A boat rests alone on the cracked ground it once floated on: Lake Poopó, the second largest in Bolivia, he disappeared taking with him an ancient way of life.
The Urus define themselves as “people of water”. Masters of fishing and hunting birds like flamingos, he lived on floating islands for centuries and rafts of reeds until they settled on the shore. Félix Mauricio’s grandparents moved to Puñaca Tinta María in 1915, when the Poopós flooded the village with shacks where they lived.
“The fish was big, a small fish weighed three kilos,” recalls Mauricio, an 82-year-old retired fisherman who chews coca leaves to ward off hunger.
He wears a totora hat, the native cane with which the boats are made, and a striped poncho, emblem of the urus, a people established thousands of years ago in Peru and Bolivia.
“Here was the lake. It dried up quickly,” Mauricio told AFP, kneeling on the bed that is now a desert.
Chronicle of a tragedy
El Poopó, a salt lake that covered 3,500 square kilometers at its peak in 1986, was completely evaporated at the end of 2015.
Scientific studies attribute it to a confluence of factors such as climate change and the extraction of water for agriculture and mining in the Bolivian highlands, approximately 3,700 meters above sea level.
In this sense, a research published in 2021 in the Journal of Hydrology: regional studies indicates the “climatic variability” and the use of water for irrigation as causes of the lake retreat.
The Mauricio family is one of seven remaining in Puñaca Tinta María, in the Oruro region of southwestern Bolivia.
Before the Poopó ran dry, there were 84 familiessay those who still live in that village built on the shore of the lake, which is currently an arid wasteland.
Along with two neighboring towns, Llapallapani and Vilañeque, it is home to the remaining Urus in the area, only around 600 according to a 2013 survey.
“Studies (many of us) lived here before. Now they are gone, no job“, regrets Cristina Mauricio, daughter of Félix, who estimates her age at 50, due to the failure to register her birth.
In recent years, rain has brought back a thin veil of water in some parts of the lake, but it is too flat to navigate and hardly any fish or birds.
no lake, the urus have learned to be masonsminers and farmers of quinoa or other crops to make a living.
“Who thought the lake would dry up? Our parents trusted Lake Poopó … It had fish, birds, eggs, everything. It was our source of life,” laments Luis Valero, mallku or the spiritual leader of the urus of poop.
“We were orphaned,” adds the 38-year-old fisherman, who is responsible for five children who race in a canoe in front of the door of the brick house.
In addition to being left without its lake, even the urus have no land: Their neighbors, the Aymara, jealously guard the fields they occupied years ago thanks to state-issued property titles.
The government, for its part, intends to distribute the remaining packages among the Urus. However, they ensure that few are fertile.
What remains of the lake is largely a crust of salt on which the last villagers have pinned their hopes.
They spent what little they had on one small plant to make iodized salt.
But they ran into something unexpected: They couldn’t find $ 500 to buy bags to put the salt on.
“The urus will disappear if we don’t get the forecast in time,” said Senator Lindaura Rasguido, of the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) party, visiting the area in October.
chilling numbers
According to the UN, the number of people in areas with water scarcity will oscillate between 2,700 and 3,200 million by 2050, compared to 1.9 billion in the first half of 2010.
And, according to the IDMC monitoring group, in 2020 alone, natural disasters caused the displacement of 30.7 million people in their countries.
In the middle of the new desert, Mauritius silently contemplates his wrecked boat. Around his neck she wears an old miniature reed boat that he made. She sighs, takes it off and places it carefully on the dead earth where he used to tame the waves and the wind.
The serene old man does not lose hope about the lake. “He’ll be back! In about five, six years, he’ll be back,” he tirelessly repeats.
Source: AFP
Source: Clarin
