El Alto Bolivia
36 images Created 3 Dec 2011
Just 25 years ago it was a small group of houses around La Paz airport, at an altitude of 12,000 feet. Now El Alto city has nearly one million people, surpassing even the capital of Bolivia, and it is the city of Latin America that grew faster .
It is also a paradigmatic city of the troubles and traumas of the country. There got refugee thousands of miners that lost their jobs in 90 ´s after the privatization and closure of many mines. The peasants expelled by the lack of land or low prices for their production. Also many who did not want to live in regions where coca growers and the Army faced with violence.
In short, anyone who did not have anything at all and was looking for a place to survive ended up in El Alto.
Today is an amazing city. Not only for its size. Also by showing how its inhabitants,the poorest of the poor in one of the poorest countries in Latin America, managed to get into society, to get some economic development, to replace their firs cardboard houses with new ones made with bricks , to trace its streets, to raise their clubs, churches and schools for their children.
Better or worse, some have managed to become a sort of middle class, a section of the society that sociologists call emerging sectors. Many, maybe most of them, remain for statistics as poor. But clearly all of them feel they got for their children a better life than the one they had to face themselves .
It is also a paradigmatic city of the troubles and traumas of the country. There got refugee thousands of miners that lost their jobs in 90 ´s after the privatization and closure of many mines. The peasants expelled by the lack of land or low prices for their production. Also many who did not want to live in regions where coca growers and the Army faced with violence.
In short, anyone who did not have anything at all and was looking for a place to survive ended up in El Alto.
Today is an amazing city. Not only for its size. Also by showing how its inhabitants,the poorest of the poor in one of the poorest countries in Latin America, managed to get into society, to get some economic development, to replace their firs cardboard houses with new ones made with bricks , to trace its streets, to raise their clubs, churches and schools for their children.
Better or worse, some have managed to become a sort of middle class, a section of the society that sociologists call emerging sectors. Many, maybe most of them, remain for statistics as poor. But clearly all of them feel they got for their children a better life than the one they had to face themselves .
