Federico Fuentes, La Paz
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the implementation of Decree 21060, which heralded the dawning of the era of neoliberal "free market" policies in Bolivia. According to Jim Schultz, executive director of the Democracy Center, a human rights investigative organisation based in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and San Francisco, California, this South American country of 8.8 million people "has been essentially the lab rat for the politics of the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and the World Bank" for the last 20 years.
Schultz told Green Left Weekly that he had asked John Williamson, an economist with the Washington-based Institute for International Economics who in 1989 was the first to coin the term "Washington Consensus" for the neoliberal policies of the IMF and World Bank, if he agreed with this view of Bolivia. Williamson had replied: "Bolivia was the big bang of the implementation of the Washington Consensus model."
The "big bang" has seen the privatisation of nearly all of Bolivia's state-owned industries, the sell-off to foreign-owned companies of the country's natural resources such as water and natural gas (the second largest reserves in South America) and the aggressive pushing of policies that enrich a tiny minority of large business owners at the expense of the working majority.
As a result, Bolivia, one of the richest countries in terms of natural resources, is the home of the poorest population in South America. Around 70% live in poverty and 25% are malnourished. Its indigenous population, which constitutes 50% of the total, is routinely discriminated against and are among the poorest of its inhabitants.
In response to the foreign corporate plundering of Bolivia's natural resources, the indigenous people have staged repeated mass revolts over the last five years, making Bolivia "a global symbol of resistance to" the Washington Consensus.
"To really understand this country", said Schultz, "you need to think apartheid South Africa but without the racial discrimination all explicitly written down in law. With the revolt against privatisation in Cochabamba in 2000, the power dynamic in this country changed. That set the foundations for all of the protests, and frankly, victories of the social movements, that have come since."
The latest phase in the struggle has been the call, following the uprising of May-June this year, for presidential and parliamentary elections to be held on December 18. For Bolivian academic and political commentator Raul Prada, "the events of May-June had to do fundamentally with the response of the social movements and organisations to a conspiracy by the right, which lasted around two years, and which had to do with Carlos Mesa's government of transition".
Mesa, previously the vice-president, became president in October 2003, as part of a constitutional succession following the popular uprising that kicked out right-wing president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Mesa had initially gained the support of the majority of the social movements and the Bolivian population for his proclaimed commitment to a transition period aimed at the recovery of Bolivia's gas resources and the election of a constitutional assembly to draft a constitution that would recognise the rights of the indigenous people.
The right-wing, however, tried to use its numbers in parliament to attempt to regain power and block such a transition. "No-one expected that the social movements would have the strength to re-emerge in a way much bigger than October 2003", said Prada.
However, a massive popular revolt forced Mesa to resign on June 6 and the parliament installed Supreme Court justice Eduardo Rodriguez as the country's new president, Rodriguez promised new presidential and parliamentary elections.
Commenting on the May-June mass movement, Prada said: "It was much bigger [than the October 2003 revolt] because it extended itself to [the eastern province of] Santa Cruz, and to the south. Many more people came out on the streets. The cooperative miners were completely incorporated into the mobilisations, as were the miners organised in trade unions. In this context, what we had was a rearticulation of the social movements in a state of emergency where they were able to confront the conspiracy of the right."
The May-June events demonstrated an interesting contradiction. On one hand, they resulted in the various local and issue-based movements, in numbers not seen for years, uniting behind the demand for the nationalisation of Bolivia's gas resources. Yet the final result was a constitutional exit to the political crisis â the calling of early elections.
This result, according to Prada, "has to do with the correlation of forces â it was strong enough to defeat the right, but the mass movement was not yet strong enough so that it could itself convoke a constituent assembly or take over the gas fields".
This analysis is shared by much of the Bolivian left. Oscar Olivera, leader of the Coordinator of the Defence of Water and Life in Bolivia, the coalition that led the water revolt of 2000 commented to GLW: "The May-June events were a clear demonstration in this country that the state form has practically collapsed, and at the same time it showed the impossibility of the social movements to make sure their objectives are achieved."
In a June 12 article in Juguete Rabioso, Alvaro Garcia Linera, the vice-presidential running mate of Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) presidential candidate Evo Morales, wrote: "Historically, there have only been two roads to reaching [power]: the electoral way or through an insurrection."
With the social movements still too weak and disunited to successfully undertake the insurrectionary road, much of the left has turned its face to the December elections.
"All of the left have agreed that these elections can not result in the return of the right", Olivera noted. "If it returns, the scenario will be one of imposing the demands of the people by force and not via the constitutional road that many want now. As an alternative, most of the left have chosen to support Morales' bid, but with varying positions."
The inability to unite has resulted in the left going to the elections with one main force at a national level spearheaded by Morales' campaign, which is promising to break with 20 years of neoliberal rule, while the left remains disunited at the local level.
Meanwhile, Morales, who came a close second in the 2002 presidential election, is the leading candidate in the opinions polls (with in excess of 30% of the vote).
Edgar Pataña, head of the COB trade union federation in El Alto, the 800,000-strong satellite city just outside the capital La Paz, told GLW that the presidential and parliamentary elections would change nothing and that "El Alto had its eyes on the constituent assembly".
Although yet to take a definitive position on the elections, the El Alto COB has not ruled out calling for a boycott.
"When the social movements of May and June decided on the demands of nationalisation of hydrocarbons and the constituent assembly, we accepted, and we strengthened the state apparatus, particularly the legislative power, allowing it to call early elections, something that the social movements never demanded or wanted", argued Olivera. "I believe it is a clear demonstration that this gigantic capacity of mobilisation still needs to implement a political project that allows the social movements to take into their own hands the destiny of the present and future.
"The elections are a space that the right â the political parties, the transnationals â has put forward as a way of putting the brakes on the advancement of the people...
"No matter which way you look at it, the elections are not the solution for the demands of the population. However, they are a space which has presented itself and which we, as autonomous social movements, are taking up in order to accumulate forces so as to permit us to pass over this bridge, which the elections are, towards these two grand demands [of nationalisation of gas resources and a constituent assembly].
"Obviously, it interests us, within the rules of this game established by the bourgeoisie, that Evo Morales enters into government, because this would make it less difficult to transit towards the two objectives that the people have put forward, but we are also conscious of the fact that it does not depend on the capacity of manoeuvring, nor does it depend on the political capacity of the government, whoever it might be, to take us to our objective. It depends fundamentally on continuing to develop and better the capacity of unity, of organisation and of mobilisations of the social movements."
Walter Villarroel is the president of the National Federation of Cooperative Miners of Bolivia (Fedecomin) which groups together 70,000 miners, and which lost a member during the May-June events, the only fatality of the uprising. He told GLW: "It is because of these big mobilisations that today we are talking about elections. For Fedecomin, there is no doubt that the elections are an alternative."
He explained that Fedecomin had called for the unity of all sectors behind Morales' candidacy but that he was worried "that there are still sectors that think of going via another path".
"In all the forums and seminars", he said, "the issue of hydrocarbons is being discussed. How can we recuperate them? The only alternative is to take power, take control of the executive and legislative power, taking the judicial power. So once Evo Morales gets into power we are committed to this project, having learned from the experience of the [leftist alliance] UDP in 1983, where the social sectors brought it to power and where it was those same social sectors who also brought it down.
"We need to strengthen [a Morales] government, if it comes in, so it can achieve stability."
Who will win the elections? What will a MAS government, if elected, deliver? How will the left respond? All these questions seem too hard to answer in this country wracked by a growing class polarisation, where the old parties can no longer govern over the indigenous majority as they used to, and the left and social movements debate how they can achieve their aims. What seems to be certain is what Schultz believes: "We're looking at a scenario where there'll be an awful lot of conflict in this country in 2006."
From Green Left Weekly, November 30, 2005.
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