Interp Culture New Millennium

Emotions and Women's Health in Bolivia

Maria Tapias

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097157
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Embodied Protests examines how Bolivia's hesitant courtship with globalization manifested in the visceral and emotional diseases that afflicted many Bolivian women. Drawing on case studies conducted among market- and working-class women in the provincial town of Punata, Maria Tapias examines how headaches and debilidad, so-called normal bouts of infant diarrhea, and the malaise oppressing whole communities were symptomatic of profound social suffering. She approaches the narratives of distress caused by poverty, domestic violence, and the failure of social networks as constituting the knowledge that shaped their understandings of well-being. At the crux of Tapias's definitive analysis is the idea that individual health perceptions, actions, and practices cannot be separated from local cultural narratives or from global and economic forces.

Evocative and compassionate, Embodied Protests gives voice to the human costs of the ongoing neoliberal experiment.

1

Neoliberalism on the Ground

Political, Economic, and Social Landscapes

Most mornings, it was not the strong Valle Alto sun streaming through my window that woke me. It was not the cacophonous chorus of neighborhood roosters, nor the gleeful chatter of children running off to school. It was not the squeaky wheels of carts hauling produce to the market three blocks from my house, the church bells calling the faithful to Mass at 7:00 A.M., or the incessant buzzing of my Casio alarm clock. What drew me out of sleep at dawn was the slow and rhythmic swish-swish-swish of Doña Soledad’s broom sweeping the sidewalk right below my bedroom window.

Each day, regardless of season, the elderly neighbor—bundled in several layers, a full black pollera (the layered or pleated skirt worn by many native Andean women), and warm tights—swept with her pichana, a sheaf of dried and stiff prickly straw tied together with a little bit of string. She meticulously swept the debris off the sidewalk onto the dirt road, and when finished, she would issue my second wake-up call: the sound of water slapping onto the road. She cast her red bucket of water in a circular motion like a fine liquid net over the surface of the dirt and pebble road. This way, when trucks and cars came jostling down our unpaved street, they didn’t leave behind a cloud of dust.

By 5 A.M. most people in Punata were already wide awake. Many women, like Doña Soledad, busily swept or watered the sidewalks and roads. Others prepared morning tea or cleaned their courtyards. Doña Selma, my landlady, blended the daily concoction of herbs she drank for her ulcer: llanten, bee pollen, and pochongora, with honey added to make it drinkable. When the academic year was in recess, Carina, a seventh-grader who lived a few doors down from me, was usually headed to her parents’ fields to water the alfalfa and feed the few animals they owned. While her brothers slept in, Carina frequently complained she was expected not only to complete this chore but then also to return home and prepare the midday soup. Unlike her brothers, she eagerly awaited the start of the school year, when she was then relieved of these chores.

Doña Flora, who lived across town from me, was already washed up, had twisted her long graying hair and switches into two thick braids, donned her pollera, sweaters, apron, and butcher’s hat, and prepared to go to the market to sell meat—something she did seven days a week all year-round, with the exception of Good Friday. Justino, the campesino hired to help transport Flora’s meat to the market, waited outside her home with his wheelbarrow. All bundled up, he wore the flaps of his brown tattered alpaca hat hanging down around his ears. Flora’s daughter Mariana, who lived across the cobblestoned street, tidied up her small convenience store (located in the front room of her home) to the sound of the latest cumbias and chicha music blaring from her radio and prepared breakfast for her two small sons, who normally ignored her first two wake-up calls. Her father, Juan, depending on when the water cooperative allotted him his share of water, could be watering his potato fields or, on Tuesday, the day of the regional market, purchasing cattle for slaughter.

Doña Vera, another market woman, was in the market before 4:30 A.M. preparing tojori and api (sweet hot beverages made from white and purple corn) for the customers who ate their first meal at her stall. Doña Wanda, up since 3:00 A.M., busily removed the last batches of bread from her oven and sent them to the market with her two helpers. Norma, a purveyor of peas and fava beans, began to collect the tiny trickle of water delivered from her spigot from 5:00 to 11:00 A.M. in numerous buckets.¹ While she waited, Norma could be either doing the family’s laundry or peeling potatoes for the midday meal before heading to her market “stall,” a colorful woven blanket spread out on the floor, shaded by a large white parasol stitched together from the fabric of old flour sacks.

By 6:00 A.M., as the sun rose, women would begin to arrive from all corners of town or neighboring villages to the market. They washed down the tile countertops, stalls, or floors and set up parasols that would offer protection from the parching midday sun. Once settled, many would go to one of the breakfast vendors and purchase something warm to drink and perhaps a fresh piece of bread, fried pieces of sweet dough (known as buñuelos), or a cheesefilled empanada. Those market women who had “contracts” with restaurant owners—usually sealed by compadrazgo ties (ritual kinship ties)—delivered meat, vegetables, or other products promptly so that the cooks could begin to simmer the midday meals. By 7:00 A.M. a steady trickle of customers would arrive at the market to buy their groceries. Since many Punateños lacked refrigerators, a daily trip to the market was one of the tasks housewives or daughters would undertake in the course of their day. Men were rarely sent to the market to buy items for the household because, according to most women, they lacked the “common sense” needed to buy quality and reasonably priced groceries.

Heading toward the plaza, past the “John Travolta” and the “Sting” barber and beauty shops, were the taxi-truffis² filled with passengers headed to Cochabamba. Some passengers would return later in the day after conducting business in the city, while many students attending university or women employed as domestic workers would return only on the weekend. Sandra, the newspaper seller, set up her stand with a large stack of the day’s edition of Los Tiempos, the Cochabamba newspaper, shouting: “Tieeeeeeemmpoooooos!” Father Crecensio, the parish priest, would be saying Mass to the local Chilean nuns and a few faithful. The pharmacists in town cleaned off the dust from the counters at which they attended their clients and prepared to raise the corrugated metal door of their respective businesses. On the very edge of town, the nighttime staff was briefing the daytime crew at the hospital. Rosalía, depending on her shift as a hospital janitor, could either be on her way home or preparing to go to work.

The hustle and bustle characteristic of early mornings in Punata belied the fact that many families, in spite of working hard and trying to maximize their resources, were struggling to make ends meet in the face of the economic hardship the country faced during the late 1990s. Indeed, many did not experience the prosperity that the government had promised would materialize “in the long run” through the implementation of neoliberal reforms. In the unrestricted, competitive market economy promoted by neoliberalism, the playing field was not always level and the “losers” far outnumbered the “winners.” Furthermore, in the daily activities with which people occupied themselves were hidden the more intimate and bodily ways people experienced the effects of neoliberal reforms.

In this chapter I explore how neoliberalism unfolded in the context of Bolivia and consider the economic strategies people deployed to help mitigate the effects of the reforms. As suggested above, not all in Punata prospered, although some did. The emergent inequalities strained the way people related to one another, altered relationships of power, and had effects on individuals regarding whom they could depend on and trust. Understanding these repercussions, however, also requires an understanding of the social and cultural contexts in which the women featured in this ethnography lived, and it is to that effort that the latter part of this chapter turns.

Neoliberalism in Bolivia

The international financial community has referred to the general lack of economic growth during the 1980s as the “lost decade” for many Latin American countries (Phillips 1998, xv). During this period Bolivia experienced strong economic decline and a persistent debt crisis. The gross national product during these years fell by almost 25 percent, and hyperinflation rates reached well over 20,000 percent leading up to September 1985 (Lind 2002; Jorgensen, Grosh, and Schacter 1992, 3). In 1985, to attend to the crisis, the Bolivian government, headed by Victor Paz Estensoro of the MNR (Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario), implemented a radical, neoliberal restructuring program called the “new economic plan.” The new economic plan, introduced by Presidential Decree 21060, was backed by the business sector and disseminated through policies known as structural adjustment programs. The IMF- and World Bank–supported structural adjustment plan sought to “rescue” debtor countries, stabilize the economy, cut inflation, and restore external and internal financial equilibrium and promote growth (Phillips 1998, xv; Jorgensen, Grosh, and Schacter 1992, 3–4). The “rescue” extended by the IMF, however, had strings attached: Bolivia had to relax protectionism and accommodate the needs of the global market.

The first phase of the reforms was to open Bolivia to the international market economy (Álvarez 1996) and suspend state subsidies. The removal of price controls resulted in increases of about 1,000 percent in the price of basic consumer goods (Kohl and Farthing 2006; Painter 1998, 39). Furthermore, opening the country’s borders to food imports stepped up competition for agricultural producers (including many producers in Punata and the larger Valle Alto area, causing several to abandon production all together), who were, in turn, unable to compete with the cheaper imported goods flooding store shelves, particularly from Chile and Peru. The fragile textile and food industrial sectors were devastated; more than 120 factories closed. The government also sought to curtail spending by freezing or cutting salaries and laying off ten thousand administrative employees and twenty-five thousand rural teachers (Kohl and Farthing 2006, 71–73). Concurrently, in October 1985 the market for tin (Bolivia’s main official export) crashed, which led to the closing of several of the national mines. This resulted in the loss of employment for twenty-three thousand miners, who were granted lands elsewhere in various parts of the country (Healey 1997). Over the course of the year, unemployment rates rose dramatically.

Along with the high unemployment rates, other cutbacks were felt as a decrease in actual wages and represented a “hidden cost” that helped widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor (Kohl and Farthing 2006, 18). For example, many social services (such as health, education, and basic welfare) that had been subsidized by the state were no longer universally available and had to be paid for by individuals (Arze and Kruse 2004; Pereira 1996, 39–40; Toranzo Roca 1997, 199). As well, the tax base changed structurally in ways that negatively affected the poor (Arze and Kruse 2004, 24). Before these reforms, revenue came primarily from taxing income and property; by the end of the 1980s, a shift had occurred whereby more taxes were drawn from purchased products (a system which proportionally disadvantages the working classes). In December 1986 the government created an Emergency Social Fund to alleviate the social costs of the reforms. This fund included resources to be used on small-scale projects that were intended to improve the infrastructure of the country (including street paving and irrigation projects) and to stimulate employment opportunities (Schacter, Grosh, and Jorgensten 1992, 6). In total, 3,045 projects were approved for a total value of 18.1 million U.S. dollars. It was during this period that the GTZ health development project in Punata and the larger Valle Alto area was initiated.

Another phase of the new economic plan was the decentralization of government power through two main laws, the Ley de Decentralización and the Ley de Participación Popular (Álvarez 1996, 4), and privatization of nationalized companies. The new laws enacted throughout the 1990s massively restructured the Bolivian state, changing the dynamics and organization of political power, the health services, and the educational system, to name a few. The rationale behind decentralization was that it would make local governments more effective and accountable and thus better able to address their constituents’ needs. In addition, the decentralization of funds was intended to improve the infrastructure, particularly in more rural areas. From 1993 to 1997, then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada continued the neoliberal economic agenda, seeking to make the state more efficient, further opening markets to trade, and selling interests in the largest state-owned enterprises (including oil and gas, telecommunications, transportation, and power) through a process known as “capitalization.”

Looking back at the first decade of the implementation of the reforms, one positive outcome was the control of hyperinflation through the dollarization of domestic bank accounts (Dunkerley in Kohl and Farthing 2006). This feat is touted as part of the “Bolivian miracle” and by some standards was taken as an indicator of the reform’s success (see Jorgensen, Grosh, and Schacter 1992). Inflation rates, albeit only one means to measure “stability,” decreased and remained at 11 percent in 1987 (Schacter, Grosh, and Jorgensten 1992), but economic growth did not materialize as expected. In fact, the reforms had profound social costs among the already destitute populations of Bolivia in terms of soaring unemployment rates, loss of social services, decrease in living standards, and growth in income inequality (Antezana 2000, Léons and Sanabria 1997 b). In light of the social costs to the poorest populations, numerous adaptive strategies (some more lucrative than others) served as “safety valves” against the pressures of the reforms. These included increased rural-to-urban migration and a swelling of the informal economy, the coca/ cocaine boom of the 1980s and 1990s, and increased international migration.

Patterns of increased migration to areas outside the Valle Alto have a much longer history than the period surrounding the implementation of the new economic plan. Tin miners, for example, regularly traveled to active mines in highland regions throughout the twentieth century. After the 1953 agrarian reform many campesinos (peasant farmers) in the Valle Alto received parcels of land that, over time, were further fragmented among subsequent heirs. By the 1960s the demands made for land led many families to migrate to urban areas and the lowlands to secure work in harvesting (Kohl and Farthing 2006, 63). From 1983 to 1985 a severe drought affected many agricultural zones of the Cochabamba Valley and further accentuated the need to migrate in search of employment. During the implementation of the new economic plan, as unemployment rates rose and as borders were opened to cheap imports, the agricultural sector took a further hit. This decline caused an engorgement of the informal economy (including increased street vending by campesinos as well as by former factory workers, miners, and teachers) and the expansion of small-scale economic activities (Buechler, Buechler, and Buechler 1998). By some estimates, by the end of the 1980s and into the 1990s the informal economy expanded to nearly 70 percent of the urban workforce (Arze and Kruse 2004, 28; Kohl and Farthing 2006, 61).

Without access to formal modes of employment and with the intensification of income inequality often associated with neoliberalism, many people weathered hardship by resorting to the coca/cocaine industry. Traditionally, coca and coca chewing has been utilized throughout the Andes in rituals, as medicine, as a way of cementing social relations, as a means to stave off hunger, and as a source of nourishment for thousands of years (Allen 1988; Conzelman et al. 2008). Coca leaves must be processed and significantly altered to produce cocaine, but the two products are often erroneously conflated, and coca production is therefore a polemical political issue internationally. During the 1980s coca production not only met demands of local use but also found a profitable niche in providing the raw material for the international cocaine market. Coca growing absorbed the shock to the unemployed and underemployed including miners, agricultural workers who formerly supplied goods to the mines, and other campesinos who could not compete with prices of imported food goods (Antezana 2000; Léons and Sanabria 1997b). People could be directly employed in the production, growth, transport, and/or stomping of coca, or their relationship to the industry could be more indirect (in roles people were more willing to admit) as people provided services to those directly involved in the trade (see chapter 3). The coca/ cocaine economy thus absorbed available labor and also became key to the reproduction of formal economic activity (Toranzo Roca 1997, 195). Indeed, Kohl and Farthing (2006) assert that one reason the new economic plan was able to produce immediate stabilization was because of the dollarization of the economy and decreased regulation that enabled the laundering of cocaine profits without much scrutiny. As will be seen in chapter 3, the lack of regulation enabled the proliferation of risky investments that left many investors vulnerable.

From the mid-1980s until 1997, it is estimated that coca growing and the elaboration of cocaine paste provided between 5 percent and 8 percent of the GDP, exceeding all other agricultural products (Kohl and Farthing 2006, 71). While the boom itself lasted until the end of the 1980s, when overproduction caused a global decrease in the price of cocaine paste, the cost of coca fluctuated throughout the 1990s but remained an important source of income for many. In 1989, President George H. W. Bush initiated a National Drug Control Policy to address the proliferation of drug use in the United States. Central to this strategy was the onset of the “war on drugs,” which focused on targeting the supply of production rather than the demand of consumption as key sites of intervention. An important component of Bush’s plan was eradication of coca fields and the interdiction of cocaine shipments from Andean countries. Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru were also required to pass a biannual certification process that would grant them “favored nation” status and upon which economic aid was established (CEDOIN, 1991). A positive certification was bestowed on countries meeting the United States’ eradiation goals. Given the imperialistic overtones of this policy and the ritual role that coca plays for Quechua and Aymara peoples, this plan was met with great resistance by campesinos, whose dissent took the form of roadblocks to major cities and popular protests.

During my extended fieldwork in the late 1990s, Bolivia continued to produce one-third of the world’s coca. While production for ritual consumption was legal, the vast illicit production supplying the raw material to cocaine producers supplied jobs to thousands of peasants (Léons and Sanabria 1997a). In 1997 Hugo Banzer (a former military dictator who had ruled in the 1970s), was reelected to the presidency and subsequently implemented a more severe coca eradication program, known as “coca zero.” The program had devastating effects on the regional economy as well as across the country (Kohl and Farthing 2009, 63), and numerous human rights violations (including extended incarcerations without trials) took place during the implementation (Conzelman et al. 2008). The Bolivian state compensate...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Embodied Protests, Emotions, and Failing Socialities
• 1. Neoliberalism on the Ground: Political, Economic, and Social Landscapes
• 2. Physicality’s Sociality and Sociality’s Physicality: Fluid Boundaries of the Body
• 3. The Intergenerational Embodiment of Social Suffering
• 4. Anxious Ambitions and the Financing of Tranquility
• 5. Moving Sentiments: Emotions and Migration
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index