Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 212
The first relationship Cochabamba was assigned to was the State of Utah. At the
expense of the American taxpayer, I was invited to visit there by a prominent steel
executive who was the leader of the Utah group. Among the dignitaries I visited were
the President and a few Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ and the Latter Day
Saints who honored me with a high level briefing about their church. Needless to say
that it was a unique opportunity. What impressed me most was the record keeping
system they had. A dossier was kept for every Mormon alive. It contained complete data
about each person, including income. It was explained to me that this income
information was needed in case it was necessary for the church to help the member
keep the standard of living he had been accustomed to. I visited Brigham Young’s
house, with the thirty bedrooms in the back. The performance of the Tabernacle Choir
was memorable.
La Paz and Utah have a significant natural similarity. Both hydrological basins, one
around the Andes high plateau near La Paz, and the other around Salt Lake City, are
closed within themselves. That is, neither drains to the oceans. The La Paz system is
composed of Lakes Titicaca and Poopo, connected by the Desaguadero River. The
Utah system is composed of Salt Lake and Lake Utah, similarly connected by the
Jordan River. Most likely as a result of the potential for research that this similarity
provided, it turned out that the party in Utah most interested in pursuing a relationship
with Bolivia was Utah State University (USU) in Logan, where I went next. Their
agricultural program included some high plateau crops that potentially could have some
affinity with Bolivia. USU communicated this interest to the other members of the Utah
group and to the State Department. Eventually Utah was reassigned to La Paz and
Cochabamba to North Carolina. USU received numerous grants from the Agency for
International Development (AID) to fund their projects in La Paz.
The leader of the North Carolina group was Hargrove “Skipper” Bowles who, under
president Kennedy, had been Secretary of the Navy and later made an unsuccessful
run for the governorship of his state. Representing Cochabamba, in 1966 I attended a
large congress of all these small alliances in Rio de Janeiro, where I met him and other
members of his team and arranged for their visit to our town. Later that year they arrived
in Cochabamba. It was a big event for my community. The U.S. Embassy briefed the
press and all the would-be local entrepreneurs were invited to participate in the
conference. It was the first time large scale simultaneous translation was used in
Cochabamba. The event helped fan the breeze of self-reliance that had started to
sweep the country after the fall of the socialist regime. I could feel the advent of
individual opportunity, as opposed to government jobs.
Following two days of meetings and sightseeing, we took a trip to the Chapare region
near Cochabamba, which is the rain forest of the eastern Andes - a region rich in many
resources but at the time still quite inaccessible. We made the trip by jeep and boat and
slept in camp cabins. It was a great opportunity to get to know each other. I was truly
impressed by Skipper Bowles’ vision and daring. He was probably the first leader with a
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