. My guess is that having 22 political parties in congress, none of
which comes close to a majority, is a much more effective check on authoritarian
government than anything in our Constitution. At least as far as my two
litmus-test questions went, every single boliviano had the same answer:
"Yes, our votes are fairly counted" and, "no, the whole thing is very inefficient
and nothing much gets done." In other words, by the standards of Thomas
Jefferson, Bolivia has a mature democracy that protects the rights of its
citizens.
| | William E.
Merritt is a senior fellow at the Burr Institute who lives in Portland, Ore.
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Poverty is still pretty much omnipresent, of course. But it seems to be
receding as fast as it can. Bolivia didn't even get around to land reform until
the 1950s, which means only a couple of generations of bolivianos have had
a stake in their country. To me, it seemed to be paying off, at least if food is
any guide. Every woman I saw who was in her forties or fifties — every one
— was about five foot, two. Many were stooped and wizened. Childhood
nutrition had clearly been an issue for these ladies. But not for their
daughters. The girls — the teenagers and twenty-somethings — are tall,
strapping, athletic, dark-haired, dark-eyed beauties. And they aren't wearing the
traditional bowler hats and ankle-length skirts, either. They are in jeans and
sweatshirts and, like as not, connected to headphones. To me, it looked like
Bolivia was speeding headlong into — well, if not the 21st century,
something like the 1970s. Something about the chaos of its history has
left Bolivia with a refreshing lack of nanny laws. In La Paz, which is the most
sophisticated, most up-to-date, most worldly metropolis in the country, it is
impossible to spot anything resembling a traffic regulation. Passing on the right
is not only accepted, it's socially mandatory — not passing on the right
will set loose a cascade of honks at your churlishness for blocking the way.
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| To me, it looked like
Bolivia was speeding headlong into — well, if not the 21st century,
something like the 1970s. |
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Seatbelts not only aren't required, they don't exist. Neither do child-safety
seats — or meddling bureaucrats sticking their heads in your window at
intersections to check whether your kids are trussed up and facing backwards in
the currently approved manner. There doesn't seem to be much in the way
of automobile emission standards and, since gasoline engines don't work very well
at 12,000 feet, almost everything on the street is diesel — which makes La
Paz smell the way Portland would smell if the mass-transit people ever get their
way. Traffic isn't controlled by mindless electrical machinery, but by the
free flow of countless pedestrians in the street because — in the old
districts, anyway — the sidewalks are hardly wide enough for street vendors,
let alone somebody wanting to walk somewhere. Another thing Bolivia doesn't seem
to have is vagrancy laws or business licenses to keep people from setting up shop
when and where they want. Actually, street vendors are supposed to be licensed,
they just don't bother. So, when the police feel like it, they come around and
sell day-use tickets to the vendors. Now I have never had to buy a day-use ticket
myself, but I couldn't shake the impression that this ticket business is a good
deal more straightforward, and a lot cheaper, than being shaken-down by a
big-city cop in the U.S. Where there are sidewalks, things like manhole
covers tend to break or get lost. Now, I can't say for sure they never get
replaced. For all I know, La Paz may have just passed a bond issue to install new
manhole covers. But you don't see evidence of that just walking around. Nor do
you see yellow tape cordoning off the holes. What you do see is a lot of people
with their eyes open watching where they are going — personal responsibility
in full flower. Soft-core porn is proudly displayed at newsstands.
Families and marriages don't seem any the worse for it. And, when a
several-hundred-year-old, several-story masonry facade looks like it's about to
tumble into a crowded street, the owner does the logical thing. He pulls loose
some cobblestones and uses the holes to brace the sticks to prop up his
building. La Paz is in a wet part of the world and has something like 200
rivers channeled beneath the streets. Now "river" may be an overstatement, but
there surely is a lot of water down there. You can hear the gurgling. What you
don't hear is so much as a peep about wild and scenic waterways. Drug
regulation doesn't seem to be much of a social priority. Coca leaves are the
national snack and, as far as I could tell, there are no prescription-drug laws
at all. You just walk into a pharmacy and buy whatever it is you need. In my
case, it was some more Cipro — and the pills cost me less than the co-pay I
had to cough up at home. I don't think this was a coincidence. The whole
business about coca is a sore spot. And it should be. Bolivians know all about
our War on Drugs, and they do not approve. T-shirts are everywhere with the
message Coca no es la cocaína. Coca is everywhere too, of course. All
we norteamericanos had it in the morning boiled into tea, and hardly any
of us ran crazy through the streets chopping up grandmothers to get the money for
our next cup. Every market has ladies with a set of iron scales
plopped down among bags of coca leaves but, even way out on the Altiplano in a
village about as isolated as we ever got anywhere on the trip, they wouldn't sell
to our Canadian guide because he looked DEA to them. The fact is, he did
look DEA — at least the way Hollywood thinks DEA looks. He was tall,
muscular, with open features and a broad smile. I wouldn't have sold coca leaves
to him, either. But then, I live in the United States and, in the United States
he really would have been DEA. In Bolivia, he was a guest. But a scary enough
looking guest that even ladies who make their living selling a legal and
traditional agricultural product in their own country — ladies who happened
to be surrounded by huge open bags of coca leaves — were so terrified of the
long arm of the U.S. government they wouldn't do business with a Canadian.
| You just walk into a
pharmacy and buy whatever it is you need. In my case, it was some more Cipro
— and the pills cost me less than the co-pay I had to cough up at home.
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Dogs are fully and happily dogs without being leashed up or locked away and,
sometimes, they pay the price. But not from being hit by cars. I never saw that.
One midnight, though, when an annoying barking dog had been carrying on outside
my hotel for about half-an-hour, something happened to warm the heart of every
North American who has been conditioned never to dare do anything in such a
situation. The string of barks was suddenly cut off by a blood-curdling yip. And
then . . . nothing. I don't think it was a car that got that pest. I think it was
a sleep-deprived boliviano and I say olé for la
libertad. I've always thought Mexican kids are freer than ours because
they get to play with fireworks. But Bolivia goes Mexico one better. In La Paz,
if you've got some dynamite, nobody thinks the worse of you if you do what comes
naturally. So, if you happen to be marching in a political rally, which somebody
happens to be doing almost any time you want to cross the street, and it occurs
to you that tossing a stick or two into the onlookers will attract attention to
your cause, you are not going to have to argue with Mothers Against Disorderly
Dynamiting, or some other gaggle of busybodies telling you what you can and
cannot do with your own dynamite. After you have passed by, whoever happens to be
left just steers around the unexploded sticks and goes about his business.
Any American who remembers the '60s has a bad feeling about being caught
in a political demonstration in Latin America, especially those involving
dynamite. But the ones in La Paz looked pleasant and good-natured, and had
nothing to do with somebody's opinion of Yanqués and whether their
cars should be set afire. Mostly, they were about incomprehensible local matters
— such as the group standing on a traffic island, singing melodic,
non-threatening Andean songs along the lines of El Condor Pasa, while holding a
Nazi flag. Painted over the swastika was a black circle with a back-slash —
the universal sign for Stamp Out. It had something do with getting the Germans
out of the phone company. Another rally — a parade, really — had
a lot of music and dancing and marching bands and flags, and seemed rather
festive even though it was in honor of the day Bolivia lost its seacoast 130
years ago in a war with Chile. Bolivians always celebrate Loss-of-the-Seacoast
Day with parades and music and dancing. In a few regards, Bolivia seems to
be picking up some of our bad habits. Hunting is strictly forbidden. Boys owe a
year of military service in case Chile turns out to have designs on the
mountains. The drinking age is 21, and is strictly enforced by scary-looking
National Policemen who favor fatigues, body armor, and chrome-plated, sawed-off
shotguns when carding fuzz-faced teenagers in discos. The voting age is
18, and it is strictly enforced, too. But by people much scarier than National
Policemen: bankers. If your voter's card isn't stamped, you can't do business at
a bank. But these are small-potato nuisances. To the casual visitor, the
place seems like a real-life, successful experiment in a lot of things
libertarians hold dear. And, for my money, it was. At least if you don't dwell
too long on the National Police. I'm not sure what to make of those guys.
There were a lot of them in La Paz, but they didn't act sinister and nobody
seemed afraid of them. Still, it was hard to adjust to the sight of all that
government hardware, and the whole thing started me thinking about where freedom
really lies. Surely, a lot of freedom is won and lost at very low levels.
And, at the level of day-to-day activity, Bolivia is a lot freer than America.
| Living in the Inca Empire
was a lot like living in Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, except without the
moderating effects of a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.
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I loved it. And then, one morning, I was taking a shower in my pretty-good,
three-star hotel and ran smack up against the limits to my own tolerance for
freedom. My hair was lathered. Warm, amoeba-friendly water was streaming
down my back. The world was good. I turned around . . . . .
. and, built into the shower stall with me . . . . . . was
a 220 switch box . . . . . . and my thoughts turned to
toast. TOAST, I thought. One . . . drop . . . one . . . SINGLE
. . . drop . . . goes . . . in . . . that . . . box . . . and . . . I'm . .
. . . . and the power cut out . . . . . . and my medulla oblongata kicked in . . . . . . and I skidded out of the shower in a stream of bubbles . . .
. . . and, right there in the darkness on the Road to Damascus, I
experienced an unexpected political conversion. I concluded that, in the matter
of electrical codes, at least, Bolivia could do with a bit more government
intrusion. * * * Bolivia hasn't always been this
way. It has recently emerged from a patch of bad government extending back to . .
. well it's hard to put a finger on exactly how far back. Bolivia is a poor
country and not much archaeology has been done. My guess would be at least to the
Tiwanaku civilization, which began imposing itself on its neighbors around the
time of Christ. But this may well be a failure of imagination on my part.
Bolivians are ambitious and could have had some form of bad government well into
the Early Stone Age. But, as far as the Late Stone Age goes, we have a
pretty good handle on what things were like — at least if you believe Don
Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa. And he was certainly in a position to know.
Just a few years after the final collapse of Inca resistance, he gathered up all
the upper-class survivors he could lay his hands on and had each tell him, in
private, the history of their own factions — and of their enemies', as well.
When he had it written down, he read it to them as a group and made the changes
they suggested. In the end, his "History of the Incas" is about as close as any
of us is ever going to come to knowing about life in the Andes before Pizarro and
his iron-clad thugs showed up. It must have been a lot like living in Nazi
Germany or the Soviet Union, except without the moderating effects of a decent
respect for the opinions of mankind. The Incas weren't good with just stone and
agriculture and cloth, they had a genius for anticipating the worst brutalities
of the next 500 years of world culture. In fact, it's hard not to read Sarmiento
without having the feeling that Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Vito Corleone kept
dog-eared copies by their beds. Every ten citizens had their very own
Curaca to report on them to the next Curaca up the line. He
reported to the Curaca in charge of 500, who reported to the thousands
Curaca, who reported to the big-deal Curaca in charge of 10,000.
Students of mid-20th-century Germany will recognize this Curaca business
for what it is — the führerprinzip: Hitler's very own
contribution to management theory, translated to a pre-European culture.
The Incas didn't just foreshadow the Nazis. They moved entire populations on a
truly Soviet scale, from the Altiplano to the jungles, or from Chile to Ecuador,
or the coast to the mountains. And for the same reason — to mess up the
ability to revolt. Like every pharaoh from Cheops to Mao, they consumed
human labor on a prodigious scale. Everybody owed three months of work a year to
the Inca, three to the local governor, and three to the Sun. Of the three months
left, one had to be spent planting, one harvesting, and the remaining month was
divided into days for things like mending clothes. It's no wonder nobody ever
invented the gunpowder and steel that would have come in handy in 1532.
The Incas were five centuries ahead of Castro in offing successful generals. Like
Caesar Augustus, they registered the whole population for taxation. Like
loathsome monarchs everywhere, they iced their relatives when they took power.
Like the Mafia, they sent out button men to make friends with whomever they
wanted to lure to their deaths. And, in a half-hearted sort of way, they trailed
along behind the Aztecs in dabbling in human sacrifice when things got
scary. When the Spaniards came, life actually may have improved under the
unbroken brigandage of captains, governors, Jesuits, military juntas, death
squads, and people with menacing titles like "political chief," "chairman,"
"supreme protector" calling the shots straight through to the 1980s —
unbroken, that is, if you don't count occasional forays of foreign bandits like
Butch and Sundance and Che dropping by to stir up things.
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