Es muy tranquilo aqui;
Porque hay mucha vigilancia;
Pero no sale por la noche!
Bienvenidos, gringo,
To the hot investment climate
Of all these
     emerging,
     western style,
     free enterprise
                  democracies!
The people are SO friendly-
In the hotels and restaurants
     and internet places
     around the plaza;
And we have guided tours to
     all the famous
     photogenic sites;
But -
Don't cross the river;
Don't go up the hillside;
Don't enter the canyon;
Don't go down to the beach;
Don't walk a block that way
     or that way
     or that way - alone;
Es peligroso;
Es muy tranquilo aqui -
En el centro -
Porque hay mucha vigilancia;
Pero no sale por la noche!

    Once I'd left Cuba, an island of tranquility where fear of the night and of the poor are rare concepts, and started my trek through South America, I didn't stop in many towns where I didn't hear those lyrics. The sudden sharp contrast between the educated, dignified Cubans living their normal lives and the mainland's "uneducated and desperate majority watched closely by all kinds of cops and military with huge guns" (I'm quoting myself: ch. 6, "Cuban Notebooks"), made the outcry of Venezuela's upper and middle class, treed in their houses every night by fear of the poor, that they "suspect" Hugo Chavez of wanting to go Cuba's way, humorously ironic. Starting with Venezuela, I found fear of the poor by desperately over-armed minority establishments to be the most obvious common characteristic of every place I went on this trip except Cuba, reason enough, surely, for anyone to give Cuba and socialism another look.
    Sadly, though, the middleclass people of the Andes think their situation is normal. Apparently unperplexed by the sheer numbers of the suspects, they always say, "There are criminals in any country, aren't there?"
    "Pues, si. But that's not the point," I said at first, before I, too, began to fear the poor. "It's all the soldiers (or cops when you can tell the difference) standing around with their akas casually pointed at my belly or my toes." I call all automatic rifles akas. "How can you live with that?"
    "But the armados," they explain patiently, "are to protect us from delincuentes."
    When I went south from Cuba, elections were coming up everywhere, and I thought I'd post a political update from each of what Washington calls the "emerging democracies." And I posted one ("From Maracaibo") on Venezuela before the August plebiscite there. But, though Venezuela is certainly on the move and may be going someplace if Hugo Chavez stays in office for 40 years, the most important thing I saw happening in the first five countries I crossed, including Venezuela, was nothing.
   I saw all the modern products in the modern malls and I saw some modern middle class kitchens. And I read the brochures. The official story of progress marching on reads the way such stuff reads, but it leaves out the milling of the ecosystem and exploitation of the teeming and dangerous masses to enrich (always) the same few winners, who must then live forever in guarded safe zones surrounded by cops and soldiers.
    Since, in a single visit, I couldn't find and sort out enough of the questionably important, slightly changing details of each country's official history as covered by the synchronized media to write an honest "update," anyway, I decided to write instead about the much more important set of near identical, unchanging aspects of every country I passed through (all of them together) that are easy to objectively verify and that cry out to be compared with Cuba.
    Americans, Europeans, and even a lot of Latin Americans may be irreversibly trained to believe that if people VOTE every 4 to 6 years and are "free" to win or lose in the market, then all's well. Since they lost their nerve along with the 1990 Nicaraguan elections, even most so-called progressives have jumped on that warm, safe bandwagon, and the fact that those supposed keys to paradise never lead 80% of humanity to a better world (and it's actually odd to think they would) is a cat left in the bag. But it's harder to stay that hard-headed when you're closer to the evidence, and poor Latin Americans have inherited generations of proof that they'll never vote their way out of poverty, and that any exercise of "freedom" to climb out of the capitalist trap in any other way will be watched closely through the crosshairs of guns.
    The official story that all the heavy armament in Colombia is to protect "the people" from the guerrillas there, as if the guerrillas were an alien force, isn't so certain when, in neighboring countries that don't have guerrillas (now), the very same kind of armament is deployed in what should be police jurisdictions against "delincuentes" (crooks), plainly equated with the poor because the armament isn't protecting poor areas (though there's crime there, too); it's protecting the safe zones of the well-off and the tourists FROM the poor. And when I asked why the Colombian army is deployed in the same way (even if it is in the mountains, too), even Colombians readily admitted that the poor are the actual enemy.
    Newspapers there recently reported an international survey supposedly showing that most Latin Americans think that "la mano dura" (the iron fist) is the best answer to their continent wide problem of "delincuencia." But Latin Americans are not very surprised when I tell them that, with virtually no military presence and very lightly armed cops, no such tension exists in Cuba. In fact, there is often someone listening who knows someone who has been to Cuba and enthusiastically backs me up. Except in Venezuela, where I encountered as much middle class ignorance as in America, most Latin Americans know Cuba is different and why. And they actually know their own worst problem is poverty and that it's the poor they are armed against.
    Every Latin American country has armed forces, including Costa Rica, but there is only one country in the hemisphere with foreign enemies. Who ARE the enemies, then, of all those other armies, navies (believe it or not, Bolivia has a navy), air forces, and militarized police, all over Latin America - all armed and trained by the U.S.? There are only a few places with active guerrilla insurgencies still providing an excuse. And, whether all of the poor want their help or not, the EPR, the Zapatistas, the FARC, the ELN, the Tupac Amaru and even the Sendero Luminoso were formed originally for the purpose of representing the poor in a struggle against capitalism. That's just a fact, and, no matter how ignorant Americans and Europeans are kept by their media, most Latin Americans, being closer to the evidence, know it.
    El Tiempo, in Colombia, recently highlighted the public pleas of a Colombian woman for the release of hostages by the FARC and freely quoted her that many Colombians sympathize with the guerrillas' social concerns though not with their methods. Cuban music and images and slogans are popular in Colombia; a survey taken right before the August 15 Venezuelan plebiscite showed a solid majority of Colombians backing Hugo Chavez; and while newspapers there never forget whose side they're on, a clear difference in the level of ambiguity in their treatment of possible FARC culpability as opposed to certain right-wing paramilitary guilt has to reflect a conscious or subconcious, national realization that the guerrillas' positon on the side of the poor is credible.
    The U.S. dictates a fantasy that all the guns it sends south are for "the war on terror" (not long ago "the war on drugs"). But THIS I know: airport security is relatively lax in South America, while border security is near zero (indicating that Washington's version of what's wrong isn't really taken seriously), and from my first encounter with wall-to-wall South American paranoia in Venezuela, I wasn't warned to watch out for local agents of Osama bin Laden or for drug cartels. In fact, neither Arab terrorists nor (believe it or not) drug runners were very often mentioned to me. I was warned to stay out of the territory of the poor, to stay in safe zones where there are plenty of armados to protect me from the poor - certainly not from suicide bombers or dope dealers - and, at night, to stay indoors because then, when the armados themselves retreat inside, even the safe streets are occupied, not by terrorists, but by terrifyingly desperate individuals out to take from me what I have that they don't have - money.
    There is a very old war in South America, continent-wide, always smoking or flickering or kindling or flaming. But it's not a war on drugs or terror or poverty (capitalism NEEDS poverty). It's an endless defensive action by the haves against the have-nots who endlessly threaten them, because they (and their foreign bankers) have most of the continent's wealth, which they don't want to share because, they say, they worked hard and deserve what they have, and because (they rarely say this) there are too many have-nots to share with. So the majority have-nots, who have little to show for their own work, mostly just endure - but many simmer, and some stew, and some strike - here, there, together, alone. It's an endless multi-level war and all those armies and navies and air forces and militarized police, all armed and trained by the U.S., are on the side of the haves - to protect them and their foreign bankers from the have-nots.

VENEZUELA (also see "From Maracaibo")

    Along the western metro spur, west of the bullring, I also found normal looking bedroom communities with names like The Laurels, where children presumably enjoy happy, wholesome childhoods. Inside their bubbles, big or small, middle class Colombians live first world lives as convincingly as if the poor majority weren't there. They are friendly, their food is excellent, and their coffee is perfect.
    I went next from Medellin to the picturesque village of Manizales, perched on a knife edge ridge so even the main street running along the ridge is almost level, and most of the town can be assessed by looking down both steep side streets from each intersection. Except for the oddity of being on that ridge, between intersections, it's a lot like the main streets of several small northern California towns I know. Manizales was one of the places nobody told me not to go out at night, though I was told there were other parts of town I shouldn't descend to. But even at mid-day in a top-of-the-ridge crowd of people who looked and acted like brown Nebraskans, I kept looking over my shoulder and jumping when anyone unexpected passed me.
    Alert readers should keep one eye on the narrator after this to see if my enthusiasm for mingling waned. But not yet. Manizales was generally a place for good and irrelevant experiences that took my mind off my mission for a few days.
    From Manizales I bussed over the central branch of the Andes, down to the deep Rio Magdalena trench that splits Colombia, and most of the way up the eastern cordillera to the 8500 foot valley of Bogota. I didn't see much military along that road, but once again the guerrillas missed their chance to kidnap me.
    Bogota is spread out like an apron in front of a very high escarpment with a white church way up on top that you can get to by teleferico or by funicular car. Behind the church and an expensive restaurant, there is a long, double file shanty bazaar where they sell arts and crafts and junk and delicious, cheap "picadas," heaping plates of steaming vegetables and meats of all kinds.
    In front of the church are coin operated telescopes to look down at the city, at the distant choza slopes that ring the big valley, at the huge clusters of edificios (excess-people warehouses) among the valley's numerous green houses and factories, and at what may be the longest relatively safe bubble in South America, less than 6 or 8 blocks wide but stretching along the base of the cliff for five or six miles, from one end of the huge, beautifully preserved old town, through a modern zone of skyscrapers, and out a long boulevard past several universities, two sprawling parks and a golf course.
    Half the boulevard and its extension all the way through old town is closed to cars on holidays and weekends so bicyclers can ride back and forth as if they were in one of the world's capitals.
    Only a few blocks out from the steep slope, things start looking worn and dirty, and there is a choza casbah with its own crumbling, chaotic main street on the slope above the old town, where I wandered around with my camera one day, trying to reverse the fear of the poor that was starting to infect me, looking for an open space with a view of where I was. I shot the slope above from a sandlot outfield, but I had no real conversations. On the sorriest looking street in Havana, if I just stop to consult my map, someone will offer directions and may wind up inviting me in for a cafecito. In the Bogota ghetto, maybe I was spotted as an outsider on the wrong side of the lines. Maybe I didn't try very hard.

    If you think you can tell I didn't explore much of Cuzco, you're right. I was burnt out and covered with bug bites, and the things I was looking for were too easy to see, anyway, so I kicked back and enjoyed the center. The bubble world of Cuzco is a nice place to be. The food isn't as good as in Arequipa, but if Peru were just the center of Cuzco, there'd be little to criticize. Varadero Beach in Cuba may seem like a bubble world, too, after all. But there are no troops with akas patrolling Varadero, and you don't have to be afraid to go outside. My attitude in Cuba is the opposite. I never go into Varadero. Outside the bubble is better. In Peru, the contrast between the tourist zone and the rest of town, between the destination spas and the rest of Peru, is stark. Any travel guide to Cuba is about ALL of Cuba. All of Peru is understandably not offered up to the fastidious.
    The internet lists 20 cities over 100,000 in Peru, probably all undercounted and less than half the names belltinklers to me. The friendly tourist agency folks in Lima assured me that most of the towns on my map, big or small, several of which I was pointing at and asking about as possible rest stops for a bus trip, were not good places to go, urging me to fly over all of them. Fly, they urged me. Fly from Lima to Cuzco, and from Cuzco to Arequipa. Peru wants tourists to spend money on plane rides. But there is probably little vigilancia in most of the empty circles on the map because there's nobody in them to protect and, with the Sendero Luminoso and Tupac Amaru crushed, less need to scare the empty circle dwellers out of joining insurrections. Peru's tourist bubbles are large, famous, and crowded (I was lucky to get on the train to Machu Picchu without an advance reservation), but few and far between. The rest of the country contains only the losers' part of the eternal South American equation of winners, losers, and armados.
    From a plane, you wouldn't see that. From a bus, you see it when you finally get to it, but you can't go everywhere, and you can't stop and ask questions or get invited inside. Most of my travel in Mexico and Central America has been in my own car. I've seen a lot of Cuba by rent-a-car, picking up hitchhikers and talking as I drove, stopping to see anything that I had a question about. But a credit card free person can't do that in South America, and I'm getting too old to hitchhike, even with my small pack, as I did in Nicaragua a few years ago. In Peru, my fellow bus travelers were mostly tourists and the bus seldom stopped where I wanted it to stop.
    On the long dry road east and up out of Arequipa to the altiplano, I saw only a few towns, and there were no Peruvians near me on the bus to ask why I saw any at all. Maybe necessary gas stations have accumulated adjuncts, or maybe people still huddle by habit where the Incas had their outposts. In one town of several thousand in an ecosystem not even adequate for dozens, I saw shapeless rock mini-ruins with rock walled dirt yards that could have been the early mistakes of the Machu Picchu architects - or the work of hermits addled by the sun - or the shelters of poor contemporary humans with no water to make bricks. I thought I saw signs of people living in them. People certainly lived in the rows of plain cubes lining the straight dirt streets of the hot dry town, and why anyone was there or had ever been there doing anything I couldn't tell from the windows of a passing bus full of tourists. Maybe there were mines nearby, but it didn't look like a place to live or even to endure. We were past what the brochures call the "narrow" coastal desert, the sand dunes, but it was still desert.
    The bus passed several billboards on that road proclaiming the goal of Peru to be growth. My message to the president of Peru is: forget growth. Peru's population is at least 10 times too big for its resource base. The counter productive military should be converted into a domestic peace corps with one of their missions to teach everyone what I've never had any trouble getting across in the third world: when 2 parents pass on their share of the world to 4 children, each child gets half as much as each parent had; when 2 parents pass on their share of the world to 1 child, that child gets twice as much as each parent had. Each new generation of Peruvians gets less of what wasn't much to begin with.
    The altiplano is large, but it isn't infinite and it isn't lush. A lot of the edge that I saw is only sparse, pale-green bunch grass, OK I guess to the flocks of surviving wild vicuñas that I saw there twice. Where the grass is thicker and you see Indian women in their layered clothing and precariously perched derbies tending mixed herds of llamas, alpacas, sheep and cows, the altiplano looks occupied.
    On the day-long part I crissed and crossed on the bus up from Arequipa to Puno and on busses the following week back and forth between Lake Titicaca and Cuzco, there may be enough isolated adobes to form another city or two. And I assume they are scattered in the same way, not closely but constantly, for over a thousand miles through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. There are probably too many of them for the land, but they make more sense than houses in the desert or in the cities and towns.
    Some small towns are justified by the need for a few stores, schools, and medical facilities, and, along the lake coast, fishermen live in towns. But for the most part, Indians in town are the extra people there's no room for on the prairie. The scattered adobes are poor, and their roofs are almost always sagging, but only the Indians who have them have anything.
    Adobe, if you didn't know, is sundried mud, and grass continues to grow from the always sagging black walls. Normally, the adobe houses are without plumbing or electricity, and many, maybe most, have no floors. Estimated hut size: under 100 square feet and up, and not too far up. Guessing from a distance, very few, if any, are over 400. But often there are two or three together in a tight group. In Nicaragua, the groups would be extended families slightly split up. Roofs go from grass to tin. Newer models made of concrete blocks duplicate the plan - a cube with a few tiny windows, but with no grass growing out of the walls.

    I couldn't verify all of that from a bus. The houses are almost always too far from the road. I talked to Indians at rest stops on the road and in Puno and Cuzco to learn, also, that around Titicaca they spend half their time hauling water for themselves and their livestock; that they live on their meager crops, mostly potatoes, and the meat, milk, and wool of their cattle, sheep, llamas, and alpacas, each family owning only a few animals, maybe selling extra produce, meat, cheese, and milk in village markets and to restaurants - trying to sell textiles and handicraft to tourists at bus stops and in tourist bubbles.
    Nobody on any of the three busses I rode this way and that across the plain bought anything. But Indian women trying to sell me things said some families scrape up enough to put painted plaster or even wood panels on the mud walls inside their homes. Individually, the Indians don't get much from the tourists who come to Peru to see them. They and their adobes are picturesque but poor, but they are still better off than landless, jobless Indians trying to live in cities or towns. Their poverty is at least dignified. But their children don't go far in school.
    Puno is a drab dung colored town wrapped around a Lake Titicaca tourist bubble, which reminded me of pictures I've seen of Tibet. I stopped there twice. About 50,000 people somehow live there with no water but the rare rain and the lake and not even enough air to go around. Lake level is 12,500 feet, and climbing the stairs to my pestiferous fourth floor room, stopping on every landing to let my heart and lungs catch up, scared me. Walking in the thin air was hard, and I didn't scorn other tourists for not leaving their zone; the town is so obviously, repugnantly poor, I didn't walk around much myself.
    In fact, a travel agent in Arequipa had told me to go to Copacabana and skip Puno, which she called dirty. But I meant to (and did) zig from Puno to Cuzco and then zag back through Puno to Copacabana, which is also on the lake but in Bolivia, on my way to La Paz, and Peruvian distances are too terrific to equivocate with. So I rejected her advice and, as a result, wound up so covered with bites from my populous Puno bed that it took two weeks and at least a gallon of 96% alcohol and lotion to end the agony. I noticed other tourists around the bubble-zone plaza all scratching the same body areas.
    But scratching, gasping tourists only endure Puno for as long as it takes to tour Titicaca's floating islands and photograph the few remaining reed boats and enjoy Titicaca trout and alpaca steak with Chilean wine in their zone before dropping back down to Cuzco or Arequipa to take a breather and get over their itch. The people have been stuck there for centuries, maybe always too many of them. Their poverty is easy to explain. Fishing, mining, and tourism can't support such an overgrown cluster of people in such a barren place.
    In fact, on a national and international scale, those three industries, plus some exotic produce (including coca) can make a few Andeans (and outsiders) rich only through an extremely uneven division of profits, a system that has been so effectively protected in Peru from revolt by overwhelming police and military force that, since the Fujimori administration crushed the country's two guerrilla movements a few years ago, Peru has been temporarily at peace - at the point of a gun - in the daytime.

BOLIVIA
    All I heard in Peru was that Bolivia is worse. Along the lake shore between Puno and Copacabana, at first, though, they are the same place - the altiplano with its thin grass; mixed flocks of llamas, alpacas, sheep, and cows; small tilled plots and scattered adobe huts, sometimes in small, tight groups. In other words, the imaginary border on the west side of the lake doesn't change the way the Indians on the altiplano live.
    The sleepy border, however, where I changed my soles for bolivianos at a loss, proved I was also changing one Andean country for another, probably also at a loss, if everything I'd heard was true. The border itself, though maybe the sleepiest of them all, was like all the others in its apparent level of security. South American security concerns are obviously focused inwardly, on each country's own people. As an outsider, carrying a backpack nobody considered suspicious, I needed more than a minute on each side to exchange visas and buenos diases, only because there were a busload of us taking turns. Maybe I never crossed a border in South America in the company of anyone with an Arab surname. But I don't think anybody is on much of a lookout for Al Qaida terrorists - or drugs, either.
    In Copacabana, I met a Colombian exile who actually mentioned drugs. He said he'd gotten fed up with living forever in the line of potential crossfire between rebels and anti-rebels and drug gangs and decided to go someplace else to rest in peace. But he didn't mean Bolivia. He meant Copacabana. Logically, if Bolivia was going to show me the worst examples of the inevitable and mostly ugly socio-economic realities that set South America off from Cuba, I guess it made sense that the first place I came to in Bolivia was the best example of the only pleasant element always in the set - a perfect bubble.
    Copacabana, an extranational enclave isolated on a peninsula across the border from Peru but also across the lake from Bolivia, may be the purest and best of safe tourist bubbles. Tourists who go out of their way to find it are usually solo adventurers or pairs. The merchants there, many of whom are expatriates, seem as unaffiliated as the tourists. And, though only separated by a map line from their Peruvian relatives, the Indians are also peninsula dwellers. The relationship between tourists, white and mestizo entrepreneurs and Indians seems unusually relaxed. The 26th town I'd stopped in on the continent, it was only the second where nobody told me when to come inside or where I shouldn't go. The relief was almost sickening.
    Just by crossing the border, I lost the advantage of easy Peruvian Spanish, except with the Indians, who, just as in Guatemala and Chiapas, speak the same second-language Spanish I do. But some eatery owners spoke English, and the music was suddenly mostly American, though ranging from jazz and blues to reggae, depending on the ages of the fingers on the buttons. The food was generally good (not a preview of La Paz), including perfect coffee and my third good breakfast in South America at the exiled Colombian's place. I even ate well in the Bolivian part of the small town in one of two restaurants owned and run by the same Indian family.
    There are no reed boats among the plastic fleet pulled up on the beach and local Indian women sometimes wear sun hats with ribbons around the crowns that cross in back like Easter bonnets. The comical derbies worn everywhere in the Andes may have very old Indian roots and look like derbies only when made of modern hat materials, but I had to ask if the sun hats were taken from movies on TV. At least every Indian woman I asked knew what I meant and they all agreed it was possible. A young woman selling hats from a display that was half derby and half sun hat wore a billed deerhunter cap.
    Copacabana is so cheap, so relaxed, and so free of any political identity, I'd have considered it as a place I might like to rest in peace myself, if I hadn't kept waking up in the night in a panic that I might stop breathing if I didn't stay awake and supervise my lungs. I had a very agreeable circular room with a lake view in the turret of a strange old hotel with a statue of an Indian woman sitting on the roof, and once I knew there was hot water if I got up at the right time and there were no biting bugs in my $10-a-night bed, fear of suffocation in the thin air was my most urgent reason for wanting to get on to Chile.
    By that time, I was thinking of La Paz, a tilted city hanging between 10,500 and 12,000 feet up, as only a procedural obligation. My passport stamps show I spent 35 days in Venezuela, 34 days in Colombia, and only 33 days in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia combined. But by the time I'd left Venezuela, it was clear that, while I wasn't going to acquire any degree of expertise on any of the countries I visited, the factors that, by comparison, make Cuba look like Paradise to all the poor in Latin America who know about it, were as visible and unmistakable as flashing red lights: the shanties, the beggars, the ambulantes, the lack of dignity, the hunger and sickness, the desperation and violence, the safe bubble worlds and unsafe casbahs, fear of the poor and the night, too many military and militarized police, racism, illiteracy, overpopulation and ecological disaster ignored, and little confidence in the government.
    On the other side of the scale, the abundance of flashy packaged products, which I don't give much importance, was also obvious - and so were the newspapers. I was already reading La Razon in Copacabana, and though it's not as good as El Tiempo, it's obviously better than Granma. But I knew years ago that Cuba's one most important failure is the absence of a good newspaper there.
    Probably very much thanks to papers like Bogota's El Tiempo, I was finding the list of South American failures compared to Cuba not even disputable or disputed in the countries I'd already visited, and I was again assured in Copacabana that I'd see the same things even more easily in Bolivia. I was reading of corruption in high places daily and being told corruption is the Bolivian government's specialty. So I took a noon bus to La Paz intending to be in Santiago within 5 days.
    Just before I got on the bus, I had read about the tendency of tourists to use Bolivia only as a stopover between Chile and Peru and of the Ministress of Tourism's complaint that the few tourists who come are always confronted with demonstrations. Not, she hastened to add, that free speech should be limited, but...
    The next morning I found Plaza Murillo in La Paz tightly guarded by militarized cops and learned from a newspaper vendor that they were keeping out demonstrators. But the park is already crowded, I objected. Yes, but those aren't the demonstrators. So the cops know a demonstrator when they see one? Yes, and they won't let any of THEM in.
    Sitting in a parkside cafe with no such thing as breakfast, hoping to see some action while sipping the same abysmal "pasado" version of coffee I hadn't enjoyed in Peru, I saw pictures in the paper that looked like a dreary new suburb I'd seen from the bus approaching the capital - miles of newly created desert poverty maybe almost as miserable as in Peru. It was as if someone building a movie set depicting a bombed town had found it too ugly and started over, foolishly using the same ugly plan, and kept starting over until the desert by the road was covered with miles of half-built walls enclosing either nothing or some half built adobe huts. Division of the bleak new ruin by empty lanes resembling dirt streets suggested it was meant to be lived in, and, sadly, it looked occupied. The paper spoke of crooked developers and a crooked mayor reclaiming "invaded" land with hasty development to make sure people paid something for their "lots." A demonstration by the dispossessed had led to death and injury when a sympathizer had set off some dynamite. Most amazing, the tract was called "Los Jardines" (The Gardens). I wondered if the Ministress of Tourism worries about transient tourists bussing past that scene.
    With the demonstrators foiled, a military band occupied the plaza and played marching music. Militarized cops surrounded the band to keep any negative critics back. Questioning people in the crowd, I found this was so normal, people generally saw nothing wrong. But while the soldiers and cops occupied the plaza, the city was shut down that day by marching seniors demonstrating against pension cuts, and by marching Indians fed up with being assigned representatives and declaring their divorce from all established parties.
    It can't be hard to shut down La Paz, which is constantly jammed by ambulantes almost to the point of shut-down, anyway. The bus from Copacabana, which we'd been told would take us to the hotel zone near the main plaza, had instead dead-ended in the center of the worst of the chaotic press, forcefully dislodging a row of sidewalk and gutter businesses as it backed relentlessly to the curb in front of a hotel the driver worked for, turning the passengers out with their luggage or packs into the crowd.
    Refusing to look at the driver's place, I found myself in the situation I'd learned to dread in Caracas and Medellin, pushing my way through a tight and maybe desperate crowd with all my belongings vulnerably slung over my shoulder. I don't generally think cops have ever done me any good, but I and the other frantic tourists probably had less to worry about as we eventually all caught cabs and fled somewhere not much different, because the streets of La Paz are almost as crawling with militarized cops as in Bogota.
    Bolivian cops elsewhere that day made the next day's paper by fatally shooting a man protesting the U.S. sponsored eradication of coca in national parks. The papers called it the new president's "first" kill. The president was profusely sorry, oddly claiming that the over-armed police weren't there to shoot anyone. But he was being almost forcefully kept from leaving the country to report to his bosses in Washington until he suspended the spraying operation.
    I'd always thought the militants in Bolivia were mostly tin miners, but students I talked to, sitting in a row on a wall not really listening to a fiery speaker in the plaza that night, told me that the tin business is gone except for a few old miners still digging in the tunnels on their own as a cooperative, with no bosses to protest anymore. It had been one of them, though, who ignited the unfortunate dynamite I'd read about.
    Though the shoeshine boys ominously all wear ski masks, the same students told me there is no armed insurgency in Bolivia. Maybe Che Guevara couldn't start one in the 60's because there aren't enough trees to hide among in the southwest half where the people are. But labor unrest and other turmoil is constant. There was little actual fighting while I was there in September. But there was ongoing civil clamor and maybe mounting violence, and no street philosopher I talked to expected the new president to change that, certainly not by playing America's game.
    Bolivian unrest and violence aren't sponsored by international terrorists or drug traffickers (though drug trafficking grows from the same roots). The root causes are overcrowding of a barren ecosystem and extreme economic inequality. Bolivia is even more desolate than Peru, and the people, packed in tightly where they're packed in, are equally desperate, and the militarized police carry too many guns not to use them.
    I was told Sucre or Potosi, which I'd decided not to see, are "mas tranquilo" than La Paz, but the other big city, rapidly outgrowing the capital, is Santa Cruz, which I'd never heard of but which, being industrial, attracts a lot of cheap labor, and was, therefore, the scene of much of the turmoil I was reading about. Being so desolate, Bolivia, like Peru, packs its population into a few places. More than any other South American capital, La Paz made me long to be in Havana.
    It's easy to see La Paz, because, like Caracas, Medellin, Bogota, Quito, and Cuzco, it's on steep ground, on two giant stair steps, the upper step the kind of squalid building jam tourists go through on a bus hoping against hope it isn't their destination, the lower seemingly more open because it's in a huge bowl. Distance, across the arc of the bowl, may have kept me from recognizing the beauty of some rich enclaves, but nothing I saw looked good. I was in the old town, and the architecture was there, but it was mired in the jostling ambience of the impoverished crowd.
    Even the lower step is 10,500 feet up and the air was still so thin I was afraid to sleep. A large plaza I could see and hear from my window was the center of the constant demonstrations, probably because the crush of ambulantes always there made the crowds look bigger, and the loud voices of collectivo drivers endlessly streaming by yelling out their destinations considerably enhanced the air of tumult and protest, so I joined the crowd for awhile each night, learning that most onlookers were only looking on and that the ambulantes, who had seen a lot happen before, considered the nights I was there not very special, probably because it was raining.
    Most ambulantes I've seen anywhere in Latin America, like most beggars, seem to spend most of their time just hoping. In La Paz they were hoping for at least 30 bolivianos before they gave up and went to whatever they called home for the night. That's less than $4 at 8 to 1, and maybe twice that in local buying power, if they ever got that much. Just walking around watching them lean on their elbows, I couldn't believe they often did. They were all trying to sell the same stuff and, in the cold, thin rain, the only ones I saw selling anything were the food stands, which sell fast food at a fair pace, because their stuff looks better than the nearby restaurant fare. It didn't look good enough to me to justify a handheld meal in the rain in the crowd with my other hand over my wallet, though.
    The government holds the unemployment rate down by counting the ambulantes, who seem to make up half the population, as "self employed" workers. Most of them are Indians.
    Three days after I arrived, so did Pablo Milanes, though his doctor had warned him he might not be able to stand the altitude. In a full page article that started on the front page of La Razon and which would never have been printed in a main stream American paper, Pablo didn't surprise Latin American readers by telling reporters that he's as revolutionary as ever and that, outside Cuba, he hasn't seen any improvement in the lot of Latin American poor since 1959. I can't say or write anything that sweeping, because I haven't seen enough, but in a way, on the same day I finished building my case for this article, Pablo virtually met me in La Paz and laid my last brick by addressing the same theme and drawing the same conclusion I had drawn.
    If I'd known Pablo was coming, I wouldn't have already had my ticket to leave before his concert, but I did, and, more interested in breathing sea level air again than in staring any longer at the obvious failure of "freedom" and democracy in La Paz, I flew next morning over a lot of dead mountains and deserts toward Santiago. As I left the Andean democracies behind me, I got a picture from the plane of a road coming out of the desert and going on into more desert, passing through a gray diamond shaped border complex floating in a sea of empty sand.

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