The Death Train

The street cars of La Paz

Bolivia is a vast country nearly void of effective transportation.  Highways are often little more than dirt tracks that are closed from transit large parts of the year.  Like many colonial nations in Africa once the colonizers departed so did the infrastructure.  Once upon a time in La Paz street cars traversed the cities.  Images from the past have a strange tendency to seem more refined and more organized than images from the present.

While Bolivia achieved independence in 1825 the colonial occupiers should be redefined from nations to commercial interests.  There was once a rail road that threatened to connect the country but never did.  Part of it stretches through the Andean highlands connecting Chile and Argentina with Oruro, La Paz and Cochabamba.   A second part of a different gauge runs from Santa Cruz to the Bolivia - Brazil border town of Puerto Suarez and south to Paraguay.

A third and fascinating railroad was constructed in the far north to cement the profits of the rubber barons.  No, these were not the founding fathers of condom manufacturing, they were short lived economic kings who tapped the trees of the Amazon to provide the worlds supply.   During my time in Bolivia I traveled several times to the far north eastern corner of the country where the rustic Bolivian frontier was divided by a simple river from the much more refined and civilized Brazilian side.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but from a Brazilian perspective, their under developed backwater was Manhattan compared to the Bolivian equivalent existing a few miles apart.  I like sometimes to imagine two priests standing on either side of the river looking at each other.  One is Brazilian and speaks Portuguese the other Bolivian and speaks Spanish.  They wave to each other and give the sign of the cross.  The Portuguese priest then climbs into a new SUV and drives off toward his local Parish.  The Bolivian priest pauses to scrape the mud off his shoes before reaching for a ragged rope and leading his donkey down a dusty road.

Main Blvd. in Guayaramerin Bolivia.  One of the few paved roads.

From the air it seems like a simple extension of a traffic grid where a bridge connecting the two has never been built.  From the ground it is dirt streets over run with mud when the torrential rains come.  It is gritty buildings barely served by utilities and the sounds of farms interwoven with the fabric of a town.  When I visited I stayed and a shoddy hotel called the San Carlos where a noisy air-conditioning unit was the sole luxury.  It was also owned by a drug trafficker/money launderer that I used to see counting dollars in the lobby.  A friend of mine had more scruples.  He refused to patronize the San Carlos and instead stayed on a cot at a local drug police garrison.  While I applaud him for his principles I readily sacrificed my own for a night of cool sleep and a semi clean shower. 

 

Perhaps a few screws and a new coat of paint.

Church In Guajara-Mirim

Guajara-Mirim (turn of the last century)

In 1903 Bolivia and Brazil signed the Treaty of Petrópolis.  The result was largely in favor of Brazil and had been propagated by a low level rebellion in the north of Bolivia financed by the Brazilian government.  The distant government in La Paz controlled by the Tin Barrons didn't hold much regard for the tropical portions of the country.  One of the most prominent was Simón Patiño.  A man of Indian descent, Patiño was at one point one of the top five richest men in the world.  The government in La Paz was beholden to the Barrons and their economic interests.  In order to foster stability they ceded 191,000 square kilometers in the northern Acre province to Brazil.  In exchange, Bolivia was provided 5,200 square kilometers of territory on the Madeira and Paraguay rivers and 10 million in cool hard cash.  The vast majority of the money undoubtedly went into the pockets of the Bolivian treaty negotiators.  Bolivia was also promised by Brazil that they would construct a railroad that would link Bolivia to the Atlantic. It would start in Porto Velho at the farthest navigable point in Brazil, circumvent a series of rapids and eventually reach the river town of Guajara-Mirim.  Just across the river the railroad would start again and travel across Bolivia to the rubber and Brazilian nut producing town of Riberalta.  The railroad crossed some of the most difficult terrain in the world and took 10,000 lives during it's construction.   It became known as the Devils Railroad.  Today, it is only a memory.  Shortly after it was built the price of rubber collapsed as Malaysian sources and synthetic rubber were developed.  This was largely due to an enterprising Englishman Henry Alexander Wickham who brought the rubber seeds to England.  Others decided to attempt to grow rubber trees in Asia and the trees found life quite acceptable. They propagated far more prodigiously than in South America and exportation was cheaper and far more direct.  The last trains to travel the tracks of the Devils Railroad were in 1972.

The old Gujara Mirim rail station.

Echos of the past was all I could think about when Ira and I took a motorized wooden launch across the river from Guayaramerin to Guajara-Mirim for the day.  The boat navigated the choppy river waters to a dock on the other side.  Everything was immediately cleaner and in better repair.  Warehouses and import stores surrounded us.  The roads were paved and the cars modern.  As we walked into the town looking for a place to have lunch we passed an old rail station that was once the terminating point of the forgotten railway.  A painted engine rested as a monument on rails that went no where.  We eventually found a restaurant and I laughed myself into nearly uncontrollable seizures as I watched Ira consume his lunch.  In some amazing still unexplained way he magically transported an enormous quantity of his food on to the table and underneath it scattered around his feet.  I wondered what barbarians the Brazilians must have wondered came out of the primitive regions beyond their borders. Despite this, I have to say Bolivia with all it's misgivings seemed much more filled with life.  Perhaps poverty has a way of lifting the soul and the heart in ways to compensate for the absence of the material.

Faced with the auspicious reality of the declining Bolivian rail system, my Diversion Investigator friend Ira and I decided to make a journey to the South Eastern corner of Bolivia.  Our goal was to conduct an intelligence related study on a nearly forgotten rail corridor.  The line ran from Puerto Quijarro/Corumba to Santa Cruz.  We had suspicions that route was being used by drug traffickers to transport cocaine out of Bolivia and transport needed chemicals into the country.  During the rainy season it was the only usable route linking Santa Cruz to Brazil.  The road that existed would turn to mud and become completely impassible. 


On paper it seemed like a great idea with a spectacular opportunity for gainfully employed adventure.  Our counterparts in La Paz thought we were insane yet it went with the territory.  In truth I think we were.  We flew to Puerto Quijarro and stayed the night at the resort hotel El Pantanal.  The Pantanal is a vast swampy region filled with extraordinary wildlife and would have been the perfect place to be a visitor yet we were on a mission.  Despite this fact, our only night there I accepted an invitation from one of the hotel staff to spend the evening visiting the nearby Brazilian city of Corumba.

El Pantanal, Bolivia

As I have traversed borders around the world I have noticed one unique quality.  A border is the perfect place to judge the dominance of one culture over another.  Even in the most industrialized of nations things are invariably never equal.  Language will cross in a one sided way.  Stores of one culture will be unequally represented by stores of another.  In a developing nation the scale of development and infrastructure can become glaringly apparent.  In Bolivia at the Brazilian border, everyone in Bolivia speaks Portuguese. In Brazil, no one speaks Spanish.  Bolivia is like an ugly step child.  A forgotten land that has no purpose beyond simply being a distant line of sight on the horizon.

When I traveled that evening to Corumba I felt like I left a remote village and entered an urban metropolis.  While not quite so dramatic it was in truth a world apart.  It was a world that functioned.  That had organized lives and a developed economy.  We visited a dance club and I marveled at the well dressed well off people around me.  At some point after midnight my hosts decided to go their own way and helped me acquire a cab to go back across the border.  What they didn't tell me is that the border closes at midnight.  As I approached armed guards waved me off.  I left the cab and pleaded my case.  I had an early train to catch.  My friend was waiting.  I had to get across.  They were not in the least concerned.  Only after I reached in my pocket and produce a handful of Bolivian currency did their attitudes change.  Apparently there was a special late night exception.

Ira explaining to me why Bolivia has air

The next morning we ventured to the railway station to commence our journey.  It was supposed to take about 12 hours and there were only three scheduled trips a week.  I took this as a sign of limited demand yet in reality I think it was to ensure the train would actually arrive for the return trip.  As we boarded the train all illusions of my European train travel experiences went by the wayside.  The seats were barely covered remnants and almost don't deserve to be called seats.  The backs long ago decided they wanted to achieve permanent recline while massive pieces of metal jabbed into me.  Around me people lay out on the floors and children were crying.  Chickens squawked and the air was filled with the smell of chicken shit.  This however was barely noticeable as the throngs of unwashed humanity took up roost around us.  Heat was in inescapable and the only fragment of relief came from the universally broken and lowered windows.  At first this seemed like a godsend yet as the train inched down the track probably at around 10 miles an hour trees bordering the tracks commenced flying into the windows of the train. 

The track itself was barely visible, the ties covered with a coating of mud leaving two barely exposed metal rails.  As day turned to night and the hours drug on the lights of the train became a magnet for a panoply of critters existing in the world out side.  From their point of view we must have looked like a slowly passing Las Vegas Strip.   At one point I woke up after nodding off for a few minutes to discover a massive praying mantis sitting in my head.  Flying things were everywhere darting through the air like small birds.  Mosquitoes happily seized the opportunity to feed as if we were a passing sushi bar on a belt winding it's way around a lunch counter.

Every so often the breaks would sequel and the train would come to a complete halt.  There we would sit.  The lights would flicker and the jungle would consume us.  Hours would pass and thoughts of torture by a North Korean jailer seemed palatable when compared to my reality.  At least in their hands the sadistic torment would have given my brain something to focus on.

Luxurious by comparison the Oruro train

By the time we finally arrived in Santa Cruz nearly 24 hours had passed.  We stepped of the train with a judgment that at any point of the line anything could happen anywhere and there was not a damn thing anyone could do about it.

If history teaches us anything, infrastructure built for a single industry is doomed.  Industry is boom and bust and all that goes with it will be as well.  Only those with the foresight of creating a national system can achieve long term prosperity.  At the turn of the century the infrastructure of Bolivia was as developed and in many ways more developed than it is today.  This with a fraction of the population.  Had anyone had the foresight to actually link the transit systems together the nation could have become a hub for South American commerce.  Instead, it is a backwater.  Bolivia however maligned does not stand alone in this.  America has suffered the same fate on a scale magnified a thousand percent.  Transit systems that once criss-crossed our cities with streetcars were destroyed to encourage the automobile.  Passenger trains that once reached out to even some of the smallest towns in America are ghosts of the past.  It seems almost every town I go to has a passenger station sitting proudly just as the one in Guajara-Mirim with no rails passing by. 

All is not lost.   The leftist government seems committed to rail travel and the line from Santa Cruz seems to have experienced a re-birth.  I believe this was largely the result of a misguided purchase by an American short line rail company.  They restored much of the track and turned the line into a profitable corridor shipping soy beans out of Bolivia grown in the lush farm lands surrounding Santa Cruz.  The thanks the got for their effort was the threat of being nationalized by the Bolivian government.  The Chilean rail company that tried to operate a line from La Paz has gone bankrupt.  Their efforts to modernize the line were met with constant protests by Indians in La Paz fomented by their resentment of a Chilean company owning something in Bolivia.  They ransacked their office and burned their vehicles.  There appears to have also been a renaissance in passenger travel as a kind of rail bus has taken over the route from Santa Cruz to Corumba.  There is talk of a line to Peru but Bolivia is always filled with talk and short on money.

At any rate,  as I lament the lost possibilities of the past I am thankful I had a chance to experience some of them.  Perhaps the future will be better, perhaps not.  At the very least, it left me with many great stories and memories to round out my life.