By Franz Chávez
LA PAZ, Nov 26 2004 (IPS)

At the foot of the Andes mountains just to the north of the former imperial city of Potosí in southwestern Bolivia, around 10,000 people live in the most dire poverty – the poorest of the poor in South America’s most impoverished country.

This is Caripuyo, where temperatures plunge at night but are mild during the day, and long-suffering families barely eke out a living from subsistence agriculture in a country where farm exports remain the primary source of revenue.

The latest population study conducted by the Ministry for Sustainable Development, analysing data from the 2001 census and making projections for this year, identified Caripuyo as the municipality in Bolivia with the worst living conditions.

One illustration of that is the fact that 170.4 out of 1,000 infants do not reach their first birthday, while the infant mortality rate for Bolivia as a whole in 2001 was 16.11 per 1,000 live births in 2001.

"In this municipality, children die because of the lack of timely medical attention. The campesino (small farmer) communities are scattered, and there are no roads by which doctors and other health professionals can reach them," the president of the Caripuyo town council, Zacarías Colque Matías, told IPS.

The residents of the small town and surrounding rural area are attended by just two doctors in a small hospital and four health posts.

Caripuyo is one of the big pending challenges of the government of President Carlos Mesa, with respect to meeting the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000.

According to the National Institute of Statistics, 61 percent of Bolivia’s 9.2 million people live below the poverty line, with one-third living in extreme poverty. However, other sources put the poverty rate at 70 percent or higher.

A U.N. report on Bolivia says it is unlikely that this country will meet the poverty target set by the Millenium Goals: reducing poverty to half of the 1990 level by 2015. It states that while the conditions for making progress towards that goal are improving, more support is needed.

The Bolivian economy remains shaky, and 400 million dollars a year in foreign aid are needed to cover the six percent fiscal deficit.

Bolivia’s gross domestic product (GDP) amounts to about 7.8 billion dollars. Agribusiness is the main export sector, closely followed by minerals such as tin and tungsten. In addition, Bolivia produces oil, and has the second largest natural gas reservoir in South America, after Venezuela.

It was the question of how best to manage and exploit these large deposits of natural gas, estimated at 53 trillion cubic feet (1.5 trillion cubic metres) and worth perhaps 100 billion dollars, that triggered the popular uprising which forced right-wing president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada to resign and flee the country in October 2003.

In the month-long protests, dubbed the "gas war", as many as 70 people were killed and 300 injured when the army was called out. But the demonstrators achieved their aim of getting a plan for foreign corporations to export Bolivia’s natural gas to the United States and Mexico via Chilean ports cancelled.

The organisations of farmers and workers and left-wing parties leading the protests were not only opposed to the construction of the pipeline for exporting the gas, but rejected the government’s entire energy policy, in particular the concessions granted to transnational companies for the exploitation of the country’s oil and gas resources.

As part of an agreement with the demonstrators, President Mesa, who replaced Sánchez de Lozada, called a Jul. 18 referendum, in which a majority of voters approved major modifications of the country’s energy policy, including a restoration of state control over oil and gas resources by strengthening the badly weakened public oil company.

Voters also came out in favour of charging the foreign oil companies higher royalties.

It is now up to parliament to translate the results of the referendum into concrete laws, which would supposedly provide the state with more resources to address the country’s pressing social needs.

But until Congress passes the new legislation, the revenue generated by taxes and royalties from the oil and gas industry is insufficient to finance comprehensive or long-term social projects.

Making long-term plans tends to be in vain, Miriam Gamboa commented to IPS. Gamboa is the head of the Centre of Action Research Studies, which carries out assistance work in the impoverished city of El Alto, located next to La Paz, where most of the residents scrape by on less than a dollar a day.

"We are far from living up to the Millennium Goals, because poverty levels have increased, creating an even greater gap between the rich and the poor," she said.

At the same time, corruption on the part of people involved in politics often leads to their illicit enrichment at the expense of resources meant for the poor, said Gamboa.

She was specifically referring to an ongoing investigation by Congress into a three million dollar purchase of a Beechcraft airplane during the government of Hugo Banzer, the 1970s dictator who was elected in 1997 and governed until his death in 2001.

The funds used for this purchase were to have gone towards medicine and food for survivors of the May 1998 earthquake in the central department of Cochabamba.

Among those under investigation by Congress today in connection with that case is former defence minister Fernando Kieffer.

To give a more precise idea of the situation in Caripuyo, town councillor Colque Matías explained that a family can, at best, earn 62 dollars a month, if they are able to transport to market and sell their small surplus of potatoes, corn, apples, peaches and llama and guanaco meat.

Since 1994, the Bolivian government makes direct transfers of revenue taken in through taxes and royalties to the country’s 314 municipalities, distributed in accordance with the number of inhabitants, by means of a novel programme aimed at boosting local participation in decision-making.

But the funds Caripuyo received this year amounted to just 16 dollars per person – insufficient for maintaining educational services in a province where the illiteracy rate reaches 35.1 percent, according to a government study titled "Education in Bolivia, municipal statistics".

La Paz, the seat of government, tops the list in Bolivia in terms of education, with 83.8 percent of local residents receiving eight or more years of schooling. In Caripuyo, by contrast, that proportion is just 17.1 percent.

Nationwide, 12.93 percent of Bolivians 15 and older are illiterate. And on average, Bolivians above the age of 19 have completed 7.57 years of schooling.

The U.N. report on Bolivia says the country is within reach of living up to the goal of universal primary education by 2015. But, it adds, much more support is needed.

Gamboa, meanwhile, said the plans for reaching the Millenium social targets "remain on paper only."

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