The Lure of the Oriente

East from the jagged wall of the Andes stretches the green, sealike wilderness of Bolivia's Oriente. In its lonely towns, descendants of Spanish aristocrats gravely toast the kings of Spain by candlelight; its brown-skinned, barefoot rubber gath, erers get their only view of the outside world from old film plays. In jungle-hemmed clearings jaguars and blood-sucking bats prey on the settlers' cattle. Along the region's sluggish, yellow rivers, savage bush Indians hunt heads and shoot arrows at low-flying airplanes. Occasionally, from the principal cities of Santa Cruz (pop. 30,000) or Trinidad (pop. 7,500) an intrepid missionary rides forth to minister to the Indians, sometimes to be seen no more.

"Progress and the outside are things we know little about, sen?1or," said a white-suited old Bolivian in Trinidad, center of a declining cattle industry. "What we have here is tranquility." He spat into a mud puddle in front of the municipalidad (city hall). "There are only six cars in all of Trinidad. We prohibit them from running when it rains. They make mudholes and get stuck. Besides, they run down our chickens and pigs."

A Highway to Build. Though the Oriente's fertile soil could easily feed food-short Bolivia, the government in La Paz long neglected the rich lowlands. Only lately, with their tin starting to peter out, have Bolivians begun to look eastward. Even now, they are interested less in the Oriente's crops than in the oil that stands in golden surface pools in the swamps near Santa Cruz.

At Andean Cochabamba the government is building a cracking plant to process crude oil to be piped up from the Oriente. At Sucre it is planning a refinery. Last week it was negotiating a $16 million U.S. Export-Import Bank loan to complete a highway from Cochabamba to Santa Cruz.

Brazilians and Argentines also have their eyes on the oil. Fighting malaria, dysentery and Indians' arrows, the Brazilians have rammed a narrow-gauge railroad 240 miles westward across the Oriente's jungle. With luck, they will link Sao Paulo and Rio with Santa Cruz by December 1950, later extend the line to Cochabamba to complete South America's third transcontinental railway. From the south an Argentine standard-gauge spur is now abuilding toward Santa Cruz.

A Look at the Chart. Bolivians, Brazilians and Argentines like to spread out big survey charts of the potentially great, 150-mile-wide petroleum zone stretching parallel to the Andes right across the Oriente. "Today we have tin, tomorrow oil," gloated a Bolivian engineer. "There is no better oil anywhere in the world," said a Brazilian, with an unmistakably proprietary air. The Argentines, who were already selling cast-iron plumbing in Santa Cruz, expected to have their say, too.

The showdown will come when both Brazil's and Argentina's railways are finished, and the two countries bid openly for Bolivia's oil. Whatever the outcome, the blessings and drawbacks of modern life will soon come to the Oriente's cattle herders and rubber collectors.

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