Word: aymaras
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...stumbly dirt road for three hours through the barren spaces of the altiplano, the 14,000-foot-high plateau that covers the western third of Bolivia. Above the tree line, this gaping wasteland is broken only by the occasional adobe huts and the surrounding protective adobe walls of the Aymara Indians, who have scratched out a living here for countless centuries. Soon the huts become more numerous, and further on there is a hint of the nearing metropolis in the frantic crowds of women and children who descend upon the bus at every stop trying to sell meager greasy pastries...
...whiff of oxygen during stopovers. Yet 4,000,000 people inhabit Bolivia; 75% are on the altiplano (high plain), a vast, barren Andean plateau averaging 12,000 ft. in altitude. Of the 75%, a few tin miners produce the nation's major export; the rest, mostly Quechua and Aymara Indians who cannot even speak Spanish, spend brief lives struggling to scratch a living from the stony soil...
...East. Brutal as any contrast of geography or industry is the cultural chasm between Bolivia's Indians and the whites and mestizos of the cities. The Indians, the vast majority of Bolivia's 3,200,000 inhabitants, live quite outside the national economy, even speaking Aymara or Quechua instead of Spanish. At home on the high, forbidding plateau since before the time of the Incas, they have developed oversize lungs to be able to live and work, dance madly and play reed pipes, get drunk and breed children in the cold, thin air. Their wants are simple...
Puny on the Plain. Four centuries after the Spanish conquest, perhaps four out of seven million Peruvians still live in the Andes, speak the Quechua and Aymara of the Incas, play their mournful five-noted pipes of Pan and on festive occasions get falling drunk on tinka, a poisonous potion of cane alcohol, nicotine and cocaine. But the pressure for land has increased, and the ancient farming ayllus (communes) are disappearing. More & more, Andean man has hired out to haciendas or mines, or moved to coastal cities. When he descends to the Pacific, it becomes his turn to undergo...
Spanish and English in addition to their own staccato Aymara or liquid Quechua...