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Like other living history performances, this event was repeated again and again. There have been dozens of such incidents in the Sector Ramis since the reserve was established. Another case, a bit to the south of Cohasía, involved a French staff member of a project, funded by overseas development money, that promoted bilingual education in Spanish and Aymara for schoolchildren. One afternoon, the staff member walked to a picturesque spot, rock that overlooked the lake, not far from the schoolhouse where she worked. She had sat down and begun to write postcards when the president of the village approached her. He told her that she was writing too much. He was not satisfied by her explanation that she was merely writing personal notes to her friends, and stood over her until she got up and left the rock. Soon after, she shifted her work to another village. As on the occasion when the villagers challenged the IMARPE staff, the president was particularly incensed by seeing an outsider who was writing, and his anger took the form of physical intimidation and the expulsion from the territory of the village. Such intimidation can be very direct. The suggestion that villagers would be willing to put out someone's eye seems a particularly vivid rejection of the government's claim that it has the right to observe and regulate local resources. As Eufracio's nervous recounting of that gesture indicated, that threat also suggested that villagers do not need special weapons to attack outsiders. They can simply use their hands.
Hilaria Quispe, a villager from Pusi, also suggested this ready availability of means to defend local territories when she described a confrontation with CENFOR staff. She had been apprehended when a couple of CENFOR employees had made a sweep through the reedbeds, checking boats and balsas for waterfowl eggs that villagers had collected. Hilaria had had the misfortunate to be caught on one of these infrequent trips. Even at its peak of activity in the early 1980s, CENFOR did not send out regular patrols through the reedbeds, since it was expensive for them to rent boats and since villagers rarely set out in search of eggs. It takes a fair amount of time and effort to find the nests, secreted in dense regions of totora. The villagers do not gather enough of these fragile eggs to have a quantity to bring to market, but only take a few for their own consumption or to trade with neighbors for grains and potatoes. Hilaria described her anger at the guards who had taken the dozen or so coot eggs that she had harvested. "They take the eggs away from us," she said. "What are we going to feed our children with?" She paused for a moment and continued, "We are making sure we have our poles with us." She paused again, for a longer interval, and then looked up and nodded her head to indicate that she saw that her point had sunk in. It was clear that she was referring to the poles of eucalyptus wood, like the one she had in her hand. Most households in the lakeshore villages have at least one of these poles, four or five centimeters thick and two or three meters long. They are the most common means of pushing a boat or balsa through shallow water, though many households also have smaller wooden oars that they use to scull boats or balsa through the water. Hilaria stated that she and the others who traveled through the reedbeds would use only the poles, not the oars. In addition to propelling boats and reeds, the poles serve other purposes as well. With a knife tied to one end, they can make a scythe for harvesting reeds. Propped up against a wall, they can support nets that are drying in the sun. They can be used as flails, pounded on piles of harvested barley to separate the grains from the stalks. And, as Hilaria suggested, these poles are effective weapons. Though their length and weight make them awkward to use in long fights, they can deliver a powerful blow. A direct strike would be enough to break an arm or even to crush a skull. The greatest advantage of these poles as weapons is that they are not exclusively weapons. It would be impossible for the government to forbid villagers from owning and carrying them. This is the quality that the poles share with pitchforks and slings and the other classic weapons of peasant rebels. They might not succeed in direct battle against firearms, but they possess great advantages over firearms because they are readily available and impossible to prohibit or even to license or register. Much as the ordinary work implements can become weapons in the defense of village autonomy, so too the villagers themselves can become soldiers, and the complex web of channels through the reedbeds become fortifications. I am not sure of the exact nature of the threat that Hilaria had made. Would she have been willing to hit a CENFOR guard and possibly kill him, or would she have just shoved him hard enough so that he would fall, fully clothed, into the chilly waters of the lake? She might have been suggesting that she would merely swing the long pole so that he would have to duck. Even if she would do nothing more than raise the pole to intimidate the CENFOR guard, he would be frightened enough to turn and flee. Hilaria certainly had heard of the other incidents when villagers chased officials out of their territories. It seems to me that she knew that the effectiveness of her threat lay in its imprecision. The villagers were willing to offer a mild response to a minor challenge to their control of their territories and to act with great violence if this control were seriously menaced. The specific government agencies and the laws could vary, but the villagers sustain their simple claim that they have the right to provide for the next generation through the food that they produce in their territory.
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