Alexey writes

On the airport military operation in Santa Cruz

2007-10-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

Probably everyone is linking to the post below, an accurate and sober account of what happened to the Viru Viru airport in Santa Cruz. The Bolivian government sent military shock troops to recover control of the airport.

The airport had a new authority appointed during the week, however the person who was replaced (and in charge of the administration so far) refused to quit. And in fact they were demanding cash payments from the airlines landing there, since the government had blocked the bank account of the organization administering Viru Viru. To avoid the situation of losing the permission to operate international flights, the government had to take a quick decision.

Anyway here is the post: link.

Caporales San Simón

2007-10-16T04:48:00.000-07:00

I couldn't help feeling nostalgic after I found these two Llajtaymanta videos on YouTube. I danced caporales for four years in Oruro's carnival a long time ago.

Caporales San Simon

Tu mi vida eres tu

Bolivia fertility rate, or is it mortality?

2007-04-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

Many months ago I put "Bolivia fertility rate" in google and see what I got as a suggestion from it. Scary!

Commenting on news

2006-12-28T15:56:00.000-08:00

You might get the impression that I am not much into Bolivian politics lately. To tell the truth I follow events back home using newspapers rather frequently, blogs are also quite useful for this purpose. Recently I quite liked Jim Schultz interpretation of the power struggles in Bolivia, so you might want to take a look.

For the moment I decided not to comment on anything political because, to be frank, I would be adding very little material to the actual events and existing discussion. I prefer to discuss about things that could be considered niche interests, that is, news items that are not considered interesting in other blogs. One of such interests is the very high rate of traffic accidents in Bolivia, especially accidents that involve intercity transportation. While I was an university student I used to travel from Cochabamba to Oruro and back every other weekend. Although some buses in which I traveled had technical problems, none of these was serious enough to cause an accident, luckily. I happen to know persons that had great personal losses because of accidents, and my brother, being a doctor, told me the horrors that victims of accidents have to go through. These experiences make me interested in the safety of transportation, so whenever I am reading something related in the press I just bookmark the item. I hope I'll have something interesting to say on this, but don't hold your breath. This is by no means a research, maybe it will be a general impression from a collection of press articles.

I have also been bookmarking news related to the yearly floods that the rainy season brings. The news talk about the destruction of much infrastructure including roads, bridges, farms and villages, but very little is discussed on how much damage can be prevented. This intrigues me, the same sad scenes are replayed year after year. I would like to know how much prevention is possible, and also how much of this is the fault of deforestation. After reading Collapse by Jared Diamond, I can see that mismanagement of resources can bring these problems about, what is alarming is that poor countries are especially vulnerable to this pattern.

Another post about nothing in particular

2006-10-18T14:29:00.000-07:00

There used to be a time when I would sit down and write carefully a blog post. That would involve having an idea worth writing about and then read and reread all sorts of sources to make sure that I would not say some rubbish. I still think that it is a valid procedure. So that I can avoid telling too many fantasies. However this imposes a gigantic time cost. And obviously that could easily take hours from some days. At present, as you can see, I am rather inactive to write things on this blog. I even stopped reading many of the blogs I used to read. The explanation is easy, I spend much of my day in front of computers and I happily avoid using them after work. The consequence is that I stopped paying to attention to my blogger activities. Ha, maybe there is a clever way to make this work. I also used to write blog posts on paper but nah! you have to copy them afterwards.

So lately my posts have been somewhat more spontaneous, not because I am trying to change the style. It is a matter of necessity. Today I started to reply to the comments (thanks to the comment authors, it is a pleasure to receive your visit!) and then I decided to write a post. A post about what? Hah! It doesn't matter, just open the blasted window and start writing about whatever. So we arrive at this sad situation, a blog that talks about itself. (grabbing a tissue and wiping away some selfpity tears) Bah it is not that bad. I am just rather verbose when I am not in editing mode, let's just leave that for academic papers and books, shall we?

Well, well. It turns out that my life has changed a bit these last few weeks, there have been more that a few changes in fact but I won't reveal everything in this blog of course. So, I am just going to say that I don't live in Utrecht anymore. I will be away in Cambridge, UK for three months. Maybe I will be sharing impressions about this place, but at the moment I have nothing too insightful to say, except errrr... it is expensive .... errr... people ride lots of bikes like in the Netherlands and.... (scratching head)... oh, well rainy and stuff. Oh, don't hold your breath, I didn't come here as an anthropologist but as a computer scientist. But I will be thinking of something to say. Unless I become lazy and six months have passed before the next post. I would like to say that after being for some years in the Netherlands, going into a bookshop here makes me feel like a child left alone in a candy store. I run from book to book, utterly undecisive about which book to buy. It is just brilliant! I will be buying something when I get paid, for now I am trying to not get bankrupt before the first month is over.

Oh well, time to sleep. Good night kiddies!

Cleaning windows

2006-09-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

I try to not be too dirty a guy. I wash my dishes after eating, I wash my mugs, clean the table and counter, I even clean my room. However I haven't cleaned my windows in a long time. Part of the explanation is that there is a passage next to my window so I don't open it very often. So the dirt didn't really bother me. But every now and then I walked past my window and I was astonished to see the quantity of dirt that time had accumulated. So I took a deep breath and on I went with window cleaning. After I was done, and the windows were dry, I used newspaper to make them shine. And I was so satisfied with the result I was smiling. Not everything is that easy to clean, like mistakes, especially big mistakes. However, after cleaning the window, I am encouraged, mistakes may be hard to clean (not erase) but darn, I will try!

Strange blog entry, but I was posting strange things anyway. If you arrived here via google when you were searching coca tea, well, sorry, I didn't set up the store yet. I really should though, zillions of people get here like that.

Visa para un sueño

2006-08-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

From 2007 a large number of countries will require Bolivians to have a visa before arriving. Gone are the days of easy traveling. Only eleven countries in the world will not ask me for a visa. Sigh.

Why is this happening? Easy, because of migration. Many people in Bolivia pack up and away they go to make some "tourism". Only in Spain it is said that 200 incoming Bolivians are detected per day. They come from several regions of Bolivia, such as La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, Ecuador, Peru and China.

What!?

Ecuador, Peru and China!?

Yup. That's what you read. Right until the end of this year it is going to be popular to be Bolivian, because by having a fake passport you can enter Spain somewhat unmolested. So, from those 200 that enter per day, sixty per cent are in fact non-Bolivians.

Update: Sergio's comment just made me realize that I quoted the La Razon article wrong. The sixty percent number for non-Bolivian people with a Bolivian passport is more like eighty percent!

Oh, and in the case you didn't notice it, I named this post after the famous song by Juan Luis Guerra.

The immortalization of everydayness

2006-08-14T15:36:00.000-07:00

It's funny how sometimes a trivial evening or day can become memorable. Of course, the requirement is that after it becomes memorable that evening still conserves some element of "everydayness". One very usual device is to use some drinks to boost the sense of humor of the meeting with your friends. This is of course what happened today :).

In any case, while returning from such a nice dinner (plus drinks) I started to listen to some old songs that I haven't payed attention to for a while. Then it struck me. I could articulate one quality that attracts me from (let's call it like this for now) alternative music and films. I say let's call alternative for now because some so-called alternative crusaders would be disgusted of my choices if I would tell them. I pay no heed to them! Let me explain to you what attracts me from these alternative media. In two words: everyday life. Yes, that's what I wrote, no super heroes, or conspiracies or some other weird stuff. It is the immortalization of everyday things that holds a special appeal to me (well, the other stuff too but this one has a grip on me). It could be a movie that follows a person in his/her daily routine, even if it is somewhat boring or uneventful. I especially love awkward conversations. Like when you have the husband or some far away relative entering the kitchen and not being able to exchange one funny sentence of conversation, that is just so great to see! :) Also, songs that sing about everyday, ordinary stuff are great, the descriptions of such situations can make them very special. Oh well, sometimes I wish i had the skills of a songwriter or player to write down my everyday stuff.

I think for next time I should make a listing of everyday stuff movies. I should be sincere, there should be some degree of specialness to make them interesting, only songs can be about monotone stuff and be interesting, movies last for one hour so you better come up with something good! So these everyday movies should have some variation. Not too wild though, just some not too strange characters searching for a way, or even better accidentally changing their routines. Yes, the immortalization of trivialness is pretty cool.

Haha, I think this will be the first post that I will not thoroughly check for spelling or stupid errors. It is easier to write them like this, with several glasses of wine on my head and not caring too much about the readership. Well, actually I care a bit. Please like it! Ha ha. Whatever, see you in the next post (or rant).

Seis de agosto

2006-08-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

I am rather sleepy now. But I couldn't let pass the occasion. Indeed, today is August the sixth, it is Bolivia's national holidays, we celebrate independence days with many parades back at home. I celebrated it today in a completely different way but still a pretty cool celebration. I met with a Bolivian friend (amongst others) and had many, many drinks consisting of Rosé and white wine. We chatted a bit about basically everything and we listened to the groups that floated across town. Yes, floated. Today it was one of the many cultural Sundays that are celebrated in Utrecht, the town where I live. There were a couple of groups that I really liked, I wrote down the names to hear them again.

So that was it for my celebration, a decent amount of drinking and lots of fun in conversations. I spoke with my father yesterday and he reminded me of the usual way to celebrate this date back at home. Loads and loads of parades. There must something about it that we like. Maybe it makes life more interesting in a little town like Oruro, or it is just a blind respect for tradition. A tradition that can be annoying when you are standing for hours under the sun. Anyway, I don't mean to rant too much, that is a usual thing when you become old. I wouldn't participate in those parades anymore, more likely I would just spend my time being lazy at home or something else. Pretty much like today actually, Being with friends and drinking one glass of wine too many. Oh well, it was fun at least. In fact, this is the way I am celebrating all these serious holidays from now on. Drinks, friends and a good time. Congrats to all my Bolivian friends and the ones that I don't know too. Now take your time to refill your glasses and sing cheeeeeeers! (and put the "Viva mi patria Bolivia" cueca in the background)

Oh, by the way, I am back. I might be blogging more often now.

Order your coca tea at Ebay!

2006-04-23T16:29:00.000-07:00

Thanks to anonymous to post this useful bit of info. I made a search on Ebay and I indeed found the sought-after tea!

Nottingham-London-Nottingham

2006-04-23T16:22:00.000-07:00

A baby screaming into your ear. You should try remaining calm while traveling in a bus, train or plane and simultaneously receiving many decibels of high-pitched noise coming out of the mouth of a two year old. I was one row ahead, the girl sitting next to the baby and his mum must have had the MP3 player working at its maximum volume. I wonder if some day I will find myself trying to appease an incredibly loud child to not annoy other passengers of a crowded public vehicle. But I am getting ahead of myself...

I took this bus to take me back to Nottingham, where tomorrow, Monday, I will follow for some days courses related to my field of research. I arrived here almost one week ago already. I found out of two conferences that I could attend before the course. Although I was not a speaker there, it was rather exhausting at times. I believe that I was working almost every evening after the conference to take advantage of the extra inspiration that all these talks provoked. I should say that the inspiration was not only technical, or in the form of new ideas, but also thanks to the enthusiasm and the performance that emanated from some excellent speakers.

After the conferences were finished I headed to London for something I was planning and looking forward to. In London I met two Cochabambino friends who started a life there some years ago. Despite the relatively short distance between us, it was only now that we met for the first time after leaving Bolivia. We spoke at length of the enriching experience that is to live abroad and meet new people. They kindly took me all around the center of London to see all there was to see, or rather all I could see in just one weekend. We hope to see each other again soon. There is plenty more to talk about and two days aren't enough.

I learned that there are many Bolivians out there in London. But they don't always come together. The differences of age, goals, values and what have you often get in the way of forming a small community. That is why I am glad we share so many things with my friends. This made possible we had such a nice time

Bird

2006-04-05T01:03:00.000-07:00

Low cost international phone calls

2006-04-05T01:00:00.000-07:00

If like me you are living abroad, probably you find yourself spending a lot of money on international phone calls. I would like to give you some tips to save money while having even more minutes to talk to your family and friends. While I am no expert in the subject, I wish someone had given me this tip before, so here it goes!

Sign up to voipbuster and buy ten euros worth of credit for phone calls. You will be able to call for free during 120 days to landlines of many countries in Europe, South America and other parts of the world. Moreover, the calls to many countries are absolutely cheap. I spend one cent a minute to call to landlines in Bolivia. The catch is that you need a computer and a fast internet connection. These last statement is not totally true, I bought a Linksys/Sipura SPA-3000 Analog VoIP Adapter to connect my plain old telephone to my internet connection. I configured the device to use my voipbuster account, so now I can use my telephone just like any other, but with low cost bills. A friend passed me a useful link from a dutch website to set it up. It looks like this now:

I hope this tip is useful to improve the contact with your loved ones. There is plenty of info via google, good luck!

More on coca

2006-04-04T23:40:00.000-07:00

In a previous post I was criticizing the tone that La Razon newspaper used to comment on a study about coca by the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Científicas (CELIN). For example, La Razon mentions that the researchers tested for the presence of a substance called benzoylecgonine in the urine of three groups of coca (or coca derived products) consumers: tea drinkers, traditional consumers (they consume coca by sort of chewing it) and cocaine consumers. This substance is produced when the consumer's liver breaks down the cocaine in the blood. So, it makes sense to assume that the more benzoylecgonine one finds in urine, the more cocaine the person has consumed. In short, we would expect to find more of that substance in cocaine users than in tea drinkers. Later, La Razon quotes the researcher saying (sort of) "We cannot differentiate the three types of consumption.", indeed all three groups had similar amounts of the substance in the urine. While this finding is surprising since it invalidates our earlier assumption, I would expect that the researchers would offer reasons for this phenomenon to take place. La Razon, however, uses this result without further elaboration to imply that this means that drinking coca tea is just as bad as taking cocaine. This is of course ridiculous given the vastly different concentrations of cocaine between the two forms of consumption. Now, while coca chewing would yield higher quantities of cocaine than simply having a warm cup of coca tea, I would again expect that it is a much smaller quantity than when consuming cocaine.

Because of this doubts, I downloaded the studies from the webpage of the Centro Latinoamericano de Investigaciones Científicas and skimmed through them in the hope of finding the explanations that were missing in La Razon. Unfortunately, I could not find the study comparing the three forms of consumption that were mentioned above. The closest thing to it was a study on the relationship between drug consumption and criminality (Violencia crimen y drogas); in page 38 the researchers mention that by benzoylecgonine urine test they could not distinguish the consumers of "pasta base" from clorhidrate (two forms of the drug).

Anyway, the point of the previous post and this one is to not get carried away by the hype. Just as it is dubious that all cultivated coca is meant for traditional consumption, it is also very dubious that a moderate consumption of coca leaves is akin to consuming cocaine. A bit of skepticism is very useful.

The studies in CELIN's webpage are worth a read. They are quite objective and neutral. In my opinion it is the La Razon's article that was biased by skipping some qualifications and elaborations to the quotes. One of the many interesting bits that can be found in the articles is the description of legal coca exports to the US (article "Coca", page 70). Coca leaves first are treated by the Stephan Chemical company to extract the cocaine from it. Cocaine is then sold to pharmaceutical companies under strict control of the FDA and the DEA. The cocaine-free coca leaves are sold to several companies, among which Coca Cola. Yes folks, Coca Cola uses coca for its taste but, contrary to the urban myth, it has no cocaine. Another interesting topic in the articles is the size of the non-illicit market for coca leaves. According to the researchers' estimations, only the Chapare region produces four times the amount needed for the non-illicit national market. It is rather strange that this result has not been more widely discussed in the Bolivian press.

Finally I wanted to mention one anecdote on foreigners perceptions on coca tea. As I mentioned before, foreigners tend to think that drinking coca tea is just like consuming cocaine, the drug, but just in a fancier way. Recently the president of Slovenia visited Bolivia for Evo Morales' presidential inauguration. Of course, just as anybody who has problems with altitude, he drank some coca tea to feel better. Later, back in Slovenia, some of his political opponents tried to taint his image using this episode. For them the president shouldn't have been "using drugs". Metka kindly translated his answer to those criticisms in the comments of a previous post. Here is an excerpt:

Regarding the coca tea and foreigners’ attitude to it, I found an interesting example of the Slovenian president when he was on the official visit for the inauguration on Morales. He drank coca tea and like expected this didn’t remain unnoticed in our small conservative society. And here comes the reply of our president to such remarks (these are not his words since I had to translate it for you): “I respect old Indian traditions (my remark: Indian is not a derogatory term in our language as for some might be). Drinking coca tea is one of them. First, I had prejudice against the tea but at the 4000 m altitude everyone drinks it. It is the best medicine against altitude sickness that can be quite uncomfortable. When Bolivian ambassador in New York said that coca tea will be the first thing on the table in La Paz, I shrugged with my shoulders and thought that I won’t do it. But when we landed on 4070 metres altitude and after the starting protocol in the hotel the Bolivian minister asked me whether they can serve the tea, then it sounded completely different. We all felt altitude sickness. And this tea helps. I reassured myself. Practically everyone, locals, foreign diplomats or congress members, they all drink coca tea. And this is completely common. This is part of culture and way of living. Therefore, I agree with the Bolivian president Evo Morales that this old tradition needs to be preserved. This has nothing to do cocaine. At the inauguration speech Morales strongly announced fight against drugs and offered cooperation with the USA. But this has nothing to do with an ancient tradition of coca tea. This has to be preserved.”

tags: bolivia

La Paz suffers two bomb attacks

2006-03-22T23:11:00.000-08:00

As I was waking up I was surprised to find out that there were two bomb explosions in La Paz. Two persons died as a result. The police apparently captured some of the perpetrators. It seems that there is no organization responsible of the bombing, it is the work of fanatic individuals. The jury is still out on the motive. Read more at the following links:

At Barrio flores read this and this
MABB
Idle Scrawl

Don't take away my coca tea!

2006-03-22T01:28:00.000-08:00

It is pretty hard to keep a steady supply of Coca tea. The usual way to do it is to buy a big box when you happen to be in Bolivia and hope that nobody is going to care at the customs. Fortunately, I have never had my coca tea taken, nor I met someone else who had that problem.

Of course it would be nice to be able to buy coca tea at Albert Heijn, Dirk van de Broek, Konmar, Lidl or Aldi. However, coca leaves or their products are not present in international trade so exporting coca tea does not seem easy. This is something that the Bolivian government wants to fix. They want to convince the international community of the legitimate benefits of coca leaves so that these can be exported.

The campaign of the government will be pretty hard, considering that many people, when you invite them a warm cup of coca tea, think you are offering them a drug, no thanks they say.

This campaign will have to be backed by serious studies. Some time ago, the foreign affairs minister suggested that coca was so nutritious that it should be part of school breakfast. This statement obviously sparked a big debate (and some wacky ideas). More recently, two studies (mentioned in La Razon here and here) brought up negative points about natural consumption of coca. The first study stated that coca has no nutritious value, the second study tried to make a closer link between coca and cocaine. This last study, tested the levels of benzoylecgonine in three user groups of coca: coca tea drinkers, coca chewers and cocaine consumers. Wikipedia tells us that this substance is produced from cocaine by the liver. More amazing, some people tested for this substance in the Po river in Italy to estimate the number of cocaine consumers down there. Going back to the study, the levels of benzoylecgonine could not be used to differentiate between the three groups of consumers. What can we tell from it? Well, that we cannot differentiate between the three groups using this substance!!! However, the newspaper and the spokesman taint without further discussion the image of coca tea drinkers and chewers using this similarity with cocaine consumers. That makes me angry as a coca tea drinker. Such strong statements need a more elaborate explanation. I will download those papers, if I find them, to see what's all that about.

On the other hand, I do not contest the conclusions of the first study. I never intended to use coca as a diet supplement. I am happy enough using it as tea.

...and please buy my soya

I already posted about the "loss of the soya market" in Colombia. After reading a few articles, I understand now that Bolivia could previously sell soya to the Colombian market paying no import fees. That is unlike other big soya producers such as Argentina and Brazil who could not easily compete because of the import fees. Now this advantage is gone, since the US might be able to sell their soya production paying zero fees as well. Now, the government is frantically looking for solutions to this impasse, while soya producers happily bark at their black future.

A life from El Alto

2006-03-08T14:19:00.000-08:00

I accidentally found the website of a Spanish family that moved to El Alto to do on-site development work. I did not see it mentioned before, so spread the word.

This is the story of a family and its project. One day, my brother Claudio and my sister-in-law Merche decided that it was time to start a new life. Their destination: the Bolivian city of El Alto. The goal: they were not sure, but amongst other things share the life of the poorest people in Bolivia, work as much as they could and give to their children a life that they could not get in Spain.

Sure enough, they left all they had in their city, they took their three children and together with four companions they decided to mingle with different people, different cultures and different poverty, the one from Bolivia.

This is the story, written in many emails, of a life from El Alto.

Read more at Una vida desde El Alto. I hope that the text in Spanish will not be a problem for most of you.

tags: bolivia

I was in Ljubljana

2006-03-08T13:49:00.000-08:00

I was too late to book an affordable direct flight to Ljubljana. Fortunately, Easyjet saved the day, although I had to wait two to three hours in London before changing my plane. No big deal, I always carry a book with me when I am travelling. This time I had two. Oh, and I finished the two.

I enjoyed the journey itself. Part of the enjoyment comes from the anticipation of fun, the other part, I don't know. Maybe it is that I am not in a rush. I can just sit, walk and just enjoy the view. I especially enjoy departing from Schiphol airport, in Amsterdam. The lounges after the security checks show that a lot of thought went into their design. You are compelled to relax before your trip, unlike London Stansted where everyone seems to be rushing somewhere. Take a look at Schiphol.

The passport check in Ljubljana took longer than usual. The delay in the passport check hinted that Bolivians don't usually arrive there in crowds. Luckily I did not have a thorough baggage check as I had in Dubrovnik.

It was impossible to get lost in the journey from the airport to Ljubljana. Especially because my reception committee was waiting right outside the customs gate.

The following days consisted of waking up late, walking around the city center and eating at home or in some traditional restaurant.

When visiting museums, monuments and other famous buildings it is handy to have a student card, the entrance prices are often halved if you show it. I do not have a student card but eventually I started saying I forgot mine at home. Some of the ticket sellers were disapprovingly shaking their heads but they gave me the discount anyway. It is a sin to forget your student card, there are so many offers for them. At the entrance of the Postojna cave, one lady did not initially buy my forgotten-student-card-story. She then asked me where I come from. When I replied I could see how worried she was for me, this poor boy forgot his card in another continent, she must have thought. So, lucky me, I got my discount.

In the last weekend of my stay, we hit the Slovenian roads in a car that Metka and I rented. Since I do not master the art of driving, I left that pleasure to her. The first day we went to a town in the northwest called Bled. I like mountainous landscapes, especially now that I live in the flat Netherlands. Take a look at the views from the castle in Bled and at the lake in Bohinj.

That evening, in a typical restaurant in the small town of Radovlica, I was thrilled to discover tongue among other delicacies that are rare in European restaurants nowadays. This lovely dish of tongue was served with potatoes and grated horse radish. This last vegetable is a sure success among the lovers of spicy ingredients and watery eyes.

The next day I visited the Postojna caves. Once again I established my poor reputation as underground photographer. I should have asked the email addresses of the Japanese tourists that did the visit with me. One of them took the picture of every stalactite, surely too busy to listen to the explanations of our guide. Another visitor was constantly chatting. After a while I realized it was a monologue, his friends were looking in awe at the cave, paying no attention to him. Maybe he was preparing a radio program about the caves.

The caves impressed me a great deal. The larger "rooms" reminded me of some passages in Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth.

We visited ten kilometers of the cave, the most of it in a small electric train. I am eager to one day try the real thing. That is, just go with a torch, some equipment and plenty of time.

The last part of the trip that day ended in Piran, a lovely Adriatic coastal town.

Lost soya market?

2006-03-03T02:53:00.000-08:00

According to the newspapers (here, here, and here), Bolivia's soya bean producers are blaming the government's inaction on the loss of the Colombian market.

What I could gather from the articles is that Colombia is subscribing to a free trade treaty with the US. The treaty allows US soya bean producers to sell up to 900 thousand tons of soya beans and soya cake to Colombia. What this means is that Bolivian soya will have to compete with efficient and subsidized American soya bean producers. Although I don't know the numbers, the panic from Bolivian producers hint that American soya is more price competitive. The economical consequences are significant, since Colombia is the second biggest market for Bolivian soya.

I do not see how the government could have pressured Colombia into not accepting American soya. Maybe using the argument that subsidized agro-industry products are unfair for competition? Seeking support from other Andean countries? I don't know how these international negotiations work.

In a response to the producers' attacks, the government floated the idea of opening China's market. Critics however consider this option economically unsound.

Finally, I am unhappy at how the newspapers sell this piece of news. They alarmingly announce the loss of a market as though Colombia is saying we are buying no more Bolivian soya. The newspapers should instead put the spotlight on the additional competition and the subsidies. The intention of the headlines is to accuse the government of ineffectiveness (arguably they are indeed guilty of that) although the real problems seem to be bigger than that.

tags: bolivia

Trip over

2006-03-03T02:47:00.000-08:00

Now that I am back from my trip I should get some time to post pictures. I discovered I am a ridiculously mediocre underground photographer. That makes me think that in future posts I might snatch some pictures from the web instead of using my own.

It is fortunate that it is possible for me to slowly get back to my working rhythm. At least now that I don't have any deadlines looming. The relaxing fun is over, let the stressing fun begin!

So, anyway, I am back in the Netherlands. Thanks for reading!

Carnival almost over

2006-02-27T04:51:00.000-08:00

Four years ago was the last time that I enjoyed carnival in Oruro. In those times I could not imagine spending that period of the year in another place. Admittedly, in carnival I might have consummed one glass of beer too many,or stayed up until unreasonable hours.

You can feel the carnival atmosphere already some days before the parade. This feeling increases when Friday arrives. At the evening you would meet with friends (after the ch'alla at work if you worked) and went for a walk to the Avenida 6 de Agosto, which in those days is called Avenida del Folclore. There and at most other points of the parade, you find the seats installed at both sides of the street. As you walk there, you feel it is going to be a cold night. Fortunately, the big crowds there lessen the effect of the chilly wind. And you didn't go to Avenida del Folclore if you are not going to dance to the tune of the bands and groups that play there, of course. So, cold can be an issue only if you end up at the main square having some drinks with friends while one of them plays the guitar. Usually, I try not to stay too late on Friday, so that I can still wake up on time on Saturday to see the first Diablada.

Playing with water is a big part of carnival. As Eduardo comments on his blog it can get rather aggressive, but from what I have heard and seen, it is more aggressive in Cochabamba than in Oruro. Most of the times pain is not an issue, but rather being completely wet; even your underwear gets soaked. Then there you are, utterly wet, cold and slightly miserable. This only lasts a few minutes because the next carnival group comes dancing, following the tune of a loud carnival band. A combination of willingness to party, love for the music and dances, and beers animates the whole crowd. It is impossible to not join them in the song and the dance. Indeed, very quickly you forget that you were so cold just a few minutes before.

I have been looking at the carnival pictures of some newspapers. I had the hope of recognizing some friends or relatives dancing in the groups. I yet have to find a more extensive gallery from the carnival. I can see that people were mostly having fun instead of taking pictures.

I have a lot of trouble believing La Patria's statement that one million persons watched the Oruro carnival. I find more credible the report from La Razon mentioning half a million spectators, although that is a very high number too!

I thought that I would get terribly nostalgic the next time that I would spend carnival somewhere else than in Oruro. The fact is that I am not. And it is not because I do not enjoy being there. In fact it is one of the most musical and exciting parties around. I have always have had fun there, I bet that my friends and relatives are still telling each other the things that they did. I am not nostalgic about not being there, maybe because I accept that for the time being it is not easy to go there.

The carnival in Oruro is not the only one worth participating in, even if people from Oruro often feel like that :). Yesterday, I was at the Slovene town of Ptuj. I laughed so much at the creativity of the costumes in the parade. You have the traditional costumes such as the Kurent and many others. I would like to show you pictures but I stupidly forgot the battery at home. Showing pictures of the parade would not do justice to the carnival. Practically every group in the parade made a sort of performance or show. This show combined with the costumes had a highly hilarious effect. As I said, I am impressed by the creativity of the people participating there, all the more so because most of them made the decoration and costumes themselves.

Update: One sentence should read: The carnival in Oruro is not the only one worth participating in, even if people from Oruro often feel it is. The wrong sentence above caused a confusion in the Bolivian blogs roundup. Clarifying: I am Orureño and carnavalero, but I don't feel nostalgic due to the lack of Oruro's carnival; what is more, I enjoy seeing other carnivals too (well, it depends, I didn't like the Den Bosch one).

I am in Ljubljana

2006-02-22T05:31:00.000-08:00

I am visiting a very close friend in Ljubljana, the relatively small, charming capital of Slovenia. I must say I didn't choose the best season to come here. It has been rainy and foggy these days, and it will probably snow too.

I spent quite some time walking in the city center looking at the well conserved historic buildings. I still have to enter inside a few of those, like the city library. Right in the center of the city, a castle on the top of a hill guards Ljubljana. I had to follow a rather steep path to get there. It was worth making the effort to get a bird's eye view of the city. In summer it must be even more impressive, when the trees by the river and the gardens all around the city retrieve their full color.

This weekend is the carnival here. Most people dress up in creative ways and then head to a village near Maribor for the celebrations (forgot the name, sorry). It is possible that we skip carnival because our main plan is to rent car to visit places like the coast, Bled and the caves at Postojna or Skojcan. I am very excited about the cave visit. If a worldwide ban on computer science were imposed, I would become a speleologist (or a entomologist, or an archeologist, or maybe I just would put google ads on this blog and live on bread and water).

There is a mystery I have to elucidate before I leave. Since I arrived last Friday, the temperature has been above zero. However, there are huge mounds of frozen snow all over the place. I was intrigued on why they don't melt immediately. Maybe it is because they were frozen at -20 C temperatures?

Malaysia article

2006-02-08T01:46:00.000-08:00

I was glad to find an article about Malaysia in El Deber. I don't often find articles about (in Bolivian terms) unusual countries in Bolivian newspapers. I enjoyed the personal insights that the journalist draws between the Bolivian and the Malaysian situation.

There are some similarities between the two countries. Both countries produced tin and rubber (introduced in Asia by the British). Both were colonies. And both are multiethnical countries.

Unfortunately the two countries did not develop at the same pace. One is an Asian tiger while the other is (still) a tiger cub :).

The three burials of Melquiades Estrada

2006-02-08T01:24:00.000-08:00

Two weeks ago, in the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, I saw The three burials of Melquiades Estrada; directed by Tommy Lee Jones and written by Guillermo Arriaga Jordán (who wrote Amores Perros and Traffic, two great films too).

A will talk a bit about it. Don't worry, no spoilers.

In this film, Melquiades Estrada, a Mexican cowboy, crosses the Mexican-US border looking for work. He is hired in a ranch where he later befriends one of the workers (played by Tommy Lee Jones). Some time after his arrival, Melquiades is shot to death and then abandonned in the desert. The authorities do not move a finger to clarify the circumstances of his murder; they merely bury him unceremoniously, given his illegal immigrant status. His friend does the impossible to find the truth and carry out Melquiades' last wish.

I hope that this short description does not make you think of an action film where revenge and shooting scenes are main attraction. No, this film explores the deep feelings and interactions of each of the characters. It has very emotionally powerful moments but it is not a "feel good" movie. Nor it is a moralistic one. I hope you can get a chance to see it.

Snack tip of the day

2006-01-29T10:28:00.000-08:00

Tortilla chips with ajvar and a cold beer.

Presidential ceremony coverage

2006-01-29T03:59:00.000-08:00

A summary of the coverage in Bolivian blogs can be found in this post by Eduardo Avila.

La razon has two photo galleries about the event here and here. Just click on Ver Fotogalería in those pages to witness the party atmosphere that followed Evo Morales taking office.

Evo Morales in Tiwanaku

2006-01-22T04:50:00.000-08:00

Bolivia's president pre-inauguration and inauguration news are surely going to echo in the whole Bolivian blogosphere. I will merely post interesting links (all in English! Click Away!):

MABB did a nice article about the pre-inauguration in Tiwanaku.
Miguel Agresta gives a personal account of the ceremony since he was in fact there!
BBC news has some pictures of this event.

The wiphala, an Inca symbol?
The BBC news page that depicts the wiphala flag, claims that this was the flag of the Inca empire. In this other page, Dra Zamudio describes the evidence that would back such an assertion, this symbol might even have been from older times.

However, Javier Escalante from the Dirección Nacional de Arqueología disagrees. According to him the wiphala flag and the famous solstice ceremonies are inventions that can be dated to twenty years ago. Such a claim cannot go unnoticed. Indeed some aymara authorities from other countries generously used unkind adjectives to describe the archeologist.

This wikipedia page gives us more detail on the wiphala flag. It makes sense to think that the design appearing in the wiphala follows an old pattern whilst its depiction in a flag is something very recent.

Unusual guests
It is also worth emphasizing the presence of some unusual guests. Evo Morales announced the return to a more strict hidrocarbons policy towards Chile. Yet, he invited the Chilean president, Ricardo Lagos, to the ceremony. Lagos accepted the invitation, his coming to Bolivia is a turning point in Bolivia-Chile relations. At least in a public relations sense.

Also, notice the presence of Slovene president, Janez Drnovsek, the only European president attending the ceremony. He has been very active internationally to promote awareness of the Darfur crisis in Sudan as pointed out in a comment to a previous post. In the same comments section Jonathan mentions the visit of president Mahamed Allbdelaziz from the Western Sahara Republic. He led the polisarian guerilas to free his country from Spanish rule in 1976. After the Spanish withdrawal, war ensued with neighboring countries Morocco and Mauritania. You can find more history in this wikipedia article. Although many countries do not recognize this young republic, Bolivia did in 1983. Somewhere I read that half of South American and Caribbean countries recognize this republic.

I read some accounts of Evo Morales' speech. He emphasized the diversity of Bolivia, dismissing revenge policies against K'aras (whities) and privileged groups that some people would want to pursue. He also announced the end of the colonial state. Indigenous peoples would have a new role in this new state. As more analyses of his speech appear in blogs, I will add links.

tag: bolivia

Missile report and presidents to come to Bolivia

2006-01-18T11:45:00.000-08:00

The final report on the missile controversy is out! It explicitly states that no one gave an order for the missiles to go out of the country. The report also points out that some related procedures within the army were skipped.

A letter by captain Arancibia Mendoza gives the names of the military officers and two US embassy employees that transported the missiles to an unknown destination.

The president asked the Cancilleria to share with the US embassy his concern on the behavior of some of its personnel members on this matter. The embassy declined to comment on the issue.

General Antezana was removed from his position by the president. To many, this comes too late, as general Antezana gave personal statements many times, breaking the rules (unknown to me) that forbid such statements from military people.

This report confirms the official version on the obsolescence of the missiles. They claim to have tested one with terrible results. It swirled in the air for a bit before crashing and missing the target. It would be great it would have hit the target after swirling like mad! It would be invulnerable to anti-missile defense!

Countering the obsolescence claim will be hard, I suppose, since the missiles are gone.

On happier news, Miguel from MABB tells us that the presidents from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Colombia, Chili, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, Venezuela, Slovenia and the Republic of Western Sahara are coming for Evo Morales' inauguration.

Kudos to Metka for informing me first about the visit of the Slovene president. Initially I thought it was a joke :).

tag: bolivia

Meme of four

2006-01-18T10:44:00.000-08:00

I noticed the meme of four which somehow is to a blog what a forward is to email. Finally I am the happy recipient of the awaited questionnaire via this post of Jonathan. The idea is to do a display of exhibitionism by answering to a series of personal questions with four answers.

Four jobs you've had in your life: Computer laboratory assistant at UMSS (student herder and computer guy), assistant at DICYT in UMSS (helped out with their webpage), lead developer of the comunidadesweb project at Virtualisimo (the first Bolivian dot-com company). PhD candidate at Utrecht University. Yes, I consider it a job.

Four movies you could watch over and over (Over and over? the same movie? Are you for real?): 12 Monkeys; 2001, A Space Odyssey (skipping the "drug induced" trip at the end); Amores Perros; 2046.

Four places you've lived: Oruro, Louvain-la-Neuve, Cochabamba, Utrecht.

Four TV shows: I don't watch much TV but I enjoyed Coupling. I'd rather answer with podcasts :). Here it goes: BBC Documentary Archive, The Naked scientists, Radio Open Source.

Four places you've been on vacation: Copacabana, Bolivia; Tuscany, Italy; Greece; Dubrovnik, Croatia.

Four websites you visit daily: La Razon, BBC News, tons of blogs via the amazing Vienna.

Four of your favorite foods: Papalisa soup,picante de lengua, oysters, ceviche.

Four places you'd rather be: Traveling in Bolivia or South America in general. For living, Cochabamba, a mediterranean city or some Asian place.

Four albums you can't live without: Antologia - Madre Deus, O Melher De Dois - Caetano Veloso, Dance Mania - Tito Puente, Give Up - The postal service.

I would like to forward this meme of four to jpcik! and Alfonso.

Missiles controversy

2006-01-16T15:07:00.000-08:00

The highest commander of the Bolivian army, general Antezana, has been in the center of a growing controversy lately.

This whole affair started when Evo Morales denounced that 29 land-air missiles were irregularly handed from the Bolivian army to the United States. Due to the importance of this missiles in Bolivia's defense, he threatened to start a responsibilities process to president Rodriguez and the defense minister.

General Antezana declared that these missiles were obsolete and had to be demolished. He also affirmed that foreign personnel participated in the demolition and furthermore he takes full responsibility of the decision. But that was only the first of many other statements, each of them changing his role in the whole affair.

First he starts regretting that the missiles went out of the country, "...maybe they should have never left, we should have brought the technicians here." However, he still shows confidence in his choice.

Two weeks later he denies that he gave any authorization for the shipment of the missiles. He tells the press to ask the defense minister to for details.

Then, a few days ago he completely drops the idea that the missiles were obsolete. He points that the outgoing government was pressured to hand over the missiles because of the almost certain victory of Evo Morales. According to him, the US didn't want these missiles in the hands of a socialist government. Later in the afternoon he talks again to the press after an undoubtedly not too friendly talk with president Rodriguez. It turns out that he might have exaggerated previously, the final facts are going to be in a forthcoming report. Let there be no doubt about the government's integrity and sovereignty.

To find what? That today Antezana talks again. He accuses the government and politicians to have signed an agreement to hand over the missiles to the US. Furthermore, he claims to have proofs, and he challenges the government to present the details of this agreement within 48 hours.

Let's forget the obvious fact that general Antezana badly needs attention. The important question here is whether these missiles were really obsolete and if the demolition of the missiles is justified.

There seems to be a final report on the matter already. According to what I read in La Prensa it should go public shortly. While we wait for that document take a look at this statement from Juan Ignacio Siles, ex-canciller during the government of Mesa. He says that they were also kindly asked to give up the missiles, but they refused. In the same article, some military sources contest that the missiles are obsolete. What is more, Bolivia is still paying for them!

Also, more information on the site of FAB extraoficial.

Miscellany

2006-01-16T15:04:00.000-08:00

Sunday evening, everything ready for sleeping. Alarm? Check. Lights off? Check. Book? Check. No, even better, we don't read at all and just sleep early for once.

I cover myself very carefully to avoid the cold from waking me up later. It is not that bad, I have good heating in my room. This reminds of my life in Oruro, a very long time ago. You had to put on something like seven or more blankets to avoid the freezing cold. It was so heavy that it was an actual effort turning in bed to achieve a more comfortable sleeping position. The waking time was always feared. You could be cosily warm in bed but as soon as you would get any arm or leg out, the cold would remind you that you don't have the thick skin of a polar bear. And don't remind me of the morning wash! That freezing water!

Anyway, the point is that I had all these preparations to be ready to sleep and what? Insomnia again. So I decided to write a short post while I prepare something for a meeting at work tomorrow.

Everything prepared, I will try another shot at sleeping.

...

That was yesterday, Blogger was busy that I could not post it. Today it is even worse. I got a flu. No, not the bird one.

On coca policy

2006-01-09T13:47:00.000-08:00

I want to highlight some fragments about coca policy from this interview to the future vice-president of Bolivia, Alvaro García Linera. García Linera maintains that the government will honour the 1008 law while a market study for the coca leaf proceeds. This law states the amount of coca plantations that must be removed. As soon as the study finishes, the amount of allowed coca plantations will change accordingly.

Note that this is more moderate than what the future president announced. Previously, Morales announced that this law would be ditched and coca plantations would be legal as soon as he would take office. Now, it seems that the status quo will remain until the study is concluded.

I heard proposals for this study but I had no idea that someone was carrying it out. Who is it? When will it conclude?

On a second reading, it seems that the study does not exist. García Linera is proposing it.

There are many more interesting things in this interview. I am emphasizing this part just because it seems to be low on Bolivian blogger radars.

tags: bolivia

Consuming media

2006-01-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

The recent holidays prompted a massive consumption of media on my part. On the most part I read books and then I watched some movies on DVDs and cinema. I read yet another comical book by Terry Pratchett, Small Gods. This one I read in French, a rather strange choice for an English book. I just could not resist all those cheap pocket books that they sell in FNAC (Brussels). I also bought the first novel of Michel Houellebecq (I will never learn how to spell his name without google). A great book that I received as a gift was Alamut by Vladimir Bartol. A story that takes place in eleventh century Iran. You got to love those kind of books.

On films I can recommend "María llena de gracia", a Colombian movie about "mulas", persons that traffic cocaine in their stomachs. I remember especially the scene where María swallows the "films". Expect unusually tense moments in that film.

Recently, I started listening to two podcasts. One is Radio Open Source with the slogan "A public radio show with Christopher Lydon". As far as I can tell they tackle sociological, economic and politic issues from around the world. Every program features a guest with expertise in a specific topic who also happens to be a blogger. I already pointed out the show that discussed the increasingly left-leaning Latin American governments. Topics such as Iraq and global warming are also discussed. There is even a program on cookbooks it seems. I will take a look at it!

The other podcast is called The Naked Scientists with the aim of promoting science to the general public. They do it with humor and quick-paced programs. Today I was listening to the special on social insects and biting bugs. I learned why the bites of horse flies are so painful. It was particularly interesting to me since I suffered the bites of this bastards in the island of Mljet. Thanks to Metka for suggesting this podcast.

I also recommend listening to the Documentary Archive from BBC Radio. You can find the podcast feed in this page.

Finally, following links in Barrio Flores I found a blog called I will teach you to be rich. I am not particularly interested in being rich or in becoming rich overnight. Well, It must not be completely true since I read the posts :). The ones that I liked are those that help me improving my self-management skills. So here you have a post about work and the guilt of not doing it and another on the myth of the great idea.

Food talk

2006-01-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

During these holidays in Belgium I got a recipe to prepare a delicious mint tea from a Moroccan restaurant. I rather like it. Sometimes too much. In fact it can cause severe episodes of insomnia if you drink over a liter of it. It was useful while I was still working during the evening. The problem started when I decided to go to bed only to stare at the ceiling. I had to blog a bit to let the sleepiness come back. Not too bad since my other blog's name has something to do with insomnia. Ha!

Have you heard about Picana? It is a traditional Bolivian dish that you eat in Christmas. It is sort of simple, at least simpler than many fancy dishes that people in other countries eat for christmas. I could not avoid thinking about it now that I saw some pictures that my brother sent me. One of those features my two cousins eating a steamy, freshly served picana. I decided not to post this picture because my cousins were not told they were going to be seen by all Internet. You know how women are with pictures :).

Oh, unfortunately I can't find pictures of picana on the web. Not the one that my family does but a rather complicated variant called picana de navidad (christmas picana), a picture here. It does not look as yummy as ours.

Some years ago a Bolivian deputy wrote a newspaper article "Diatriba contra la picana". I was very angry at him. How dared he complain about such a delicious dish? Maybe he complained about the christmas one and not about the one true picana. If I see him once, I should invite him to eat by my aunt Carmen. I bet you a beer that he would convert instantly.

All this talk about food might have made your digestive juices flow, my dear reader. Go get something to eat, you have deserved it. I am waiting to eat the dish that my flatmate cooked today. Tomorrow it is my turn, I am going to kick ass with ratatouille and cous cous.

Off topic, the marketing department of this blog has decided to write a post on food from time to time. Serious studies showed that a large part of the visiting readership get into this blog when looking for food talk.

First 2006 post

2006-01-05T01:09:00.000-08:00

After periods of febrile blogging activity (such as the elections week) I tend to be rather quiet on my blog. I was even quieter because of holidays as I was not using internet all that much.

For Christmas I went to visit my mother and Jean Michel. Following Belgian tradition we had very good food and very large amounts of it. I did a bit of shopping at FNAC with my mother, I love how many cheap pocket books you can find there. I bought a few for the coming trips. I also had time to visit Belgian friends and practice a bit of Belgian slang and Belgian beer drinking :).

For New Year, we met with Bolivian friends in Ghent. All of them are doing PhDs, just as me, so we talked a lot about funny aspects of research, also also about the not so funny ones. Surprisingly we didn't talk very much about politics. That is rather strange, because if you put two or three Bolivians together they will start talking politics and geopolitics, even if a lot of non-sense comes out. Never mind, we talked more about the future, our future that is. We had the traditional oven-prepared pork in the oven with salads. Unfortunately, we forgot to buy apple puree!

I lied a bit when I said we didn't talk politics, we talked about the elections. All Bolivians at this time are following very closely all things related to elections. This reminds me that there was a radio show hosting Jeffrey Sachs, Miguel Centellas and Jim Shultz. You can access it here, I will try to comment later on it.

A personal note from Eduardo (Barrioflores)

2005-12-20T15:58:00.000-08:00

Eduardo travelled to Bolivia a few weeks ago in order to get an internal insight of a political party's campaign. I would like to share a post of his with you, it is about the way that Morales and his party were perceived during and after the campaign, the clichés that were used against him, some misconceptions about him and especially, about personal commitment versus easy ranting. Because of the things he has seen, he has changed his perceptions and opinions. Thank you Eduardo for sharing such intimate thoughts with the rest of us. I keep looking forward to your next posts.

The promised post is here.

New blog

2005-12-19T15:15:00.000-08:00

As if I had a lot of free time to blog like crazy (I don't), I opened a new blog called El púlpito del insomne. Its goal is to talk about programming languages and some of the research I do in my work. I decided to write it in Spanish. I reproduce the introductory post below:

Son altas horas de la noche en las que inauguro esta bitácora, o más apropiadamente, mi púlpito. Desde donde dirigiré incansables peroratas acerca de toda clase de tópicos relacionados con la programación. Trataré de aclarar la jerigonza de los artículos en el campo de la teoría de lenguajes de programación. Espero hacer este material atractivo y útil.

Este es un sitio de divulgación en el que quiero contagiar el interés por mi trabajo y los temas que se relacionan con este. Aunque aún no hay demasiadas batácoras de este tipo en inglés, quisiera hacerlo en español. Esto para no olvidar mi lengua materna y sobre todo para contribuir con una bitácora de calidad (a eso aspiramos) en nuestro idioma.

Quick elections post

2005-12-19T15:11:00.000-08:00

The CNE seems to be confirming the projection numbers from Bolivian media. It has counted 33% of the votes, at this point MAS has 48.3% while PODEMOS has 34.7%. You can take a look by yourself here.

More detailed information on elections

2005-12-19T02:26:00.000-08:00

The CNE is due to post some preliminary results today by noon, Bolivian time.
In the meantime, I am going to use the poll numbers provided by TV and radio networks.

This article from El deber reproduces some quotes that I missed from interviews to Tuto Quiroga and Samuel Doria Medina. They show that Tuto Quiroga, indeed, recognized the MAS victory, although in a vague noncommittal way. Samuel on the other hand stated that he would support the first majority.

Let's see how different regions of Bolivia have voted using an image from the article above. Evo Morales has a stronger support in the western part of Bolivia while he does not finish first in the eastern side. That is not a surprise, the policies that he wants to pursue have been repeatedly demanded only in the west. This asks for a close examination of the governor elections.

Previously, presidents would impose the governors for each region. This election was the first in which governors were elected by direct vote. From the preliminary results, it seems that most of the elected governors are not from Evo Morales' party. That will likely make harder to implement some policies for MAS. Especially tougher measures on gas companies. This will become a central-versus-regional debate. I think that the elected governors from Santa Cruz and Tarija will oppose the future gas policies on the grounds that it meddles with their autonomy.

The policies that the MAS wants to implement in the short term are: legalize coca leaf crops, impose additional obligations to gas companies, call a constituent assembly and implement employment protection laws.

A few weeks ago I didn't support the organization of a constituent assembly. Its advocates argued that they wanted to rewrite the constitution to change the current status of land tenure, economical model, etc. Actually they are not very specific on what areas they would like to change and in which way. That is one of the reasons that I didn't support this cause. Another reason for which I was skeptical was that it is possible to change the current constitution following the current established methods of change.

Thanks to a link by MABB, I could listen to a series of presentations about the Bolivian political situation. The speakers included both supporters and detractors of the constituent assembly process. The supporters were not articulate or specific enough to make their case against their detractors. They fail to mention what I think is a valid reason to make this assembly. Currently it is possible to change the constitution but it is slow and most importantly it requires a lot of political will which is usually absent, because congressmen in general were used to support the status quo. By agreeing in making the assembly, it is a fact that there is going a talk on highly thorny topics that would otherwise would be indirectly blocked.

I think the constituent assembly is about having the political will for change rather than a technical device. I now weakly support this assembly. I say weakly because I am not sure about the assembly specific aspects.

Finally, I was surprised to see in the graphic that I used in the post that there was a second round mentioned. The candidates didn't agree to go for a second round and Bolivia's electoral process doesn't include it. Did I miss something?

Unofficially, a landslide victory

2005-12-18T18:49:00.000-08:00

As the TV and radio stations continued to count their poll results, the percentage of votes for Evo Morales continued to increase. In fact, the numbers from PAT and Unitel throw something like fifty percent. Thus, in the last hours there have been speeches from all major candidates.

Tuto Quiroga congratulated the MAS campaigners. But he didn't explicitly recognize his failure or Evo's victory. He just reassured his voters that he is staying in Bolivia to work for democracy and that he would take whatever job that destiny would land at his feet. Most commentators feel that he actually acknowledged Evo's victory. However, he was careful enough to leave the door open to an hypothetical presidency.

Samuel Doria Medina acknowledged the MAS victory. However, he said that he would make no alliances. Even if he said that he would support the first candidate if a difference of more than five points separates him from the second.

Evo Morales spoke for a long time in the place where he attained political notoriety, the cocalero's headquarters in Chapare. He emphasized the historical quality of these elections and talked about the change that Bolivia will undergo under his rule. He was rather aggressive against the Corte Nacional Electoral, or CNE, (more on that below) and not very conciliatory with people that didn't vote for him. His vice-president candidate had a more conciliatory speech, he avoided the election problems and, in my opinion, had a more hopeful tone.

There were many people who were not allowed to vote today. The body that takes care of elections logistics, CNE, did not consider people who didn't register for these elections, as they were required. However, there are accounts from people who fulfilled all the requirements but yet, they were not allowed to cast their vote. Technical problem or something more obscure? The MAS argues that the regions where this problem was most serious were the most supportive of MAS. Following this reasoning, Evo Morales demanded the resignation of the CNE's president.

We still have to wait for the official vote numbers. Yet, the most likely outcome is that Evo Morales is going to be the next president of Bolivia with a strong congress backing.

Waiting for news

2005-12-18T13:58:00.000-08:00

I am currently listening to news of Bolivian elections. You can tune in (if you understand Spanish) connecting to the stream http://200.85.128.6:8000/erbol with winamp, iTunes or something else. The elections are over by now, most of the votes should be counted in the next hours.

Update. TV and radio networks have projected the election results using the answers given by interviewed voters at polling stations:

ATB gives: MAS (41.2%), PODEMOS (36.3%), UN (12.1%), MNR(6.9%).
Usted elige network gives: MAS (44.5%), PODEMOS (34.3%), UN (8.7%), MNR (7.2%)
Unitel gives: MAS (45%), PODEMOS (33%), UN (10%), MNR (7%).

I got this numbers from the radio link I just provided above.

Van wie is Bolivia

2005-12-18T04:17:00.000-08:00

Which in English translates as "To whom belongs Bolivia?". This dutch documentary, by Mariëtte Heres, was filmed during the june riots in La Paz that ousted Carlos Mesa from the presidency. It is mainly based on interviews made to very different social actors, the first an indigenous woman market seller and the other a fairly wealthy white occupying the position of hydrocarbons overseer (Superintendente de hidrocarburos).

Our market seller raises three children by herself in a room deprived from electricity due to lack of money. On the other hand our man has a quite enormous house, a SUV car, healthy children and much material comfort. Heres contrasts their different living conditions and especially their differing opinions on the management of Bolivia's most precious natural resource: gas.

Our market seller supports nationalization, in fact, she actively participated in the turmoil I already mentioned above. She motivates her choices, saying that the multinational corporations are plundering Bolivia together with the white elite. She sincerely believes that she is fighting for the best future possible of her children. On the other hand the man thinks (also sincerely, I presume) that the nationalization is a mistake. He offers the usual reasoning: capital, international agreements, etc.

The movie offers more interviews to the social movements leaders, some presidential candidates such as Evo Morales and Samuel Doria Medina and some other persons.

From the film I gather that Heres supports the market seller's view, that market economies are evil and multinational corporations too. I could not follow the debate after the screening very well (it was in dutch), but I believe it confirms my impressions.

I don't claim the issues don't exist. They do and they are serious. However, the film simplifies them and it doesn't offer anything new.

However, we can interpret the film in a way that Heres did not intend. Forget for a minute the merits and demerits of our market seller and our government official for a second. Instead, note that the film might well be about mistrust in Bolivian society. Our market seller thinks that the government official is under hire by multinational corporations, while this one believes that she does not have a say in this matters because she is not well-informed on them.

This lack of trust can be seen in many places in Bolivian society, even more so in the presidential elections: Indigenous leaders and leaders of social movements would doubt Tuto Quiroga's will to govern for the benefit of the majority of bolivian society. Now consider the other side, medium and high class persons might doubt Evo Morales' statesmanship.

The political actors may be doing (some of them at least) what they sincerely think is the best action. But they don't trust the actions of the others. It is important to address the sources of mistrust, make political actors acknowledge the gripes of each other and work towards a common solution that minimally satisfies their needs. Without this understanding and acknowledgment of these issues, more conflicts are inevitable, whoever becomes elected.

Bolivian elections in one week

2005-12-11T12:05:00.000-08:00

Dario caught me off-guard yesterday when he asked me when were Bolivan elections going to take place. I realized it is going to be pretty soon: next week. The news have not changed much later. Evo Morales is still leading the polls over Tuto Quiroga by some points. No debate between them has taken place, more surprisingly, I found out that most people (at least people online) support the non-debating stance of Evo Morales. I found it in this poll in La Razon. As of now, 54.24% of people consider that Evo should not debate against Tuto Quiroga or Samuel Doria Medina.

Read some articles at Barrio Flores for an insiders look at parties campaigning for elections. Eduardo is following a some party staff to get a good idea on how campaigning for an uninominal candidate works.

Blenders, parties, visits and guerilla movies

2005-12-09T15:34:00.000-08:00

A blender is a glass container where at the bottom sit small metal knives assembled around an axe. You are supposed to fill it with some sort of nutricious substances, adding some liquid in case the mixture is too dry. Next, you put the glass container with the content on a small box featuring an electric motor inside. As you push a button on the box, a deafening noise clearly suggests that the stuff in the container is being sliced and mixed. My favorite use of this electromechanical device is reducing boiled vegetables to liquid in order to make thick soups. Another favorite is to do the same with fruits and milk, it is great to have milkshakes as breakfast.

Recently I used this implement to mix cocktails for a party we threw in honor of the birthday of Metka, who came to pay us a visit. The party was, in all honesty, quite a success. Drinks were flowing for the thirsty guests and everybody was in the mood to have fun. This was not the only party in this period. I attended one in the old student building I used to live. It was a very good party with live music. Besides that, you also attend and make dinners for your friends.

A few weeks ago I went to the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam with friends. From all the films I saw, the one that attracted the most attention was Guerilla Girl. It was actually the world premiere. The Danish director wanted to, as he puts it, turn the cliché of terrorism upside down. They filmed the three months course (yes, you have to follow a course) of a group of young colombians preparing to be active FARC members. The movie showed a rather idyllic view of the life of a guerrillero. I was surprised that the FARC instructors listened to the opinions of the new members, even if their opinions were not positive for the guerilla. The movie gave you the feeling of a boy scout camp with an open atmosphere and relaxed discipline. I have my doubts that this is how things are in reality.

Site counter change and more of Bolivia elections

2005-11-15T13:28:00.000-08:00

Last week I noticed that the counter I used from "webstats4u" opened pop ups every now and then. They started to do that after "nedstats", the counter company, was bought by an advertising company, as stated in this post. I was very annoyed at this change so I decided to use the counter provided by statcounter, you can see their button on the left. To everybody who had a pop up when visiting this blog, my excuses: you don't have spyware, it was the counter. I believe it is fixed now.

I want to make some publicity for statcounter :). These guys have very cool options to analyze the traffic in your site. I might open the traffic reporting to all visitors when I find the time to not be lazy :). You might find it fun. For instance, it helped me discover that I appear among the first items in google when you search for "easy Bolivian food"!

Among other things that happened lately, I was corrected about the way I use the verb "to weigh". In fact, I didn't use it at all! I used "to weight", which is obviously wrong. I would like to thank that person ;). My English is far from perfect. If you happen to be a native speaker and you find a very obvious and silly mistake being repeated over and again please write me a short note. Thanks!

I would like you to read a post by Eduardo in Barrio Flores. He talks about the significance of "an indigenous Bolivian citizen" being "on the verge of capturing the Presidency of the Republic of Bolivia." Contrary to what some posters on his site assert, discrimination does happen in Bolivia. It is not purely racial, though. If you are indigenous (or have indigenous roots) but successful and/or rich, I think you can still be respected by others in Bolivian society. Even if you might still suffer from some form of discrimination. What I mean to say is that discrimination is not clear-cut. If your family name is Mamani or Choque, it does not mean that you are systematically condemned to lowly jobs. I have hardworking friends with such names in Bolivia who are doing quite well.

Still, the bad conditions for the majority of people in Bolivia remain. Many of them see Evo Morales as the way forward. After reading an article about the economic history of Bolivia, I am reminded of the chronic political instability. I should not expect any particular candidate to reverse that trend. Most likely this trend will continue.

Enough of rants. There are many hardworking people in Bolivia. Some of them, the scientific society of computer science students in my home university (UMSS), have organized a series of talks to motivate students. They have talks ranging from technical to life-experience sort of talks. One of them was an interview made to me by Rolando and Juan José from the linux group Pingüinos del Mismo Iceberg in Cochabamba. It is very encouraging to see students like them with ideas and motivation. Keep it going, guys!

Update: Above I forgot to refer to the post that explains the situation with the counter company. Here it is.

Will Bolivia elect elections?

2005-11-08T01:36:00.000-08:00

In a previous post I explained the problems that Bolivia is going through to have a general election in December. Last week the Bolivian blogosphere thought that this problems were solved. Given the inability of the region representatives to reach an agreement, the current president, Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze, issued a decree stating the new distribution of congress seats among the regions. Oruro and Potosi lose each one seat, La Paz loses two while you have Cochabamba winning one and Santa Cruz winning three.

All that was left was for the congress to approve the decree. However, it was not clear whether the congress would approve the presidential decree, so it was decided to postpone the sessions to this week. By then it was already known that the representatives of Santa Cruz were not going to participate in the session. While they wouldn't block this decree, they would save their faces by showing their disapproval somehow. Alas, the positions have radicalized again from last week. Now Oruro is not participating in the session, the Potosi representatives might vote it down and some La Paz deputies are considering filing a unconstitutionality demand against the elections.

Last week, I was waiting for this process to unfold before posting. I was sure that this decree would pass and all the circus these days was a way for the congressmen to avoid any kind of association with the decree. For months the congress avoided hard choices and procrastinated. I thought that the goal of the congressmen was having the president saving the day so that they can go away with clean hands. That is, they cannot be accused of working against their regions. Now there is the danger of further disagreement and delay.

In that last post I also pointed to an anti-university manifesto. Now Oswaldo has posted a follow up to it. He moderates a little bit one of his proposals (close the university altogether). He also answers to one comment criticizing him of just voicing ideas. He allegedly organized an assembly from which a letter came out to the university authorities. He goes on to criticize the university's love of money.

Last time I was pondering his extreme positions in my head. Closing the university is too much, but change has to be done by external factors it seems. As is currently, an academic has little choice but to play with the system. Although most authorities are elected, authoritarianism is a big component of university organizations. The academic (and staff) must strictly observe the hierarchical structure.

Pressure for improvement from the government has to weaken the sacred "autonomía universitaria", which means a hard struggle against the university. The electoral offers would have to include university reform so that this process has legitimacy in the face of the "autonomía universitaria" argument. Maybe in the next elections.

500 thousand migrants in Santa Cruz

2005-10-31T13:11:00.000-08:00

One fourth of the inhabitants of Santa Cruz were born in some other region of Bolivia. According to this La Razon article, out of the 1.9 million of inhabitants, half a million are migrants. I post this information because a friend asked me if the migration was so massive that the proportion of seats in the parliament has to shift. The answer is yes. Take a look at the graphic below:

The first column, at the left, will show you that the Cochabambinos are the biggest group of "adventurers". The top table above shows you the amount of people that emigrate/immigrate from/to a given region. Not surprisingly (it is common knowledge in Bolivia) Potosi and Oruro top the charts for the regions that lose more population. Oruro was not always the biggest exporter of people, I suppose that the increase has to do with the closure of mine related industries in 1985. On the other hand Potosi is topping the three charts. Take this with a grain of salt, probably a proper analysis takes into account relative and not absolute quantities. I am just too busy to do arithmetics now.

What are the reasons to move to Santa Cruz? More jobs.

Lazy blogger shows his nose again

2005-10-30T11:34:00.000-08:00

Hello there, readers! As you can see these last two weeks consisted of intense, almost feverish blogging inactivity! I spent a lot of time writing other stuff so that I got tired of even writing emails or blog posts. Things are getting better now that I am using an RSS feeds reader. I will explain for the readers who don't know what is that. An RSS feeds reader is a program checks for you whether there are new posts in blogs you usually read. Thus, saving the time you spend in typing the address in your web browser. It may seem silly but you do indeed save time.

Blogs and press
Since Bolivia's last elections there is a large increase of non-mainstream information about Bolivia. From the moment I left Bolivia I was a regular reader of online editions of Bolivian newspapers. At that time, however, that was all I read. Currently I can say that my main source of information comes from Bolivian blogs. Many of their writers go deeply into the news, trying to find an insight that is so often lacking in newspapers.

Let me give you an example. Bolivia's general elections are supposed to be on the fourth of December. They are the result of negotiations with social sectors in Bolivia who were deeply dissatisfied with the way the country was being run. So you can see these elections as the primary prerequisite for stability. Unfortunately, there is the risk of the elections being delayed. All that as a result of the unsolvable question of how to distribute congress seats following the result of the 2001 census.

Now, while the newspapers give you the latest information about the happenings (who doesn't agree, who is threatening, etc). They don't provide enough discussion for an informed debate. I would like to see them discussing the arguments of each side. Instead of that, one gets the impression that people ought to form a supporting unit behind the main protagonists without discussing whether or not that is the right thing. From time to time, some informative editorial or opinion article appears, but it is often loaded with rhetoric.

Fortunately, you can turn to the Bolivian blogs for more information about the topic. They spend more time than the newspapers discussing about the issues involved. They also offer possible motivations of the actors to act the way they do.

More specifically, about this topic, you can turn to MABB's post and another from Ciao explaining the whole situation. In short, many Bolivians emigrated from Potosi, Oruro (where I am from), and La Paz to Cochabamba and Santa Cruz. This has been quantified in the 2001 census where I participated as a voluntary. Now, Santa Cruz and Cochabamba are demanding that the number of their representatives is increased. However, that implies that La Paz, Oruro and Potosi must reduce their representatives, something they are not willing to do. The argument to go on with this change is straightforward: it is in the constitution; it is written that the seats have to be redistributed as the population fluctuates. However, the negatively affected regions reply that these elections are not completely in line with the constitution (because of the way they were conceived during the crisis earlier in this year) so that it can be followed non-strictly. Also there is the issue that there is another article in the constitution stating that the redistribution must be done "con equidad". That is, you must somehow take into account the situation of economically depressed regions.

Well, the point of this hand-wavy explanation of the problem is that it is complex and it requires debate: why are some viewpoints are valid and why others are not. Simply put, you can enumerate: we abide by the law, the law is not perfect for us the poor regions so let's discuss it and we (the Oruro/Potosi/La Paz representatives) don't want to lose our seats/jobs so we make the most noise possible to keep them.

Maybe the newspapers are not the place where to repeat this debate over and over, they just supply news. However, even if it is not intended, I can't help but feel that this is an issue of Us versus Them when reading the newspaper articles . I suggest reading MABB, The democracy center, Barrio Flores and Ciao for informed discussion of Bolivian news.

I found another example of independent opinion in Eduardo's review of Bolivian blogs. It is a severe critic of the state university system in Bolivia. I am being quite mild at calling it severe, the post shows in all its horror how the state university is ruled by power struggles and corruption. It is the harshest critic I have read, a newspaper would not have published it. I am glad that well-written independent opinion about our universities is finding its way to the internet. It would be nice if some university worker could open an anonymous blog and show us all the things that happen within. Anyway, this topic deserves much more attention than it is given. Maybe in a future post.

It is a pity that the best blogs to read about Bolivian politics are in English. Maybe a political scientist out there in Bolivia is willing to fill in the gap.

BRICs: The economic powerhouses of 2050

2005-10-16T15:02:00.000-07:00

BBC Radio World Service has a series of four programs about the four biggest economies in 2050: Brazil, Russia, India and China; in short, BRICs. This claim has been put forward by the Goldman Sachs bank in this article. The abstract reads:

Over the next 50 years, Brazil, Russia, India and China-the BRICs economies-could become a much larger force in the world economy. We map out GDP growth, income per capita and currency movements in the BRICs economies until 2050.

The results are startling. If things go right, in less than 40 years, the BRICs economies together could be larger than the G6 in US dollar terms. By 2025 they could account for over half the size of the G6. Of the current G6, only the US and Japan may be among the six largest economies in US dollar terms in 2050.

The list of the world's ten largest economies may look quite different in 2050. The largest economies in the world (by GDP) mayno longer be the richest (by income per capita), making strategic choices for firms more complex.

Along with this BBC's documentary you will travel to all four countries to listen to interviews of many economical actors, big and small. The idea is that China and India will become the world leaders in manufacturing and services. The growing markets and industries will require resources, provided by Russia and Brazil. You can already see the flow of investment from China to Asia and South America. Is this scenario too optimistic? Aren't we forgetting the big problems that this countries face.

To provide balance, the reporter travels to poor neighborhoods to then talk with people living there. Understandably, they express skepticism at the BRICs thesis. The additional income of these countries flows slower into isolated or excluded areas. More problems include the huge belts of poverty around big cities, massive corruption both in public and private sectors, environmental disasters, health disasters, etc.

Nevertheless, an Indian economist (if I remember right) reminds us that all these problems were present in today's developed nations when they were becoming rich nations. About corruption, maybe the problem that makes us the most pessimistic, he tells that it is not an instrumental problem. As countries become more developed (rich) these problems slowly fade away. Also he points to the slums that existed in Berlin and London at the end of the 19th century and beginning of 20th century.

In the interviews you will listen to optimistic young people talking about their future. This good documentary gives you a foretaste of the interesting times to come.

You can download the four episodes from this webpage. You should click on "download mp3" in the right side panel to listen to the program. The next four episodes are available in the same panel, a bit lower.

If you are into podcasting, you may subscribe to the BBC Documentary feed. All feeds are available from here.

Gas shortage and smuggling

2005-10-10T01:58:00.000-07:00

These last weeks there has been a shortage of liquid gas in La Paz. It seems that there are other affected regions such as Potosi. MABB reports on the situation with pictures.

Liquid gas is usually sold in metal containers whose English name I ignore. In Spanish we call them "garrafas". The shortage of gas in La Paz reminds me of some articles I read months ago.

This town is about one or two hours (I don't remember) away from La Paz. It is split in half by river Desaguadero, which is also the border between Bolivia and Peru. If you want to go to Peru you should go to migrations office fill a boring form, get a stamp and cross to Peru. As you cross the bridge you are surprised by the number of people going back and forth pulling and pushing wagons full of goods. This is called "contrabando hormiga" or ant smuggling. I don't know the laws precisely so I might say something incorrect. I think that if you transport merchandises in a relatively small quantity you need not pay taxes. The small quantity in transportation is the reason that the word "hormiga" is used :).

I believe that this year one of the newspapers La Razón or La Prensa made a thorough investigation of gas smuggling in the border town of Desaguadero. I will try to find it.

Given that gas is more expensive in Peru than in Bolivia, there were massive sales of gas "garrafas" to the Peruvian part of Desaguadero. Take a look at this article from La Prensa.

After these reports the government acted quickly. They stopped the excessive influx of garrafas to this region. They calculated how much the Bolivian population in Desaguadero would need to only ship the needed quantity. I translate the last paragraph from here.

Up to July, the demand for liquid gas in Desaguadero reached 11 thousand "garradas" per month, but the Superintendencia (a body regulating hidrocarbons trade and production) restricted the delivery to the [regional] distributors to only 3800 "garrafas" per month.

Now it seems that smugglers go as far as La Paz to buy "garrafas" and sell them to Peru. And the consequences, you see them now: shortage of gas in La Paz. I wonder if there is a another solution other than increasing the prices for gas. According to the article from La Prensa, a garrafa in Bolivia is worth 68 bolivianos while in Peru it is 80 bolivianos. Increasing the prices proved unfeasible because of protests. Of course shortage of gas provokes protests as well. Working in the government seems to be a very hard job indeed. I am happy to just be a humble computer scientist :).

A related article and another. The latter mentions that the garrafas make it as far in Peru as Arequipa!

Links to avian influenza sites

2005-10-08T17:31:00.000-07:00

These last months the press has been bombarding us with news concerning a bird flu that can sometimes infect humans. Lately the tone has become more alarmist. Is there a pandemic looming? What will cause it?

This bird flu virus is currently spreading among bird populations. Sometimes it can infect humans, and when it does the mortality rate is of 55%. That is pretty bad if your job involves some kind of contact with chickens because currently you can only catch it from them. However, if the virus becomes able to travel from human to human, that is all you are going to see in the news for a long time to come.

There are two ways that this situation can come about. First, a human virus could acquire the deadly characteristics of the avian virus. This requires both viruses to be in the same host at the same time. In the second scenario, you have the virus mutating. I quote the following part from this sobering article:

...Unfortunately, scientists have never had the opportunity to use modern methods to study the emergence of a pandemic strain. Our understanding of how the human influenza virus incorporates avian elements is, as a consequence, very limited. Predictions that the current behaviour of the H5N1 avian virus is indicative of a growing pandemic threat are really just speculation.

There are really two quite distinct scenarios being promoted. Davis, along with many scientists, makes no real effort to distinguish between them. The first is the antigenic drift scenario described above. It is plausible, if poorly understood.

The second is the mutation scenario. This is the stuff of science fiction. It predicts the direct conversion of the H5N1 avian virus into, in effect, a human virus. The emergence of a brand-new virulent and highly infectious human virus is theoretically possible, but fortunately, as history teaches us, vanishingly rare. We have to look back to the sixth-century plague of Justinian, if not earlier, for a precedent. Predictions that we are now on the brink of such a rare biological event speak more to hubris than to good science.

It is of course very reassuring after one is done reading the article: it is not pessimistic. Even if such an epidemic takes place, people in many countries are better prepared than in previous pandemics (although I have many doubts about general practitioners in the Netherlands. I will leave that to another post). Yet his assessment of the second scenario has rebuked by some recent work.

As unbelievable as it sounds, scientists have managed to recreate the virus from the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic using tissue from a frozen body exhumed in Alaska. They showed that this strain is particularly virulent:

In the Science article, Terrence M. Tumpey and colleagues report that they generated a flu virus bearing all eight gene segments of the 1918 virus in order to study what made it so virulent. They exposed groups of mice to that virus and to other viruses in which some of the 1918 virus's genes were replaced by genes from recent flu viruses.
The 1918 virus turned out to be extremely virulent. Mice infected with it died in as little as 3 days, and mice that survived as long as 4 days had 39,000 times as many virus particles in their lungs as did mice infected with a control flu virus, a Texas strain of H1N1 from 1991. All the mice infected with the 1918 virus died, while those exposed to the Texas strain survived. Further, the 1918 virus was at least 100 times as lethal as an engineered virus that contained five 1918 genes and three genes from the Texas H1N1 strain.

They did a related experiment on human lung tissue obtaining similar trends. Now, the characteristic that relates this 1918 virus with today's situation is:

In the other study, researchers at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) report that the close resemblance of the 1918 virus to avian flu viruses suggests that the 1918 virus was an avian strain that managed to adapt to humans without first acquiring any genes from existing human flu viruses. Further, the researchers found that several of the same mutations that differentiated the 1918 virus from avian flu viruses are found in the H5N1 virus, which has killed more than 60 people in Asia. The report appears in Nature

This seems to support the possibility of scenario two.

I am trying to read a bit more to learn about it. If you want to do the same the Flu Wiki is a good place to start.

Saturday night and working!

2005-10-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

It is not like me to post so often to my blog. Often meaning two posts per week :). I am currently working a little bit. I am just in the right mood for it. I decided earlier today I would sleep early. It didn't happen, it is past two already and the clock is still ticking.

So what have I been up to? Yesterday we celebrated the graduation of a Greek friend. It was a night out in the center, from bar to bar. The main event was staying in a Greek restaurant that becomes a Bouzouki in the evenings (if that is how it is written). Traditional Greek music and drinks. Ladies dancing but the guys sitting (and occasionally dancing too). We were next to the band so you had to put more effort to speak. It reminded me of peñas, places with traditional groups where you can sit, eat, drink and of course dance to the music. I enjoy such activities as long as it is not too crowded. You have to like the music, otherwise you can't enjoy as much as the natives do. So yesterday I realized what might a foreign person feel when they go to a peña for the first time.

Eventually, we (the non-Greek people) left that restaurant for a bar. Thus, resuming the usual course of events for a weekend: some drinks and chat. For some reason all of us got very hungry; when we ordered drinks some sort of snack was ordered as well. I seriously missed a tradition from my home town in Bolivia, Oruro. There, as I go back home, I stop by my casera to have some ranga. The ranga is a thick soup made from cow's stomach. Not any of the stomachs (I believe there are four), you use the one that has the texture of a towel. It is the softest one, sometimes we call it toallita. This yummy soup (that for many readers will sound yucky) is a spicy, thick and tasty concoction. If you happen to be an uninitiated, ask a fellow Orureño to take you to the best rangas in town.

Yesterday my evening ended with a prepackaged Japanese soup. Not bad, but there is nothing like the real thing.

Comments about emigration article

2005-10-07T02:53:00.000-07:00

Recently a Bolivian reader told me that she is soon moving to the Netherlands. This reminded me that the number of Bolivian students around Utrecht has decreased. A reason for this perception might be that I stopped attending student parties here. So if you are Bolivian and living in Utrecht (or in the Netherlands) drop me a mail. You can find my email address on the left side of the blog. Sorry if you cannot copy/paste it or just click on it. With that sacrifice of yours I have less spam to go through!

Have you checked out this article from La Razon? It says that Bolivia gets more money from expats working abroad than from the sale of gas. It is estimated that 860 million dollars will be sent to Bolivia this year, 40% percent of exports. The Multilateral Investement Fund (FOMIN) conducted a poll on 1523 persons that receive money from abroad. The study cannot use just money transfer numbers from financial institutions because 38% of people receive money directly from travelers. (This reminds me of the Bolivian tradition of sending food, drinks, money with travelers that your family or you happen to know. Only in a few cases I heard of Bolivians using the post or banks for such purposes :).)

FOMIN also calculates that there are one million Bolivian migrants sending money home. Half of them live in Latin America and the other half in Europe and the United States. MABB posts a full English translation of the same article (including a nice chart). Regarding the conclusions in his post:

Two negative aspects are important to consider. One is that by trying to encourage a massive transfer of dollars from the world into Bolivia, inflation could be triggered. The other important aspect is for the government not to encourage emmigration. The brain-drain problem in Bolivia is bad enough as it is.

I am more optimist about the outcome of emigration. Migrant Bolivians are making trade links that are going to be extremely useful for the future. I believe that, for instance, India is doing better currently because of the connections that it developed thanks to emigration.

"Alexey writes" mentioned on Global Voices

2005-10-02T13:42:00.000-07:00

Eduardo from Barrio Flores posted a review of the Bolivian blogosphere to Global Voices. Now, I begin to understand the sudden surge of traffic! Thanks to Eduardo for including the ramblings of this blog in that list.

As mentioned there, the topics that incite more interest in this blog are comments about trips and adventures with cooking. My blog does not feature a particular topic, as such I am afraid I don't have a regular readership. A few times I naively attempted to talk about politics and the obtained effect and feeling is what has been commented in Revisión de todo un poco.

This blog will continue featuring random stuff about my daily life. Despite this, I have the hope that some people will keep interested in coming back for more. More regular posting should help. I will figure out how to do that without losing the scarce time I currently have.

Literary corner

2005-09-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

I read some nice books lately of which i would like to talk a little bit. The first one of them, Baudolino by Umberto Eco is a historical novel taking place in (mostly) Europe at around 1100. I like historical novels, It is interesting to me to imagine how people and historical characters lived at the time. The novel's main character, Baudolino, has two amazingly useful gifts. The first gift allows to learn a language perfectly just by listening to two persons talking it; the other gift is that he is an incorrigible liar. Thanks to his talents, he manages to become Frederick Barbarossa's adoptive son and abandon a life in the countryside as a farmer. Not that he is a good farmer, he spends most of his time dangerously roaming in battle fields out of curiosity. Anything to avoid helping his family in the farm. Lazy as he is, his new life serves him well. The book describes many interesting facts from the time in a humorous way. The ever-changing alliances of cities in north Italy, the delicacies that that are part of the cuisine of Constantinople, looting by crusaders, trading of religious relics, etc. The last part of the book becomes too fantastic for my taste, Umberto Eco himself lies as much as Baudolino :).

Then i read the first book of The Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy by Douglas Adams. I found it very entertaining, the jokes of the narrator and the dialogues are clever. The story is not credible enough for a science fiction book, but I guess that it is not really what this book is about. I had a good laugh with this book but i don't consider it a great book. That is why i hadn't big expectations for the movie. Nevertheless the movie was just as funny as the book, I laughed a lot, at the end it becomes too romantic but still it is a fun and relaxing movie to see. If you have doubts about seeing this movie i will reveal a bit of the plot (not a spoiler, though). The book is about an earthling, named Arthur, who happens to have his house and his planet, incidentally the earth, destroyed the same day. Fortunately his friend, Ford, is an alien who is doing a research for The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy for the company that publishes it. You can think of this "book" as some kind of a lonely planet book for space travel. As he knows a few ropes about cheap space traveling, he saves Arthur and off they go hoping around the galaxy. I love the beginning of the movie with the dolphins singing the musical "So long and thanks for all the fish".

The third book is Terry Pratchet's Thief of Time. It was the funniest book i read in a while! The story is rich and demented. The world in which the story takes place is just as bizarre. The characters include Death (the one guy with the scythe), the Death of rats (some kind of pet), some eccentric tibetan-like monks that teach the old discipline of controlling time, a socially-challenged genius clock maker and some strange beings that are the accountants of the universe (don't ask, read it). I can promise a laugh every five pages and a constant smiling because of the cleverness of the book. It is an irreverent book just as The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, it pokes fun at everything. Readers of Harry Potter and The hitchhikers guide to the galaxy will love this one.

The last entry is about a movie, not a book. Yesterday I watched Kung Fu Hustle, I don't remember when was the last time i laughed so hard. Tears were coming out of my eyes and at a certain point i was afraid that my stomach was going to explode (after that copious dinner i had, who wouldn't!). The jokes are not clever as in the previous two cases, they are childish, like throwing a knife to the wrong place (yourself) or the charming joys of marital life (the wife beating the husband to a pulp). If you need a laugh, this movie will not disappoint you. I read that there are even funnier movies by the same director, i will try to find them and try to watch them with a relatively empty stomach.

A trip recharges you...

2005-09-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

...even if the trip only lasts nine days (a few hours less actually). It is hard not to enjoy Dubrovnik, the old town has (apparently) untouched ramparts and old stone buildings. I say apparently because the old town was shelled during Croatia's struggle for independence. If you see the pictures of the time, most buildings were touched and some completely destroyed, and compare them with modern pictures, you would think that the first never happened.

The restauration of the buildings left Dubrovnik in good shape for visitors. Yet, many scars remain there, but not by accident or lack of time, they're there to remind the visitors of the siege.

So there i was, walking all over the place and shooting pictures. I had great sea food including some wonderful oysters. I ashamedly have to admit that once i fell into a tourist trap restaurant, one of those where the waiter is talking to every tourist in the street into his menu. Besides that, it was great food and two times i also prepared (under expert supervision) food at home.

The weather was still warm with plenty of time for swimming and catching some sun.
Almost every day i had to do hiking whether i felt like it or not. You see, the place where we were staying was slightly far from the center and to make things better, on top of a quite steep hill. Walking was much more pleasant in the charming old town and amidst nice nature. One of the islands we visited, Mljet, hosts a national park with a very beautiful nature. After biking for quite sometime in it, we were in a very beautiful rocky beach where we had the chance to see a live octopus!

All in all, i loved it a great deal and now i feel with a better disposition to work :).

Katrina links

2005-09-10T15:37:00.000-07:00

I decided to include links to s0me stories about Hurricane Katrina which are mentioned very often in the blogosphere. These stories are based on witness acounts, so they give a more alarming impression than do the stories told by officials or mainstream media. You can see many of the stories under this link "Heroes despite our government".

The most impressive story is based on the accounts of two emergency medical service workers that were in New Orleans during and after Hurrican Katrina. Read it here.

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreens store at the corner of Royal and Iberville Streets in the city’s historic French Quarter remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing, and the milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat.
The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers and prescriptions, and fled the city. Outside Walgreens’ windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry. The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized, and the windows at Walgreens gave way to the looters.

There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices and bottled water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead, they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

The iPhoto rant of the week

2005-09-09T14:52:00.000-07:00

I hate iPhoto! It is slow and heavy weight! The approach that windows XP takes to pictures is less intrusive. You have your pictures nicely organized in folders and you don't have to go through this import/export non-sense. Apple's iPhoto can crash so easily and when loading it asks you to point to the library. What? To the photo library? I have to tell you again for the 10th time?!?!?

I am seriously thinking of using my cheap (100 euros) linux box to manage pictures.

Daily life, Bolivian politics, etc

2005-09-06T16:02:00.000-07:00

Some updates about my daily life. Work is progressing fine and I am thinking about some further ideas for research. I hope they are fruitful enough to work on them seriously :).

After university I went to the nearby lake to skate for a few hours (two). Now I can skate faster, finally I have the "skating" feeling. When you feel you are gliding over the floor and you stop thinking about how to move your feet around. More speed brings harder falls, but Alexey is cautious and well equipped. No big wounds to regret!!

Next week I am going for short holidays to Dubrovnik, for about nine days. And just before it I will pick up my damaged camera. Expect many new pictures on my blog!

Today I was expecting that some of the Bolivian bloggers would post a thoughtful post about the political situation in Bolivia. I will have to wait a few days until they digest the events. The main event is that today (or yesterday?) was the deadline for the presentation of the political parties for the upcoming election in December. There is much room for analysis because within hours before the deadline, alliances were made and broken. You can interpret this sudden reorganization of political parties ideologically... Well not really, you change your ideology just hours before the deadline? No. The most likely situation is that bargaining got pretty tough between the presidential candidates/parties and the allies.

Currently most of the parties started with a presidential candidate and later they forged alliances with different sectors of society to fill the remaining posts (vicepresident, etc). In this way, they expected to capture the fragmented Bolivian vote. I would like to know the secret deals that they cut in order to capture attractive candidates with a lot of politic capital (read votes). Because of this competition some candidates freely exchanged political parties when they had better conditions.

As a result some organizations(FEJUVE) and parties(FRENTE AMPLIO) could not fulfill the requirements needed to run for presidency. I am worried that no representatives of FEJUVE are allied with a political party. It means that when people in El Alto are unhappy again they cannot act in the parliament and they will block again. I hope I am mistaken.

Some analysts think that such composed presidential formulas will bring about a very inefficient government that will not solve the fundamental problems. Maybe it is true. But on the other hand, these last years we see a need for consensus. A way to achieve it is an effective alliance in political parties. Let's hope we will see them battling in the parliament only.

Not only bad news in Bolivia. Some friends in Cochabamba organized a free software congress. They were successful in bringing together the different free software groups in Bolivia. I have posted some links to blog coverage in almadadenoche, since I am too lazy to copy you can read it there.

Tips for bolivian dishes

2005-09-06T15:35:00.000-07:00

Two posts ago, my comments about bolivian soup inspired some inquiries. The question is whether peanuts need to be soaked overnight to cook them. Alexey, the great cook, always forgets to soak the peanuts overnight although our dear Nelly de Jordan suggests to do so in her book about Bolivian food. Once i did it for many hours and other times just as little as half an hour. To me it does not make such a difference as long as you blend it finely. Soups are not hard to do so you can try one of the recipes on internet yourself. Maybe the hardest part is to prevent the potatoes and the rice from sinking to the bottom of the pot and burning. When you put them (at the end) make sure there is enough water, stir and don't overcook!

Something that is relatively easy to make is papas a la huancaina. Doña Nelly (i have the book with me) suggests a tastier variation, that is to make the peanut sauce with grated cheese. I tried it with feta cheese and it was heavenly.

I am also lucky enough to find Yuca at the turkish market and try out some recipes. Other ingredients i bring back from Bolivia allow me to occasionally do some api and charque. Tongue and stomach are harder to find at the supermarket so i cannot make other Bolivian delicatessen that i love so much.

I just realized Eduardo has a section about Bolivian food. Go for a visit even if he does not like picante de lengua ;).

Bolivian news

2005-09-01T02:34:00.000-07:00

From time to time i stick here some links to bolivian news. I found in Miguel's blog some interesting bits about the micro lending industry. He quotes the following article from South Africa:

Ideas we can borrow from Bolivia
Vuyo Njokweni
AMID the arguments on the most suitable regulatory framework for South African microlending, it is worth-

while taking a brief look at Bolivia, a country more associated with revolutionaries and drug peddlers.

In fact, Bolivia has a world-class microlending industry. Claudio Gonzalez Vega observed “one could not write the world history of microfinance without highlighting Bolivia”. Bolivia stands out as one of the pioneers of modern consumer finance. Its name is synonymous with successful consumer lending.

read the full story at MABB.

Lazy blogger

2005-09-01T02:20:00.000-07:00

I have not being very good at blogging these weeks. I see that i only had a few posts these months. Probably that discouraged a few readers :), although there are very few regular ones.

I did not go for holidays this two months but it is possible i make a short trip in september or october. Despite that, i felt like i had a break during this period. I was still working but the absence of colleagues in the office or maybe the fact that i worked at home most of the time made it more relaxed. I have had a great time with friends around here. Yesterday I went to the graduation ceremony of a dear friend, after that we had an exotic dinner at an african restaurant. In the Netherlands you have many international people coming and going every year. As a result friendships last for that year and sometimes maintained through email. I stay longer than that period and i have seen many people come and go. Fortunately i have a network of friends who stay around longer, i am grateful for that. It can be sad to say goodbye to someone every year. While i am not good at keeping contact, being the lazy email writer that i am, i try to keep in touch with people that are closer. This graduation friend of mine is one of them so i give thanks to skype that long distance conversations are not expensive anymore :).

During this crazy period when people move to new places and shuffle their stuff around i ended up having many boxes at home. Now i feel the need to arrange everything before resuming writing. It makes me more calm. I can't work while i have the impression that there is something to be done. Later in the afternoon i will take skating break from work.

Two weeks ago i prepared bolivian peanut soup. It was quite tasty! The funny thing is that this soup tastes better when you keep it for one day (in the fridge) and then warm it again.

Elections in Bolivia

2005-08-12T08:07:00.000-07:00

These days I have been pleasantly surprised at the coverage that some blogs made about the bolivian political situation. You can see the campaign is very active. The political parties the usually took all the power in previous governments (MNR, ADN, MIR) are not the main protagonists in this new season. There are new parties but some of the candidates have emerged from the previous parties. So you can't really say that the political landscape has changed that much. Of course, that will depend on the collaborators that they will choose to run the country.

When explaining the political situation to some of my friends, I said to them that I do not believe Evo Morales, candidate of MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), is going to win. He is the leader of the main party that leads the alternative political groups (that is alternative to the ones traditionally in power). While previously he had good support from the people, he lost support because of the troubles that Bolivia had been in, some months ago. Initially he tried to portray himself more moderate than he was, but later, he became more extreme when he saw that the other alternative groups were accusing him of being too moderate and conciliatory. In the end he decided to go for the extreme proposals (nationalize gas) and extreme measures (block roads) losing the support that he previously had.

I have been reading that a political analyst Alvaro Garcia Linera, proposed that all the left forces (what I have been haphazardly been calling alternative) should unite for the december elections. While now, at least a leader of a political party (MIP) sneered at the proposal, it may well be possible that later they decide to unite for the elections. Most often in politics, these leaders just see their short-term gains, however, these movements are becoming more important day by day. If these groups would unite under a project, to me they would project the image of finally being organized for construction and compromise rather than easy criticism and destruction. Enough of my ignorant ramblings! Let's see what the blogs say!

At barrio flores Eduardo talks about Joaquino, the Potosi mayor, running for presidency. His party, Frente Amplio, is an alliance of several mayors of bolivian cities. I can recall reading a report from CEDLA or CEDIB (use google my dear reader) talking about corruption in municipalities. This report gave quite a good image of the work being done in Potosi and La Paz. They mentioned that bureaucracy was being reduced and the townhall was made more efficient. I wish I could find that report (I tried yesterday) so you could read it. If a reader can find it, I will be grateful if you can provide me a link. If the information in the report is accurate, we can expect that the people of these party doing an acceptable job in running the country.

Miguel is quite a prolific blogger, he produced many posts about the electoral situation in Bolivia. In this one he describes the proposal to unite leftist parties by Garcia Linera. You will find a lot of information there and in the comments. It might be interesting to know for you that Alvaro Garcia Linera and Felipe Quispe were part of an armed group that performed some attacks on bolivian infrastructure.

Miguel's most recent post deals with Tuto Quiroga's candidature and his group Alianza Siglo XXI. While Tuto Quiroga represents the counterpart to the (gas nationalization) proposals put forth by, say, MAS. He is seen as supportive of the current neoliberal policies. However he managed to make alliances with citizen groups in El Alto, which is the city that started the problems some months ago.

There has been interesting analysis by Jim in the democracy center. You can read this post and its comments about the Garcia Linera proposal. Another post questions the ability of the MAS to govern Bolivia if they get the presidency.

Never too old to learn new things

2005-08-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

I always watched with some envy the skaters that would pass nearby when i was biking. I used to think that i would eventually learn to do this. The motivation came when i saw a huge caravan of them skating past my apartment. There were a few hundreds of them. It is very pleasant to skate in the Netherlands, everywhere the ground is flat and there are bike roads everywhere. You don't have to worry very much about cars.

So i decided it was time to learn now and decided to buy a pair of skates with my accomplice. I still didn't have the pleasure of skating for kilometers aroudn Utrecht. I am still to inexperienced to risk crashing into someone else. So i usually go into the park (Wilhelmina park) and spend an hour trying to learn something. It definitely helped that at this age i lost my shame. Everybody was laughing at my comical attempts to keep my balance. The first time it was impossible since every step i took just made the situation worse. If you have seen movies in which an unfortunate victim is sliding over some slippery surface with the feet and legs going in all directions, you have the picture.

Unfortunately it has been a bit hard to practice because the weather over here is horrible. Is it summer yet? We still don't see much of it. I still have hopes that the sun comes out more often to be able to practice my newly acquired skills!

There is still hope that Alexey can still learn though. Just a few more falls! And once i know how to go fast the nice wounds will start to arrive. I owe a debt to my accomplice and skate teacher (she also makes pictures of my accidents as you could see before).

I haven't lost my touch with pets

2005-07-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

I have been busy with real life lately. Very little internet and a lot of time spent with people that i care very much about. Let's use this little time before entering shopping spree (it's saturday here in Utrecht!) to dump an update.

I am doing cat-sitting for two weeks, one week is already over and that leaves us one week left. It has not been easy because i am very attached to my house (to my houses in general, not the current one in particular). I am a very homey person, well, sometimes.

Anyway, this cat was giving me a little bit of a hard time. But several days passed and we have seen a lot of progress since then. While at the beginning the kitty would barely stand my presence, now it purrs when i am serving food. Maybe this can be attributed to my natural charisma with pets. I have had many throughout my life; i i remember my dogs, cats, lizards, hamsters, oh! It's only that? Anyway, my point is that i liked them and most of the time they liked me too (or they ignored me for the sake of pacifical coexistence).

Another explanation given to me by someone (don't take it too seriously, folks) is that cats have a two bit brain for persons. Consider it as two switches that can be in the on or off position. One switch tells the kitty whether it knows or not this person. The second switch tells whether the person is a source of food or not. I seem to have put both switches in the on position. It does not run away like before and it purrs! I just trained it to associate me with food. Oh well!

I think these last years i suffered a slow transformation. Little by little, i need less and less sleep to feel sufficiently rested. I consideredt this while having my morning shower at half past eight in the morning, even though i came back at half past two last night. I don't feel tired at all and i had little sleep the last days too. From a 10 hour sleeping lizard i have become a 6 hour sleeping lemur. Funnily enough, it was one of my wishes. One of these things that people ask you at parties. If i could wish for a thing, what would it be? My answer was to be able to sleep, say, 2 hours but feel as if i am just waking up from a very productive (rest-wise) 10 hour sleep. That goal is very far away. Let's go slowly to keep sane.

Oil?

2005-07-16T19:03:00.000-07:00

I do not know what is the position of the reader of this blog with respect to the war in Irak. Was it waged because Saddam really had weapons of mass destruction? Most people i know assume (as i do) that the war was waged because of oil. In the beginning one might be a little bit shocked, but then one just gets used to it. "Such is the world" we say.

The end result of this war is that there are new stable reserves of oil in the world. It doesn't matter if there are bombings and resistance in Irak, as long as the costs to run this operation is lower than the profit had from extracting and selling the oil. Most probably my readers are rather bored at this points, they have been repeated endlessly elsewhere. What is maybe more interesting comes from an article i read about "Peak oil theory" and its relation to the war. This theory asserts that since oil is not a renewable resource, it will eventually be exhausted and we can predict when it will happen. There will be a time when drilling new wells will be more expensive than purchasing existing ones. The new wells are going to be to small to be economically profitable, all big, productive, efficient wells have already been found. Once we reach this stage prices are bound to rise, given the diminishing supply and the increasing demand. This is not an apocalyptic scenario, be assured. The increasing prices of oil will make that other sources of energy will become reasonably profitable and, thus, exploited.

However, a controlled transition is highly desirable and also the ones who have the wells will make juicy profits in this last stage. Thus, the article makes the case that these reasons are behind the war in Irak.

Related to this, there is the question of the renewable nature of oil. There is a russian theory claiming that oil is produced by bacteria. According to its proponents, the oil fields are replenished regularly. This sounds crazy on a first reading, but i found some web pages of apparently clever people saying that this theory might be credible. I do not have the link right now but i remember reading it from an energy professor of a university in Rotterdam. If there is someone knowledgeable on the subject i would love some comments on this theory.

Anyway, all this is very far from my domain of expertise, but it was on my blogging list :). Later in this week you will find more down to earth subjects, although not less important. Cheers!

Venezuela's redistribution of wealth

2005-07-16T17:41:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately i will not manage to finish my paper for the deadline. There are some problems related to the soundness of my type system and ensuing tasks. It is like a domino, whatever i change will affect the next changes. So, what i am working on will have to wait a little bit before it is finished.

So, this week i was reading many things, and as always i was saying to myself that i should blog on this or on that. But then i have so many tabs open on my browser. I keep them open so i can close them when i have blogged on them or diggested them. Guess what, there are still many tabs open, so many that my browser may crash any time now :).

I have added two more links to my "Alexey reads" section. One is a link to the blog of boli-nica and another is to the democracy center. The authors of those blogs have different ways of looking at the world. The readers may do well of looking at both of them to not commit too quickly to an opinion.

If you have been following this blog for a while, you notice that i write about (not so deeply) personal things and sometimes about bolivian politics. Well, this time, i will write some more about politics. Although, my dear reader, i ask for your indulgence in my ignorant quoting of things i that read and think :).

Normally, i am not very sympathetic with leftist positions of organizations within my country, Bolivia. Mainly, because such positions have not worked well in the past. However, this week i was reading some articles written by authors that had more of a "izquierda" viewpoint. I will provide the link to one that talks about the Chavez regime in Venezuela. It describes the situation that maybe the social movements would want to take place in Bolivia. Namely, the resditribution of money for the improvement of living conditions of the poorest people in today's society. One of two main components are healthcare for poor neighbourhoods provided by cuban doctors in exchange for oil for the cuban governement. The supporters of this measure argue that in this way there is cheap healthcare in places where, otherwise, venezuelan doctors would not normally accept a job. As a consequence there is already a protest from venezuelan doctors that argue that this scheme hurts their source of employment and reduces their income. Furthermore, they claim that the cuban doctors are a vehicle for political indoctrination.

Other measures adopted by the Venezuelan government are subsidized markets, and informal education organizations. The government claims that in this way "1.3 million people have learned to read, millions have received medical care and an estimated 35-40 percent of the population now shops at subsidized, government-owned supermarkets". All this is achieved by redistributing the money that the state gets from the oil business. I suppose that that is the plan of the social movements in Bolivia if the oil industry is nationalized. Let me repeat my position that i am not for nationalization but for whatever arrangement that gets us (bolivians) a good income without getting into trouble with the international community. Oh well, let's go on with the article.

I can summarize the article as follows, the majority of the population is supporting Chavez government because they can see a difference in their life quality. This redistribution of resources was a bold move that roused the anger of the powerful oposition and you could see the results in their rallies calling for the ousting of president Chavez. However, some key actors of venezuelan economy are worried by the actions of the Chavez regime. I copy this quote from Oscar Garcia Mendoza, president of Banco Venezolano de Credito,

In 2004 government spending jumped 47 percent, much of which went to pay for healthcare and education--the missions. But despite the oil windfall, the government has had to borrow heavily. Instead of turning to international financiers, it has increased its internal debt to Venezuelan banks.

"But what makes this really crazy," says Garcia, "is that the government is depositing all its oil revenue in the same banks at about 5 percent, then borrowing it back at 14 percent. It's a very easy way for bankers to make money. That's why I say this is a government for the rich."

Maybe the most interesting quotes come from Jorge Giordani, the planning and development minister. First, he is worried about the corruption problems, simply there is not enough done to mitigate this problem. But most interesting are his opinions about the development of venezuelan society. Is it possible to use the oil money to educate people in order to have a more diversified economy? People educated enough to do "high technology, business services, healthcare and agriculture"?. He replies:

"We've been fighting political battles for most of our time in office. Many people have learned to read in the last few years, but how long will it take for them to work in high technology, or medicine, or services? Ten years? A generation? We are fighting a very individualistic, rentier culture. Everything has been 'Mama state, Papa state, give me oil money.' To organize people is extremely hard."

Giordani seems weary and cynical. "No, I am just practical," he says with a chuckle. "Development in Venezuela will take at least fifty years."

And how long will the oil last?

"Maybe twenty years, maybe thirty."

Of course, the question comes back to Bolivia's situation. How is the money of gas going to be used? How to get the most of it? And, more sadly, we have to realize that development is a process that takes several generations. No miracle or lottery is going to change radically the situation of the country.

Another thing that you see from this article and from what happened to Bolivia in the last months is that politics are very dirty. There are no completely decent political parties or a political Messiah. There are bitter fights among the parties involved and no one wants to concede anything. Are people really thinking that elections are going to bring the chosen that is going to fix things once and for all? That hope has been going on for more than two decades. Most likely, after this coming elections the same problems are going to appear. Confrontations, radical positions and demagogic speeches will be the rule. The change should be bottom up rather that top down. It does not matter if the president is capable if he/she is not able to organize a structure that suits the needs of society.

Monday already!

2005-07-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

I am still up on sunday after a copious dinner. My flatmate invited her colleagues over and she prepared lots of great food. There is so much that we will not have to cook for days.

I did not make as much progress as i expected in my paper. The main reason is that i cannot get around a technical problem. If i can get this completeness proff working, then i will have enough motivation to stay awake for nights until i finish the paper. I will code a bit now, maybe tomorrow my head will be fresh enough to solve it.

Last week, Metka came back from Tanzania and immediately she flew back to Slovenia. She couldn't stop telling about her stories there :). I didn't manage to see her pictures yet (thousands). However she sent me a few nice ones from when she was in Zanzibar. I am happy she had a great time there :), now she is catching time up with her family.

Links section

2005-07-10T06:29:00.000-07:00

For a long time i wanted to put a link to the blogs i regularly read and finally today i managed. It may look ugly in your browser, because i cannot control the html output of blogrolling without paying. I tried to improve things with basic CSS tricks, but it does not work well, apparently. I am too bored and busy to do more at the moment. Of course, advice is welcome!!

Some days ago Eduardo was writing about the need of keeping your honor high in Bolivia. That is, fight if you are challenged! I have many similar stories as well, fortunately, no injuries or deaths among my friends/family. Sorry for your friend Eduardo.

Update: It seems that CSS is now working well.

A new creationist theory

2005-07-06T02:36:00.000-07:00

There is a non-stop debate in the US about what should be taught in classrooms. Evolutionary theory? Creationist theory? Both?

Fortunately for all of us there are more options. I am very fond of this new creationist theory that answers very sensibly the deep questions of our universe. You can't miss it!

The situations in Bolivia seems to be moving forward. The congress has finally aggreed for new elections. You can find reports at mabb and barrioflores. Some very unusual pictures about bolivia: gay pride in Bolivia.

I am currently finishing my nourrishing breakfast and preparing my lunch. This is going to be a very long day working on my paper for POPL 2005. There is still much to do. Maybe not too much computer type setting today since i have to work on proofs. I expect i will be sleeping late tonight again.

Bolivian movies

2005-07-03T15:27:00.000-07:00

Almadadenoche is commenting on bolivian movies. I am really eager to see the ones he mention there. In a previous post i mentioned two bolivian movies i saw recently. I heartily recommend El Atraco. I especially like the conversations of the main character with the university professor. They approach politics as chess, where moves have to be carefully considered and you have also to consider your position in the board, and the kind of piece you are. Another part i like is the interrogatory of Raul by Bernal, or is it the other way around? I sure must get this movie next time i go to Bolivia. I should like to watch it again.

A read a great book last week, it is called The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. A great story about passion in the times of Napoleon. Its description of Venice is so mysterious that you really want to go after you read it.

Update: El periódico La Razón has this article about two forthcoming bolivian movies. One of them is made by the same director as El Atraco, Paolo Agazzi. I want to see it!

"no al neo liberalismo privatisador!!!!!!!!"

2005-07-03T15:11:00.000-07:00

That was the subject of the email that Nancy, my friend working in La Paz, sent me. I paste parts of it below:

Hi folks,

Here everything is back to normal, we have water, gas, food, transport and all restaurants and shops are open again. I guess the entire Bolivian police force and all activist are taking a rest, which means PEACE for the rest of us. it was all quite scary and im glad it is over.

so many of you asked me about the crisis we had few weeks ago here in Bolivia. Well, I have written a small report about it. Look attachment!!!!!!!!!! just bear in mind that the report is what WE think, me and the head of the NGO i work for at the moment. It is subjective and emotional!!!

Here almost everybody is for the nationalisation of gas, not just the political activist, but also the bureaucrats. Im for the nationalisation of gas, simply because it will improve accessibility. privatisation will increase the prices of the natural resources drastically meaning the poor will have less access to it or even no access at all, well...........more on the report.

Like I said im for the nationalisation of gas, but im not sure how realistic it is in these days.

I would love to know your opinion. Are you for or against the nationalisation of gas? and please explain why???????? it doesnt have to be long!

I also received her report which elaborates more on the points above, i am not quoting it here for lack of space and time. Anyway, i sent her the following reply:

El capitalismo no es tan malo, después de todo los países más prósperos del mundo son capitalistas. Algunos piden más impuestos y el estado hace más cosas pero en esencia, todos son mercados libres con un número de regulaciones.

¿Es China una excepción? ¿Es una potencia naciente que no es capitalista? Tal vez no, una gran razón del crecimiento que ahora tiene es la apertura a capitales y compañías extranjeras.

Otro ejemplo dramático, echemos un vistazo al mapa de la tierra de noche. Fíjate en lo oscura que es Korea del norte y lo brillante que es Korea del sur. Korea del sur era más pobre que la del norte al final de la guerra de Korea. Los papeles se invirtieron.

Hablando de Bolivia, las privatizaciones (o capitalizaciones) no siempre salieron mal. Desde que Entel fué capitalizada el servicio mejoró mucho, los celulares bajaron de precio, lo mismo con internet. Seguramente puedes encontrar más ejemplos de esto.

Hay cosas que no podemos hacer ya que somos pobres. Por ejemplo no podemos extender la red de alcantarillado y agua potable. Por lo que permitir que una empresa la administre y ponga dinero no parece una idea tan mala. Lo importante, es hacer bien este proceso e imponer condiciones a la empresa.

En el caso del gas no nos importa realmente si queremos nacionalizar o no las reservas de gas. Lo que nos importa es tener la mayor ganancia posible para nosotros. Si podemos negociar con las empresas un incremento a los impuestos/regalías y el precio interno del combustible tal vez tenemos un buen trato, no? La nacionalización es una medida que es muy posible que nos deje más pobres que lo que podríamos ser.

Ahora que echamos a las dos compañías de agua de Cochabamba y El Alto, ¿Que hará la gente pobre que no tiene alcantarillado y agua? ¿Quién pondrá el dinero? ¿Que haremos cuando no podamos conseguir dinero para industrializar el gas?

La compañía de aguas de Cochabamba, efectivamente subió los precios del servicio. ¿No hubiera sido mejor llegar a un acuerdo que beneficie a la compañía y los usuarios en vez de echar a la compañía sin considerar las consecuencias?

Verás, en Bolivia hay mucha corrupción. Si eliges nacionalizar, la compañia estatal será corrupta e ineficiente (ineficiencia implica menos oportunidad para salir de la pobreza) y si eliges privatizar la corrupción hará que el control sobre las empresas no sea bueno.

Tal vez no es el libre mercado lo que ha fallado en Bolivia, tal vez es toda la sociedad. ¿Cual es la solución, ahorcar a todos los políticos e imponer un gobierno del pueblo? El resultado más probable, será la misma corrupción e ineficiencia. El problema es muy profundo.

Dices que la mayoría de la gente está a favor de la nacionalización. Me pregunto que significa la nacionalización en sus cabezas. En todo caso, si es lo que la mayoría quiere, tendrá que ser.

If you want to discuss comments are welcome! :)

Bla, sleepy!

2005-06-24T15:49:00.000-07:00

I am actually sleepy. Yes but i have to go through my blog post obligation :). No, another day without going out. I am just having the quite time now.

Today there were some talks about Bertrand Russell's paper On Denoting at the university. Much of it involved many notions of philosophy and linguistics that i am not acquainted with. I will have a hard time looking up on the dictionary. There were also important things that i could understand. Maybe the most interesting thing was the attempt of Russell to give a denotation to variables. He failed, from what i could understand, he ran into circularities that probably ended up in contradictions or perhaps plain non-sense. The consequence of it is that he had to take variables as something irreductible. This reminded me of something Achim Jung or maybe Paul Levy mentioned at the courses in Birmingham. That finally variables have been understood and he gave us a reference to a paper written by Marcelo Fiore and Gordon Plotkin. Let's hope i didn't make a mistake and pointed to the wrong one. You can surely tell i don't understand the topic very well :). Well, i am eager to do it.

I skipped the afternoon talks, i thought it better to work. I was to unfocused to do proofs and writing so i improved the layout of some figures of the paper i must submit. Fortunately, i started listening to BBC radio. There really cool things in there! You don't get distracted (much) but you feel the company while you are working. I listened to many programs but eventually some pushed me to check some things on BBC's website and i found an article about foreign aid to Africa. They say... What if the aid is stopped? They mainly claim it is for the better. Less dependency is better, let the country get out of poverty by itself. That and many recomendations, make trade easier, stop encouraging the brain drain (is it my case? :)), etc. Relevant to Bolivia as well since we were among the countries whose debt was forgiven. It turns out to be that this is a series of programs called "what if". There was another article about the legalisation of drugs. Again, this is another issue related to Bolivia. Do you know that half of the jail population in Bolivia is in there because of the 1008 law? (this law punishes a broad range of activities related to drug trade) Would there be less human misery if drugs were legalized? This is not exactly the scenario in the article since cocaine was still outlawed there.

On bolivian news papers there are still articles about the unhappy happenings last weeks. Stuff already discussed by articles i already linked before, coercion for demonstrations, violence, etc. This one discusses about the effect that demonstrations had on parliament people. You see, the parliament decided to abandon La Paz because of the protests and left to Sucre to meet in peace. However, the movements responded quick and they moved to Sucre to effect further pressure. At some moment the police told them that they could not be able to protect parliament any longer. So they were really afraid, some fainted, cried and even had hearth attacks. It seems the pressure was fundamental for the resignation of Vaca Diez and Cossio, now, as you know, Rodriguez is president.

So what's all this politics stuff and philosophy? Can't i blog something nice? Well, these weeks haven't seen anything exciting. Tomorrow i shall be having some barbecue, so i might show you some pictures from it, guys.

A public apology

2005-06-19T15:25:00.000-07:00

I would like to apologize to all my friends, male and female for the lack of attention that i gave to their physical pains. I don't mean the well-aimed-punch-to-the-face kind of pain, but rather the pain that is constantly there and nibbles you away to madness. I am talking about headaches and of period pains. I was often oblivious about it when my friends very loudly complained about it. Now, i know what it is guys. Alexey shall pay attention next time you have it!!

Now on happier topics...

In the train from Belgium i was reading and enjoying the third volume of the autobiography of Beltrand Russell. This mathematician started a topic that is very dear to my hearth: type systems. He wrote on philosophy, etics and morals and plenty of other stuff; surely the Russell paradox rings a bell to you, isn't it? Russell was also a politics activist, he campaigned for women's right to vote, against the first world war, against nuclear arms race, war crimes, etc. I find his autobiography extremely interesting and i think i will read books such as History of Western Philosophy, Marriage and Morals, and perhaps others.

On today's readings i found the following gems:

At present, children are taught to love their country to the exclusion of other countries, and among their countrymen in history those whom they are specially taught to admire are usually those who have shown most skill in killing foreigners.

Wonderfully phrased, isn't it? This is in fact what happened with much of my school education, a lot of teaching about heroes and their deeds.

Another thing that i like about him is his search for happiness. Many people think, and believe it myself to a certain degree, that people who make works of importance have some serious emotional and/or psychological disturbances. Quite on the contrary, Russell criticizes a remark made by another writer with respect to a poet. This other writer remarked that the genius of that poet is due to his tragic life. Instead, Russell thinks that the poet might have produced more work in happier circumstances. A very refreshing point of view! At least to me!

Pain pain

2005-06-19T02:33:00.000-07:00

Is is very silly. Since my trip to Germany i caught some pain in my back. It might be because of the small space between your bed and the bed of the next guy above. You have little space to change!

Besides that life has been very good to me. I am writing now from Belgium where i am visiting my mom and Jean Michel. The weather is changing for the better finally, we have a lot of sun and very few clouds. Now i must finally repair my bike, there is incentive for it!

Bolivia has been peaceful these days, that is fine because i spend less time reading stuff on the internet :). Our favourite revolutionary comittee has been assessing the happenings of the last weeks. Of course i will share the article with you my dear readers! I also wanted to share some other links with you these days, but i was busy working :). So, the first is a discussion that ensues from a prediction that Bolivia may not last long. Finally there is another fine discussion on Jim Schultz' blog. Pay especial attention to the posts of Andrew. For a long time i felt that Jim was overly simplifying the bolivian situation in his analysis but could not quite articulate it, Andrew does it very well for me.

Great weekend and tuesday

2005-06-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yeah! Today i went to the concert of Nigel Kennedy, playing the four seasons of Vivaldi. It is the first time i saw a virtuoso. On top of that he was slightly excentric and a funny show man. All the credit goes to my friend Gar Yein who payed for my ticket as payment of a service. I wouldn't have paid for the ticket myself. But now, having seen it, i would! If you have the chance, go and see him, he is great.

I mentioned before that for the weekend i travelled to Konstanz to attend the wedding of Clara and Andres. Every detail was carefully arranged from the religious marriage to the reception at the Konzil. It is the first time i go to a german marriage and i was delighted at the participation of the family. Many of them made plays, sang, made special gifts and even made a movie!!

In that weekend we had time to walk around the city and sightsee a bit. Fortunately i was able to borrow a camera to make several dozens of pictures. I saved costs by staying in a youth hostel in Switzerland, the saved money went into the tons of food drinks i had during that weekend. The youth hostel is just within walking distance from Konstanz, it is very easy to get there since there are no border controls! The first day i was alone so it wasn't so much fun to walk around Konstanz. After my colleagues arrived things became more interesting and they could make pictures of me :).

On sunday i went to Zurich to meet my friend Osmar. This visit didn't produce many pictures which is a pity, i think that the park by the lake in Zurich is my favourite city park ever. It just goes on for kilometers, ideal for a walk and a talk. There are many street performers over there. But by far the most impressive one was this guy who managed to balance stone on top of stone in an unbelievable way!

More pictures at flickr: here and here.

Back from trip

2005-06-13T17:44:00.000-07:00

I had a very nice weekend in Germany and Switzerland where i attended the wedding of a colleague. Pictures may soon follow since i took many. I can't post them now since it is late and i just came back from the PhD graduation party of my friend Thomas.

So, about Bolivia, we have a new president and it seems that he is willing to make new elections. However, the social movements are still insisting in nationalization. Interestingly enough, most of the people are in favor of it, even in Santa Cruz. So what should be the conclusion? That we should nationalize even if it is a mistake? Big issue, huh? How do you make decisions based on the opinion of people that doesn't know all the details? You can see here how these movements can coerce you to join them even if you don't agree.

I might be posting something about my weekend trip tomorrow, stay tuned.

Update: I wanted to link to this article. It is favourable to former president Mesa which has been quite rare these last months. When he entered office there was a lot of hope but unfortunately things didn't turn out good.

More news

2005-06-08T06:44:00.000-07:00

I spend already enough time reading articles, blogs and news so i will not do long posts now.

From La Razon and La Prensa, we have two items about the situation in La Paz. Happily water is running again although the protests are becoming more violent. Also two interesting editorials, one might even prove prophetic. Let's hope not.

It is not all about bad news. There are good things going on as well. A linux user group in Cochabamba (known as the PiMI) and many others around Bolivia organized the penguin week to evangelize the use of free software.

Ok, now let's go back to work!

President of Bolivia resigns

2005-06-07T01:07:00.000-07:00

Carlos Mesa, president of Bolivia, presented his resignation to the congress in the face of the social movements (protestors) that have sieged La Paz for (i believe) two weeks. This move is not going to demobilize the movements, that will depend on who is the person who is going to succeed Carlos Mesa. According to the bolivian constitution it has to be the president of the congress. However, social movements do not want a politician to take in the presidency. Instead, they demand that the two next persons in line (both politicians) resign and that the president of the supreme court assumes the position. Still, this will not be enough to end the crisis, the movements want by all means the nationalization of the gas reserves and a constituent assembly.

As usual you can follow the situation in Bolivian newspapers:

For english speaking people i suggest the following blogs which have links to articles reporting the situation in english:

It seems that a pipe that transports water to La Paz has been broken. According to this article :

Protesters broke open the main drinking water pipe to La Paz, cutting off the water supply to the capital, La Paz radio station Radio Panamericana reported.

This explains what Nancy wrote some hours ago:

Hi folks,

just thought I update you with the news hear in Bolivia, the heart of south america.

well, it has gone worse. We had peace at the weekend, I guess the demonstraters and the entire Bolivian police force got tired and decided to have a rest, he he. That meant that I was able to leave the hotel and go for a nice walk. Everybody looked really relaxed on the weekend, that was so nice to see.

However, it all started again on mOnday.

now there is little food to buy, the supermarkets are half empty, prices are gone up drastically and the queues are very very long in all shops. it got worse in the evening, they protesters managed to cut the water.

So no water in 3 areas of La paz, no bread either no where in la paz, and no gas.

yes, it looks bad, all of la paz is blocked you can not go out and you can not get in.

the airport is still closed and there are no buses, no cars.

so even if i wanted to go i couldnt.

most resturants are closed too. and most shops.

well, lets see what happens, I basically lost the motivation to work. The interviews are less fun as everybody is very stressed.

the NGO is quiet to, all the volunteer workers are not coming and even some of the full time employers are not there.

Im working on both reports and hope to finish as soon as i can than I decide how to leave bolivia.

lets hope there wont be a civil war.

im actually a bit scared, but please dont worry any of you, I will be fine, somehow

lots of love to all of you

nancy

My brother was trapped in a hotel (a medical congress) last time something like this happened. He explained it was hard to find a place to eat. Actually, the businesses that were operating (restaurants, internet cafes,...) were doing so with doors closed. You had to go around the streets, very carefully of course, and as soon you spotted light under the door you would knock and have an expensive meal. Now the situation is even worse since water has been cut. Some pictures about the roadblocks in El Alto.

In Oruro, the situation is not that bad. We actually didn't have a detailed conversation with my brother to know about the situation there. Looking at the official newspaper of Oruro (La patria) i cannot find anything too bad. The usual roadblocks show up but that's about it.

Mayhem in Bolivia

2005-06-03T17:30:00.000-07:00

Although i live in the Netherlands i have to say i am not very knowledgeable about the European consitution debate. My impression is that the victory of the No camp was due to misinformation. More precisely, the arguments used by the No camp did not actually involve the constitution but other issues that should not have been taken into account for this discussion. Take a look at this.

Now let's turn our attention to Bolivia. Although the news are only now emerging in mainstream media such as BBC and CNN, everybody saw it coming. It was a matter of when rather than if. It was precisely the day after i left Bolivia that the problems started. In short, worker unions, poor farmers, teacher organizations, public transport, and many others started protesting against a law approved by the senate chamber. This law increases the taxes that foreign oil companies pay in Bolivia. The protesting groups complain that this law is still not fair, foreign companies, they say, should stop plundering the country's resources.

While this law was being debated the question was how much is a good percentage for the tax. But now that the law has been approved (demanding more than 50% of tax and "regalías"), the protesting groups demand nationalization of the gas reserves. These groups maintain the viewpoint that multinationals will exploit the resources without giving back enough to the people. A consequence of the protest is that La Paz is paralized. The same happens with many roads connecting cities among Bolivia.

All this violence makes me very upset. I think that these leaders are taking advantage of the poorest people to cause a political mayhem which may put them in power. With they in power will things improve? I am very doubtful about their abilities. It is easier to destroy than to create.

Many bloggers have been covering these happenings. Early look at marches in La Paz (some more), some posts about behavior of demonstrations and their organization/financing. I also received an email from a friend who is doing her project of international development in La Paz. Nancy says:

Bolivia could be discribed as a country at the age of civil war!!!!!
The political situation is very very bad, and I have to admit that im a bit scared. There are non stop protest, roadblocks, lots of violant behaviour. Demonstration here is not like the demos in london, there are much bigger and everybody is very violant. They hate seeing people wearing ties, so everytime there is a person wearing a tie they beat them up, 2, 3 and sometimes 4 of them they also attack taxi drivers. they stop the car force them to go out and hit them with a belt.Two or 3 people hold the taxi driver by their feet and hand and one of them hits the poor guy who scared shitless with a belt. Yesturday I saw how an old man was wearing a tie and 2 people were hiting him with a belt and a young man was trying to help him and the protester beat the guy as well and took his bag. there are no buses running and the airport is closed to, so lets see if I can get out of here safely. Everybody is nervous, our boss at the NGO said to us that we can stop with the work if we want. but we feel that being in the office working would be a good distraction. Also the streets is full of gas. The police are not allowed to shut, the president doesnt want any dead people so the police spray the whole city centre with gas, its is horrible you can not breath and your eyes hurt a lot. its all very ugly, most people are very scared, nervous and frustrasted. look on the internet under http://www.laprensa.com.bo/hoy/default.htm
is in spanish, but you can see some pictures

I sort of get the idea, the police is very busy protecting the key parts of La Paz while usual citizens of La Paz get no protection for aggression. A cousin of mine told me some scary things that could happen if you were out in the street while the ousting of the previous president happened. The damage caused by social movements is not quantified and their leaders are not held accountable for this damage.

I will end this post with more links, take a look at an article that examines how history repeats itself. It is amazing how many similarities there are with the current situation. It is sad to think that we might lose some more decades of development.

I have been quite critical against these social movements. You can find another perspective from this articulate blogger that has strong simpathy for these movements. Oh, and a link i promised to Metka.

Disculpas a los visitantes que preferirían ver este blog en español. Este blog comenzó para comentar mi vida en Utrecht, y los directos implicados en esas primeras historias no hablan español. En este momento no se si cambiar de idioma, hay una audiencia potencialmente más grande si lo dejo en inglés.

First barbecue

2005-05-30T15:46:00.000-07:00

I am breaking with my tradition of doing posts with pictures. That will be the arrangement until i get my camera fixed or i get another source of pictures.

On friday it was quite hot already here in The Netherlands, i don't remember the temperature but it easily could have been 30. It was tempted to have a beer outside or go to the lake near my home for a swim. Instead i managed to convince myself that it would be a good idea to work. That's what i did, i had a very nice dinner (charque de llama) and after that i started hacking on my type inferencer. At one AM i get fed up and decide to join the guys from Grote, a student house, for a drink. I met them at België, a bar that specializes in belgian beers. After one we left and i met a friend with which i used to work on a project, Hanga. Now she lives in Enschede so we used the time to catch up with each other's lives.

The next day was still hot but somewhat less, the cause was the wind, as is always in this crazy place. Well, we decide to go to the lake for a barbecue and we start rather late, at eight. It was fun and the weather was allright there. But at a certain time mosquitoes started bothering a lot, so much that i still have visible bites and they itch so badly! They were not afraid neither of the barbecue smoke or cigarette smoke. Someone dubbed the term smokytoes for them.

The next day i went to the swimming pool and swam intensively. Gar Yein came along and we spent the whole afternoon together. I helped her with a french interview, kind of translation. She prepared a nice chinese dinner and then it was time to sleep.

Today it was a good working day and i had a nice dinner too. There was "Eyes Wide Shut" on TV, i still didn't make up my mind on what the movie is about. I think it is about relationships, faithfulness and sex. The whole thing about the secret society might just be a metaphor. Anyway, if you want a decent critic for that movie google for it! That reminded me of a commentary about a book by Michel Houellebecq. I have the link in spanish. I like very much the exploration of the idea of sex as a differentiation system. I will eventually read this book, i only read Atomized by the same author.

It is time that i wash the dishes and perhaps read a little bit more before going to sleep. Good night all.

Back in Utrecht

2005-05-23T13:43:00.000-07:00

So finally i am back in Utrecht. I came back on monday last week, i have been a bit lazy about updating the blog these last weeks. One of the reasons is that i was having too much fun in Bolivia to actually use internet. Not only that, i also worked a bit so it was not one hundred percent holidays.

I am going to miss very much spending time with my family and friends. It turns out that one month was a very short time. I couldn't meet all the people i wanted to meet and also i couldn't eat all the dishes on my wish list! Next time i am going to actually write down that list and i will not come back until i have everything ticked, i should do that for people as well :). One of the dishes i ate the most was Picante de Lengua which is a spicy stew whose main ingredient is cow's tongue, a real treat! Even if i ate it two times, when my grandfather learned i was craving for that dish he arranged a family lunch where tongue was the main guest!

Later that evening my uncle brought some pictures of my family from twenty years ago. More precisely these were not pictures but slides. That made it very easy for the whole family to see and laugh at the young faces of, now much older, cousins. We had a great time trying to recognize who was who at that time, and some pictures were extremely hilarious. My brother took pictures of many of the slide projections. I will show one where my brother and i are small kids.

Sigh! It was a great time there. Now i am back for work. To quickly get used to the new time zone i avoided sleeping in the plane. Then i would be sleepy enough to choose the right hour to go to bed. Unfortunately i did some things until late that evening, mainly reading. That happened to me practically every night and i still have trouble waking up at the time i am supposed to. I guess this week i should be getting to my normal levels.

I guess the main activities this week are going to be work, and possibly a visit to the cinema to watch the third episode of star wars. I didn't care very much about the other episodes but i guess that now the marketing campaign got me. By the way, over the last two weeks i watched two bolivian movies that you should definetely see. One is called "El Atraco" and the other "Dependencia Sexual".

To close this post, the picture of my last lunch at Oruro.

Trip to Copacabana

2005-05-04T13:50:00.000-07:00

Last weekend i had a really great trip to Copacabana, a small town located on the shore of lake Titicaca. We left on friday with mi brother Andrey and my cousin Pamela.

The first night we were there it was really empty. That was surprising because it is quite a touristic town. Never mind, people arrived next day and Copacabana remained crowded the rest of the weekend. We ate a lot those days, a never ending supply of trout and another fish called pejerrey. It took some time to find a suitable hotel room, we were quite picky. Since we were staying only a few days we had a good budget for rooms. However, most rooms we found were dull and unwelcoming. Finally we found one that was good enough you can see it in the picture above. Perhaps we were in backpacker's street and that explains the lack of luxury.

Above you see Copacabana from the old Inca observatory just outside the town. And below is a picture we took while sailing away to Isla del sol.

Copacabana has a lot of places to eat out, bars and souvenir stores. As i said above our diet included exclusively fishes, we even dared to eat ceviche at a kiosk in the street. That was my final exam, since i came to Bolivia i avoided risky dishes so i wouldn't spend one week in the toilet. Happily now i can say i have adapted i can get street food and live to tell.

Besides food and a beautiful landscape, Copacabana is a spiritual place. Many pilgrims come to pray to the Virgen de Copacabana, they leave juicy donations that finance the construction and maintenance of a large part of the temple. It is really a beautiful church. My brother managed to convince some people living in a tall building to make this picture for you.

Another nice thing to do there is to take a day trip to Isla del Sol. We left the first day very early and arrived to the island at about ten in the morning. We walked the whole island from north to south. The landscape there varies a lot, there are very arid parts, typical of the Altiplano but there are also parts of the island that are suprisingly green. The place below is called the Inca stairs or something like that. There is a fountain that makes this piece of land very fertile.

I would like to show you so many more pictures since i found the place so beautiful. I was lucky that my brother was with me, he is a compulsive photographer so we ended up with a couple of hundred pictures :). You can find a few more samples at flickr (click one of the pictures).

I may write some more later, i am in a bit of a hurry and can't put more here. Anyway, enjoy!

Roadblocks

2005-04-23T16:35:00.000-07:00

Roadblocks as a form of political protest are very commonplace in Bolivia. It is one of several form of protests, including strikes, hunger strikes and demonstrations. To make roadblocks you need stones, cars, burning tires, fallen trees or just angry people.

If a group decides to make a road block, they decide to go to a close street/road or they choose one that will impact a large amount of people. The last choice is not hard in Bolivia where there are very few roads connecting cities and towns. Thus, often you end up with a line of hundreds of vehicles with people eager for the roadblock to recede.

I will not discuss extensively the reasons that justify road blocks. These include demands of higher political participation from excluded groups, lack of employment, people being fired, tax increases, lack of diesel, corrupt bosses. I could go on and on forever.

Very often the people participating in the road blocks or demonstrations are not well informed about the issues at stake, leaders might exaggerate the problems or even lie about them. Lately road blocks are very frequent and roadblocks are preferred to solve problems the normal way.

Yesterday we had a fun joke about roadblocks, my cousin's husband told her that there was a road block in the road from Oruro to La Paz. When she asked what was the reason he told her that people was upset that a german pope was elected instead of a latin american one. In fact, this roadblock some mine workers demand the government to return the mine to their true owners, after some unemployed mine workers took it by force. My cousin believed the pope reason for a second, with this you can see that sometimes roadblocks are installed because of crazy reasons.

Right now i am in Oruro and couldn't travel to La Paz last week because of the roadblock i talked about. I am now planning to go to Cochabamba to visit friends and family on monday. However, there is a roadblock on that road too, so it is not sure i will leave Oruro anytime soon.

I will have to stay in Oruro sleeping with good company ;).

Meet my brother Andrey, who lives in Oruro.

Llajua

2005-04-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

These days i have been eating meals with llajua. A typical bolivian spicy sauce. It is made with locoto, a kind of chili, tomatoes and quilquiña(think of a herb akin to parsley or basil). I forgot how tasty it is! Let me illustrate you. When you buy some kind of chili to spice up your food you expect this "tongue bite" to improve the taste. Well, locoto not only adds spiciness but also a nice taste. And when you add quilquiña on top of it... man! it can get really good.

Now in Oruro, Bolivia!!

2005-04-18T07:13:00.000-07:00

I am finally writing from Oruro, Bolivia. Unfortunately i cannot show pictures, because my damn camera broke down. I can't believe it! Just the day before i leave to Bolivia. I am now using my old camera and the traditional films. I cannot make as many pictures as before... sight! I will eventually have pictures when i scan them but you will have them.

The trip has been a bit long and i needed some hours of sleep to recover. The jet-lag didn't help either :). I have no altitude sickness(Oruro is at 3706mts over sea level) although i have been leaving at sea level for three years now.

My home town hasn't changed much. The streets look the same and my house too. I would say that the thing that shocked me the most is criminality. The rates of assault have soured in all big cities. I have been told that there are 20 stabbed people daily in my home town. The explanation seems to be the change of the penal procedure code. With the old code you had people in jail with no process started!! The justice was inefficient and you suffered from it. Thus, then new code had this as the main improvement, you couldn't stay in jail without a process or evidence against you. The new code insured that you couldn't be locked in jail for 24 hours without justification. However, after the change, real criminals couldn't be processed. The involved institutions couldn't arrange a process in that time. So you have jailed criminals and released the next day. As a consequence, people is very angry and make demonstrations. There are also many cases of normal people capturing thieves and beating them to death.

Trip in two days!

2005-04-08T02:06:00.000-07:00

I have been wanting to post an update for some days now but i have been quite busy and then blogger gave me a lot of problems with Firefox. Finally i managed to post using Safari (another browser). Firstly i should say that the past weekend was very sunny, on sunday we went to eat to El Brillante (cozy spanish tapas place) and then to eat ice cream (see picture on the left).

After that we decided to go to Wilhelmina park where many people were lying on the grass. I took a little notebook to work a bit but i wasn't very successful.

Workwise this week was good, i already started to implement a prototype on my project (more on that in a coming post). While doing that i implemented a type safe disjoint map, useful if you are doing compilers and interpreters in Haskell, i will put it in a coming post as well.

Last night i spent a lot of time uploading pictures to Metka's blog. Very nice pictures from Tanzania. However the blogging software wouldn't accept the pictures as they were and silently failed. After spending a lot of time trying to figure out what was wrong i resized them and now it works.

I am very excited, in a few days i go to this school. And after that i go for one month to Bolivia to visit my family and friends, that after three years absence! By the way, if someone is interested in reading bolivian blogs this guy has a list.

Osmar's visit

2005-04-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

Last week Osmar, a dear bolivian friend of mine, arrived for a visit. We met at Titus Brandma, a fun student building here in Utrecht. This is also how i met most of my closest friends over here. He stayed for a few days and we even managed to cook a very nice bolivian dish: Pique. You may see some of it in the picture, it consists of a lot of fried meat with french fries, paprika, onions and other vegetables. From the left to the right(top to bottom), you have Camilo washing dishes and Dario, Osmar and myself trying to digest the abundant food.

On saturday we had some really nice weather. Many people went to the center and had some drinks at the bars by the old canal. You can see how the center of Utrecht looks in a sunny day.

Update: After resizing the pictures of my blog i decided to include this funny one of Dario and Yuan Ju.

Easter holidays in Belgium

2005-03-27T15:15:00.000-08:00

A four hour trip to Charleroi, Belgium turned into a seven hours nightmare because of a small accident. Nightmare is exageration though, i merely forgot my luggage in one of the trains. As a result i had to wait that the "Service de bagages" calls another trains station and send back my stuff. I was very glad that i lost my luggage in Belgium, hehe.

As usual, the stay with my mother and Jean Michel (my mother's husband) is abundant in food and wine. As an example check this picture of us (well, i am not in the picture) feasting on cous-cous.

My mother just closed her eyes, it is fair i show a better picture.

In case you wonder how i look, i made pictures of myself to put in my profile.

Wow, it's late now. I was busy reading (finished reading) A Sunday at the pool in Kigali by Gil Courtemanche, a book about the Rwandan genocide. Good night all.