Residents of the

Thousand Star Hotel

Name given to the streets of Cochabamba by a local NGO 

Pal Dobrin and Jane Drake

Today is Sex Education Day in San Sebastian park. A police officer on an off-road motorcycle pulls up to the group of kids sitting on the grass. This isn’t just any ordinary group of kids as practically each one of them has their p’utis – a small plastic container of glue – held to their nose. Under his helmet the officer is wearing a black ski-mask which covers everything except his angry looking eyes. He revs hard making his motorcycle roar, emphasizing his order to the kids that they should get the hell out. The kids normally rule the park but today it is reserved for the Bolivian families. Sergio is one of San Sebastian’s veteran street-kids, the last nine of his eighteen years he has lived on the street and abused a variety of different drugs. “But nothing works as good as the clefa”, he says referring to the glue. His face and his left arm are covered in scars and his eyes are glazed. He holds out his arm to show thirty or more horizontal four centimeters long scars, three of them are recent and highly infected. When he picks at one of the scabs some puss comes out. “It’s over a girl, ª says Fernando, “it’s always over a girl.” “When you’re in the street and you want to declare your love for your chica (girlfriend) you slash your arm with a knife in front of your friends, it’s a warning to them that you’re not afraid of hurting yourself and therefore not afraid of hurting anyone else if they touch your property”, adds Sergio. The wounds give an insight into one of the more disturbing trends of the street population.

There are an estimated 500 kids living on the streets of Cochabamba, it is difficult to establish the real number as the population is a migratory one. Due to it’s climate Cochabamba attracts street kids from Santa Cruz and La Paz, where life on the streets is even harder because of the harsh climate. Most of the kids are extremely thin as they prefer to spend their money on glue rather than food, in any case, the glue erases any feelings of hunger they may have. With their clothes hanging off their skeletal frames, their hair full of lice and their bodies scarred from knife wounds they roam the streets like animals. Although the situation in Cochabamba is bad it is far from being the worst. In South-America there are an estimated 40-50 million kids on the streets.

Like a pack of wild dogs, the group of street kids streams across the park hot on the heels of their friend, Mauricio, who is being frog-marched away by 5 policemen on suspicion of stealing. There’s a lot of shouting and commotion until Mauricio’s sister, who is hysterical and high on clefa, but most of all desperate to defend her little brother, pulls out a knife and starts waving it at one of the policemen. Everyone backs off. The kids are jumpy and although the police are having a hard time keeping calm, they assure us that they are not going to hurt them. We draw the conclusion that our presence has stopped the police, this time at least, from acting in the abusive way so often heard about. “The police are very bad, they beat us. Worst are the GES (Grupo Especial de Seguridad) who often have truncheons,” says one of the girls. The threat of violence amongst the street population is ever present and fights break out constantly, the way they treat each other is far from gentle. “The older they are, the more years they’ve spent on the street, the more aggressive they are,” explains Bernardo, an educator working with the street kids of Cochabamba.

The kids steal their clefa, money and anything else that they can get their hands on from wherever they can. The hot spot for this activity is La Cancha, a large market area in the centre of the city. The stallholders despair and foreign tourists are easy prey. Like a modern Fagin, Moises is the leader of the San Sebastian kids. From 9 to 17 years of age he was in and out of various centres for street kids, stealing when necessary to finance his solvent abuse. At the age of 18 he was sent to jail for being an accomplice in an important robbery. Following a year in prison the 20- year-old came out a lot more violent, friends even described him as sadistic. He was soon placed in a government centre but after the alleged raping of a young girl he was thrown out. He took with him a group of young kids which was to form the base of his band. The deal is that the members of his band steal for him as, being of bulky frame, he himself is too slow. All money and stolen goods are handed over and in return he offers protection. With a heavy hand he controls his band members and no one leaves without his consent. Most of the girls want to be with Moises because of the safety and relative richness that being the leader’s chica brings. No one would dare to lay a hand on his property. “There must be something that we don’t know about Moises” states Monica Boglioli, Head of Special Projects within SEDEGES (Social Services) “every time we manage to get him arrested it is only a matter of days before he’s back out on the street again”. One of the youngest in the group, Richard, is practicing knife throwing on a tree, totally unconcerned for the safety of the Bolivian family sitting on the bench behind it. Davis is picking lice from Moises hair, who is presently taking a nap in the shade, and Juanita is dancing to music only she can hear. They are just like one big family sharing the park, albeit a very violent family. It’s the law of the jungle that applies here. Although the atmosphere is jovial there is an air of tension due to the ever present threat of violence.

The type of glue the kids inhale is mainly used in the shoemaking trade, solvent-based adhesives that contain powerful toxins such as toluene and cyclohexane. It’s anaesthetizing qualities that make it appealing to the kids, suppressing feelings of hunger, cold, abandonment and depression. It goes directly to the front lobe where the switchboard of the brain is located and to the centres that control emotions. The brain’s connection with reality is turned off, neutralizing stress and fear along with their memory. A drug perfectly designed for the oblivion they desire. What the kids don’t realize is that it also causes irreversible brain damage. The left side of Fernando’s face is frozen and his features distorted. This is the result of his many years of solvent abuse. “My memory is not so good anymore” he confesses. Other effects commonly observed amongst those who abuse solvents are liver failure, kidney failure, asphyxiation, bone marrow and severe foetal damage, if not even sudden death.

“This stuff is worse then heroin” explains famous neurologist Herb Schaumberg to the human rights organization Boes.org. “With heroin you get addicted, but it doesn’t destroy your brain like this stuff does. This is very insidious. The children do not realize what is happening to them.”

The phenomena of street-kids are not a new one. Pajaro frutero (fruit birds) in Peru, polillas (moths) in Bolivia, marginais (marginals) in Brazil, bui doi (dust children) in Vietnam, moustiques (mosquitoes) in Cameroon and balados (wanderers) in Congo are just a few names that have been used to describe them. It is more a rule than an exception that the kids are without parents, the latter are either dead, have abandoned their kids or have treated them in such a way that they have left them no choice but to escape to the streets. The majority of the kids that have left home in favour of the streets have at some stage in their lives been abused physically, psychologically or sexually by those responsible for them. They struggle with the inner conflict of, on one hand desperately needing their parents, craving their love and attention and on the other hand, feeling angry at them for all the suffering they have caused and therefore wanting to free themselves from them. “I want to be a policeman when I am big” explains Gonzalo who is 9 years old, “then I can put my parents in prison, take a tank and bomb their house”. Gonzalo was taken into care after neighbours reported abuse. “What right did they have to hit me?” he asks.

The plight of the street-kids drew a lot of media attention in the early nineties when Bruce Harris and other child advocates went to war against H.B Fuller, the huge American company responsible for manufacturing the glue named Resistol, so generally used by the street children of Central America that they were named “resistoleros” after it. They demanded that the company either switch to water based glues which are less dangerous or that they follow the example of another company selling model-plane glue, who, facing the same problem twenty years earlier, made their formula less attractive to inhale by adding mustard seed oil. Its frightful derivative, mustard gas, was used during World War I. Mustard seed oil, the product that makes brown mustard spicy and in high concentrations will make your eyes burn and your throat retch, is considered harmless in lesser concentrations. After an eight year battle H.B Fuller finally withdrew from the Central American market about 18 months ago after continuing pressure and much adverse publicity. “We never asked them to quit the market,” says Harris, “simply to switch to less toxic water based formulas or make the existing formula less desirable for the kids to inhale.” Due to advances in the production of water based glues the addition of mustard seed oil is no longer the issue. The banning of toluene and cyclohexane outright in Latin America is now the goal. Chile, Venezuela and Argentina already have laws prohibiting their use. These toxins were banned for a period of time in Costa Rica, but only until there was a change of government.

Hugo Aranda Alarcon is a Russian trained psychologist who has worked for many years with street kids in Moscow. He is currently the Director of two government run centres for street kids in Cochabamba. “The base of the problem is social, why do these kids end up on the street in the first place?” questions Hugo. “What is missing in our country is a commission at the national level dedicated to solving the problem of the street kids”.

“We need a group of specialists to examine their needs and, based on that information, come up with a rehabilitation programme that we can use countrywide ” he continues. “In Bolivia there is no programme for prevention, something that exists in many western countries, partly because of the economic situation but also because there is a total absence of social assistance within our education system. It is not even obligatory for the kids to go to school.”

Cocaine is the latest problem confronting the street kids. This is due to the excess of the drug that has appeared on the market almost overnight. Once a country of exporters Bolivia is now turning into a country of consumers. Due to the eradication of coca fields in the Cha- pare and Yungas regions of Bolivia and the presence of US military it is much harder to export the drug, the only remaining option is to sell it within the country. The cultivators are targeting the street kids as vendors. On a night the rich kids can be seen cruising the streets of Cochabamba in their latest model sports cars looking for their suppliers. Not a difficult task as the street kids have their regular haunts and are therefore easy to find. The contrast is a stark one. In the return for selling the drug the cultivators provide the kids with “free samples”. Those who pretend to be their friends consider the lives of these kids worthless. The government run centre, Infractores, is currently full of minors (12-16 years of age) who have been caught either cultivating or transporting cocaine. “This is a new problem we’re facing” explains Hugo Aranda, Director of Infractores “and in view of the economic crisis our country is facing it can only get worse”. The odds are totally stacked against these kids, to them street life is easy life, that is until the day their luck finally runs out. And for most of them it does, sooner rather than later.