Amargo Mar

Racial, social and cultural aspects of La Paz (called Chuquiago by the Aymaras) seen through four stories.

A community reacts against a group of foreigners who under the guise of development assistance are forcibly sterilizing the peasant women.

End of the 20's. Alfonso a young writer brought up in France, arrives to an adventurous mining town (Uyuni) in the midst of the Bolivian high plateau. Here he meets the beautiful Claudina a sensual, strong willed chola, la "Misqui simi" ("The one with the sweet lips"). Uyuni radiates a strange magnetism, it is charged with a collective euphoria produced by the bewitching mineral. The lives of the characters enter a whirl of passion, ambition and frustration.

After several years a student returns to his native village only to find that despite the agrarian reform act of 1952, nothing has changed in the treatment of peasants, and racial discrimination continues.