(3 of 10)
∙BOLIVIA has come a long way since 1948, when a La Paz newspaper carried an advertisement: "For sale—200 hectares of land, 47 hogs, 83 Indians." Since the 1952 revolution that toppled the country's feudal tin barons, the Spanish criollos, who make up a mere 15% of the country's 4,000,000 people, no longer traffic in serfs, and most Indians have their own plot of land. Yet, on the 12,000-ft. Andean plateau, where 75% of Bolivians live, the peasants still sleep on dried llama fetuses to cure what ails them, still subsist mainly on dried potatoes. The U.S. put great store in President Victor Paz Estenssoro, who made a start at bringing his country into the 20th century, but was so heavy-handed about it that he was overthrown by a military coup last November. Air Force General Rene Barrientos is now in command and promises new elections this September.
∙CHILE is the most European of the west-coast countries, honors—of all people—Bernardo O'Higgins as its first President, and has a long history of constitutional government. Nevertheless, the country's 8,200,000 people, 66% of them part Indian, have never been able to feed themselves; their country, for all the lush wheat-and wine-growing valleys, is still mostly desert and mountain that do not produce enough food for the soaring population. Like Peru's Belaunde, Chile's new President Eduardo Frei offers a vast reform program, including a landmark partnership with three U.S. companies to double copper production by 1970. Frei has suffered from a hostile lame-duck Congress in which his Christian Democrats controlled only 33 of 192 seats. "Chile," he says, "cannot wait indefinitely." And this week he went into crucial congressional elections, hoping for a more cooperative legislature.
Spanish or Quechua. Whatever the problems of the others, Peru has them all—and more. It is the biggest of the west-coast nations, the heart of the ancient Inca empire, and no place for the timid. "When you see no trees," said one 16th century Spanish navigator, "you have reached Peru." The seacoast capital, Lima, is bigger than Detroit, and sleek modern skyscrapers crowd in on some of the most magnificent Spanish architecture this side of Madrid. Yet 400,000 of its 2,000,000 citizens squat in festering slums, among them the infamous Planeta, built next to a centuries-old garbage dump, where stony-faced Indians scrabble in the smoldering refuse.
Beyond lies the desert, so parched that for miles on end not a living thing can be seen. A short distance inland, the Andean foothills rise to 13,000-ft. plateaus, inhabited by 53% of Peru's 11 million people, virtually all of them Indians. Some labor in the mines for $2 a day; others work the steeply terraced hillsides, chewing gummy wads of coca, a leafy narcotic, to ward off hunger and cold. In the village of Hualcan, 200 miles northwest of Lima, only eight of 900 people can even communicate in Spanish; the rest speak Quechua, the language of their Inca ancestors. After a visit to Hualcan, a U.S. anthropologist reported that the Indians at first thought him an evil spirit come to steal the fat from their bones.