[NYTr] Bolivia: An Open Laboratory

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

CIP Americas Program - Jan 7, 2008
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/4876

Why Bolivia Matters

by Laura Carlsen

Bolivia's National Palace is a classic colonial building that sits on
the pigeon-filled Plaza Murillo in downtown La Paz. It's more often
called the "Palacio Quemado" or "Burned Palace" because it's been set
on fire repeatedly by dissidents of one stripe or another over the
centuries since Bolivia gained its fragile independence. Today, painted
a cheery yellow, it stands as a reminder of a conflictive past and a
fresh future.

During the colonial period the Spanish exploited the country's mineral
wealth without mercy, leading to the death of hundreds of thousands of
indigenous mineworkers and uprisings that punctuated the nation's
history with blood and legends. Between forced labor, the war of
independence, and European diseases, the new nation began its life as a
republic rich in natural resources but with a decimated populace. In
the words of an historian in 1831, Bolivia was like "a beggar seated on
a throne of gold."

In many ways, the nation's predicament changed little over the two
centuries of republican life. The indigenous population, if no longer
enslaved, confronted permanent inequality in political institutions and
economic opportunities. The constant flow of resource wealth to a
criollo elite—allied with foreign interests—cut deep channels into
Bolivian society. Those flows changed form but scarcely diminished with
the advent of globalization.

The government of President Evo Morales came to power in January 2006
with bold plans to change all this. Its main promise to its indigenous
and impoverished base of support was to reform the constitution to
assure the indigenous majority the full exercise of its citizenship,
and to redistribute national wealth in favor of the poor.

Despite winning an absolute majority in the 2005 presidential
elections, the Morales administration has had considerable difficulty
leveraging its political capital into an efficient reform process.

Constitutional Revision

For the fledgling government of President Evo Morales, a new
constitution is the cornerstone of lasting change. The goal is to
create a new legal structure for Bolivian society that for the first
time in the nation's history respects and legally recognizes diversity
in a "plurinational" country.

The Constituent Assembly arose as a demand by social movements in the
1990s and more specifically in the Water War of Cochabamba in
2000-2001. In recent years neoliberal governments made legal and
constitutional changes to grant private investors near carte-blanche
access to natural resources and basic services, exposing the poor
nation to one of the most unequal and exploitive forms of globalization
found in the hemisphere. These legal changes became the hallmark of
their governments and the source of their downfall.

For instance, in 2003 President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada fled to the
United States after his government fired into a crowd of protestors,
killing dozens. He and former defense minister Sanchez Berzain
currently face extradition demands and a lawsuit from the Center for
Constitutional Rights for damages related to the murder of 67 women,
men, and children in the September and October protests, nearly all
from indigenous Aymara communities.

After taking office the Morales government moved rapidly to institute
the Constituent Assembly. The unprecedented process required
establishing new institutions and rules that have generated ambiguity
at times and conflict throughout. Acrimonious negotiations, dualing
mobilizations in the streets, and overheated media warnings of
ungovernability held the nation in near permanent chaos from July of
2006 to the mandated deadline of Dec. 14, 2007. Much of that time the
assembly was suspended.

The government has been criticized frequently by both the left and the
right for errors of judgment and procedure, but it has attempted to
keep dialogue open. The conservative opposition has taken a
confrontational stance toward the Constituent Assembly—presided over by
Quechua and women's rights leader Silvia Lazarte —from the outset. The
loosely coordinated opposition has zig-zagged between calls for greater
adherence to the law and illegal acts of sabotage, including violence
from civic committees and local neo-fascist groups. Finally, some but
not all of the rightwing conservative parties launched a boycott of the
institutional process.

The Assembly faced one obstacle after another. Debates over
representation, regional autonomy, landholdings, and an old issue of
where the nation's capital should be physically located (Sucre or La
Paz) tested the limits of a country facing entrenched interests and the
uncertainties of moving from a historically unjust system to a new
system yet to be defined.

Toward Referendum

Finally on December 9 the assembly approved the constitutional text
with the required two-thirds vote, but with a boycott of the major
political conservative party PODEMOS. The text now goes to a national
referendum, but only after a separate referendum on the crucial issue
of land reform.

In a recent interview with the CIP Americas Policy Program, Vice
President Alvaro Garcia Linera stated that the conflicts have their
roots in Bolivia's history and reflect a fundamentally healthy, if
difficult, stage of democratic redefinition.

Following the boycotted assembly, four of the nine departmental
governments declared autonomy, with some leaders going so far as to
threaten secession. They have begun gathering signatures to call a
referendum on a far more radical form of autonomy that would grant
local governments broad control over resources found in their
territories and erode central government authority and national
cohesion. Since these departments concentrate much of the nation's oil
and gas and agricultural production, the move is a serious challenge to
the Morales government, which has responded by declaring it divisive
and illegal.

The text of the proposed constitution begins by declaring that Bolivia
is "a unitary, plurinational, communitarian, free, independent,
sovereign, democratic, social decentralized state, with territorial
autonomies" that is founded on "plurality and political, economic,
judicial, cultural, and linguistic pluralism."

The sheer quantity of adjectives reveals the complexity of the
political project underfoot. The declaration of principles reflects the
recent history of Bolivia's grassroots struggles for political
representation for the indigenous majority and similar efforts in other
Latin American nations with sizable indigenous populations.

It also addresses the age-old issue of the balance of power between
federal, state, and local government by recognizing four types of
autonomy: departmental, regional, municipal, and indigenous. The
practical overlap here will be a challenge.

A detailed analysis of the 411 proposed articles now becomes the task
at hand of Bolivian society as the constitution goes up for a popular
referendum. But the other key element worth mentioning is the
constitution's overall concept of building a state that controls and
regulates natural-resource use for the public good. This is a political
sea change from the era when it was assumed that what was best for the
private sector was best for the nation.

Why Bolivia Matters

To outsiders, Bolivia's upheaval may seem like merely the latest in a
seemingly endless series of conflicts in a tiny nation known for
political instability.

The corporate-controlled media in the United States have carefully
crafted an image of a relatively ignorant and violent populace running
rampant over hopelessly weak institutions. These distorted images
persist even though the deep changes proposed by the government have
been conducted largely through legal channels and it has been the
conservative opposition that has sought to undermine those processes.

The indigenous character of Evo Morales's leadership and popular
support plays like a subtle but palpably racist sub-theme in the
international press, with the Wall Street Journal taking the lead in
Evo-bashing. An Indian president, Morales is persistently portrayed as
a pawn of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, and his deep ties to
traditional coca growers are recast as nefarious drug lord activities.
Numerous press reports portray indigenous organizations as mindless
mobs intent on dismantling the remains of Bolivia's dubious democratic
institutions.

The viciousness of these attacks on the Morales government best reveal
the potential global impact of what it's trying to do. Bolivia matters,
to everyone seeking more just and stable societies, for two reasons
that Vice President Garcia Linera describes as the "two conquests of
equality"—political justice and economic justice.

The government's attempt to establish conditions for the full exercise
of citizenship for indigenous peoples goes beyond equal access to
limited forms of representative democracy. Recognizing the rights for
the 36 peoples mentioned in the new constitution implies devising
concrete mechanisms to harmonize communitarian and liberal forms of
justice and government that have very different logics. Every nation in
the Western Hemisphere where indigenous peoples have survived the
genocidal campaigns of the past five centuries faces this challenge.

The second challenge, the effort to harness the sustainable use of
natural resources for the public good, tests the limits to change
imposed by the global neoliberal system. Can a country climb from
poverty to equitable development through constitutional reform?

The answer will depend in large part on the dynamics of Bolivian
politics and the ability of the political leadership. But it will also
depend on the extent of external limitations. In assessing those
limitations, Mexican political analyst Adolfo Gilly points out "the
inelastic limits that those who govern run into, whether it be the
ferocious resistance of the classes that have been displaced from
power, and their political and economic representatives, foreign as
well as domestic; or the steel cage in which the new global neoliberal
order encloses possibilities of action, along with the imminent
presence of its powerful material base—the Pentagon, the military force
of the United States; or the material limits of scarcity, national
isolation, and poverty."

The Morales administration has so far sought to break the ties that
bind in various ways. It announced withdrawal from the U.S.-run School
of the Americas—now called the Western Hemisphere Institute for
Security Cooperation (WHINSEC) but still often referred to by the less
cumbersome name it carried prior to a 2001 revamping. SOA/WHINSEC is a
military training facility in Georgia that has produced a long line of
dictators and torturers throughout the hemisphere.

With respect to the global economy, the Bolivian government decided to
withdraw from the International Centre for Settlement of Investment
Disputes of the World Bank, a trade arbitration system characterized by
its supranational powers, lack of transparency, and bias toward
investors.

Bolivia has sought renegotiation of its Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with
Mexico as well as opposing an FTA with the United States, while signing
a People's Trade Agreement with Venezuela and Cuba. In March of 2006
the government stated it would not seek to renew its standby agreement
with the IMF, which was responsible for imposing neoliberal policies
that hurt the national economy and its most vulnerable sectors.

International Response

The response of the Bush administration to the Morales government has
been hostile but guarded. U.S. Agency for International Development has
moved to directly fund projects in opposition regions to strengthen
resistance to the policies of Morales' party, the Movement for
Socialism (MAS), as part of its "democracy-building" program.

The U.S. ambassador in Bolivia, Phillip Goldberg has had frequent
run-ins with the Bolivian government over accusations of politically
targeted aid. The ambassador recently stated that the relationship
between the two countries was "complicated" and emphasized that
cooperation would be focused on reducing coca cultivation. This
formulation is ominous given the wide differences between the Morales
government's policy of promoting traditional coca growing while
cracking down on cocaine production, and the U.S. drug war model
centered on militarization and fumigation programs.

On the other hand, several Latin American nations have stepped up to
support Bolivia following the termination of the Constituent Assembly.
Brazil's President Lula made a state visit and announced a $1 billion
investment by the country's state-owned petroleum company in oil and
gas. The announcement was particularly significant since Brazil's
semi-public gas giant Petrobras initially protested the Morales
government's nationalization of control of its operations in the
country and suspended further investment. Chilean president Michelle
Bachelet also gave explicit support to the beleaguered government by
promising to finish the Inter-Oceanic highway system.

Perhaps the most important determining factor in the success of the
Morales program will be its relationship with progressive social
movements of indigenous peoples, workers, miners, women, and others
that created the revolutionary conditions that brought the MAS to
power. Not only is this the government's base of support, but it is the
true source of national sovereignty and impetus for democratic change.
Although the Evo Morales administration defines itself as "a government
of social movements," historians Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thompson
rightly point out that the relationship is far from simple and that it
will be crucial that the independence and political space of those
movements not be subsumed in the logic of the state.

Bolivia today is an open laboratory. It might seem an unlikely stage
for such an ambitious experiment: a landlocked nation of scarcely nine
million with strong vestiges of colonial rule and the continent's
highest poverty rate. Yet the effort to use the state to retake and
redistribute resources ceded to private economic interests under
globalization, to enfranchise indigenous populations, to narrow the
appalling gap between the haves and have-nots of our era deserves a
chance and will no doubt provide lessons for the rest of the world.


[Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org) is director of the Americas
Policy Program (www.americaspolicy.org) at the Center for International
Policy in Mexico City, where she has been a writer and political
analyst for two decades. ]