Bolivia to Require US Visitors to Get Visas

If you look in the American Heritage Dictionary (New College Edition, 2005) under the term royal pain in the ass, for definition number three you will find the words:

Noun. The experience a Bolivian goes through to seek a tourist entry visa to the United States.

Bolivians seeking tourist entry to the US have the pleasure of completing the following steps:

1. Pay $110 (twice the monthly minimum wage) at a DHL office for the honor of submitting a visa application and seeking an interview at the US Embassy in La Paz.

2. Wait (usually months) for your interview to be scheduled.

3. Travel to La Paz and wait in a long line in Arctic-like morning weather outside the fortress-like, white US Embassy.

4. Approach the first window and have your paperwork reviewed (including submission of all kinds of personal economic information, such as bank statements, employment letters, etc.). Have a good chance of being turned away right then for completing the confusing (English-only) forms incorrectly.

5. Advance to a second window for questioning about your intentions. By the luck of the draw you might chat through the thick glass window with someone who is friendly, or with an official who seems interested in turning surly into a fine art.

6. Stand a good 9 out of 10 chance of being denied (no refund of the $110 you paid the US government for the experience).

I have watched the attrition process a few times while making my own visits to the “interview room” at the Embassy. Denial, in many cases, seems just arbitrary. My landlord, an accountant at the university in his 40s with a family here and two houses, got denied a visa to visit his relatives in Nebraska. Did the US government really think he was sneaking in to become a day laborer in Arlington? [Added note #1: Undocumented Bolivian immigrants speaking Quechua, by the way, played a key role in rebuilding the Pentagon after 9/11.]

What’s the current process for someone from the US to enter Bolivia as a tourist?

1. Get off the plane from Miami.

2. Hand the friendly fellow at the immigration desk the ten- line, half-page immigration form that lists your birth date, nationality and destination.

3. Get a free 90-day entry visa and collect your luggage (You do have to pay $45 to leave.)

So, it is no surprise that many Bolivians feel like the process between our two nations isn’t exactly reciprocal and on January 1st President Evo Morales issued an executive decree mandating that, starting soon, citizens of the US visiting Bolivia will need to have pre-arranged entry visas.

[Added note #2: If US citizens want to stay long-term they face visa requirements equally as cumbersome as the US, including an AIDS test and many days spent in long lines.]

The Troubling Game of Bolivian Visa Math

Okay, let’s dispense with the self-disclosure and politics first.

No, my family and I are not likely to be affected by the new requirement. My wife and I (we have lived here for more than nine years) have permanent resident visas in our blue US passports so we can come and go as we please. Our three children each have dual citizenship and two passports.

Yes, Bolivia certainly has both a legitimate right to assert whatever entry rules it desires and, as noted above, has ample justification to let the process for people from the US coming here be a little more like it is the other way around. Evo also asserted security concerns recalling that, last March, a deranged Californian came here as a US tourist and exploded bombs in two La Paz hotels, leaving two people dead.

So, with the legitimacy of Bolivia’s demand recognized, let’s take a look at the practical side of things.

What the new visa process for US citizens (and potentially Europeans as well) will look like remains unclear, but here is how it was described in today’s Cochabamba daily, Opinion:

What US visitors would be required to submit:

1. A birth certificate.
2. A certificate of residency (which we don’t actually have in the US).
3. Documentation of financial assets (bank records, etc.).
4. Documentation of employment.

This is essentially a mirror of the US requirements for Bolivians, and all would-be visitors would have to solicit such a visa from the Bolivian Embassy in Washington.

Tourism industry officials in Bolivia were quick to express their objections to the plan and their worries that it will cost Bolivia a lucrative chunk of its tourism trade. The Vice-minister of Government Coordination dismissed those concerns, noting, “…besides, the number of US citizens entering the country is minimal.”

So let’s do a little math.

With Aerosur now joining LAB and American Airlines to offer direct service to and from Miami (and AA adding three new incoming flights a week) that means that each week there are about 18 flights headed here directly from the US. The planes headed here each have a seating capacity of about 200. Let’s assume (for purposes of argument) that just one in ten of those seats is filled by a US citizen coming in as a tourist. That would mean about 360 people per week, almost 19,000 per year.

In December I paid a visit to the Bolivian Embassy in Washington and to the country’s competent new Ambassador. The Embassy has a current staff of seven, with a heavy burden of existing responsibilities for diplomatic relations, dealing with the Bolivian immigrant community and other tasks. If everyone, including the Ambassador, dropped everything and did nothing but process US tourist visas eight hours per day, five days per week, for fifty weeks a year (trust me, they are going to need two weeks off), that translates out to 2,700 visas per staff member, or about ten per day per person.

Likely Effects

To be sure, a lot of visitors will just deal with it. I travel all over the world for work and I have had to leap through hoops tougher than this. My favorite was when I had to send my US passport by Federal Express to the Ugandan Embassy in Washington, only to have Fed. Ex. send it back to me in Bogotá, Colombia instead of Cochabamba, Bolivia (all those Bs, Cs, and As could confuse anyone). I barely got my passport back in time to travel (and failed in my effort to get my passport frequent flier miles for its round the world tour).

A good many other people won’t be so willing to jump through the new Bolivian visa hoops. What portion of those tourists who head to Machu Pichu and then add on a week’s worth of visiting to La Paz or Lake Titicaca will just respond by saying, “I have to send my passport and bank records to the Bolivian Embassy in Washington? Hmmm, I hear Lima is nice.” If so, that translates into a good many restaurant, hotel and other tourism related jobs that are going to get a lot less plentiful.

Now maybe the Bolivian government has already planed all of this out and has some surprise streamlined process ready to spring on us that will avoid all this. I am willing to take on-line bets that it doesn’t. Maybe this will turn out to be more bluster than substance. That’s a possibility too.

Again, in my opinion Bolivia has a fair point to make about the entry requirements being so vastly different for Bolivians and US citizens to visit one another’s countries. But there are also ways to do visas that are less cumbersome. In the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, I got my visa [legally] at the airport in the middle of the night for a reasonable price. The same in Croatia. Brazil didn’t ask for any bank records but did make me pay $100 (but in Brazil they throw in beaches, which Bolivia doesn’t).

In other words, Bolivia may be faced with the dilemma that what seems fair in one way, will end up being both economically damaging and a bureaucratic mess in other ways.

Perhaps what Bolivia should do is require visiting tourists to bring in bagels. It would demonstrate just a little more of a commitment to come here and I know a few people who would take them off the government’s hands at a fair price.