From flooded fields to a vanished lake: The politics of broken water cycles in the Bolivian Altiplano

Abstract

In the floodplains of Bolivia’s western highlands, or Altiplano, farmers, herders, and fishers maintain their livelihoods at water-land interfaces that are riddled with disaster risk. This paper draws on 13 months of fieldwork in the region as well as contemporary press accounts to explore water-land disasters in the Desaguadero River floodplain and Lake Poopó watershed. My analysis builds on Henri Lefebvre’s notion of rhythm to articulate a “politics of cyclic dissonance” – struggles and negotiations surrounding cyclical relationships like rainfall and annual flooding that break apart and leave dangerous consequences in their wake. I analyze two recent cases in Bolivia related to climate change taken from opposite extremes of the water cycle. The first case is the drying of Lake Poopó in 2015, an event that garnered headlines around the world as a representation of a drastic impact from climate change. The second case is the struggle of farmers in a community in the Lake Poopó watershed to manage flood irrigation in their canal systems without becoming victims of flooding themselves. Both cases illustrate how managing cyclic dissonance is a matter of negotiation, both between people representing different communities, between political constituencies and political leaders, and even between people and the environment, but such politics also works to obscure solutions to environmental problems that emerge from desynchronized cycles.