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BOLIVIA-PERU: Titicaca Truths Revealed

Bernarda Claure* - Tierramérica

BAHÍA DE COHANA, Bolivia, Jun 7 2008 (IPS) - Nobody doubts that Lake Titicaca, a watershed and resource shared by Bolivia and Peru, is polluted. But a half-century after the two governments realised there was a problem there are still no detailed studies of the state of its waters.

The six most heavily damaged sites include Bahía de Cohana, in the western Bolivian department of La Paz, and Peru’s Bahía Interior de Puno, in the department of the same name.

The problem is enormous natural ponds filled with a toxic cocktail of sewage, organic pollution and industrial and mining waste.

The lack of sewage treatment itself has become a health threat to the nearby communities.

“We only use the water to wash clothes,” Sonia Copa told Tierramérica near the town of Argachi, an hour’s drive from Bahía de Cohana. “We don’t even give it to the animals because sometimes it’s red, sometimes it’s black, and it smells bad.”

In Argachi, families have opted to dig wells to get water. “We are scared of falling ill. Animals have died from drinking the river water,” said Felipe Chura, owner of a small herd of cattle.

Despite numerous investigations and studies, the problem has not been dealt with in a systematic way, so it is impossible to fully assess the environmental conditions and future impacts, Alberto Giesecke, an engineer with Peru’s National Environment Council, told Tierramérica.

According to Giesecke, the main problem on the Peruvian side are the effluents and solid waste from the nearby communities. On the Bolivian side, polluted water flows from the western municipalities of Viacha, Laja and Pucarani and from the industrial city of El Alto – together representing nearly one million people

Lake Titicaca, whose name means “rock of the jaguar” or “rock of the feline” in the Aymara language, is located on the border of the two South American countries, in the Andes mountains. It is the world’s highest navigable lake, at 3,810 metres above sea level.

Its waters are crystalline blue across most of its 8,562 square kilometre surface (3,790 sq km belong to Bolivia and 4,772 to Peru). Among its native wildlife are several species of duck, fish like the endangered suche (Trichomycterus rivulatus) and karachi (of the Orestias genus), and the giant Lake Titicaca frog (Telmatobius culeus).

Among the aquatic vegetation are the bulrush, a flowering seaweed known as yana llacho, and duckweed.

More than 25 rivers flow into Titicaca. Pollution is believed to have affected “a small percentage” of them, Luis Alberto Sánchez, coordinator in Bolivia of the Lake Titicaca Binational Authority, told Tierramérica.

Between the information from diverse institutions and the perceptions of local residents, a kind of puzzle has emerged.

“Public, academic and private institutions are involved, but the monitoring systems are not continuous or sustainable, so the information is not standardised,” said Giesecke.

“Perhaps we have to introduce a more modest approach, practice basic monitoring. As one author said, content ourselves with reaching a level of optimum ignorance and not seek to know everything there is to know,” added the official. To take on the problem, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is promoting a binational plan to establish an official environmental monitoring network “to make the information uniform, with just one protocol,” said biologist Evelyn Taucer, of the ecology and conservation graduate studies centre at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA) in La Paz.

“We are identifying six locations for the monitoring stations, based upon which we will conduct physical, biological and chemical tests of the water and study aquatic biodiversity,” she told Tierramérica. What is needed, she added, “is that the efforts are channelled into one single network that provides official information for decision making.”

Both in Bolivia and Peru, municipal governments, city councils, ministries and subordinate offices, as well as the Binational Authority, are involved in Titicaca issues.

Bahía de Cohana is a four-hour drive from La Paz, in the lower lake region of Bolivia. One doesn’t have to be an expert to notice that the Sewanka River, which follows part of the road to this cattle-raising town of some 1,000 inhabitants, is dirty and that the lake gives off a foul odour.

According to limnologist Roberto Apaza, of UMSA’s environmental quality laboratory, sedimentation, the proliferation of duckweed and the consequent reduction of spaces for birds and fish are a fact that the local people have to deal with.

This is already being discussed in schools. “They teach us about the water pollution,” said Lucio Pari, 14, who knows that the duckweed and bulrushes have high concentrations of cadmium, lead and arsenic, as shown by a study by the UMSA lab.

Duckweed, in the midst of which Andean geese frolic on the lake, absorbs the most pollutants. The plant is used as fertiliser, while bulrushes are used as livestock feed.

“A considerable number of cattle are not butchered in the municipal slaughterhouses, but at clandestine, outdoor sites,” and the remains “are dumped directly into the Katari River,” wrote researcher Francisco Fontúrbel in an overview of ecotourism in Bahía de Cohana.

Such practices contribute to the spread of the liver fluke parasite, a flatworm that may have killed at least three people in the area, according to Esteban Zapana, a former municipal official.

Some of the proposed solutions to Lake Titicaca’s ills come from non-governmental organisations.

For example, there is “anaerobic biodigestion technology”, a process of fermentation of human and animal excrement and of agricultural waste to generate biogas, says Oliver Campero, director of a development technologies project that has research stations in Tiwanaku, some 70 km from Cohana.

The Bolivian government plans to reduce pollution in the bay by 25 percent and ensure that the water consumed by local communities in the area is potable.

The results will soon be available on a bidding process for infrastructure to collect water from a runoff site, treat it and channel it back, according to Ramiro Villarroel, director of natural resources and the environment in La Paz.

If the contamination is not reversed, said Fontúrbel’s report, the Titicaca watershed “could begin to collapse, interrupting the food chain and turning the shores of Titicaca into swamp.”

(*Originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)