"Bolivia: Donde la Politica Es Indigena"

Poor Bolivia! During the 1970s and '80s I recall picking up The New York "Times" and finding out, after the latest coup, that there was yet another government ruling Bolivia. What a joke! Seriously, though, generations of exploitation of Quechuan and Aymaran indigenous peoples, plus the mestizo population, have turned Bolivia into the second poorest country in our hemisphere. If the United States is a brawny, somewhat brainless big brother, Bolivia is America's shyest little sister.

Since 2006 she has emerged from the woodwork in part due to her feisty indigenous President Evo Morales, responsible for nationalizing the country's gas and oil, rewriting the constitution, and instituting land reform. The Bush Administration may link Morales with other leftists like Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez. The good news is that Bolivia is beginning to shine. With gold, tin, and silver mines, the country has an economic future. What Bolivia lacks is a sense of cultural identity among its campesinos, as well as in cities like La Paz, Sucre and Cochabamba, as opposed to the Europeanized, oligarchic Santa Cruz.

This half-hour piece is overloaded with Bolivians speechifying. The redoubtable activist-cum-psychologist Chellis Glendinning does her damndest to give us a detailed audio portrait of disaffected Bolivians. The first and third parts of her production record interviews translated from Spanish.

The most brilliant, distinguished portion of Glendinning's piece consists of six or so minutes devoted to a man from Tennessee who has lived in Totorkawa, Bolivia since 1999, Jack Herranen. He runs a community organization called Casa Crianza. Most important, he's a guitar-wielding composer who sings about Bolivia the way Woody Guthrie sang about America's Great Depression. Although the sound quality of Herranen's recordings isn't the best, his songs are stellar.

I'm not sure there will be a crowd of PDs eager to license Glendinning's 29-minute piece. What if she uploaded the mid-section of this piece, with an intro, and canned the rest? Some work would need to be done to spiff up the sound quality. But Jack Herranen's songs say all I need to know about Bolivia. If music be food for thought, play on!