Sucre

Dear Friends, you find me here doing a little research on LANIC, looking for a more comprehensive list of Bolivian NGOs and research institutes. Fieldwork is a little tough in that I guess the first time out you´re not sure what to take and what to leave behind and invariably space, or lack thereof, requires you leave behind all sort of necessary and helpful information and research -- stuff that at home you can just put your finger on immediately. Anyways, so here -- finally -- is a picture of Sucre taken from an observation point above the city. For those of you who don´t already know and are wondering ´why Sucre?´it´s the judicial center of Bolivia. It´s where you find the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Tribunal, and all sort of related offices. The population is probably about 200,000, depending on where you draw the line. And one thing that has struck me this time during my travels around the country is the youthfulness of the population. I´d have to check the stats, but I´d be willing to bet the % is very high. Everywhere you look and everytime you turn there are children and young people -- all over the place. It was especially stark in Potosi with regard to the number of young children of primary school age. There were schools everywhere and the kids were always under foot, happy and running through the streets. In Sucre it´s more the middle school to high school crowd you see tons of -- so the country has a wonderful resource, which it now needs to educate well. From all accounts, unfortunately, that´s not necessarily the case, unless it´s a private education.

Sucre is small, or so it seems to me. I can get around here much faster than I could ever get around the UT campus. From my apartment to the city center (the main plaza) its about an 8 minute walk, and that´s if I´m c-r-e-e-p-i-n-g along, more like 5 at a B pace. To the ICBA (ick-bah), it´s less than a 3 minute walk. And to the correo and supermarket, it´s no more than 10; nothing actually is any more than 10. Unless I´m going to the airport, I never, ever have to take a taxi anywhere, which is good. Either late this week or early next week, my plan is to locate and visit the primary libraries and archives in town, I´m especially interested in ones at the law school and supreme court and will let everyone know how it goes.

On the research front, I did manage to download and print several key law journal articles on my topic, in addition to coming across some new ones which are interesting, if not quite on point (which isn´t a bad thing). Found one one PIL in Israel, focusing almost entirely on ¨the conditions under which¨and am reading one by Lutz and Sikkink on ¨Justice Cascades¨and the impact of foreign human rights trials in Latin America. All in all things are limping along nicely.

Hasta la proxima.