Enjoying Bolivia 197season, chilly surazo winds may slash away the Santa Cruz
heat. The region is not exempt from an occasional winter
torrent, but humidity during this relatively dry period
remains tolerable.
A thriving agricultural region, Santa Cruz has also grown
as an industrial centre. Cruceños have a reputation for being
more entrepreneurial than Paceños. With more than a fi fth
of Bolivia’s largest companies based here, Santa Cruz may
be surpassing La Paz as a business hub.
Santa Cruz is a three-ring city, with its inner anillo (ring)
containing most of the city’s highlights. Its second and third
rings are mainly residential or industrial. Bolivia’s premier
hotel resort, Los Tajibos, is cast way out in the third ring.
Santa Cruz has Bolivia’s best zoo, a fi ne art museum (Casa
de la Cultura Museo de Arte), an insect exhibit (what better
place than in the tropics) at the Natural History Museum and
a profusion of parks and gardens.
The Santa Cruz region is a montage of totally diverse and
sometimes contradictory cultures and subcultures, including
Mennonite farmers who wear Pennsylvania outfi ts in tropical
heat, Sikhs from India, Okinawans and a fertile movement
of environmental activists acting as an alternative to a
conformist culture of 400 beauty pageants.
Defenders of the environment are invited to visit the offi ce
of the Asociación Ecológica del Oriente (ASEO), 681 Cristóbal
de Mendoza Avenue. Over a cup of coffee with ASEO’s
executive director, young and dynamic María Teresa Vargas,
I learned of the frightful use of illegal pesticides, whose
importation to Bolivia involves international accomplices
from countries where the same pesticides are also banned.
Vargas tells of a Santa Cruz man who used the banned DDT
to murder his three children and then committed suicide.
“Many peasants employ no protective measures when using
these illegal poisons,” she says. “Some actually mix the stuff
with their hands.”
Tourist books often refer to the exotic sloths who live in
the trees in Santa Cruz’s Plaza 24 de Septiembre. Vargas
explains that the sloths’ inadequate diet leaves them too
weak to sustain themselves on the branches of trees.