Chile and Bolivia A South American Journey with Jonathan Dimbleby

I'm on a journey through South America, one that will take me many thousands of miles,

from south to north and east to west.

An exploration, an adventure, and a revelation.

It is spectacular.

It's the driest desert in the whole world.

This "new world" used to mean dictators and brutality.

But South America has changed. Instead of despair, there's hope.

There are riches in abundance. Economies that are booming.

Take just one wagon of copper.

That's something like 600,000 per wagon.

There's also poverty, crime and violence, impossible to ignore.

I'm with the police on patrol in a barrio notorious for gang warfare.

The story of this continent is resonant with pride in the past.

The real evidence that this came with the slaves from Africa centuries ago.

The countries of South America, with some 400 million inhabitants,

are blessed with living traditions and perplexing surprises.

This is important not only as a sport,

but culturally, would you believe.

There are radicals at the rodeo, breaking a great taboo.

And children who formed their own trade union.

The unexpected is everywhere.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

My journey starts with something of a success story,

with a state that was once reviled,

but is now the envy of the continent.

This is Santiago, home to nearly six million people.

A cosmopolitan capital that is growing and flourishing as never before.

This is the spirit of the new,

an economy that has more than doubled in the last ten years.

Foreigners flooding into the country because of the free market.

If it goes on like this, over the next ten years,

Chile will have an average income per head that rivals that of Spain,

the old colonial master.

Chile is now an open society, confident and outgoing.

Corruption is notable by its absence.

Freedom has usurped tyranny, democracy has replaced dictatorship.

For me, the transformation is startling.

30 years ago, most of South America was under the jackboot.

Military dictators, fascist rule.

Chile was a quintessential example.

When I was last here, General Pinochet was in power.

Foreign reporters were banned, so I had to go undercover.

It was very unnerving.

The people of Chile were cowed, and men in uniform

were the face of a regime that terrorised its own people -

that locked them up, that tortured them,

that killed them, and had them "disappeared".

Now, instead of being protectors of a tyranny,

these troops are the outwardly symbolic face of a genuinely free society.

Today, I can go where I want and meet who I like.

Trapped by my own past here, it is a very strange experience.

Even though I know Chile is free,

it still seems remarkable to me that somewhere like this can exist.

It's The Clinic.

Patricio?

-Yes.

-Patricio.

-Hi, John.

-Hi.

Patricio Fernandez runs a best-selling magazine, a weekly shock of satire and subversion.

Chile's Private Eye.

The magazine was founded in 1998,

inspired by a drama in London that convulsed Chile.

Why do you call it The Clinic?

Our name came from the name of a London clinic

where Pinochet was arrested.

In 1988, Pinochet, who was no longer in office,

was charged internationally with crimes against humanity.

Though he'd never be put on trial,

the dictator's humiliation was total.

The arrest of Pinochet was, maybe for me,

the most important event in the new democracy in Chile.

It's like...

you have a devil in your house,

and some day a magic hand can take off it.

You can't imagine that before.

Never Pinochet would be arrested, for us.

That was impossible.

The Clinic is profoundly irreverent. The rich and powerful are lampooned,

their hypocrisies ridiculed, their scandals exposed.

Freedom of expression with a vengeance.

What we like is find here a lot of very different voices. Crazy voices.

Logical voices, left voices, right voices.

So it's a really open place where everyone can say what they want,

where you can be very subversive, very offensive,

you can sometimes be very kind, but not very often!

I really can't get over this. If you think only a generation ago,

for daring to sit like this together,

they would've been put in prison, tortured,

and some would've been killed for having the temerity to speak freely.

Now they have the same freedom to say what they want

as anywhere in the world. It's absolutely fantastic.

I've got to get the drinks back.

Sorry. There we are.

-I was needing...

-You were needing it!

THEY LAUGH

But you don't measure freedom simply in terms of rights or rules.

Pinochet stole Chile's liberty.

The big question for me is how they live and breathe that liberty

now that they've got it back again.

When you've been through the kind of dramas and traumas that the people of Chile have,

it makes one wonder, now that they're free, what they do with their identity.

Has it been stolen from them?

Do they have to rediscover it, remake it?

What country is it that they now have?

And who are they?

MUSIC PLAYS

This is a tea dance,

but the rhythm and the steps express the very soul of the nation.

It's the people's dance, the cueca.

But Pinochet not only seized power from the people, he stole the cueca, as well,

and turned it into a weapon for jingoistic propaganda.

The lead singer is one of Chile's most famous actors.

A-ha!

And Daniel Munoz is using this status

to reclaim the cueca for the people.

HE WHOOPS

I've never seen... Can you first show me those plates?

They are like, er, castanets.

What happened to the cueca, then, when the dictatorship was in place?

When Pinochet was controlling this country?

That was the past.

Today, Daniel wants the cueca to be the theme tune for the future.

An assertion of freedom and a rejection of tyranny.

They've even given the cueca a new name to reflect its new purpose.

The cueca brava.

The dance takes the form of an elaborate courtship between a rooster and his bird.

It's not only seductive, but irresistible.

Dictators come and, mercifully, they go.

Today, there seems no reason to doubt that the spirit that inspires the cueca brava will prevail.

APPLAUSE AND CHEERING

The real thing is the amazing atmosphere in here. It's so lovely.

There is not one unsmiling face.

Away from the capital, and into Chile's rural heartlands,

once the stronghold of Pinochet's most committed followers,

and, I presumed, somewhat ambivalent about the new Chile.

The National Rodeo Championships at Rancagua,

almost men only, and not for the faint-hearted.

This is the machismo, if you like, that goes deep back in Chilean tradition,

when the cows had to be brought down from the mountains, and had to be controlled and separated.

Of course, it has its roots, too, in a very male

and, historically, quite violent society, as well.

That violence was incubated almost 500 years ago,

when the Conquistadors swept across South America, wreaking havoc.

After three centuries of colonial rule, the Spanish departed.

Among their bequests, the rodeo.

Deeply conservative, fiercely competitive.

Today, rodeo is a national sport, and almost as popular as football.

You might think that rodeo is run by ranchers, Pinochet people. Not so.

The president of this year's event turns out to be a property developer.

Oscar Leria, like many of those here,

is hooked on a romance with the past, not with Pinochet.

What is a real Chilean?

The real Chilean is people who have come from the farms.

Of course, now my children, they believe in different things.

There is globalisation, Facebook, internet, so they are changing.

But, in our sport, we try to conserve the old stuff.

-To hold on to that?

-Yes, yes.

The Rancagua Championships are televised across the nation.

A three-day festival with a formal opening at sunset on the first evening.

SOMBRE MUSIC PLAYS

It's a solemn ceremony.

The Conquistadors not only brought horses to Chile, but the deity

in whose name the rodeo is given a Catholic blessing.

For many modern Chileans, the rodeo is an embarrassment, a reactionary anachronism.

But, for me, the hooves and the history make a heady cocktail.

A long time ago, when I was young, I used to love horses

and I used to do all of this, cleaning and washing them and riding them.

Smells the same, too. A mixture of horse sweat and manure. Nothing like it.

What I'd really like is a ride.

And I was to get my wish.

Though in a rodeo world so deeply enthralled to the past, not quite in the way I'd imagined.

Yeah?

Suave hacia al lado, suave.

Michelle Recart is a rebel who challenged the old rules that kept women at bay.

Now, she's the first lady of Chilean rodeo.

Cambiamos de mano...

-Mm-hm.

-Tomas... Esa con esa.

She is also a very good trainer...

..teaching me the ancient art of persuading the horse to perform a kind of soft-shoe shuffle.

The purpose - to pin a cow against the wall, forcing it into submission.

That was better.

Suave.

In Chile, women only got equal voting rights in 1949.

Even today, fewer than half of them go out to work.

Michelle, though, helps run the family business, a cleaning firm.

But rodeo has always been her passion.

How do you think the men in the rodeo regarded the role of women?

Against these odds, Michelle qualified for the National Championships

when she was 17, so the men immediately changed the rules to keep her out.

But she refused to back down and, eventually, the men gave up.

In 2010, women were finally permitted to compete at Rancagua.

Michelle thinks I'm ready for the next stage.

A cow?

Wow.

She's serious!

HE LAUGHS

This will be quite something.

I did as I was told and, to my immense relief, it seemed to work.

Very good!

In almost every area of life, not only in Chile, but throughout South America,

there are women like Michelle, challenging old certainties...

..and thereby changing the continent.

Estupendo!

Just being here is a treat for me.

And they call it work!

From the rural rodeo to the Atacama Desert, over 700 miles to the north.

'This train is heading west to the Pacific.

'It's carrying copper, the principal source of this country's wealth.'

Chile has more than 30 per cent of the world's total supply

and most of the mines are in this invaluable desert.

Take just one wagon of copper, 60 tonnes.

Each tonne worth up to 10,000.

60 by 10,000. That's something like 600,000 per wagon.

When you have a big load on,

what's the maximum load sometimes you have with one, two, three locomotives?

-That's a huge weight to have.

-Two locomotives. Two.

-Two locomotives?

That's a huge weight.

What is it you most enjoy about it?

Copper is a crucial raw material.

Without copper, electrical engineering would be impossible.

And demand across the globe for what is now a precious metal in all but name,

is not only insatiable, but rising fast.

Likewise, the price.

11,51...

Last year, copper earned Chile more than 11 billion.

But there's a twist to the story of the Atacama Desert.

Intriguingly, this line wasn't originally built for copper.

It was built to take nitrate out of the desert.

Those who built it were the British.

This is Chacabuco.

Like the desert railway, the town was also constructed by the British.

It was founded in 1924, in an age when the demand for nitrate,

which was then used to make fertiliser,

was almost as great as the demand for copper today.

No -one knows the bleak story of this company town better than the writer Jorge Montealegre.

Was it like a model community?

But if the workers were trapped here, there were compensations.

With a little imagination, you can hear the voice of Caruso,

who came here once to entertain the workers in Chacabuco's flourishing theatre.

But nitrate was soon to be replaced by a synthetic substitute.

And in 1938, a mere 14 years after its foundation,

Chacabuco was closed down, for what was presumed to be the last time.

But that was not the end of the story.

35 years later, Chacabuco was given a new lease of life.

In 1973, General Pinochet turned it into a concentration camp

for those who opposed his dictatorship.

Jorge was one of the inmates.

What was it like when you came here?

Jorge was a student radical

and an aspiring author who wrote his first poem in this prison.

Today, he is a writer and scholar of renown.

When you look at Chile today, how do you feel about your country?

The detainees were kept nine to a room, up to a year

in a prison that was fenced with electric wire and ringed by tanks.

I think this place ought to be a monument to repression.

It's so easy to say it happened out here in Chile,

but the truth is that a lot of other people were party to it.

Governments - Britain, America, elsewhere - propped up Pinochet,

kept him in power.

And the monument should be saying to all of us, "Don't deal with dictators."

From Chacabuco, it's 70 miles to the Pacific Ocean.

It was a liberation to drive through this harsh stretch of the Atacama Desert.

It is spectacular.

Nothing growing.

Barely a drop of rain.

It's the driest desert in the whole world.

Caleta Concepcion is a fishing village so isolated

that it has no telephones, no running water.

But, unlikely as it may seem, it's an entrepreneurial hot-spot of real significance.

It's beautiful weather. Fantastico.

For me, it's a real delight being out here on the water.

It's a warm, lovely afternoon. But, for Humberto and his team,

this is work, because he's a fisherman day in, day out.

Except, that is, this afternoon.

He's not after fish today, but another crop from the sea.

For today's harvest, the crew land on an island that's devoid of other human life.

They lead me across an eerie moonscape in search of their quarry.

This is it.

Seaweed.

Chile not only has a 4,000-mile coastline,

but is now the fifth-largest exporter of this valuable algae.

Humberto is a natural leader of men -

a union activist who has represented Chile's fishermen at home and abroad.

But, as the boss of the local co-operative,

he's now turned himself into an entrepreneur.

A bag of seaweed weighs in at 10.

Once dried and crushed, it's exported to the rest of the world, and principally to China.

There, it ends up as a gel in foods, medicines, toothpaste, face creams, and even beer.

Seaweed is a nice little earner for Chile.

But for the fishermen of Caleta Concepcion,

it's a vital harvest that allows them to stay put in the village they cherish.

From one of the richest countries in South America, to one of the poorest.

By plane, it takes a couple of hours.

I've reached Bolivia and the city of La Paz, the highest capital in the world.

At 12-13,000 feet,

the houses cling to the side of the Andes. It is truly spectacular.

La Paz is home to nearly a million people,

half of whom live at or below the official poverty line.

But their resilience defies the altitude.

Unusually for South America,

85 per cent of the population is Bolivian Indian in origin -

the indigenous people of the Andes.

Until recently, they had been ruled first by the Conquistadors

and then their descendants, Bolivia's Spanish minority.

It's been an explosive cocktail.

When I first came here, it was coup and counter-coup,

violent repression. Now, things are very different.

There's democracy.

The majority population has reclaimed its country.

It's asserted its rights. A profound social revolution is now under way.

And I'm about to see an example of just that.

La Paz is dominated by the Aymara community,

which celebrates its liberation with a passion...for wrestling.

Not only men, but women, as well.

The Cholitas, as they call themselves, dress in traditional costume -

a powerful assertion of their national identity.

Maria and Marta are twin sisters rehearsing for a bout later this evening.

And, of course, their moves are carefully choreographed to achieve maximum impact.

HE GRUNTS

HE LAUGHS

This is important not only as a sport, but culturally, would you believe?

-Better?

-Si.

I distrust... I-I...

Oh!

HE LAUGHS

I surrender.

The twins invited me back to the home they share on the mountainous edge of the city,

where they have surrounded themselves with symbols of their native culture.

Their social and political emancipation is very recent.

But it was achieved through the ballot box, not by violence.

How were you treated, before, in the old days?

Perched above the capital

is a satellite city with a population of a million or more.

It's called El Alto.

Three out of four people here live hand-to-mouth

on the very margins of the money economy. Wrestling is their refuge.

Maria and Marta are big stars, and their fans are out in force.

And I've been roped in to do my bit in support of what will certainly be the winning side -

I hope!

They make a formidable pair. But there's a rare suspense.

For the first time, they've elected to challenge two men.

Maria and Marta are not only skilled wrestlers,

but fine thespians, who understand perfectly the essence of high drama.

So, for a while, all seemed lost.

The men behaving badly, the damsels in deepening distress.

A miracle was needed.

On cue, I sprang to the rescue.

REFEREE SHOUTS

It did the trick. Suddenly, the women were on top.

And, finally, the coup de grace.

SHE WHOOPS

I said we'd win.

The real breakthrough for Bolivia's Indian majority came in 2005,

when, for the first time, they elected one of their own as the country's president.

Evo Morales promised them a future of radical reform,

an end to discrimination, and a socialist tomorrow.

The critics predicted chaos.

But the doom-mongers were wrong.

The economy is stable, growth rates are steady,

and, being rich in strategic raw materials for the global market,

there is abundant cash in the state coffers.

Despite the poverty, there's a new energy in the streets of this restless capital.

I am in one of the thousands of minibus taxis,

which are the main means of getting around in this great sprawl of a city.

Everyone seems to be on the move.

Everyone working in one way or another, including the children.

Juan Carlos is 13. He's a vocero, a bus conductor.

HE SHOUTS IN SPANISH

His job is to drum up business.

Every time he fills the bus, he gets one boliviano - ten pence. He also goes to school.

It's a uniquely Bolivian notion,

but the fact is, Juan Carlos belongs to a formal union of child workers.

As elsewhere in South America, child labour is widespread,

in mines and plantations, as well as on the buses,

all of which the children themselves regard as a right, not an abuse.

The Union of Child Workers is not only for the young, it's run by the young, and they're very powerful,

so powerful they managed to change the constitution of the land,

persuading the politicians that instead of outlawing child work,

they should enshrine the rights of children to work, in the law.

Noemi is 16. She's one of the leaders of the child union,

out recruiting more members.

It seems to many people in my country very wrong that you should be urging children to work.

You want to have more rights. How are you going to get that?

Noemi would like every one of the country's one million child workers in a union.

You are a real militant.

From La Paz, I headed through the chilly splendour of the Andes

on my way towards a very different Bolivia, a region called the Yungas.

Here, it is warm, humid and rich in vegetation.

I'm in the mountains and I'm on my way to meet a family

which, like all those who farm on these hills,

is harvesting a crop which is the source of Bolivian's national drink.

-You leave the young leaves.

-Si.

You pick the dark leaves.

Guillemina is one of that 40% of Bolivia's population who depend on agriculture for their livelihood.

In her case, the crop is coca.

It's a hard life, for a very modest income.

How many hours do you do this every day when you're picking?

How important is coca as a drink for the people of Bolivia?

And when you chew it...

-What effect does that have?

-Si, si.

People have said to me that coca has a special spiritual value as well.

Can you explain that?

Pachamama is the fertility goddess, Mother Earth,

a mother who presides over the harvest, and in whose benevolence the family has unquestioning belief.

'Pachamama has been worshipped throughout the Andes for thousands of years.'

What struck me enormously about this

is the feeling that you pray to the earth, and it's in some way sacred.

For me it's wonderful to hear someone openly say,

"We say to the earth, 'Please give us good crops'"

without any sense of embarrassment at all.

It's a real belief, that I find very attractive.

The family harvest the crop three times a year.

It provides an average annual income of just over 2 a day.

Life on the margins.

There is one problem with the cultivation of coca.

The leaf contains ingredients that can be manufactured into a drug

that the governments of the world are pledged to stamp out.

Cocaine.

Bolivia is the third largest producer of the raw materials of cocaine in the world.

Before Morales, the US Drugs Agency operated freely here,

with the intention of eradicating coca farming completely.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

Uh-huh. Gracias.

When Morales became president, the American enforcers were expelled.

The new government claimed it could tackle the cocaine problem

on its own.

But it has yet to succeed.

Production of cocaine continues to rise.

But the overwhelming majority of coca farmers

have no connection with narcotics

They don't like Bolivia still being treated as America's back yard.

I can only wonder what they must think,

how crass it is that government should say,

-"Sorry, your crop

-can

-damage other people's lives,

"therefore we're tearing it out."

Imagine what would happen if we said,

"Alcohol kills and causes untold damage,

"so we're taking out all the vineyards in the world."

It's an outrage to them that we could even contemplate it.

They must say to themselves, "Surely there's another way."

From the mountains in the west, to the lowlands in the north,

close to the border with Brazil.

The Madre de Dios is a tributary of the Amazon river.

From this region, deep in the rainforest,

they harvest 70% of the world's supply of what are called, unfairly,

Brazil nuts.

I've come to meet Nada Vaqueros, one of Bolivia's great campaigners.

A union activist, who's spent 20 years

fighting for the rights of the workers

who gather and shell the nuts.

-Nada?

-Hi!

SHE SPEAKS QUECHUA

Riberalta!

Upwards of 700 people are employed

in this swelteringly hot factory,

one of 18 in the town.

Almost all the workers are women.

Their wages - £5 for a 12-hour shift.

'Nada has led strikes.

'She's been vilified and fired, but she's always come back for more.

'As a direct result, pay has gone up four-fold

'and the women, at last

'have some dignity.'

What were conditions like

until you started to agitate to improve them?

The work that's going on all around here is really hard

and I feel...humbled

by people like Nada.

What they have to achieve is quite astonishing,

more than most of us ever achieve in a lifetime.

So, it's a kind of privilege to be here, in all seriousness.

Nada hasn't been content

simply to make a radical difference

to the wages and conditions of the workers in the nut factories,

she's taken a step further.

She's managed to persuade - or, actually, virtually -

to force the government to build houses for them, as well.

Nada is an inspiration to the women of this region and beyond.

No-one has ever offered to improve the lot

of Bolivia's women.

She has insisted on it.

As a result, the workers are building more than 200 houses

on the edge of town,

thanks to an interest-free loan from the government.

When the project was declared open,

President Morales turned up for the ceremony in person.

Nada thought he was taking credit he didn't deserve.

The next thing you did was pour juice over him.

Why was that?

-So you threw the juice on him?

-Si.

NADA IMITATES JUICE SPLASHING

-JONATHAN LAUGHS

-What did he do?

SHE SPEAKS QUECHUA

Nada's implacable resolve

is not only changing lives in Riberalta,

it's transforming attitudes as well.

The new Bolivia is being built as much from the bottom up

as the top down.

Flying ever deeper into the rainforest,

I headed for a unique reminder of Bolivia's rich heritage.

In the 17th century,

when the country was ruled by Spain,

this remote region was at the very edge of the Catholic world.

San Ignacio de Moxos is a jungle settlement of 14,000 souls

that was founded in 1689 by two Jesuit missionaries.

Their legacy is music -

baroque harmonies from the age of Handel and Vivaldi,

which still flourish

in this isolated town.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

Edgar Villa helps to run a music school.

He's an archivist who scours the community for music

that's been passed down through the centuries.

MAN SINGS

Missionary baroque still survives,

even in the smallest communities.

Marcel is an elder of the local church...

..who holds in his head the sacred melodies of his father's generation.

How was it passed down to you?

In this way, the music school has now assembled

hundreds of baroque scores from the surrounding community.

I could sit here all afternoon listening to this music,

being taken down the generations

and surviving for future generations.

It's wonderful.

CHOIR SINGS

The music school itself,

is an artistic beacon for more than 100 young students

from San Ignacio and the surrounding area.

CHOIR SINGS HYMN

It is extraordinary.

A small town in the middle of the jungle...

..a music school...

..and they're playing early baroque music...

..which has its origins here, nearly 400 years ago.

Until the 1970's,

the existence of Bolivian baroque was virtually unknown.

Now, it's renowned throughout the country, and in the world beyond.

The school is flourishing,

and - which is more impressive -

it draws exclusively on local talent.

Everyone in the choir and everyone in the orchestra

comes from the community?

Yes, everyone. Everyone in this school.

Because of the communication's here,

it's very difficult to arrive to this town.

It's very difficult to get to?

And the only way we can find people

is people from the town.

The baroque arrived

from an alien, colonial culture,

but it's been embraced and adapted -

European and native traditions woven together to form new harmonies.

There are many levels of mixture.

You can find music that remembers just to the natives.

But you are playing with a violin, a very European instrument.

And now you can find this instrument,

native instrument, playing very European music.

WOMAN SINGS

What I've seen on my journey so far,

makes a nonsense of our old-world cliches,

implying that the New World prefers

to snooze on the sidelines while the rest of us get on with it.

WOMAN SINGS

South America is moving fast,

but making its own future in its own way.

And very impressive it is.

Next week -

Colombia emerging from civil war...

..and Venezuela, wrestling with Hugo Chavez -

two very different visions for the New World.

# Gloria, gloria, gloria

# In excelsis deo

# Gloria

# In excelsis

# Gloria

# In excelsis

# Gloria

# In excelsis

# In excelsis deo

# Gloria in excelsis deo. #

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