Federico Fuentes
No one can talk about the crisis in Bolivia, the site of continuous waves of mobilisation, road blockades and general strikes that have thrown out two presidents already, without mentioning Evo Morales. No matter what the viewpoint of the analyst, Morales and his party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), are seen as key to understanding the unfolding situation.
From his left flank, Morales is under constant criticism for many of the positions he has taken. Some leaders of the Bolivian Workers Central (COB), El Alto's Federation of Neighbourhood Committees (FEJUVE), the Regional Workers Central of El Alto (COR) and Trotskyist groups frequently protest Morales' "moderate" stance. In the middle of last year, leaders of the COB, in a push led by Jamie Solares, expelled Morales from the organisation for being a "traitor" and "sell-out". Following the recent round of mobilisations, the COR declared Morales an "enemy" of the people of El Alto, because of MAS's "traitorous" actions in demobilising the peasants in country's interior.
This hostility has only been matched by the campaign run against MAS and Morales by the right. As far back as December 2001, the then-US ambassador to Bolivia compared Morales to Osama bin Laden, and called his cocalero (coca farmer) followers the "Andean Taliban".
One of the most frequent claims is that Morales is linked to the left-wing Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez. During the October 2003 uprising, which overthrew President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, then Lozada's defence minister, claimed that MAS was receiving funds from the Venezuelan government, a claim reiterated on January 20 this year by the recently resigned chief of US Southern Command armed forces, James Hill. Then, in February, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told the international media that "she was very concerned" by the strengthening in Bolivia "of a party made up of coca growers". Since then, her frequent anti-MAS outbursts have led Morales to refer to her as his campaign manager, as the more Washington attacks him, the higher his popularity goes.
Morales has his traditional base in the cocaleros, particularly from the Chapare region where he is a leader of the cocalero union. Many cocaleros were mine workers until they lost their jobs in the mid-1980s. Mine closures were a big consequence of the IMF's 1980s neoliberal project in Bolivia, pushed in part to destroy the base of the militant miners union, which had historically been the backbone of revolutionary struggle in Bolivia. Many of the 30,000 predominately indigenous miners turned to coca growing for subsistence, bringing with them a heritage of militant class struggle unionism.
By the late 1980s, the cocaleros had become a powerful symbol of resistance. The coca leaf is a powerful part of traditional indigenous culture, and their defence of the right to grow it, combined with a legacy of opposing military intervention in Bolivia, made the cocaleros symbols of the struggle for Bolivian sovereignty, in the face of imperialist encroachment.
While they continued to grow in strength throughout the early 1990s, according to Forrest Hylton writing in a January 27, 2003, Znet article, the cocaleros became isolated in the eastern lowlands due to the lack of organised opposition elsewhere in Bolivia and "suffered serious setbacks under [Hugo] Banzer's forced eradication" program between 1997-2001.
MAS emerged out of this struggle. In a November 2002 interview in The Ecologist, Morales explained: "After long experiences of broken promises in the countryside we had to come to the conclusion that what we needed was a way to change the whole political system. As long as we carried on voting for the mainstream parties, we knew we were going to keep seeing massacres, militarisation and bad economic policies."
So in 1995, after a few failed attempts, a national conference of cocalero and peasant unions was called to form a party, giving life to the Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (IPSP), which ran in the 1997 elections as MAS, as that name was already electorally registered.
Socialism?
MAS founder and ideologue Antonio Peredo Leigue, told Punto Final that MAS had come together as "a permanent contradiction between indigenists, Marxists and social-democratic conceptions".
When Resumen Latinoamericano journalist Diego Gonzalez asked Morales if he described himself as a Marxist, he replied "What is Marxism? I come from the peasant communities, from the people, not from the universities or the learning centers. I can talk about Marxism but what importance does that have? It is not about importing politics, ideologies, programs. The people know. Our organisations are wise enough to resolve their problems, in fact they are the reservoirs of knowledge in the defence of life, of humanity. Don't speak to me about Marxism, Leninism, Trotskyism, we lose time. Here it is about understanding and living our problems in order to propose solutions."
MAS' birth and early years coincided with a turning point in the class struggle, led by Bolivia's indigenous people. In early 2000, mass mobilisations in Cochabamba booted out US multinational Bechtel, which had bought out the region's water supply and increased water rates and charged for collected rainwater. That year, protests spread to the Aymara indigenous people of the altiplano highlands above La Paz.
The 2002 national elections propelled the country's indigenous people, with MAS and Morales as their most prominent representatives, to centre stage. Despite, or perhaps because of, comments by then US Ambassador Manuel Rocha that if Bolivians "elect those who want Bolivia to become a major cocaine exporter again, this will endanger the future of US assistance", Morales almost won the presidency to de Lozada, losing by less than 2%.
The growth of MAS has occurred despite a fall in cocalero numbers, caused by the coca elimination programs pushed on Bolivian governments by Washington, and despite MAS's refusal to make alliances with neoliberal parties, or even to accept government money for the election campaign. Indigenous parties, MAS and the Indigenous Pachakutik Movement (MIP) of Felipe Quispe, now held one-third of Bolivia's parliament.
Leftist political commentator and former guerilla fighter Alvaro Linera Garcia pointed out the significance of this in an March 27 interview in La Jornada: "The most important political fact in Bolivia in the last few years is that the indigenous peoples have been able to vote for other indigenous peoples. This had never happened before. This represents a symbolic revolution in a society as racist as that of Bolivia, and where indigenous people, despite being 62% of the population, had not participated in the structure of political power." This was vividly demonstrated by the refusal of MAS and MIP parliamentarians to allow parliament to meet until sessions were held with simultaneous translation into the three main indigenous languages, for the first time in Bolivian history.
As the indigenous people became more politically confident, class polarisation grew, culminating in the October 2003 uprising that overthrew de Lozada. Protests against the government's gas contracts that were favourable to transnationals, quickly led to calls for de Lozada's resignation, particularly as police violence increased. Lozada was eventually forced to flee in a helicopter to Miami, as La Paz was laid siege, sending a clear message to the ruling political elite that indigenous people were prepared to fight tooth and nail against leaders who were in the US's pocket.
De Lozada's overthrow handed the presidency to his vice-president, Carlos Mesa, with the agreement of almost all the social movement organisations. To get such support, Mesa pledged to move forward on the "October Agenda" — return control of Bolivia's gas to the people, a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution and re-found the nation with the active involvement of the indigenous majority, and trials of those responsible for the 67 deaths in the uprising.
The Mesa government created a real challenge for the left. Some of the more radical left, including the COB and MIP did not wait long to move back onto the streets in opposition to the new president. After an initial three-month truce, protests began agin. The COB called an indefinite strike from May 1, 2004, although it failed to mobilise any significant section of the population. Quispe resigned from parliament, saying he could no longer be a part of "this neoliberal institution", and would return to his indigenous base in the altiplano to take up arms against the government.
Morales and MAS, while supporting mobiliations of the popular movements, took a different position. In its assessment of the October 2003 uprising, published in the December 2003 Memoria, MAS said it "should put forward a critical support of the government without participation in the cabinet and other forms of the executive."
MAS assessed that there were three factors threatening the gains of the October uprising: the limitations of Mesa — a liberal politician who, although willing to bring about some changes, would not seriously challenge the oligarchy; the dangers posed by the military and repressive apparatus of the state, which have direct ties to the oligarchy; and the lack of a clearly articulated vision of an alternative economic/political structure that could unite the popular forces.
The growing rift in the movement came to a head in the July 18 referendum on gas last year, part of Mesa's strategy to meet the October Agenda. Whilst Quispe and Solares were calling for a boycott — even the burning of ballot boxes — MAS was one of the referendum's biggest supporters, which led to Morales's expulsion from the COB. Arguing that the referendum was an important gain from the October uprising, and offering an opportunity to decide the future of Bolivia's resources, Morales called for different responses to the five referendum questions than did Mesa.
Many on the radical left, however, correctly pointed out that the referendum had been worded in such vague terms that a favourable vote would give Mesa a "mandate" for any law he wanted. In the five questions, the word "nationalisation" did not appear once.
Not a single ballot box was burnt down and only a few protests registered on the day, signalling that the calls to actively obstruct the referendum process had no resonance amongst the masses. In a July 20 ZNet article, Hylton pointed out that the radical left had obtained some success, noting that abstentions were 10% higher than usual, and that more than 20% of votes cast were either blank or had "nationalisation" written on them. However, he added: "of the rank-and-file activists who voted, perhaps a majority voted 'yes' on the first three questions and no on the last two, just as MAS had advocated." The referendum showed that discontent was still high, but that the left was now split.
However, Mesa's breathing space did not last for long. By September, the struggle over gas had re-emerged on the streets, with both the radical left and MAS calling their own demonstrations. At the same time, Morales' discourse seemingly became more radical, as he stepped up his attacks on Mesa, arguing that Mesa was "going the same way" as de Lozada".
Morales' shift to the left appears to have been influenced by three factors. Firstly, Mesa's continued shift rightwards, signalled by: his attempts to re-form the neoliberal "megacoalition" in parliament; his unwillingness to support any gas bill that came close to the aspirations of the Bolivian masses; and his moves to restart coca eradication, as urged by the US.
The second factor was pointed out by Walter Chavez in a November 22 Inprecor article, where he noted that around the same time two different forces within MAS started arguing for a more conciliatory line towards Mesa. MAS senator and founder Filemon Escobar argued inside MAS that, in order to stave off rightist coup attempts, it was necessary to give complete support to Mesa. Escobar was expelled from MAS after allegations that he had taken money in return for not turning up to parliament during a vote to give US troops immunity on Bolivian territory. By January this year, Escobar, along with some MAS parliamentarians formed the pro-Mesa "Patriotic Bloc". Some left intellectuals also left MAS to take up positions in the Mesa cabinet.
The third, and perhaps key factor, was the influence of Morales's support base upon his position. There is no doubt that opportunist errors and political moderation, including at one stage rejecting gas nationalisation in any form, caused dissent within Morales' base. This was exacerbated by the September murder of a cocalero by anti-drug forces in the Chapare. In response, Morales called a meeting in the Chapare to discuss the next steps, from which he initiated protests that shook La Paz in October last year, around gas ownership and trial for those killed in the October uprising.
After Mesa hiked up fuel taxes on New Years Eve, Morales declared he was "enemy number 1" and initiated nationwide demonstrations during January. When the gas bill was due to go before Congress again in March, Morales initiated a wave of protests and road blockades. For a while MAS, COB, FEJUVE and others united to re-form the General Staff of the Peoples and organise united protests across the whole country.
However, this organisational unity was not maintained for the May-June mobilisation that led to Mesa's overthrow. In part, this was because of differences over the nationalisation demand, and what it meant. Undoubtedly, Morales was left behind by the masses, as even MAS leaders admitted, when he initially did not call for nationalisation, a position he shifted to during the mobilisations.
The biggest division between MAS and the other social movements, however, was over the demands of shutting down parliament and Mesa's resignation. Whilst the radical left support these, Morales argued it was dangerous to call for the shut down of parliament as it represented democracy, and Congress should be forced to respect the mandate of the people. He stated that Mesa should not resign, but instead recuperate the gas and call for a constituent assembly. If he was unable to do so, morales said he should step down and call new elections.
Alvaro Garcia Linera argued in the May 24 El Diario that the Second Gas War demands had acquired a clear political character, which led towards a new government. Linera points out that, given the contradictions and weaknesses in the movement, attaining power by insurrection or elections would be difficult, and give the right-wing opportunities to benefit. He argues that in order to carry out an insurrection, the social movements would have to confront the state repressive apparatus in a situation where the balance of forces inside that apparatus, despite some splits, was not favourable. The fractured nature of the left would also make the electoral road hard, a challenge the left may now have to face.
For now, the Bolivian masses continue to move forward. Linera wrote in the March 27 La Jornada: "No one can govern without taking into account the social movements; that is why, sooner or later, either by authoritarian, revolutionary or agreed upon manner (the last being the grand expectation of the majority), the situation will have to change."
A victory for MAS in the next elections would not only be a blow to the right, it would herald the indigenous people's capture of further political space — providing a powerful beacon for indigenous movements in Ecuador and Peru, and the election of a close friend and political ally of Cuban President Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. The question is whether the left can unite behind Morales, despite its differences, or allow disunity to open the door of the right to regain the initiative.
From Green Left Weekly, June 22, 2005.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.