Since last December Bolivia has been lashed by the climatic vagaries of El Niño, which caused exceedingly violent rain and floods, leaving 350 thousand people homeless. But not only. The unstoppable fury of nature also managed to kill: 35 people did not survive the floods and six others are missing. The Department of Beni, in the North-eastern area of the Country, suffered the most damage. And the tales that reach us from Bolivia are devastating. “I have been in Bolivia for three weeks- Claudio Testa, important photographer, tells us- I had come meaning taking photographs of the sites where Che Guevara lived his last days but the rain stopped me. The damage caused by El Niño is mind-boggling. The low-lands of Bolivia, from the Beni department to the Santa Cruz province, all the area of the plantations and great cattle-breeding farms is half-way under water, we are speaking of more than one million lifeless cattle, of more than 70 thousand homeless, and there are those who hazard the record number of one million Bolivians left without a roof over their heads, and the epidemic risks are added to the floods”.

What is happening? “In a land where communications are very difficult even in normal conditions -Testa further tell us- now in some areas it has become impossible to move by land. To go from Sucre to Santa Cruz I had to resort to a plane and during the flight I was able to observe with my own eyes the fragility of a territory where life never was easy, the dry table-lands, with small villages of campesinos in unreachable sites, with the lands around them burnt by the sun that shines at three thousand and more metres above sea level. Then going south are inundated plains, completely flooded fields, impassable roads, collapsed bridges, fords that to us would be unthinkable. The images of this catastrophe which are broadcast by the local television are horrifying: people who go on living in their homes with water to their knees, roads submerged in mud or blocked by enormous lorries that slipped in the mud and stopped in the middle of the road, people who walk in the mud to go from one bus to the other.
International solidarity in the meantime started moving. Food aids for a million euro came from Italy and many other nations are devoting themselves to bringing assistance to this tormented South American Country.