High in the Bolivian Altiplano, Challapata is where the road from La Paz splits: one way to Potosí and the other to Uyuni and the salt flats. It seems an unremarkable place; many tourists steam through without even realising. But Bolivians know it to be home to the country’s biggest contraband car fair, a hub in a trade network that reaches from Japan to the Bolivian Amazon.
Contraband cars – known as chutos – are nothing new in Bolivia. But those behind the business have recently received a fresh burst of attention, as a younger generation has taken to posting videos of their adrenaline-fueled border runs on Tiktok.
Efraín, 35, said he started out as a chutero when he was 12. In the ensuing years, the fundamentals of the trade have stayed the same: second-hand cars from richer countries, like Japan, are bought and shipped to Iquique, a free port in Chile. From there – along with other cars stolen in Chile – they are spirited across the long desert border with Bolivia, using clandestine paths to avoid military patrols.
“It’s very risky, but it’s profitable, too,” said Efraín. “And it’s exciting. It’s like taking part in the Dakar Rally. At least I see it that way, because you have to drive through the night with no lights. That way, the soldiers don’t see you. You can pass under their noses without them realizing. But if you turn the lights on, suddenly you see in the distance, one, three, five, 10 lights coming for you.”
At 35 years old, Efraín is a veteran– and he said it’s the teenagers that are using TikTok. Videos show groups of chuteros drinking and making ritualistic offerings before journeys; others show convoys of SUVs tearing across the salt flats; some show wrecked and burnt-out vehicles lost on the way.
Almost all of these videos are set to one song – Chutero Yo Soy, by Simon Latorre – that has become an unlikely viral hit. A conversation with a chutero close to Latorre yielded a phone number. When he answered the phone, he did so in the third person: “Simon Latorre at your service.”
Latorre himself is not a chutero, nor even Bolivian: he’s from Juliaca, a city in southern Peru. But he had a Bolivian friend who was a chutero, and it was through him that he saw the lifestyle.
“He would go bravely into the night, and come back with his cars,” said Latorre. “Then he would go out again. He didn’t even have time to sleep. Such is the sacrifice he had to make. Sometimes he would say he’d had problems, that he’d run into the army, they’d opened fire, things like that.”
His friend asked him to compose a song about chuteros, for chuteros. And so he wrote Chutero Yo Soy, which he started performing in towns along the Bolivia-Chile border.
Then they asked him to perform in Challapata. “What a welcome. Honestly, I didn’t know Challapata before that, but when I went to perform loads of people turned up, and they knew my songs and sang along. There’s nothing better as an artist.”
Tania Jiménez, a sociologist who carried out years of fieldwork among chuteros, and more recently a digital ethnography, notes that being a chutero is a kind of identity, with a culture of rituals, fiestas and songs around it.
Very few women are involved, and the songs reflect that. “They’re about sacrifice, and having the courage to dare to do it – there’s a marked sense of masculinity.”
The vice-minister of the fight against contraband recently compared chutero culture to that of drug-trafficking gangs. “That’s ridiculous,” laughed Jiménez. “Very forced.” She said that groups having their songs is commonplace in Andean culture. “If you strip it of its cultural context, of course it could look like the culture of criminal groups in Mexico.
“But honestly,” she adds, “I think it’s stupid that they’re putting these videos up. We all know that they’re on Facebook: if you go and search ‘autos chutos’, there are loads of groups. People will even deliver one to you. But these videos are a kind of ostentation of what they do.”
That the song went viral has been a source of some anxiety for Latorre. “I sometimes worry that the Bolivian authorities might turn against me, asking why Simon is singing these songs dedicated to chuteros. But I’m just a songwriter – I don’t do this work myself,” said Latorre. “I hope that’s how the authorities see it.”
Meanwhile the chuto business drives on. Analysts reckon perhaps 25,000 chutos enter Bolivia every year, and some of the money earned gets piled back into fiestas where Latorre might perform. His representative says he does two or three gigs a month in Bolivia. “People call me every day asking for a shoutout in my next song,” said Latorre. He reflected for a moment. “I have more fans in Bolivia than in Peru. Some people know me here – but not like in Bolivia.”
