Delgadillo and his fava bean plants. Jos Delgadillo is proud of his heavy turnips. His potatoes prosper with such abandon that they seem to burst from the earth. But most of all, the comandante of the Eighth Infantry Battalion Ayacucho loves to show visitors the ingenious technology he and his men use to produce such an agricultural bounty.
Most army installations are strictly off limits to drop-in visitors.
But in no time Delgadillo had mobilized a group of soldiers in smartly pressed camouflage and shiny boots to lead a tour. Men of the Eighth Infantry Battalion show off the fruits of their labor and the ingenuity of their ancestors. The technique, called suka collo in the Aymara language spoken here, and waru waru in Quechua, was developed by the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Lake Titicaca area at least 3,000 years ago. But the technique was inexplicably abandoned around 1400 A.D., before the arrival of the Spanish. At one time, suka collos covered some 82,000 hectares of low-lying land around Lake Titicaca, both in Bolivia and Peru.