BOLIVIA'S FAITHFUL MOTORISTS

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Over a thousand people die on Bolivia's roads every year, largely because the drivers are a little crazy. Simon Wroe heads to the country to investigate ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

On March 3rd traffic disappeared from the normally hectic streets of La Paz. The 1m residents of Bolivia's largest city woke to find all the taxis, painted buses and collectivo minivans spirited away.

Drivers across Bolivia were on strike. Nothing unusual there—Bolivians strike with regularity. But these drivers had a unique reason: outrage at a new law declaring that anyone caught driving while drunk would lose their license. Thousands of employees from the country's bus and school-transport services marched through the streets (in as straight a line as they could muster) in defence of their right to be inebriated while operating public transport. For two days and two nights, mobs blockaded the main roads. Drivers flouting the boycott were threatened, and some were pulled out of their vehicles and beaten.

"The Drunkards' Strike" (El Paro de Borracho), as it became known, is just another chapter in Bolivia's destructive love affair with motoring. In a country of 10m people and fewer than 500,000 cars, Bolivia's National Institute of Statistics (INE) recorded nearly 40,000 accidents in 2008. The World Health Organisation estimates over a thousand people die on Bolivia's roads every year.

Bolivia is one of South America's poorest countries. Its infrastructure is terrible, with shambling roads (only 5% of which are paved) and a crumbling rail network. Many of the vehicles are decrepit. But poverty cannot fully explain the recklessness of Bolivian drivers, who operate with flagrant disregard for police and the army.

Efforts to enforce driving laws have been questionable at best, and are occasionally absurd. The country is the only one in Latin America with no seatbelt law, according to a 2009 World Health Organisation report on road safety. In 2005 the city of La Paz introduced its own method of traffic control, which involves placing youths dressed as zebras in the middle of the busiest roads. City officials assumed drivers would behave differently if the welfare of a child in a cute costume was at stake. Unfortunately, collisions remain common, such as one in December, when a bus with faulty brakes crashed into one of these two-legged creatures (who survived). New "zebra"-related accidents make headlines every few months, though few result in serious injury. The scheme has been generally hailed as a success and the youths—often juvenile offenders and street kids, with limited representation—are still in use. Drivers, however, hate the zebras.

What makes travel on Bolivia's roads so dangerous? What accounts for the unique mindset of the Bolivian motorist? In my travels to the country, these questions brought me close to God at a ritual car blessing in Copacabana, and close to death on North Yungas Road, perhaps the world's most dangerous (ie, 40 miles of mud and rocks carved into the Andes, which descends 11,500 feet from La Paz to Coroico). I witnessed collisions and landslides; I was nearly run over almost daily.

When I arrived in February, travel in much of the country was nearly impossible. Storms had turned the highways into muddy quagmires, a graveyard for hubristic trucks and coaches. For three days I was stuck in the first desert town across the border from Chile. People smiled at my concern. What did I expect? The rainy season destroyed the roads every year.

The general reliability of a vehicle seems of little importance to the Bolivian driver. In 2005 six American insurance companies were desperately trying to recoup their losses from Hurricane Katrina by selling cars damaged in the disaster. Though other struggling Latin American countries refused to touch these vehicles, Bolivia reportedly bought much of the stock. A local environmental agency believes 10,000 or more of these flooded cars may have ended up here, according to the AP in 2007. Despite dangerous mechanical problems with the "Autos Katrina", there are no laws against buying and selling unsafe vehicles in Bolivia.

In January, 72 people were killed and 196 injured in bus accidents, while ten other passengers were reported as "lost". At least one bus driver involved was intoxicated; another one lacked a licence. In February, after a particularly heinous few months for public transport, Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, passed the legislation on drunk-driving. The law is strict: a single offence can result in a driver's license being revoked for a lifetime; parent companies are fined and vehicles are potentially confiscated.