WELCOME TO BOLIVIA

It is a chilly winter evening in the first days of June when I finally arrive at the airport of Cochabamba. The place is busy, bustling with delegates to the meeting of the Organisation of American States (OAS / OEA) that has just come to its end here in Cochabamba.

I am, however, too exhausted to pay attention to all this. I have been on the road for two days and had to do some extra exercise at my point of entry to Bolivia, El Alto airport just outside (or rather: just above) La Paz, at an altitude of 4,000 m. Although I was going to continue to Cochabamba in the very same airplane, I was asked to leave the plane with all my luggage, run across the airfield, find the officer that would put the migration stamp in my passport, fill in a customs declaration, and sprint to the other end of the airport building in order to be able to enter the airfield and the very same airplane again. I did all this in about 20 minutes and arrived just in time for the take-off to Cochabamba. Welcome to Bolivia! In front of the majestic Illimani, a Samsung ad greets me.

Arriving in La Paz

In Cochabamba, my boyfriend and his niece are waiting for me. What a welcome, after a year!

As we leave the airport, the 15-year old niece goes on about the “folkloric nonsense” organised as the farewell ceremony for the OEA delegates. “A shame for Bolivia”, she thinks. With her white complexion, they call her “gringa” in the family. Welcome to Bolivia, a country that is not one, but many.

After the obligatory welcome tea, hugs and kisses with the family, my boyfriend and me take a taxi back to our house. He has found a house in a “safe place”, and that means: In a place with security guards. Our house is in a closed urbanisation that can only be entered passing a safety checkpoint. The taxi driver has to leave his ID card before he drives us up to our house, a lovely house with a garden for our dog, but also with a high fence with sharp ends.

Needless to say, I hate closed urbanisations. But my boyfriend says that only here we can be safe – safe from people who don’t have as much as we do, who live in the Southern part of the city or in the nearby villages and come here at night to steal our things.

Welcome to Bolivia, the place where everybody is afraid of everyone. The richest are so afraid that they live up the hill, with double the amount of safety guards and electric fences. We live in an upper-middle class ghetto in the city. Then there are those who can afford a house and have money but do not identify with the established middle class. They organise their own protection, usually by warning thieves that they will be lynched if they enter the area. And then there are the ones who don’t have a lot and live in the Southern part of the city, some of them also up the hill, but without any protection. These people might get killed in a fight over a few Bolivianos, but there is nobody to protect them. So you see: Everybody is afraid, because there is always somebody who has less.

As the whole country, Cochabamba is a highly segregated city. I do not doubt that I need to be concerned about my safety here. But every day, in so many details, it strikes me: When will these people see that they are part of the same Bolivia?

MCDONALDISATION?

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.