Free The Travel Writer by Jeff Soloway Page A

new political party. Conciencia de Patria.”
    The Conscience of the Homeland. Quite a mouthful to get on a ballot. I badgered my brain for the words I wanted. It usually takes me a day or two to get back into the swing of Spanish.
    “Who votes for such a party?” I asked.
    “Me, for example. I am Condepa,” the cabbie answered, and when we lurched to rejoin the teeming traffic in the main street, he stabbed his finger toward the other cabs. “And he is Condepa. And he is Condepa also. The mayor of El Alto City is also Condepa. The majority ofthe drivers are Condepa,” he added, as if that alone assured electoral victory.
    “Bolivian politics gives me a headache,” I said. “All I know is the president and the Mallku.”
    The Mallku was a man named Felipe Quispe, who claimed to be a descendant in spirit, if not in blood, of the ancient Aymara kings, whose homeland was the high plateau north of La Paz, around Lake Titicaca. Quispe led a party called the United Union Confederation of Working Peasants of Bolivia, composed mainly of rural Quechua and Aymara speakers, the proud but surpassingly poor country hicks of Bolivia. Every July, after the harvest, when farmers had little else to do but organize, Quispe would organize strikes and blockades in protest of governmental neglect. In recent years, he had extended his influence even to the lowland coca growers, also mainly indigenous, who were threatened by the U.S.-backed coca eradication campaign.
    “Which Mallku?” he said.
    I hadn’t known there was more than one.
    “Quispe,” I said.
    “Don’t talk to me about Quispe,” the cabdriver said. “He’s a peasant, with a peasant’s strategy. Strikes, blockades, demonstrations. Last month my brother was caught behind a blockade in the North Yungas for a week because of Quispe and his childish demands. And where does it get him?”
    I grunted sympathetically. I had once ridden to a new national park in the jungly Chapare province on a tourist van accompanied by a handful of soldiers in a jeep. We rounded a corner and were faced with a swarm of farmers in the road, brandishing a few dusty rifles (souvenirs of service in past revolutions), rusty machetes, shovels, and even some sharpened sticks. They were followers of Quispe’s lowland counterpart, Evo Morales, whose influence had been rising. The two men in front held a chain across the road. They were protesting the latest defoliation runs in Chapare, where all coca leaf cultivation is illegal. The soldiers leaned from the windows and ordered them to scram; the farmers responded with a handful of stones, haphazardly aimed (Bolivians grow up playing soccer, not baseball); my fellow tourists cringed in the van. The soldiers ducked and swore, and the guide turned to assure us there was nothing to worry about. He was right. A minor explosion beside us, like a backfire, an eardrum-tearing scream from the passenger beside me—and suddenly the farmers were fleeing back toward the trees, leaping over tufts of grass as they ran and still clutching their valuable weapons to their chests. The soldiers had fired above their heads. As the van rumbled over the fallen chain, the guide insisted it was all just a political ballet, but the pale French woman beside me trembled all the way to the lodge, and that night insisted on being returned to Cochabamba.
    “The peasants will always be poor,” the man continued. “We of Condepa have a betterMallku.”
    “A better Mallku?” I said.
    “Much better.”
    “Better with his promises, or better with … his things? You know? That he achieves.”
    It’s better to seize upon the first, inadequate word than to fumble foolishly for the right one. I have extensive experience in the many and varied sensations of feeling foolish when speaking Spanish.
    “Both. He doesn’t promise a new Andean nation; he promises jobs, and from time to time he makes good. Go to any driver and ask him.”
    “Are you asking him about Hilary?” said