Bolivia: How a 3,500-square-kilometer lake that evaporated led to the end of a culture

A dinghy rests lonely on the cracked ground on which it once floated: Lake Poopó, the second-largest lake in Bolivia, has disappeared, taking an ancient way of life with it.

The Urus call themselves a “water people.” Masters of fishing and hunting birds such as flamingos, they lived for centuries on floating islands and reed rafts before settling on the shores.

Félix Mauricio’s grandparents moved to Puñaca Tinta María in 1915, when the Poopó flooded the village of shacks where they lived.

“The fish were big; one little fish weighed three kilos,” Mauricio, an 82-year-old retired fisherman who chews coca leaves to ease his hunger, recalls between sobs.

He wears a hat made of totora, the native reed from which boats are made, and a striped poncho, the symbol of the Urus, a people settled thousands of years ago in Peru and Bolivia.

Here was the lake. It dried up fast,” Mauricio told AFP, kneeling on what is now a desert bed.

The Poopó, a salt lake that covered 3,500 square kilometers at its peak in 1986, completely evaporated in late 2015.

Scientific studies attribute this to a confluence of factors, such as climate change and water extraction for agriculture and mining in the Bolivian highlands, some 3,700 meters above sea level.

Along these lines, research published in 2021 in the “Journal of Hydrology: Regional Studies” indicates “climate variability” and water use for irrigation as the causes of the lake’s retreat.

WATER ORPHANS

Mauricio’s family is one of seven that remain in Puñaca Tinta María in the Oruro region of southwest Bolivia.

Before the Poopó dried up, there were 84 families, say those who still live in this tiny village built on the shores of the lake, now turned into an arid desert.

Along with two nearby villages, Llapallapani and Vilañeque, it is home to the remaining grizzlies. There are only about 600 of them, according to a 2013 survey.

“Many lived here before. Now, they are gone, there is no work,” laments Cristina Mauricio, Félix’s daughter, who estimates her age at 50 due to the lack of birth records.

In recent years, rain has resurfaced a thin layer of water in parts of the lake, but it is too flat to navigate and almost without fish or birds.

Without a lake, the Urus have learned to be masons, miners, and farmers of quinoa or other crops to make a living.

“Who thought the lake would dry up? Our parents trusted Lake Poopó. They had fish, birds, eggs, everything. It was our source of life,” laments mallku Luis Valero, the Poopó Urus spiritual leader.

“We were orphaned,” adds the 38-year-old fisherman, who takes care of five children running around in a canoe outside his adobe house.

In addition to having lost their lake, the Urus are also landless: Their neighbors, the Aymara people, jealously guard the fields they took over years ago, thanks to property titles handed out by the state.

The government, for its part, intends to distribute the remaining plots among the Urus. They assure, however, that few are fertile.

“THEY WILL DISAPPEAR”

What remains of the lake is essentially a crust of salt on which the last inhabitants of the settlement pinned their hopes.

They spent what little they had on a small factory to make iodized salt. Then they hit a snag: they couldn’t raise US$500 to buy bags to package the salt.

“The Urus will disappear if we don’t make the forecasts in time,” said Senator Lindaura Rasguido, from the ruling Movement towards Socialism (MAS) party, when she visited the area in October.

According to the UN, the number of people in water-scarce areas will oscillate between 2.7 billion and 3.2 billion by 2050, up from 1.9 billion in the first half of the 2010s.

And, according to the IDMC monitoring group, in 2020 alone, natural disasters will displace 30.7 million people in their countries.

Mauricio silently contemplates his wrecked boat in the middle of the new desert.

Around his neck, he wears an old miniature reed boat that he made himself.

Sighing, he takes off the cord and places it, carefully, on the dead earth, where before he tamed the waves and the wind.

The lake “will come back! In about five, six years, it will come back”, repeats the old man serenely.

With information from UOL