186 CultureShock! Bolivia
Alteños Suffer Too
The late El Compadre Carlos Palenque would listen to the misfortunes
of the suffering masses who visited his populist television programme,
La Tribuna Libre del Pueblo, and would refer them to medical, legal or
social services. But when one confused Alteño exhibited the wounds
from a beating from an employer, a frustrated and impotent Palenque
exhorted him to return to his farming community.And yet El Alto has become the epicentre of change in
Bolivia. El Alto residents have overcome every obstacle in
the Book of Impossibility, very much thanks to a grass roots
organisation that sprung forth from traditional Aymara
community democracy, under the banner of FEJUVE (La
Federación de Juntas Vecinales, roughly, Federation of
Neighbourhood Committees). Today, FEJUVE continues the
struggle for natural gas control and for water rights (that
began with the La Coordinadora in Cochabamba in 2000). La
Coordinadora had an identifi able spokesman but in El Alto
it is diffi cult to identify any one leader. At any moment, a
new face may rise to the surface in community assemblies,
through charged debate that outside observers would think
were out of control.
Without fi xed leaders, FEJUVE gets the job done, to the
extent that it served as the catalyst for the social movement
that led to the expulsion of president Sánchez de Lozada
in 2003.
FEJUVE’s Aymara identity has an historical antecedent
in the 1781 anti-colonial milicias of Tupac Katari, whose
command centre was in what is today known as El Alto, and
who conducted a siege of La Paz from this strategic point
4,000 m (13,123 ft) above sea level. But it was not until the
1940s, following the establishment of railroad and airforce
installations, that landowners parceled out their holdings and
anarchic urbanisation began. As late as 1952, there were only
11,000 inhabitants on this high plain outpost.
The development of urban committees that would
eventually coalesce around FEJUVE was based on rural
Aymara social structures. Three approximate zones developed