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BOLIVIA: Children Under Threat

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Dec 17 2004 (IPS) - A journalists’ association in this Bolivian city granted an award this week to local reporter Abdel Padilla for describing the plight of newborn infants who are the victims of outright infanticide or simply allowed to die in Caripuyo, the country’s poorest municipality.

Padilla reported that people in rural areas of Bolivia often put less value on the life of a newborn baby than on their livestock. Compounding the problem is the strong social stigma faced by single mothers, or girls who become mothers at excessively young ages.

“Some babies are thrown onto the rocks as soon as they are born, others are suffocated, either while they’re nursing or as they sleep, and some die of hunger because the mothers simply refuse to nurse them.

“But most die because they fall sick…and they are just left to die,” Padilla told the local newspaper La Prensa after visiting several communities in Caripuyo, which is located in the southwestern department (province) of Potosí.

The president of the Caripuyo town council, Zacarías Colque Matías, told IPS that infant mortality is indeed high in that area, but denied that Padilla’s allegations are true.

According to UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children 2005: Childhood Under Threat” report, geographic and cultural barriers, added to economic problems, remain the biggest hurdles to reducing child mortality rates in Bolivia.

The report, which was released globally by UNICEF (the U.N. children’s fund) on Dec. 9 but presented in La Paz on Thursday, highlights the gap between the under-five mortality rate among indigenous children in rural areas (70 deaths per 1,000 live births) and the rate in urban areas (50 per 1,000).

Official figures from the National Institute of Statistics (INE) show that 15 municipalities in Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, fall in the category of extreme poverty.

Meanwhile, the proportion of the population living in poverty ranges from 55 to 71 percent, depending on the area.

Rural parts of the country lack adequate health services and roads that would make it possible to rapidly obtain health care for the sick, such as children affected by the stomach ailments that are so common in tropical areas, or by respiratory infections in the Andean highland zones.

In Bolivia, a country of 9.2 million where indigenous people make up a majority of the population, an average of 255,000 babies are born every year. But 53 out of 1,000 die before reaching their first birthday, according to the UNICEF report.

Annual per capita income stands at 890 dollars. But in the sprawling slum city of El Alto, next to La Paz, many families scrape by on less than a dollar a day, with a diet of bread and tea made from the dried leaves of the cacao tree for breakfast and a thin soup of scant nutritional value for dinner.

In the UNICEF report, Bolivia ranks 65th out of 194 countries with respect to child mortality, with 66 children per 1,000 live births dying before the age of five.

Life expectancy at birth stands at 64 years. But in the western part of the country, and especially the mining regions, life expectancy is as low as 40 years.

The highest under-five mortality rate in the world is 284 per 1,000 live births, in the West African nation of Sierra Leone, and the lowest is three per 1,000, in Sweden.

UNICEF notes that many of the world’s poorest countries continue to assign more funding to defence spending than to health and education. The report states, however, that Bolivia is among the countries that spend the most on education, which gives room for hope of economic and social progress over the next few years.

The report also says infant and child mortality should be reduced thanks to a government policy that would expand basic health insurance to all pregnant women and all children under five, as well as coverage to first-time mothers until six months after the birth.

In Bolivia, UNICEF is focusing its efforts on providing structural solutions to problems in the poorest municipalities through an integrated local development programme that will expand access to education and health care, and promote the rights of children.

The head of the programme, Bladimir Ameller, told IPS that the first initiatives, carried out in the municipalities of Baures and Huacaraje, in the tropical northern department of Beni, have helped improve the administration of local funds.