The coronavirus arrived in Bolivia amid uncertainty and panic that gave rise to racism. There are reports in which Indigenous people say they were denied medical care because healthcare workers were afraid of becoming infected. They were labeled sources of contagion for failing to comply with lockdown measures, since their livelihoods depended on in-person activities. Yet during the same period, another narrative emerged within Indigenous communities: that the Andean body was resistant to the virus because of the hardiness developed from living at high altitudes.
The contradiction between these narratives did not strike sociologist Javier Andrés Claros as new. He delved into medical archives and found that biomedicine has always been interested in studying Indigenous people, doing so from two seemingly opposing perspectives: pathologization and glorification.
“When unknown diseases emerge, nobody wants to take responsibility. The tendency is to look for culprits among others. We saw it with Covid, yellow fever, the Spanish flu and HIV,” Claros tells EL PAÍS. “That ‘other’ is not always the modern ideal; it is usually the Asian, the Indigenous person or the Muslim.”
Because infectious diseases added a social dimension to the study, namely the stigma surrounding those infected and their behavior, Claros focused on syphilis, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and epidemic typhus. In temporal terms, he limited his research — published in the book El indio patologizado y glorificado: representaciones del indígena andino (The Pathologized and Glorified Indian: Representations of the Andean Indigenous Person) — to the first half of the 20th century, from 1900 to 1950.
During that period, the publication of Bolivian medical journals became more regular as part of an effort to professionalize a field that did not yet enjoy the prestige it has today. “Although bacteriology was in its early stages, people still didn’t know how to prevent these diseases or what the treatments were,” Carlos explains. “To understand them locally, they began linking them to geography and the Indigenous body.”
Two ideas appear consistently throughout the texts he studied: that the Andean Indigenous body constituted a distinct biological type in which diseases took on particular characteristics, and that Indigenous people perpetuated unhygienic practices that endangered public health.
In the theses, specialized medical journals and bulletins of the time, social and cultural factors were incorporated into what was ostensibly a biological field of study. In this way, liberal scientific racism, the colonial legacy and nationalist Indigenismo converged. Hospital infrastructure and medical equipment were rudimentary in Bolivia and even more so in Indigenous communities, which had limited access to rights.
“Authors of the period argued that Indigenous people were in a state of degeneration as a result of centuries of colonial oppression, a condition conceived as pathological and reproduced by local power actors such as landowners,” Carlos writes in the book.
The prejudice that viewed Indigenous people as “primitive” and “barbaric” extended into the realm of health and disease. Based on chronicles from the period of the Spanish conquest, some researchers even advanced the hypothesis that syphilis had been transmitted from llamas to Indigenous people through sexual relations, supposedly as a result of such practices.
Moreover, scholars proposed disease categories or variants specific to Bolivia, assuming that Aymara and Quechua bodies were more susceptible to bacteria. Néstor Morales Villazón postulated the existence of “Indigenous tuberculosis,” while Félix Veintemillas described what he called “Altiplano epidemic typhus.”
Between the 1930s and 1940s, Veintemillas also portrayed Indigenous women, because of their role as domestic servants, as the vehicle through which typhus was carried from the countryside to the white population. He regarded Andean Indigenous people as the “reservoir” of the disease and of the lice that transmitted it, owing to practices he considered unhygienic.
The La Paz physician devoted himself to collecting blood samples from Indigenous people in order to develop anti-typhus serums. He was not the only one to promote a cure specifically aimed at peasants: Morales Villazón proposed a form of vaccine therapy that involved not only injections but also the “correction” of cultural practices that he believed served as vectors of typhoid fever.
The racialization of disease was not always pathologizing. During the first half of the 20th century, Bolivian biomedicine studied the Andean body as a distinct biological type with unique characteristics shaped by the environment in which it developed. It was argued that, because of factors such as altitude, diseases like syphilis were less virulent in Bolivia, and that Indigenous people exemplified this particularity by displaying a supposed resistance to the disease’s more advanced stages.
The leading proponent of this theory was the physician and geographer Jaime Mendoza, author of El macizo boliviano (The Bolivian Massif). In his 1935 book, he argued that Andean geography, altitude, climate, isolation and the conditions of the territory, had historically shaped both the population and Bolivia itself. The concept was later applied to medicine. Mendoza found relatively few cases of tuberculosis among the Aymara population. In his view, Andean Indigenous people had benefited since ancestral times from high altitude and sunlight, allowing their bodies to develop a supposed resistance to virulent diseases.
Whether pathologizing or glorifying Indigenous people, this interdisciplinary medical discourse began to lose ground by the mid-20th century due to more standardized understandings of infectious diseases. However, Claros believes that the association of certain diseases with Indigenous peoples has persisted. “Both representations, though opposing, have left a lasting mark on Bolivia’s social and cultural narrative, perpetuating dynamics of racism and idealization toward Indigenous peoples by freezing them into stereotypes that limit their complexity and linking them to a disease,” he says.
If discrimination in accessing treatment for the coronavirus is a current example of the pathologization of Indigenous people, research on the alleged “Andean gene” is an example of their glorification. The Universidad Mayor de San Andrés found that Andean inhabitants carry a mutated gene that allows better adaptation to altitude and protects them from altitude sickness.
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