The Road to Chulumani

Short Synopsis

A documentary film that takes viewers on a historic road trip through three centuries of Bolivian history.  It explores my family's involvement in the slave trade, the Chaco War, and connections with Nazi war criminals.

Description/Treatment

The Road to Chulumani

My father’s family came from Bolivia, the second poorest country in the hemisphere after Haiti. But the Tejadas weren’t poor peasants; they were part of the country’s wealthy elite. My grandfather imported a marble staircase from Paris for his La Paz townhouse. My father didn’t come to here as an undocumented worker, he was sent to study at Cal Tech.

When I was growing up in California, being Latino was defined in terms of Mexican American culture and politics; Santana and La Causa, La Raza Unida and Mecha, El Teatro Campesino and Aztec dancing. I knew about the Chicano Moratorium, where three people were killed, but almost nothing about the Chaco War where 90,000 died during my grandfather’s tenure as President of Bolivia. I knew about the desperate conditions of farmworkers, but had only heard vague references to my family’s past as slave owners.

It wasn’t until I was 55 that I finally decided to visit Bolivia for the first time and try to make sense of my family’s past, how it shaped Bolivia and made me who I am today. This film will be a record of my journey back in time, along a road of memories and historical exploration that parallels the road from La Paz to Chulumani, the sleepy capital of the Yungas region where my family had its estates.

Telling the story of my family is much more than a personal exploration. Our story is emblematic of the entire continent. Telling it is reveals how the basic structures of Latin American society have evolved from the time of the Conquest to the present, and how conflicting cultures and traditions have survived despite the inequalities of the political process

With its hairpin turns and vertical drop-offs, the road to Chulumani is considered one of the most dangerous roads in the world. But the devils that I will confront along the way are personal ones— the legacy of my family’s involvement with slavery, their involvement in pointless wars, and tantalizing clues to their connections with Nazi war criminals.

My first stop on the road is a stone castle called El Chaco. The name means “small farm,” but it also refers to the desolate area that Bolivia lost to Paraguay in 1936. My grandfather, Jose Luis Tejada Sorzano, who had been elected Vice President in 1932, had the difficult task of bringing the bloodiest war in Latin American history to an end when President Salamanca was deposed by a coup. During the war Don Jose Luis built this extravagant stone folly alongside the new road to Chulumani, which was built by Paraguayan prisoners of war. Today El Chaco is a semi-abandoned bed and breakfast. Across the road, an old man recalls the patron (boss) fondly, remembering how he helped those who lived on his land and worked for him. Another view is offered by a land reform official, who reminds me that although some owners were kind, the peasants who worked for them were essentially indentured servants.

As I lean on the castle’s rickety balconies, my thoughts are pulled back to the war that consumed the nation over 70 years ago. Now I am transported to the arid landscape of the Chaco itself, where my father, the President’s oldest son, served as a military telegraph operator. I walk the abandoned battlefields and military museums, talking with old men about their memories, as flickering archival images recall the grim conflict. One veteran sums up the experience: “There was comradeship, and a little happiness; but in the end war is war — you kill and you die.”

One of the reasons put forward at the time for the war was the talk of vast oil reserves that Standard Oil had discovered in the region. In fact, my grandfather had been impeached (and acquitted) by the Bolivian Senate a few years earlier, on charges of accepting bribes from Standard Oil. But when the war ended there was no oil to be found. The real reason for the war may have been the age-old one of distracting the population from more pressing problems — things like poverty and Indian suffrage. The universal disillusionment with the Chaco War echoed the negative reactions to World War I, two decades earlier. The generation that fought in the Chaco would eventually create a social revolution in 1952 that would strip my family of its lands and influence.

Moving down the road again, I arrive at Tiquimpaya, a former family estate dating back to the colonial era. Its main crop was coca, the sacred plant of the Andes, a plant that kills hunger and gives strength — and is now processed to make cocaine. The great haciendas required large numbers of workers, and in the colonial period many were African slaves. They were originally brought to Bolivia to work in the silver mines of the altiplano, the desolate highlands. But few could survive the altitude and the cold, so they were taken to the sub-tropical valleys to work on large estates, like those of my family.

In nearby towns I meet Afro Bolivians, some named Tejada and Sorzano, who are descendants of the slaves once owned by my family. We see colonial documents from my family’s archive that trace their role in owning and trading slaves — censuses, reports of disobedience and escapes. Pedro Andaveriz, the son of a famous Afro Bolivian hero of the Chaco war, explains that people of African descent are nearly invisible in Bolivia today, even lower in status than the impoverished Indian population.

Now I’m watching Afro Bolivians performing the saya, a song and dance form that celebrates African resistance. In La Paz, the African tradition is mocked in extravagant festival celebrations performed by Indians. We see giant grotesque figures of black people with huge lips and leering eyes. These caricatures are worlds away from the reality of the poverty-stricken Afro Bolivian communities.

In 1939 my father brought his new bride to Bolivia. My mother sent her sister in the U.S. a running commentary on her life in Bolivia, hundreds of pages written on thin onionskin paper. It offers a vivid portrait of daily life and relations between the ruling classes and the Indian majority. She described ponguaje, the debt servitude that forced Indians to work the master’s lands for free, and serve in the patron’s house for two weeks every year. Indians weren’t even allowed to vote in Bolivia until 1952, when I was 8 years old. As I read my mother’s letters I realize that not much has changed in Bolivia since she wrote them. The gaps between rich and poor, Spanish-speaking and Aymara and Quechua speaking are immense — much greater than the class and race distinctions in the U.S. There is still profound distrust on both sides in Bolivia. This was vividly illustrated when I visited one of our family’s former estates last summer. I was called in front of a hastily-assembled community meeting to explain that the patron’s family had no interest in trying to take the land back; and that even though I was a Tejada, I didn’t approve of how my family had treated them. I left realizing that the mistrust of hundreds of years couldn’t be wiped away in one encounter.

After World War Two, Latin America was flooded with European refugees, including many Nazi fugitives… people like Adolph Eichman, the architect of the concentration camps… Joseph Mengele, the vicious doctor who performed experiments on Jewish prisoners… and Klaus Barbie, the Gestapo’ butcher of Lyon,” who ended up in Bolivia. I thought I knew Barbie’s story from Marcel Ophul’s great film Hotel Terminus, which tells how Barbie was tracked down and brought to justice. I was shocked to find out recently that Barbie spent his first two years in Bolivia running a sawmill at Llojeta, one of my family’s estates in Yungas. Everyone in my family who was involved with this period is dead, so I will never know whether my family knew who was working at Llojeta.

My trip ends in Chulumani, the quiet provincial capital where my grandfather began his political career almost 100 years ago. In the plaza people are discussing the latest moves by Evo Morales, elected in 2006 as first Indian President in Bolivian history. Morales has focused on redressing the inequalities of five hundred years, and in doing so has met with tremendous resistance from Bolivia’s elites. What my family did and accomplished has been largely forgotten, even though they played a key role in bringing the country to this point.

In an epilogue, I meet with the residents of the village of Llojeta. At first they thought that I had come to take their land back. Now we discuss working together on community development projects to help them finally realize the promises made 50 years ago during land reform.