No pesky health codes or intrusive waste management laws are hampering free enterprise at the San Julian market. These are the images that come back to my mind when wing nuts – the kind that presently run our country – talk about getting the government and its regulators out of the affairs of people.

At markets like this in Bolivia, it is customary to hang the severed head of a cow as a sign to prospective customers that you have fresh beef on hand. Butchers do the same thing in the US, except that they might use plastic cows like the ones that I used to see atop Bi-Lo grocery stores in the South. Or they use neon signs. The cool thing about the neon signs is that they emit a warm electrical buzz. This particular shop had no neon sign, but they did have that steady buzz, provided, in this case, by the enormous ravenous flies making a home, lunch, and birthing ground of the bovine noggin. If you want to see the head - and I know you do - look closely on the counter at the left of the picture above.

The market covers about three acres of space. Much of it is housed in a one-story concrete structure consisting of small compartments, like storage rooms you would rent at a u-store-it facility, with the heavy roll-up steel garage doors and padlocks, opening onto three or four corridors. The dark concrete floor sucks up what little brightness is offered by the harsh and glaring fluorescent lighting.

Back inside, the chickens were waiting uncovered and unrefrigerated for buyers on the countertop at about ten o’clock in the morning when I took these pictures. Hours later, I returned to the market for a six-pack (very well refrigerated) and noticed that a couple of the chickens had been bought, or perhaps they’d been carried off by some of the flies.

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