8-30-05, 3:00 pm
“Landlocked Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, is once again locked in uncertainty. In June, 2005, for the second time in the 21st century, a Bolivian president has been forced to resign in the face of massive popular demonstrations, strikes and road blockades. An interim caretaker government has been installed, headed by a lawyer and former Supreme Court justice, Eduardo Rodriguez, with the sole purpose of administrating general elections in December. Many analysts forecast that if honest elections were to be held today, Evo Morales, former leader of the coca growers union and candidate of the populist Movimiento al Socialismo party (MAS-Movement to Socialism) would win a clear plurality, if not a majority of the popular vote. The Miami Herald describes Morales as an “anti-American and anti-globalization Socialist who is close to Cuba’s Fidel Castro,” but in fact his political ideology could be best described as a mixture of indigenism and populism.
Poverty and Militancy
According to United Nations figures, Bolivia is the poorest nation in South America. In the western hemisphere only Nicaragua, Guatemala, Honduras and Haiti have worse poverty than Bolivia. According to census figures, a majority (62 percent) of the country’s 8.3 million inhabitants identify themselves as members of indigenous ethnic groups. Almost one third of the population identifies itself as Quechua, and one quarter as Aymara (two ethnic groups descended from the peoples of the Inca empire), while another 6 claims other indigenous origin. A small ruling “caste” of largely European-descended Bolivians has successfully monopolized political and economic power since the country’s foundation. This has been such a constant that some radical analysts now describe the country’s independence from Spain as little more than a passing of the colonial whip-handle from Spanish to local Creole hands, without ever lifting the lash from the backs of the indigenous majority. Indigenous Bolivians were not even granted citizenship until 1952, and de facto (even if no longer de jure) ethnic and linguistic inequality remains a daily fact of life in Bolivia.
According to UN figures, Bolivia also has the greatest degree of economic inequality of any country in South America, a problem reported to be growing day by day. Racism, rampant injustice, economic exploitation and extreme poverty have borne bitter fruits of instability and conflict: Bolivia suffered at least 200 coups d’etat in 180 years of independence.
Yet, Bolivia is not simply another ungovernable, chaotic “failed state.” In the last century Bolivia has been the scene of some of the strongest labor militancy in South America, with the Bolivian Workers’ Confederation [COB] leading working class movements against poverty, racism and dictatorship. In the heyday of mining in Bolivia, unionized workers could easily bring the country to a stop or bring a dictator to his knees. Unfortunately, in recent decades the power of the miners’ unions in Bolivia has declined sharply with the playing-out of the mines and the government-decreed privatization and downsizing of the mining industry in 1985-moves that cost the jobs of more than 27,000 miners. During the same years, globalization and the “Drug War” have brought about the growing destitution of Bolivia’s rural farmworkers and small landowners.
A direct result has been massive flight to the cities. A once largely rural country is now over 60 percent urban, and while the population of rural zones is stagnant or falling, the cities’ average annual growth rate of 3.7 percent is concentrated in the “rings of misery” that surround all the country’s urban centers. Here, neighborhood associations and ethnic-based political forces have attempted to fill the power-vacuum left by the collapse of organized labor as a major player in the country’s politics. And in the rural areas, the “elephant in the room” which once no one dared to mention (coca) has also begun to stir and make its presence known in the corridors of power. At the same time, regional divisiveness has been increasing. The country’s Andean west, largely indigenous, poor, mainly rural, centered around the cities of Los Altos and Cochabamba, remains the seat of what is left of labor union power, and has become the base for powerful new ethnic and neighborhood-based organizations. In contrast, Bolivia’s historically Creole “southeastern crescent,” dominated by the city of Santa Cruz, has been more favorable to globalization and forms the power-base of the country’s traditional political parties.
In recent decades, pressures toward globalization has been met with docile and often enthusiastic responses on the part of Bolivian government leaders, most notable among them Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the “great neoliberal reformer,” who turned Bolivia into an experimental subject for the application of radical International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies. The country has been described as Latin America’s “most faithful student” of the doctrines of neoliberalism. The immediate result has been an overwhelming economic, social and political crisis, the underlying cause of the current wave of rebellion.
Resistance and Repression
Since the year 2000, when economic problems reached crisis stage, the country’s leaders have imposed “structural adjustments” at the insistence of the IMF and World Bank. Economic stagnation, along with a lack of real plans to address economic inequality, cuts in social expenditures made as part of “structural adjustment,” and external debt payments (which absorb an astounding 55.5 percent of the entire gross national product), public job cuts and liberalized labor laws have all hit (mainly indigenous) poor and rural people the hardest. Fully two thirds of the nation’s population is now in absolute poverty (compared to a Latin American average of “only” 43 percent ), and United Nations reports conclude that “it will be impossible for the Bolivian state to accomplish” plans for the reduction of extreme poverty by 2015. At the same time, quality of life indicators continue to fall, in what economists have politely described as “a crimp in the development process.”
National elections in 2002 brought about major changes in Bolivia’s congress, including the first significant indigenous presence in the congress. Evo Morales’ MAS party, a largely indigenous movement, won 21 percent of the popular vote, coming in a close second to Sanchez de Lozada’s rightist Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario [MNR] with 22 percent . Additionally, the Movimiento Indigena Pachakuti [Pachakuti Indigenous Movement], headed by Felipe Quispe, gained 6 percent of the vote.
The first “Gas War” took place in September and October of 2003. In early September, rural Aymara demonstrators around the national capital of La Paz began to block roads and to hold mass marches. On October 8, the largely rural uprising had grown into an indefinite general strike called by neighborhood organizations in El Alto, the Aymara ethnic “capital.” Strikers’ roadblocks and mass demonstrations cut off supplies of food, fuel and consumer goods to La Paz for more than a week.
In response to the strikers’ actions, the government sent military units into El Alto and imposed a wave of violent repression, with a toll of over 60 dead and 400 wounded, including one soldier who died. The brutality of the repression against unarmed strikers, along with Sanchez de Lozada’s refusal to talk with strike leaders, led to demands for his resignation. Popular pressure grew to such a magnitude that on October 17, 2003, Sanchez de Lozada was forced to resign and to flee to the United States. He was succeeded by Carlos Mesa, his Vice President, who immediately agreed to implementation of the strikers’ major demands: a referendum on natural gas policy, repeal of the existing energy laws, and a Constitutional Convention [Constituent Assembly] to rewrite the country’s Constitution.
However, the traditional parties retained a two-thirds majority in the Congress, more than sufficient to block any reformist initiatives. The much-demanded gas referendum was held as promised in July, 2004, but was so ambiguously worded that the resulting new energy law enacted in May, 2005 pleased nobody. And, the promised Constitutional Convention was postponed indefinitely.
On June 10, 2005, three weeks of popular uprising, strikes and road blockades once again brought the fall of the country’s government.
Unbounded Rhetoric, Unresolved Crisis
This most recent upsurge in popular resistance has been dubbed “Gas War II,” since it was sparked by renewed demands for nationalization of Bolivia’s natural gas production [which, in fact, is already nationalized in the ground, but which is then becomes the property of transnational corporations “at the wellhead” for 18 percent of its market value]. However, the current upsurge stems from issues that are much broader than just natural gas. At least two distinct political agendas have emerged: the popular “October Agenda” supported by the Left, demanding effective nationalization of gas production, and “the refoundation of the Republic” with a Constitutional Convention to rewrite the national constitution; and a competing “January Agenda” of the traditional Santa Cruz Creole oligarchy, pushing a rightist project of globalization, regional separatism and local private profit from the gas industry. A Constitutional Convention has now been scheduled to open July 2, 2006, but whether this will actual occur and what changes it may bring largely depends on events in the coming months.
As Bolivia’s elections, set for December, 4, 2005, draw nearer, events in that country have evoked the widest possible variety of comments and speculation. Ultra-left groups in Bolivia and elsewhere excitedly proclaim that the country is in a “pre-revolutionary” situation, conveniently ignoring the fact that the Bolivian military is still very much in physical control of the country (even though choosing to stand aside during the most recent events), and that populist leaders like Evo Morales have clearly opted for nonviolence and incremental democratic change. According to the Communist Party of Bolivia, “there are some popular or labor leaders who claim that the hour of revolution has arrived and that a people’s government must be imposed. Some are arguing along the same feverish line of thought for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.” The truth is that these ideological flights of fancy fall like a ring onto the finger of the separatists and reactionaries who, before losing their privileges, would rather see Bolivia torn apart. It is hardly necessary to point out that any such experiments would be strangled in the cradle, either by lack of popular support, or perhaps by the intervention of neighboring countries who hunger for our natural energy resources.”
In North America and Europe there are those on the left who claim that Morales and the Bolivian indigenous movement are raising the new-wave, power-shunning, “fourth world” postmodern banner that was dropped by the “Zapatista” movement in Mexico. A few even express pipe-dreams of La Paz under Morales becoming a new Katmandu, where “everything goes,” showing up the hypocrisy of the “War Against Drugs” and opening a space in the world for a new attitude toward substances, lifestyles and personal freedom.
However, more sober observers recall that the United States is deeply involved in “Drug War” activities in Bolivia, and is likely to remain so in the foreseeable future. The “Drug War” continues to be a convenient excuse for intervention to protect transnational interests against local threats, as in Colombia. It would be no surprise if at some point we begin to hear rhetoric from the Bush Administration demanding American or “international” intervention in Bolivia to prevent the emergence of a “Narco-State in the heart of South America” (and not incidentally, to aim another dagger at the heart of the nearby Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela).
In statements following the resignation of Carlos Mesa, the Communist Party of Bolivia warned that the country’s crisis is far from being resolved. In fact, the Party had issued an earlier warning that “the country is in great danger,” and “the difficult situation that our country faces [is] a generalized national crisis that threatens the integrity and the very national existence of Bolivia as we know it.” Party First Secretary Marcos Domich declared: “Our reflections [are] that the tactics on the people’s side are, generally, mistaken. Neither this government nor this Congress will resolve our demands and our needs. Only a political change of scene, early general elections, can give us time to breathe in the present battle, and at the same time create a space for real unity of the people’s forces.” Where the Bolivian crisis may lead is still undecided, but the Party’s call is for unity, vigilance and democracy as the situation develops day by day.
