"The mayor of a small town in Bolivia has been attacked by opposition protesters who dragged her through the streets barefoot, covered her in red paint and forcibly cut her hair...."

"The protesters accused Mayor [Patricia] Arce of having bussed in supporters of the president to try and break a blockade they had set up and blamed her for the reported deaths [of two opposition protesters]... Amid shouts of 'murderess, murderess' masked men dragged her through the streets barefoot to the bridge. There, they made her kneel down, cut her hair and doused her in red paint. They also forced her to sign a resignation letter."

BBC reports.

"The market has this natural tendency to commoditize things. There’s no longer a face, a place, it’s just quinoa."

You have to understand why that's supposed to be a problem, and how people are scampering to fix it.

"We’re at this inflection point where we want people to know where their quinoa is coming from, and the consumer actually is willing to pay them a little more so they do put their kids through school."

"They" = Bolivian farmers, who after centuries of eating something that was just the only grain they could grow find the whole world clamoring for the stuff as if it's special.

There's a shortage now, but there's a glut coming, as farmers in other places — like Canada — start growing quinoa, using modern farming equipment. Will the Bolivan farmers update their farming methods? Or will their dealers succeed in convincing you that ancient Bolivian artisan-grown quinoa is worth twice as much?

"Tiwanaku was not a violent culture... to expand its reach Tiwanaku became very political creating colonies, trade agreements... and state cults."

This was around 400 A.D., in the place that today is Boliva (today's "History of" country):

The empire continued to grow with no end in sight. William H. Isbell states that "Tiahuanaco underwent a dramatic transformation between AD 600 and 700 that established new monumental standards for civic architecture and greatly increased the resident population." Tiwanaku continued to absorb cultures rather than eradicate them.... The elites gained their status by the surplus of food they gained from all of the regions and then by having the ability to redistribute the food among all the people. This is where the control of llama herds became very significant to Tiwanaku....



Tiwanaku disappeared around AD 1000 because food production, their main source of power, dried up. The land was not inhabited for many years after that.

Later came the Inca and the Spanish.


Pizzaro.