The Poor sent empty away

Hardships of the Hacienda Days

Bolivians struggle to recover from past, imagine a better future | By Donna Stokes

A high altitude grasslands where the Frasquía community graze their young alpacas and llamas. Mount Illampu is in the background with snowcapped peak.

Frasquia, Bolivia - (from Heifer International) Maxima Callisaya-Mamani sits wrapped in a wool blanket on the ground outside her small adobe home in Frasquía, a village in northwestern Bolivia. Near her sits her adult son, Ponciano Flores-Callisaya. Dark clouds descend from the towering snow-capped mountain Illampu in the late afternoon. “Soon it will snow,” Maxima says, cinching her blanket a bit tighter around her shoulders.

The Hacienda Days

Maxima talks about the hacienda days in Bolivia when large foreign agricultural firms moved in and made the indigenous people work the land as indentured servants.

“In the old days, we used to work from dawn to dusk,” she begins. “We had to carry fertilizer [manure] for the bosses of the hacienda. It was a lot of work for us. We were too tired. We had to do everything for ourselves from nighttime until dawn. We didn’t have time to do things for our families; we just had to work for the boss. Sometimes we didn’t have food ourselves.

“It was slavery. Sometimes the pay was to give you a tiny piece of land to grow your own food on, but it was basically bondage. Everyone told us the bosses would say, ‘you live on my land, so you’re obliged to work my land for me. I stole it from your forebears now you have to work on it.’ It was a feudal arrangement. During the hacienda times I had five sons and five daughters. Ponciano is the oldest.”

From Subservience into Poverty

Beginning in 1952, agrarian reform in Bolivia outlawed coerced labor and introduced a program returning property to the indigenous people, though much of the redistributed land was not as productive, Maxima says.

“My children have all set up around [Frasquía]. Now they’re living in poverty and need a lot of help to progress. We don’t have money to purchase fertilizers for our crops. … In the times of hacienda we didn’t use fertilizer and we had average production of [good-sized] potatoes. They were big and healthy. The earth was relatively new then and was plowed with oxen. We didn’t use chemical fertilizers. We used manure as fertilizer on that ground in order to produce better.

“Now that we produce less, though, we live poor,” Maxima says. “Although it’s our own land we are poor.”

Hope for Future Generations

Maxima’s son Ponciano explains the difficulty in raising crops at this altitude of nearly 14,000 feet. “We do subsistence-level agriculture,” he says. “I stay here because I have to stay here. I have nowhere else to go. Sometimes the rain and hail come and there are a lot of pests. It’s hard to make a living.”

Maxima agrees. “If we had to work, even with stones, we would work with stones. If there was any work to be done to earn more money we would do it.”

Ponciano talks about how Heifer alpacas and llamas have helped his family survive in this stark landscape by providing wool and cooking fuel, and on rare occasions, meat. “It’s safe,” he says of raising animals, “because often crops fail. The frost will kill them. Hail also falls and we don’t have much food for the family.” He concludes, “In this region the best kind of production option is animals.”

The gift of an alpaca helped Maxima and her son. But thousands of other families still live in desperate poverty. You can help.