La Paz’s Water Supply Fouled by Action, Inaction

The Choqueyapu River starts up on the snow-capped mountaintops that surround La Paz, rushing and bubbling downhill crystal clear to Bolivia’s capital. It flows out of the city a sickening reddish brown.

The 1 million residents of the world’s highest capital city use the river as a sewer and garbage dump. Factories add chemical residues.

Germs thrive in the noxious soup, but not much else does.

“That river is biologically dead,” said environmental expert Maria del Carmen Rocabado. “I think that if I dropped a fish in there, it would be dead in a matter of seconds.”

Government leaders acknowledge the contamination is a serious problem for the city, which sits 11,880 feet up in the Andes. But Bolivia struggles with a common problem of the Third World: Pollution, health woes and other problems outrun the cash-strapped government’s ability to cope.

La Paz’s annual budget for public works is $25 million; experts estimate the cost of a water treatment system at $300 million. The city is seeking foreign donations, but aid money does not flow as easily as it once did from the industrial world.

The Choqueyapu, which eventually ends up in the Amazon, runs underground through downtown La Paz. Above it, pleasant walkways and clean streets are set amid modern high-rises.

Things are quite different outside those commercial and middle-class neighborhoods. Its shores brim with garbage and dog carcasses. Housewives and shopkeepers toss in trash rather than pay for the private garbage collection the city relies on. Markets and even hospitals dump garbage into the water.

Nearly half the brick and adobe houses in La Paz lack running water and sewer hookups. Heavy rains wash garbage and human waste down city streets into the river.

The water is a source of disease, experts say, posing a severe health threat to the city’s residents as well as the rural people downstream.

Down the valley in Rio Abajo, Aymara Indian farmers use the river for cooking, drinking and irrigating their crops. Vegetables grown with the contaminated water end up in city markets. Both farmers and market shoppers are exposed to dysentery, cholera, amoebas and other parasites, health experts say.

And then there are the chemical residues. Studies have found cyanide, which is dumped from leather tanneries, as well as dyes and chemicals discharged by paper and textile plants.

“These factories should not be located in the center of the city,” Rocabado said. “You can’t fine businesses for dumping chemicals into the river if we have no limits of how much is permissible and how much isn’t.”

The municipal government has outlined several projects to address water contamination, as well as air pollution from motor vehicles and other sources. But good wishes and ideas clash with a lack of money. The city is nearly bankrupt from frequent mismanagement by previous administrations.

Forced to cut costs, former Mayor Ronald MacLean and current Mayor Gaby Candia have laid off 2,200 employees--more than half the municipal work force--and transferred many services to the private sector.

Hundreds of laid-off workers have staged a hunger strike, road blocks and marches to protest the firings, closing City Hall for a month last year.

The city hopes the layoffs will reduce its payroll cost from 90% of the annual budget to 28%. But even with those cuts, the city cannot afford the water-treatment system it needs, officials say.