Place of potatoes, no police and a mayor who was set on fire

Letter from Ayo Ayo: Stepping off the bus in Ayo Ayo, an Irish visitor feels a long way from home.

The town lies across a main road, around 80km (50 miles) south of the Bolivian capital, La Paz, on the dry Andean Altiplano - or "high plain". At almost 4,000m above sea level, it is four times higher than the summit of Carrantuohill and the air is so thin that even walking at a clip can leave you short of breath after a block or two.

The Altiplano feels an empty, lonely, place with little in it apart from a huge sky, the flat, rocky scrub scarred by dried-up river beds, and the distant brown hills on either side which seem to run parallel with the road towards a vanishing point lost in a heat haze.

Ayo Ayo itself seems a natural extension of this harsh landscape. The place is an irregular collection of mainly one-storey buildings lining roughly cobbled laneways. Many of the dwellings are made of mud bricks with grass thatch for roofs. Many look deserted and derelict.

Despite being the last weekend before Christmas, there is little sign of life and no sign of Christmas - no Christmas trees or lights and no decorations in the shop windows. Then again, there does not seem to be any shops.

At first the main square seems as dead as the rest of the town. But then a door opens and two men carry out low stools to sit in the sun.

I make my way over and introduce myself. Immediately I'm invited to join them for a beer. My hosts are Augusto, the town's retired school teacher, and Franz, a local artisan. Chatting to them, it quickly becomes clear that this mainly Aymara Indian town high up in South America actually has plenty in common with the past - if not the present - of many similar-sized places in Ireland.

For a start, Augusto points to the hill rising up behind the church, the only really impressive building in Ayo Ayo. There, small stony fields are marked out by low stone walls like you see in Connemara.

"Papas!" (This is the word for potatoes.)

Andean Indians were the first people to grow potatoes for food. Augusto tells me that most of the town's inhabitants still make their living growing potatoes, and he reels off a multitude of varieties.

With few job opportunities beyond growing potatoes, Franz says that many of Ayo Ayo's inhabitants have been forced to leave and look for work elsewhere. The result is that most families in this small town in the middle of nowhere have close family ties to the cosmopolitan cities of Buenos Aires and São Paulo - and even further afield in the United States and Spain. Franz himself worked for four years in Stockholm, and says "but you miss where you are from and so I came back".

Emigration means that, along with potatoes, remittances from those who have left are an important part of the local economy. And emigration has made the town value its bilingualism.

Spanish is viewed as useful for getting on in the wider world but, at home among themselves, people still speak the old language of the Aymara. "It is a sweeter and more subtle language," says Augusto, "good for telling jokes."

As we drink, Franz picks up his guitar to sing a ballad about the town's most famous son, Tupaj Katari, whose statue in the square is the only obvious adornment in the whole place.

Katari was leader of the last great Indian uprising against Spanish rule, besieging La Paz in 1781 before being defeated, caught and quartered. The town's annual festival is held to mark that execution.

As Augusto refills my glass, a man on a bicycle rolls across the empty square, spots the beer and shouts over his shoulder than he'll report us to the police.

It is the day before elections and the whole of Bolivia is supposedly observing a weekend-long alcohol ban. But the threat of the police is a kind of in-joke in Ayo Ayo.

"There are no police," says Franz. They fled following the events of June 2004, when residents hauled the mayor before an improvised "community court" on charges of corruption.

The residents had gone to the state's courts but the case was dropped. This, say Franz and Augusto, is because the courts are as corrupt as local officials.

Despite being subjected to a brutal interrogation, the mayor refused to confess to his alleged crimes. Regardless, in the middle of the night, he was beaten, strung up from a lamppost and set on fire, dying at some point during his ordeal.

Seventeen of the alleged ringleaders are in jail awaiting trial for the killing.

But anyone in Ayo Ayo willing to talk about the case refuses to condemn them, and Augusto defends the right of the community to exercise its own justice if all other avenues are closed to it.

The town now has a new mayor who has found the funds to put plants in the currently barren main square.

"When you come here next, there will be plants everywhere," says Franz.