the upwardly mobile in Sacaba, their fears of remaining trapped in a rural identity while also valuing the ideal of peasant community as a refuge from the hectic pace of urban life.
When Amanda, a lawyer from the rural Sacaba locality of Choro, took me with her to attend a monthly meeting of her parents’ coca growers’ union in the Chapare in August 2009, we began the trip from downtown Cochabamba City (see maps in Figures 1 and 2).7 Hopping on a minibus in the Cancha, Cochabamba’s enormous open-air market, in the early morning, commuters and long-distance travelers could take refuge from the smell of diesel fuel and the sounds of thousands of vendors hawking plastic bags, calla lilies, and bicycle tires. After inching through the market crowds, the minibus sped past the public university district, hospitals, a military base, and a botanical garden whose high walls were covered with competing graffiti from the early 2000s condemning or supporting road blockades pressuring for nationalization of natural gas.
The border between Cochabamba City and Sacaba Municipality was unmarked and unnoticeable amid the sprawl as the minibus passed a strip of triple-story hardware stores and rotisserie chicken restaurants, until we zipped past a large, battered, white aluminum sign perched in a traffic circle. This read, “First Sacaba. Municipal Government Working for Development. Onward, Sacabans!” We had reached Sacaba’s urban zone (eje urbano) that bridged Cochabamba City and Sacaba’s provincial town. A large upper-middle-class housing development was followed by a road leading to the Cochabamba Motorcycling Track Association, diesel truck repair shops behind grimy expanses of earth, and an enormous yellow elementary school founded by a deceased Bolivian beer magnate and populist politician. We passed mom-and-pop lumber companies displaying slender eucalyptus logs laid in rows on the ground; a ceramic tile factory; a hotel, its second and third floors still under construction; green fields filled with cows; a store selling steel rebar; a vacant lot filled with trash surrounded by a barbed wire fence; a one-room health clinic; a paint store; a cluster of chicha (corn beer) taverns with cauldrons of fried pork bubbling over fire pits, sending up clouds of greasy, savory steam; another field of cows.
The minibus left the highway and entered the provincial town of Sacaba. Hércules Gym fronted a vacant lot where ragged traveling circuses sometimes stopped to perform. The bus passed the spruced-up Sacaba Town plaza, freshly planted with pansies and orange trees, thanks to the influx of funding by the Law of Popular Participation. Plaza benches were filled with men and women hatching real-estate deals and keeping watchful eyes on people entering and exiting the yellow stucco archways of Sacaba’s hundred-year-old city hall. The bus wove through Sacaba’s crowded outdoor market in which vendors hawked grapefruit, nylon stockings, DDT, and potatoes. Ringing the market were a storefront flour mill, dusty jewelry stores, pharmacies, butcher shops, and money-exchange houses sporting signs that revealed the current exchange rates between euros and U.S. dollars and Bolivian pesos.
At a crush of passenger buses and trucks parked on the highway opposite Sacaba’s Transit Police headquarters, long-distance travelers disembarked minibuses from Cochabamba to find transportation to the Chapare. Some of them, women with weary faces and hair escaping their braids in large wisps, with bundles of clothing and food on their backs and often several small children in tow, had been travelling for days already and were still seven hours from their final destination. Amanda and I bought our bus tickets amid a cacophony of hawkers shouting out the price of tickets. Disheveled boys in shabby, navy-blue slacks called the buses’ destinations in exchange for a peso from the bus drivers. They shouted the names of Chapare boomtowns: “Ivigarzama, Ivigarzama, Ivigarzama! Puerto Villarroel!” Women and girls peddled bags of bread and plastic bottles of pink, green, and yellow sodas to passengers through bus windows. The smell of fried chicken wafted over from a restaurant named “Hong Kong,” mingling with the smells of diesel fuel, dust, and tripe soup bubbling over gas burners in small kiosks. Our bus was relatively high priced in exchange for well-padded seats, good shock absorbers, a gleaming exterior, and the presentation of a horror film.
Figure 1. Cochabamba Department showing Sacaba and the Chapare.
Figure 2. Bolivia.
After waiting an hour for passengers, the bus wound up the twisting highway through Amanda’s hometown of Choro, one of Sacaba Municipality’s rural localities. Despite its designation within Sacaba Municipality as a peasant community (comunidad campesina), few Choro residents worked solely in agriculture and few resided exclusively in Choro. From the bus, Choro appeared as a thick sprinkling of cement and adobe houses lining the highway, many marked by poles with small white cloths fluttering in the wind, signaling that their occupants sold chicha. Rolling hills were painted in a checkerboard of green, yellow, and brown. Large swaths of dry, brown, unirrigated land punctuated the verdant, irrigated potato, onion, and fava bean fields.
The steep grades of the highway beyond Choro were the terror of long-distance truckers; the groaning of the brakes on their secondhand Norwegian Volvo semis and tractor-trailers could be heard at all hours of day and night as they passed through Choro to deliver their cargo of tin roofing, natural gas, or tropical lumber to Cochabamba City. There were frequent accidents on nearby hairpin curves, and truck carcasses dotted the sides of the highway, attesting to the frequency with which brakes failed or drivers succumbed to sleepiness or alcohol.
Choro’s 2001 census count of roughly 1,400 inhabitants masked the constant ebbs and flows of this population during different seasons and during the periodic fluctuations in the price of the coca leaves and cocaine in the Chapare. Many houses remained empty for significant periods of time; at other times they filled to capacity when people returned for holidays, school, or to try their luck making a living back in Sacaba. People waited alongside the highway for bus rides to their coca fields in the Chapare, bundles of blankets and occasionally a bound sheep at their feet.
The bus groaned up through smaller hamlets and large herds of sheep. Increasing elevation thinned the trees and vegetation and chilled our toes. Eroded orange hillsides interspersed with green gave way to desertlike, spiky bromeliads and cactus. At a high pass through these foothills of the Andes, in the chilly market town of Colomi, Amanda bought a bag of boiled, salted fava beans and sheep cheese patties. As we turned down the eastern flank of the Andes and entered tropical elevations, the air that had been wintry became moist and warm. The roar of rivers penetrated the windows of the bus that had been closed against the dust. Lush greenery began appearing on the steep hillsides and our hair sprang to life in the humidity. The bus’s brakes squealed with effort as it miraculously clung to the twisting road. Amanda pointed happily and wordlessly to a thunderous river whose waters roiled and crashed against gigantic boulders, as if just seeing rushing water quenched the thirst of living in Cochabamba’s arid valleys.
When we arrived at the checkpoint that marked the entry to the Chapare, heralded by a plaster Virgin encased in glass, members of the drug control armed forces in olive and camouflage military uniforms were inspecting the contents of a long line of trucks and buses. Before the election of Evo Morales, travelers feared the checkpoint as a principal node of interdiction in the drug war. A bus passenger could be arrested for carrying items recently declared contraband because they could be used in cocaine production—sulfuric acid or even seemingly innocuous elements of cocaine base paste production like toilet paper and onions. Passengers leaving the Chapare feared arrest for carrying small amounts of cocaine for sale or unregistered stashes of coca leaves for their own consumption. Past the checkpoint, the bus then entered the flat tropical plain of the Amazon basin and sped along an arrow-straight highway flanked by lush vegetation until we arrived several hours later at the boomtown of Puerto Villarroel. We stayed for one day
