As I arrive
exhausted in Buenos Aires after a 14 hour transatlantic flight, I check out my
luggage to wait for the next leg of my journey: The flight to Bolivia. Desire
for breakfast overcomes me, and I walk by the McDonalds to get some fruit tea.
Nicely calculated, two big suitcases and a cup of hot tea to go.
Balancing the hot teacup in my hand, I rest under a huge ad in the arrivals hall. “A thousand
destinations, one taste”, it promises, featuring the
universal McDonalds burger. But this, I realise, will not expect me in Bolivia.
McDonalds has left Bolivia.
The fast
food chain lasted for five years in the country, before it closed down all its
restaurants in Bolivia in mid 2003 (DeSuremain, 2009). A recent documentary titled “Por que quebró McDonalds en Bolivia?” (Why did McDonalds Bolivia go
bankrupt?) has given new popularity to the apparent failure of McDonalds in
Bolivia. But while the documentary and various web sources praise the Bolivian
rejection of fast food and of McDonalds as a symbol of Western capitalism, it
is actually not at all clear why McDonalds left the country (Andean Information
Network, 2012).
Do
Bolivians reject fast food? According to my experience, not at all. Wherever
you go in an urban area, at any time of the day, you will find street vendors
selling traditional and Western fast food, and you will find restaurants
offering food to go. From the traditional salteña (pastries
filled with something like a meat stew) or fried intestines to hot dogs and
fried chicken – Bolivians love their fast food. I even discovered what I call a
“Bolivian hamburger”: “Trancapechos” (translated something like “stomach
stuffers”), a white bread roll filled with: rice, fried potatoes, a generous
piece of fried beef, a fried egg, tomato-onion salad and the obligatory hot
sauce (containing locoto, the local chilli variant).
Do
Bolivians reject McDonalds for ideological reasons? Some say so. For De
Suremain (2009), for instance, the Bolivian population initiated a conscious
boycott of McDonalds from around 2001 on, just around the time when the U.S.
invasion of Iraq started. On the other hand, the more successful introduction
of Shawarmas / Kebab in Bolivia is supposed to show Bolivian loyalty with Arab
countries (ibid.).
From my
experience so far, I would regard that analysis as overly political. Bolivians
continue to consume all kinds of Western fast food. Moreover, almost every
family meal is accompanied by the obligatory 2-litre bottle of Coca-Cola,
another potential symbol of U.S. imperialism.
But here’s
another piece of information: A standard McDonalds burger in La Paz used to
cost the equivalent of 0.50 euro cents (about 5 Bolivianos), and a full meal
2.50 euros (about 20 Bolivianos) (De Suremain, 2009). For the amount of 5
Bolivianos, you can buy 2 or even 3 traditional salteñas, and for 20 Bolivianos,
2 persons can eat an abundant meal including drinks.
So
certainly, McDonalds was only affordable for certain social strata (DeSuremain,
2009), mainly the upper-middle class that does however not depend on McDonalds
for their daily alimentation. For the broad mass of Bolivian society, McDonalds
was an expensive taste, too expensive to eventually get hooked on BigMacs.
Sources:
Andean
Information Network Bolivia (13 January 2012). McDonalds left Bolivia in 2002;
Fast Food still abundant on city streets. Retrieved from http://ain-bolivia.org/2012/01/mcdonald%E2%80%99s-left-bolivia-in-2002-fast-food-still-abundant-on-city-streets/#hide
DeSuremain,
C. (2009). Shawarmas contra MacDonald’s. Globalización y estandarización
alimentaria a prueba de las reivindicaciones identitarias (Bolivia). Anthropology of Food, S6, December 2009.
