Dumbest scam ever

Our waiter at a restaurant made us pay him when we ordered and then bolted without bringing us change. He might as well never return. I went to his boss -- the owner -- mentioned what had happened, and made it clear we wouldn't leave without getting our money. He gave it to us, wrote the punk's name on a pad and sent us on our way.

Greetings from Okinawa

No, not that one.
It's a town about two hours from Santa Cruz settled by Japanese immigrants more than 50 years ago. We were there as the town celebrated its annual fiesta last weekend with karate demonstrations, Bolivian and Japanese folkloric dancing and soba stands. The festival also marked the annual wheat harvest, so I included a photo of La Senora Wheat herself.

Forget natural gas...

soy and sunflower exports. Santa Cruz's best chance at economic success would be to exploit its most abundant resource: Wannabe models. Drivers from around the city converge on this gas station so they can be served coca tea and coffee and have their gas pumped by pretty women in go-go boots, miniskirts, or whatever the outfit of the day happens to be.
Already one MBA I know is drafting a business plan for the U.S. Any investors?
(Click photo to enlarge)

Hamas, Bolivia and coca

Rumsfeld made the connection during his visit to Paraguay today. Click here to read the Washington Post article.

A friend of our enemy is...our friend?

Shock and confusion here as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez announces plans to replace Bolivian imports of soy and sunflower oil with American products.
Shock because it means $40 million in lost income for South America's poorest country, according to news reports.
Confusion because Chavez is a big pain in the U.S.'s ass and lots of U.S. dollars have been to counter his popular Leftist and anti-Yanqui movement. It is strange he would favor U.S. trade.
Several State Department officials have accused Chavez and Fidel (yeah, that one) with funding the campaign of populist Bolivian presidential candidate Evo Morales, a coca farmer.
So Morales, by the transitive property, has become a pain the ass for the U.S. -- and the ass of the current administration of the Harvard-educated, neo-liberal and IMF-friendly interim President Eduardo Rodriguez (though he has been very muted since the same Leftist movement drove the last president, Carlos Mesa, from power in June and his neo-liberal predecessor two years before).
Here's why the U.S. considers Morales a threat: Aside from admitting that his campaign will be funded by the crop used to make cocaine, Morales favors the nationalization of Bolivia's natural gas industry and, not surprisingly, the U.S. and IMF don't like that.
(The embassy wants me to lead a seminar in the Morales stronghold El Alto on how citizen reporters can report fairly on popular indigenous movements and free trade. I will try to do just that.)
The punchline of the story is that a trade official in the U.S.-friendly administration is now pleading with Morales to ask his "friend" Chavez to change his mind.

Damn Bolivian wi-fi

We have some nice photos to post from a festival we attended in a nearby Japanese village last weekend, but the Internet connection here has been too slow. Ironically, there's a telecommunications conference at the hotel and guests have used up all the bandwidth. Check in a few days for some new photos.

An update

The director of the municipal agency who was beaten and spit upon by the mob that took over his office has struck back.
His supporters -- allegedly from the same neighborhood -- raided the adjacent Plaza 24 de Septiembre yesterday and beat up people believed to have been involved in the building takeover.
To further complicate matters: Local press reports that the mob that took over the building on Monday and demanded a neighborhood cleanup also accused one of the officials in the agency of passing off phony bills at her lottery stand.
As some kicked and spit on her boss inside on Monday, others chased her outside and tore most of her clothes off (a tasteful photo of the act appeared in the next day's paper.)
She (wearing a neck brace) and her supporters formed part of the retaliatory mob that flooded the central square on Tuesday.
Local press reports that the municipal offices are still occupied by SOMEONE other than those who are supposed to be there. I read the articles more than once and can't figure out which mob is hanging out. Either way, it didn't concern the hundreds of military police officers who gathered in the same square Wednesday to celebrate Bolivia's flag day. Why bring order when you can blow a trumpet instead?

A scary reminder

I got a terrifying taste this morning of how close Bolivia teeters toward anarchy.
I was meeting with an official from the municipal independent budget office at a long table that he shares with a few other functionaries in a tight loft. Imagine a room the size of a Manhattan living room reached by climbing a narrow spiral staircase.
About five minutes into the meeting we heard the pops of about a dozen large explosions that shook the windows. No one inside the office reacted so I assumed the booms were construction noise or firecrackers.
Then we heard a human commotion outside. Like a flash flood, several hundred demonstrators had converged outside the office building in the five minutes I was inside. To announce their arrival, the demonstrators had thrown the dynamite – I am told it is an Ayamara custom. Everyone in the loft stood when they heard the stomping of protestors on the wood floor downstairs. The mob had pushed past the security guard and through a metal gate.
“They’re inside!” someone in the loft shouted. We all rushed to the spiral staircase, but several dozen demonstrators were already climbing up and wouldn’t let us pass.
The demonstrators were from a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of town and demanded a meeting with the director of the budget office. They said he had ignored earlier, more civil requests. They wanted to tell him that they were angry about the amount of trash in their neighborhood.
A leader of the group, spitting with rage, rushed to the director of the office and cornered him at his desk. The crowd around him squeezed in blocking all means of escape. The crowd pushed a female secretary and I against a wall and, fortunately, largely ignored us.
Some of the female protestors then began to open file cabinets and dump and tear documents. The secretary and I tried to escape down the staircase but were forced back upstairs.
As the director of the office listened to the leader of the mob, wiping sweat from his forehead with a rag every few seconds, the crowd grew more and more animated. Then, several of the demonstrators began to beat the director on the head, face, in the neck and back. As he crouched to protect himself, a few women spit their chaws of chewed coca leaves in his face.
A few of the director’s deputies managed to push the director through the crowd toward the spiral staircase toward the exit. But the mob pushed him down the staircase and he must have fallen about 12 feet. I couldn’t see whether he was injured.
The crowd then turned on my friend and began hitting him and spitting on him. He managed to squirm to the staircase and descended uninjured.
The mob had effectively taken over a government building with me and the secretary inside and no police were visible.
No one seemed to notice us there until leader of the mob turned to me and asked if I worked there too. I explained that I was a professor and journalist and that we wanted to leave. He waved me and the secretary out and we had to push hard to climb down the stairs and outside the building.
On the street were close to a thousand demonstrators from the neighborhood and a few National Police officers, holding shotguns, who -- I swear -- shrugged when I looked their way. It took more than 20 minutes after I LEFT THE BUILDING before riot police were standing in front of the adjacent mayor’s office.
A leader of the demonstrators held a press conference outside.
“We demand a meeting with the mayor and with the (independent budget office),” he told reporters. “This was a pacifistic march. If this doesn’t work, we will have to look at our other options.”