Climate Change Claims a Lake,
and a Way of Life


LLAPALLAPANI, Bolivia — The water receded and the fish died. They surfaced by the tens of thousands, belly-up, and the stench drifted in the air for weeks.

The birds that had fed on the fish had little choice but to abandon Lake Poopó, once Bolivia’s second-largest but now just a dry, salty expanse. Many of the Uru-Murato people, who had lived off its waters for generations, left as well, joining a new global march of refugees fleeing not war or persecution, but climate change.

“The lake was our mother and our father,” said Adrián Quispe, one of five brothers who were working as fishermen and raising families here in Llapallapani. “Without this lake, where do we go?”



After surviving decades of water diversion and cyclical El Niño droughts in the Andes, Lake Poopó basically disappeared in December. The ripple effects go beyond the loss of livelihood for the Quispes and hundreds of other fishing families, beyond the migration of people forced to leave homes that are no longer viable.

The vanishing of Lake Poopó threatens the very identity of the Uru-Murato people, the oldest indigenous group in the area. They adapted over generations to the conquests of the Inca and the Spanish, but seem unable to adjust to the abrupt upheaval climate change has caused.

Only 636 Uru-Murato are estimated to remain in Llapallapani and two nearby villages. Since the fish died off in 2014, scores have left to work in lead mines or salt flats up to 200 miles away; those who stayed behind scrape by as farmers or otherwise survive on what used to be the shore.

Emilio Huanaco, an indigenous judicial official, is down to his last bottles of flamingo fat, used for centuries to alleviate arthritis. He has never used medication for his aching knee.

Eva Choque, 33, sat next to her adobe home drying meat for the first time on a clothesline. She and her four children ate only fish before.

They and their neighbors were known to nearly everyone in the area as “the people of the lake.” Some adopted the last name Mauricio after the mauri, which is what they called a fish that used to fill their nets. They worshiped St. Peter because he was a fisherman, ritually offering him fish each September at the water’s edge, but that celebration ended when the fish died two years ago.

“This is a millenarian culture that has been here since the start,” said Carol Rocha Grimaldi, a Bolivian anthropologist whose office shows a satellite picture of a full lake, a scene no longer visible in real life. “But can the people of the lake exist without the lake?”

It is hard to overstate how central fishing was to Uru life. When a New York Times photographer, Josh Haner, and I asked Mr. Quispe whether he had made his living as a fisherman, he gave us a strange look before answering, essentially, “What else is there?”

Men spent stretches as long as two weeks without returning to shore, wandering the lake to follow schools of karachi, a gray fish that looked like a sardine, or pejerrey, which had big scales and grew as long as Mr. Quispe’s arm.

Some wives worked alongside their husbands, to pull the nets and do the cooking, making the boats a kind of home.

Fishing season began on the lake’s edge with a ritual called the Remembering. The Quispe brothers were among about 40 Llapallapani men who would pass a long night chewing coca leaf and drinking liquor. Together, the group recited the names of Lake Poopó’s landmarks and how to find them.

“That night, we would ask for a safe journey, that there would be little wind, that there wouldn’t be so much rain,” Mr. Quispe, 42, told us. “We remembered all night, and we chewed our coca.”

Continued at:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/07/world/americas/bolivia-climate-change-lake-poopo.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0