View of the World (25 page)

With the exception of the eldest son, in his
moda inglese
pinstriped suit, and his stylish wife, the general impression the group gave was one
of less than affluence; yet it was clear that a small fortune was being spent on this meal. By the time coffee came I found myself chatting to the head of the house. He had just been released from hospital – hence the celebration. The family went out on the town two or three times a year, he said, ‘whenever an excuse can be found’. So the money went.

It was the kind of household based on a three-roomed flat – the young couple and their children would live separately – with nothing on
hire-purchase
, the minimum of furniture and a kitchen of the old-fashioned kind with nothing electrical in it apart from the toaster.

The father went on to say that he had been employed as a mechanic in the Alfasud factory, then laid off. He added that while drawing what benefits he could, he had managed to get his hands on a list of Alfasud buyers in the area and, by servicing their cars at cut price, had been able ‘to keep the soup flowing’. His daughter went to school, but took time off before Christmas to make figurines for Nativity cribs, which at that season were in great demand. If necessary his wife could always turn her hand to sewing umbrellas for sale in the London stores. Should a financial emergency arise, the eldest son, who ‘worked on the boats’ – he nodded in the direction of the piratical launches in the harbour – could be counted on to pitch in. ‘
Si arrangia
,’ he said: ‘We get by somehow.’ It had always been the true motto of Naples.

D
R GUIDO STRAUSS
, Bolivian Under Secretary for Immigration, caused a stir throughout Latin America last year [1977] when he announced his government’s intention to encourage the entry into Bolivia ‘of large and important numbers of white immigrants … especially from Namibia, Rhodesia and South Africa.’

His statement was published by Bolivia’s leading newspaper,
Presencia
, which later revealed that 150,000 whites would be accommodated and that the scheme had been financed by a 150-million-dollar credit to Bolivia offered by the Federal German Republic.

Censorship in Bolivia fosters eagerness on the part of the Press to study and reflect the governmental viewpoint, but in this instance
Presencia
seems to have been in a quandary as to the official line. A vigorous denial by one department of the plan’s very existence, coincided with a wealth of confirmatory detail poured forth by another. ‘At the very time,’ wailed the newspaper, ‘when the Institute of Colonisation affirmed that they had no knowledge of such a project … Under Secretary Guido Strauss said that the immigration plan was a matter of top priority.’

Confusion was worse confounded by publication of extracts from a confidential letter written by Strauss to his minister, General Juan Lechín Suarez. The letter was full of precise figures and facts. The white settlers would be admitted in stages, taking possibly as long as six years, although 30,000 families could be admitted in the first year if the financial arrangements were settled by then. The exact areas to be taken over by the newcomers were listed and the amount of land they would
receive (800,000 hectares). Strauss noted that the cost of purchasing this land – which was to be given to settlers – and of building roads was 250 million dollars, and that this sum had been funded.

The letter breathed the sentiments of humanity, and warned of the holocaust that awaited South African whites once black majority rule became a fact. Mr Sean McBride, High Commissioner for Namibia at the UN, was quoted as having said that Namibian whites would have to abandon the country. ‘There is no doubt that the factors of a catastrophe are imminent,’ Dr Strauss wrote. Motives of national self-interest were also touched upon. Bolivia’s economically under-developed,
underpopulated
areas cried out for the drive and the technical skills of the energetic South Africans. He also made the claim that Britain, the US and France between them were ready to put up 2,000 million dollars to indemnify white Rhodesians, ‘who would be unable to resist the process of Africanisation.’

Adverse reaction to this colonisation was to be expected, and was led by the Catholic Church, the only body in Bolivia prepared to stand up to the dictatorship. A conference of religious leaders was held last July and a declaration followed listing numerous objections to the plan. What clearly disturbed the Church was the prospect of apartheid in Bolivia.
Presencia
was permitted to publish the criticisms. I quote from two paragraphs only:

La Paz, at 12,400 feet is, the highest capital in the world. The plane lands on the edge of a plateau high above it, engines screaming in reverse and wing-flaps clawing at the thin air. A few hundred yards from the
runway’s
end, the abyss awaits. The city lying below is crammed into a monstrous crater. Here, in this hole in the earth, its original Spanish builders, who went there to mine gold, huddled out of reach of the terrible wind that whines like a persistent beggar at every turn. From the almost infernal vision beneath, one turns back to that of the flat world of the Altiplano, almost all of it over 13,000 feet.

This is the homeland of the Aymara Indians, whose grandiose civilisation preceded that of the Incas. They have been forcibly
Christian-ised
, and enslaved over four centuries, and they are still tremendously exploited. But somehow they have survived. Now, with the Church turned benign, they are no longer compelled to carry priests in chairs on their backs, or scourged for persisting in their ancient worship of
Pacha-mama
, the mother-goddess, and
Tío
, the Devil, who is also, appropriately, god of the tin mines. In their honour the Aymara sacrifice innumerable llama foetuses and get drunk whenever they can. Their distrust of all whites has become instinctive, and can be belligerent. At best one is ignored, and at worst hustled away. Whites who insist on fraternising with Aymaras in their state of holy drunkenness may even find themselves attacked.

Bolivia is a poor country; its per capita income of about £200 a year putting it at the bottom of the league of South American nations. Its adult literacy is about thirty per cent. Oil revenues have brought about some increase in prosperity in recent years, but this has been diverted to a small sector of the population and largely spent on non-essential consumer goods. Far from bringing comfort to the peasant majority, the new prosperity has in fact done the reverse, for while the prices of
agricultural produce have been rigorously held down, almost everything else is imported and subject to the inflationary process.

National poverty and under-development formed the theme of Under Secretary Guido Strauss’s argument in favour of mass immigration of whites from South African countries when I interviewed him in La Paz. He was communicative and direct, a man with a reputation for not mincing words. Occasionally he is indiscreet, and is widely quoted as having said in public, ‘They [the white immigrants] will certainly find our Indians no more stupid or lazy than their own blacks.’ He confirmed to me with enthusiasm all the details of the project so far published, whether or not they had been denied elsewhere, and added to these a little fresh data.

Bolivia, Dr Strauss explained, a country twice the size of Spain, had a population of five millions. Such people as it had were crowded into the semi-barren Altiplano and a number of upland valleys, leaving the vast and rich territory of the eastern provinces virtually unpopulated. Through lack of development of its agricultural wealth, the country was even obliged to import food. When, therefore, discreet international moves had been set afoot to discover possible areas of resettlement for whites whom it was believed would sooner or later be forced out of Rhodesia, Namibia and South Africa, Bolivia had recognised that its acceptance of such refugees might provide a partial solution to this problem.

Dr Strauss said that approaches had been made (through the German Federal Government) not only to Bolivia, but to Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela. Brazil and Venezuela had agreed to accept a limited number of technicians.

Only Bolivia had been ready to take on immigrants of all classes en bloc. Dr Strauss said that any white settler would be given, free, a minimum of 50 hectares of first class agricultural land, and would also receive social, technical and economic assistance. Those who wished to engage in ranching would receive ‘very much more’, together with ample low-cost labour.

Dr Strauss handed me a copy of the Bolivian immigration laws, which also stressed Bolivia’s demographic predicament, and the inducements offered to immigrants who could contribute to its solution. Settlers from all countries would be welcomed with open arms, but, he said, a special and natural sympathy predisposed Bolivians in favour of persons of European origin, who shared with them a common heritage of culture and religion.

Asked how many immigrants from the South African countries had already arrived, Dr Strauss said that some ‘spontaneous’ immigration had taken place. He believed that this trickle would soon become a flood, an inundation which could be expected as soon as black majority rule becomes a fact. The infrastructure, including the building of roads in areas where the colonialists were to be settled, was complete. Bolivia for them, Dr Strauss said, is a promised land.

One question remained. Forty-one Indian tribes, with a total
population
of about 120,000, are recorded as living in the nominal emptiness of Eastern Bolivia. Some of them occupy precisely those areas shown on Dr Strauss’s map as designated for development. What was to become of them?

This was a question which Dr Strauss did not feel competent to reply to. If I wanted to know anything about Indians, and the nation’s plans for them, he suggested that I should go and talk to the Summer Institute of Linguistics, the largest of the group of North American evangelical missionaries working in Bolivia. This I did.

The mildness of Mr Victor Halterman’s personality came as a surprise after learning something of his formidable reputation as head of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. With the exception of Under Secretary Strauss, who was naturally obliged to keep his thoughts to himself, I never met a Bolivian who did not regard the Summer Institute of Linguistics as the base for operations of the CIA in Bolivia; possibly in South America itself.

Mr Halterman’s reticence and modesty were reflected in his bare office in a ramshackle building. Shoved into a corner at the back of the cheap furniture stood a splendid object of carved wood and macaw’s feathers,
an Indian god, said the missionary, that had been joyously surrendered to him by some of his converts. The other decoration was a coloured photograph of a Chácobo Indian wearing handsome nose-tusks, and a long gown of bark.

The presence of these reminders of the Indians’ uncivilised past came as a surprise, because, in the mood of the Pilgrim Fathers, most missionaries frown on all such things, banning personal adornments of all kinds (unless produced in a modern factory) as well as outlawing musical instruments, and jollifications of any kind in missionary compounds. Mr Halterman was more liberal in his outlook. Indians might dress up as they pleased, and even sing and dance, but only in a ‘folkloric’ spirit, in other words as long as such activities were stripped of any possibility of a hidden ‘superstitious significance’.

Among the innumerable North American religious bodies devoted to the spiritual advancement of South America are three main missionary groups: the New Tribes Mission, the South American Mission, and the Summer Institute of Linguistics, all of whom concern themselves with the capture of Indian souls. Of these the SIL is possibly the richest and most powerful, with thirteen active posts throughout the country. Not only does it have the government’s support, but one learns with surprise that it comes under the Ministry of Culture and Education, of which Mr Halterman is an official.

It may be in acknowledgement of this official co-operation that the biblical text that features most prominently in the SIL’s well-produced promotional literature is Romans 13:1, offered in Spanish and eight Indian translations. The Institute’s text is at variance both with that of the English Revised Version of the Bible, and its Spanish equivalent. ‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers’ becomes ‘Obey your legal superiors, because God has given them command’, while the SIL quite remarkably re-translates ‘the powers that be are ordained by God’ as ‘There is no government on earth that God has not permitted to come to power.’ (Could General Banzer, who seized control of the country in 1971, have had a hand in this linguistic exercise?)

Mr Halterman agreed that the SIL, as well as the two other evangelical
missions, were religious fundamentalists, and therefore ready with a tooth and nail defence of every line of the Holy Writ, including the world’s literal creation in six days, and Eve’s origin as a rib from Adam’s side.

Fundamentalists also believe that all the non-Christians of this world, including those who have never heard of the existence of the Christian faith, are doomed to spend eternity in hell. As the printed doctrinal statement of the New Tribes Mission – with whose theology Mr Halterman said he was in complete agreement – puts it: ‘We believe in the unending punishment of the unsaved.’ It is this belief that inspires so many missionaries to save souls at all costs, often with disregard for the converts’ welfare in this world.

‘We have a very limited medical programme,’ Mr Halterman said, and one could be sure he meant what he said. It is this indifference to anything but the act of conversion that explains the almost incredible experience reported by the German anthropologist Jürgen Riester in an encounter with a missionary who in 1962 had been entrusted by the Bolivian government with the pacification of the Ayoreo Indians.

‘The missionary allowed more than 150 Ayoreos to die in cold blood, after establishing contact with them. The Indians were dying of a respiratory disease accompanied by high fever, and the missionary held back medicine, using the following argument: “In any case they won’t allow themselves to be converted. If I baptise them just before they die, they’ll go straight to heaven.”’

Mr Halterman agreed that a certain number of Indians remained at large in the forest areas designated for future occupation by the white immigrants. It was a matter for regret, he thought, and he seemed to blame himself and his brother missionaries for incompetence in this matter. The Indians could be dangerous, he said, mentioning that only two days before, a member of an oil exploration team had been shot to death by arrows. However, there were still souls to be harvested, and he described with quiet relish the methods used to entice the occasional surviving Indian group from its natural environment so that this could be accomplished.