Evo Morales

[Abood]

i was watchin' BBC last night and they were broadcasting the inauguration of the new Bolivian president, well i watched it. I dunno why im givin u my life story, lol..
just askin about ur opinions.
personally, i think he should be a great leader - well he gave a great speech and he seeks change.

[18tir]

This is good news. His rise to power in Bolivia and Bachelet's election in Chile are two decisive blows against U.S. imperialism in Latin America. Each leftist victory in an election like this is a blow to the imperial presence in South America and a win for the indigenous nationalist resistance, which Chavez is now apparently the leader of. Some in America are already talking of a leftist alliance from Fidel in Cuba to Chavez to Lula to Morales to Bachelet. Unfortunately, this also means there is going to be a reaction from the conservative pro-U.S. elements, such as amongst the huge businesses and the army.

Morales interview with the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/st...1692648,00.html (http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1692648,00.html)

[Abood]

thnx for the link.
well, its a point for socialism. my frends don't believe that socialism will work, cuz its a dream ideology. well, hah, one point for me :D
i hope he sticks to his promises and his speech :)

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Why Evo Morales is no answer (http://freepeoplesmovement.org/lib1a.html)

Michelle Bachelet is no socialist (http://wsws.org/articles/2006/jan2006/chil-j17.shtml)

[commiecrusader]

Bachelet certainly won't ally herself with Castro or Chavez I don't think. She is not in any way radical or truly socialist.

[fernando]

Well better than a die hard neoliberal like Fujimori or Pinochet right? I dont think you can expect a communist revolution or any form of communist system rising up very soon, not only has "communism" alienated itself from the masses (USSR and guerilla movements like Sendero Luminoso for example) but the US would simply take them out immediatly. Its going to be a slow but steady development and will hopefully work for the better of the poor people, which was the primary reason why communism was thought up...right?

[commiecrusader]

Well better than a die hard neoliberal like Fujimori or Pinochet right?
I don't deny this. He is undeniably better than either of these people.


I dont think you can expect a communist revolution or any form of communist system rising up very soon, not only has "communism" alienated itself from the masses
But if it's going to happen anywhere, then I think that Latin America is the most likely place for it to happen at the moment.


which was the primary reason why communism was thought up...right?
No. It was thought up because Marx saw it as the logical way in which society would progress, not because he thought that he wanted to end inequalities.

I would be very pleased for Morales, Castro, Chavez, Lula and Bachelet to join in an axis of leftism, but I fear that it may well not happen. Bachelet is the weakest link in that chain.

[fernando]

But if it's going to happen anywhere, then I think that Latin America is the most likely place for it to happen at the moment.

That same thing was said in the 60s and 70s if I remember correctly, however I do agree with you that a more left leaning Latin America is getting very close, perhaps even united.


No. It was thought up because Marx saw it as the logical way in which society would progress, not because he thought that he wanted to end inequalities.
So Marxism isnt a system which is really in the interest of the poor but more as a "logical reaction" in Marx' vision? What if Marx is wrong? Will the communists be brave enough to admit this? But yeah time will tell how things will end up in Latin America, I hope for the best, the people have suffered long enough!


I would be very pleased for Morales, Castro, Chavez, Lula and Bachelet to join in an axis of leftism, but I fear that it may well not happen. Bachelet is the weakest link in that chain.
Dont be too pessimistic :P Chavez, Lula and Krischner (sp?) are already forming a bloc in Latin America. Castro, Chavez and I also think Moralas now form a more "socialist" bloc, I could very well see these 5 countries forming some sort of bloc, Chile will eventually join in as well. Peru will hopefully get a more leftist (but not Garcia) government after their next elections.

[drain.you]

The continent is shaping up nicely for a United Soviet States of Latin America.

[Atlas Swallowed]

The continent is shaping up for some real opposition to US imperilism.

[fernando]

Originally posted by [email protected] 23 2006, 08:00 PM
The continent is shaping up nicely for a United Soviet States of Latin America.
Then it will be doomed from the beginning...we dont need another USSR...

[violencia.Proletariat]

Originally posted by [email protected] 23 2006, 04:00 PM
The continent is shaping up nicely for a United Soviet States of Latin America.
None of these states are run on councils. What are you trying to get across with this name?

[drain.you]

Then it will be doomed from the beginning...we dont need another USSR...
Why would a country ran under soviets be doomed from the beginning? :S


None of these states are run on councils. What are you trying to get across with this name?
Well it seems that L America will unite within our lifetime and soviets is one way to organise it once it does.

[fernando]

Well perhaps its because I simply assumed you meant a Latin American version of the USSR. The superpower that the USSR might have been, it eventually collapsed because its economy and political system was too dependend on the need of an enemy (here the US and capitalism), hence when Gorbatjov (sp?) made major changes in policy (less investment in military, perestroyka etc) it started to collapse.


Well it seems that L America will unite within our lifetime and soviets is one way to organise it once it does.
Hmm a united Latin America would be great, but united in what way? I seriously doubt that it would be one state similar to the USSR or the former Yugoslavia. I think it would be a more leftist version of the EU, but then hopefully more aimed at the interests of the masses instead of the wealthy elite.

However Im curious how this socialist Latin America will deal with the indiginous tribes and cultures present there? Will they be forced to follow the socialist doctrines an throw away their culture? It's interesting to see how Latin America (if united) would react to the great diversity of cultures present on its continent.

[matiasm]

Originally posted by Atlas [email protected] 23 2006, 08:08 PM
The continent is shaping up for some real opposition to US imperilism.
no not the continent, just venezuela and cuba and maybe bolivia.

Chile, no they will not put up a fight against imperialism, how can you put up a fight against it when you are still continuning a neoliberalist program?? (which is what bachelet is doing)

[Delirium]

It is nontheless an undeniably good trend.

[ComTom]

LEts keep in mind that even Liberal goverments that have atleast wanted some poor people off the street have been overthrown by the US. I think that this rise of socialism will be healthy for the people of South and central America.

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

The contintent is shaping up for bourgeois liberal governments, the same ones that have been rulling it. There's nothing new but their self affixed labels. Do you get this excited when the Democrats win an election?

I'm starting to get really fucking annoyed at this place.

[commiecrusader]

The contintent is shaping up for bourgeois liberal governments, the same ones that have been rulling it. There's nothing new but their self affixed labels.
We will see if their actions match your words. No one is claiming that these people are going to lead revolutions and transform their countries into communist nations, but they are (apart from maybe Bachelet) more leftist than their predecessors. The further left the world goes the better, even if it never resulted in communism.


Do you get this excited when the Democrats win an election?
No. However if the communist/socialist party in america won then I would be very excited.


I'm starting to get really fucking annoyed at this place.
:blink: what is wrong with you? Why are you so angry?

[Faceless]

The contintent is shaping up for bourgeois liberal governments, the same ones that have been rulling it. There's nothing new but their self affixed labels. Do you get this excited when the Democrats win an election?

I'm starting to get really fucking annoyed at this place.

dude, calm down.

Castro based his model for Cuba initially upon the United States until he realised that even minor reforms will incur the wrath of imperialism, thus he was forced to turn in a socialist direction, and base his power upon the poor workers and peasants. Unless chavez is killed and the revolution destroyed, there is every chance that this could happen. Of course, it means that he will need the integrity of Castro not to sell out. Lula sold out. It is true though that some people can not be bought. It remains to be seen whether or not this will happen in Bolivia. However, your anti-Morales rants; what will they achieve? If you are correct, then you will simply gain the right to stick your tongue out at us and say, "I told you so!" If you are wrong, you may end up having to back track embarassingly, as the Socialist Party and many SWPers are here in Britain today over Chavez. Either way, you have chosen the easy way out. The proper attitude would be to take a stance of critical support for Morales and Chavez. Where they fulfill their comittments you should be supportive, where they fall short you must stress where they fall short. If the leaders sell out, that does not make these elections of "leftist" leaders any less significant, as you no doubt would like them to be. These leaders have made comittments, it will be a dangerous thing indeed for them to sell the workers and peasants short. In Bolivia two governments have been toppled already.

Your "article" makes examples of rhetoric and actions which appear non-socialist from morales. The same could be seen of Chavez. This lead people to dismiss him early. They automatically assumed that he had the consciousness of a marxist, and judged him on these standards. No revolution will be a straight line.

[Sugar Hill Kevis]

I like his jumper

[Karl Marx's Camel]

The contintent is shaping up for bourgeois liberal governments, the same ones that have been rulling it. There's nothing new but their self affixed labels. Do you get this excited when the Democrats win an election?

I'm starting to get really fucking annoyed at this place.
I agree with you.

[Fidelbrand]

First we have a man of Fidelity, now we have Morales.

Hugo, Fidel and Morales are the new Latin American hopes.

[Andy Bowden]

CDL is right. People should stop acting as cheerleaders for these people, we should advocate support for the movements in these countries, not their reformist leaders. Our Brazilian Comrades know painfully well that Reformists can use revolutionary rhetoric and shite upon the working class when they get into power.


Morales could easily be a Lula and not a Chavez. Our role should be to support the movements, and increase their power to the extent that Morales has no choice and must swing to the left to stay in power.

[Luís Henrique]

Originally posted by [email protected] 25 2006, 05:46 PM
First we have a man of Fidelity, now we have Morales.
Ah, yeah, but Chávez is the key. ;)

Luís Henrique

[Catch22]

Originally posted by Andy [email protected] 25 2006, 08:53 PM
CDL is right. People should stop acting as cheerleaders for these people, we should advocate support for the movements in these countries, not their reformist leaders. Our Brazilian Comrades know painfully well that Reformists can use revolutionary rhetoric and shite upon the working class when they get into power.


Morales could easily be a Lula and not a Chavez. Our role should be to support the movements, and increase their power to the extent that Morales has no choice and must swing to the left to stay in power.
Indeed, the movements in Bolivia are extremely powerful and extremely wary of elected officials, including the MAS. Morales is going to come into power, dance around the issues for about 6 months and then promptly witness the disintegration of his rule as the social movements mobilize to crush him. Morales only won because the movements agreed to a unified ticket and the creation of a constituent assembly. If Morales doesn’t do that then he won’t be around for very long. Considering his need to govern with one of the rightist parties in the senate, I think that day will come pretty soon.

[Fidelbrand]

Originally posted by Andy [email protected] 26 2006, 04:53 AM
Our role should be to support the movements, and increase their power to the extent that Morales has no choice and must swing to the left to stay in power.
That's cunning, but it's also the reality of politics. :unsure:

But it should be cautioned that anyone who doesn't agree with the Latin American Trio can swing their tails to U.S. for political/economic backups. ;)

[вор в законе]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/guides/456900/456942/img/1136312635.gif

This is South America's political map, provided by BBC.

[chebol]

Ah, yeah, but Chávez is the key. wink.gif

Luís Henrique

Atrocious. :lol:

Seriously, tho'. The whole point is that these leaders have been put there by the people. We should show critical support for such leaders, while, yes, supporting the organised popular movements. That is not what CDL is about tho'.

From even before Morales' election, he was decrying him as a traitor.

Now maybe CDL's belief will be proved right, but until then we've got the at least equally valid beliefs of 53.7 percent of the bolivian electorate which say something else- for now.


"the key." damn. I must be getting old. That is really, really bad. :D

[Tekun]

I recognize that the left is gaining support in South America
And as much as I would like to support Morales, Bachelet, and Silva for leaning to the left-I am a socialist, and these leaders are definitely not socialists
The only leader I "admire" if at that, is Morales for opposing the US and his opposition to intl imperialism (in addition to being the first indigenous president in Bolivia's history)

I do not believe that these leaders will change very much, they need to adopt a position like the one Fidel took during and after the revolution
One to make strides and changes in society in order to uplift the ppl
They should adopt socialism, and begin to give the proletariat/peasants the power and means of production which they desperately need

I don't really understand why many of our members are happy and excited about these left leaning leaders
Bachelet and Silva are bourgeoisie leftists who try to pass themselves off as socialist/leftists
Yet despite their "socialist" rhetoric, therez still a big gap between the classes, poverty is still prevalent throughout Brazil, and economic liberalism drains these countries of natural resources which belong to its citizens
In addition, they're still siding with the enemy, they're willing to do business with the entity which oppresses them
I reject and do not support Bachelet or Silva

As far as Morales...
Thanks to Companero's article, I've been rethinking my position regarding Morales
And its true, he wants to give peasants or the indigenous ppl political power, yet not to advance socialism, but to adopt Andean capitalism
His MAS is not socialist, and it has had a history of working with Bolivia's ruling parties

Yet, I will reserve my condemnation for him until I see some policies enacted
I hope he keeps learning from Fidel and Chavez
Time will tell whether or not he actually leans way to the left
Hopefully he dismisses his libertarian stance to help the peasants/indigenous
And he adopts real socialism to help everyone in Bolivia

Although Chavez is not socialist, some of his policies reflect socialism, and as far as his literacy campaign and his nationalizing of certain industries goes, Im starting to really support this guy
Hope he's ready to move Venezuela into a dictatorship of the proletariat

[Technocrates]

Democratic socialism is always better than a dictatorship of the proletariat, I find. I hope Chavez moves it more in that direction.

[Fidelbrand]

Originally posted by [email protected] 27 2006, 08:27 PM
Democratic socialism is always better than a dictatorship of the proletariat, I find. I hope Chavez moves it more in that direction.
Not disagreeing with you, but can you explain it further in stating why do you think so ?

[( R )evolution]

I believe that Bachelet will not do anything radical. But Castro and Chavez and maybe Morales have the ability and the want to do something. I could see a left Latin America but more re-forms and the US needs to stay out of other country's politics (yeah we know that is gonna happen)

[chebol]

Two articles, just to keep abreast of what's happening in Bolivia:

The Role of the International Indigenous Movement and What the Left is Missing
What Brought Evo Morales to Power?
http://www.counterpunch.org/ortiz02102006.html
By ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ

What has been left out of reports and analysis in both the mainstream press and among anti-imperialists and leftists about the triumph of Evo Morales' election as President of Bolivia is the role played by the three-decade international indigenous movement that preceded it. Few are even aware of that powerful and remarkable historic movement, which springs from generations of grassroots organizing.

If the left, particularly the Latin American left, misses this point, it's a shame, as mistrust of and racism against the indigenous nations has been the Achilles heel of previous revolutionary movements in Latin America (as well as North America).

Indeed, some indigenous activists and organizations in the Andean region are wary of Evo Morales because of his left politics and alliances, for the very reason that the Latin American left has so consistently either ignored indigenous issues and aspirations, or used the indigenous and tossed them aside (recall that the liberation armies of Bolivar and San Martin and the independence movement and 20th century revolution in Mexico, as well as the recent Guatemalan revolution, were made up of indigenous foot soldiers).

The burden is on the American (and I mean Western Hemisphere) left to catch up with what has been going on with the indigenous movement in order to understand the victory of Evo Morales, which is a victory for the indigenous peoples of the world AND for anti-imperialism/anti-capitalism. If there is ever to be socialism and just societies in the Americas, the leadership and form of it must come from the indigenous peoples. Peruvian communist pioneer, José Carlos Mariátegui recognized this reality, and it's time to take another look at past and future strategies and not just pay guilty lip service to the "plight" of indigenous peoples.
Here's a short history, with references for further study, of the international indigenous movement.

Read the rest at: http://www.counterpunch.org/ortiz02102006.html

Pushing Reforms While Under Fire
Evo Morales: the Early Days
http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach02112006.html
By ROGER BURBACH

Evo Morales is just an inspirational symbol for his people? Think again. Bolivia's first Indian president has shown political acuity in his early days in office, skillfully maneuvering and sticking to his radical program for transforming the country while keeping adversaries at home and abroad at bay.

On Feb. 6, just 15 days after his inauguration, Morales called for the mobilization of the country's peasant organizations to shield his government against efforts by "some transnational corporations" to destabilize the country to stop the "nationalization" of energy resources. The plot, he said, had been detected by the armed forces.

A day after swearing in, Morales shook up the Bolivian high command by choosing a low-ranking general to head the military, effectively forcing higher-ranking generals to resign. The move was a key move, as the Bolivian armed forces have a long history of intervening in Bolivian politics.

Morales also called on peasant and other popular organizations to rally behind his call for the election of a constituent assembly in early July, to draft a new constituent for Bolivia. "The oligarchs," he said, "should not be given time to breathe" as the country tries to reshape its basic institutions.

Read the rest at: http://www.counterpunch.org/burbach02112006.html

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
If there is ever to be socialism and just societies in the Americas, the leadership and form of it must come from the indigenous peoples.

Primitivist nonsense.

Probably based on the premise that there is something "inherently sacred" about "being indigenous".

There isn't.

Uninhabited territories are settled by groups of people...who hold onto them until they run into technologically more advanced peoples.

There have been some exceptions to that...but not very many.

You may find this "sad" or "unjust"...but arguing with reality on a "moral basis" is generally about as productive as trying to outyell a hurricane.

This is not to argue, of course, that non-indigenous cultures will not borrow cultural artifacts from indigenous cultures.

*lights cigarette* :D

It's not totally beyond the realm of possibility that 22nd century communism could borrow some social practices from indigenous cultures...but I think it's rather wildly unlikely.

Social forms that were invented to serve the needs of nomads, hunter-gatherers, and primitive agriculturists are usually totally unsuitable for "high tech" cultures.

As a historical materialist would expect. :)

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Yeah, that's crazy to expect that the leadership of a revolutionary society to reflect the actual population.

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by [email protected] 11 2006, 10:55 PM
Yeah, that's crazy to expect that the leadership of a revolutionary society to reflect the actual population.
She said "leadership and form of it".

The leading personalities could come from any source within the country.

The forms will not look anything like the forms associated with "traditional indigenous cultures".

Why would you expect otherwise?

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[Ligeia]

I've read an interview with Alvaro Garcia Linera,who may be vicepresident of the MAS(or is he already?).

And there he tells that they want "Andean capitalism" as it's a form of postcapitalism,and more advanced,a transitional stage to socialism.They want this since Bolivia isn't a high developed country but they hope socialism to come there in 20-30 years.

What do you think lies behind these statements?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

I think:


As Bolpress pointed out, "On the question of socialism ... he [Alvaro Garcia Linera, Morales' Vice-president] has worked hard to convince the electorate that he will never mention this word again."

&


Morales and Garcia Linera themselves are the first to quell the exaggerations from all sides of the political spectrum, saying, "We should admit that Bolivia will still be capitalist in the next 50 to 100 years."

http://www.freepeoplesmovement.org/lib1a.html

[Ligeia]

I've read this artcle and the original from bolpress,too but what does this mean?

Does it mean that they are making the same policy with words of the left?

Linera calls himself a marxist but it's sure they won't apply socialism,the statement before,proofed that,too,so what do they want?

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Capitalism. They are bourgeois liberals, nothing more.

[chebol]

Just for the debate, another view...


Evo Morales, Communitarian Socialism, and the Regional Power Block
Heinz Dieterich
MRZine, January 7, 2006
http://mltoday.com/Pages/NLiberation/Diete...EvoMorales.html (http://mltoday.com/Pages/NLiberation/Dieterich-EvoMorales.html)

[RedskinUltraRMC]

Bill Van Auken - World Socialist Web Site
Bolivia's "socialist" president-elect Morales guarantees private property (http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jan2006/boli-j04.shtml)

James Petras - CounterPunch
The Bankers Can Rest Easy - Evo Morales: All Growl, No Claws? (http://www.counterpunch.org/petras01042006.html)
A Bizarre Beginning in Bolivia - Inside Evo Morales's Cabinet (http://www.counterpunch.org/petras02042006.html)

Gretchen Gordon - ZMag
The New Bolivian Experience (http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=52&ItemID=9670)

[redstar2000]

Originally posted by chebol+Feb 12 2006, 07:59 PM--> (chebol @ Feb 12 2006, 07:59 PM) Just for the debate, another view...


Evo Morales, Communitarian Socialism, and the Regional Power Block
Heinz Dieterich
MRZine, January 7, 2006
http://mltoday.com/Pages/NLiberation/Diete...EvoMorales.html (http://mltoday.com/Pages/NLiberation/Dieterich-EvoMorales.html) [/b]

Heinz Dieterich
If we translate the formulation to a more precise language, we have to say that we are treating with a model of third-worldist Keynesian developmentalism, that is, a market economy with a strong developmentalist and protectionist function of the State, within a bourgeois political superstructure and an environment of abysmal neocolonial socio-economic destruction.

"Communitarian socialism" = development of modern capitalism.

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[norwegian commie]

I think he is a great leader. He has already decreased his own salary with i think it was 60%.
The vice president does not get hes own house, he sais its big enough for us both.
That i admire, he alsoe decreased the maximum wage of all goverment employees. He is moweing more and more to the left.

You guys get so caught up in critizising every left movement that occurs.
Meanewhile revolutions are dying. Try seeing the possibilities not only the errors of the system. as long as it is made by man it will have faults.

Look at Chavez he started of way moore "bluish" than he is now!
He now openly supports and honor Castro. Critisise the US, making him what they call a second Castro. The leftist ideas are spreading and gaining power in Latin Amerika. And when it needs help illsure as hell be ther! In our USSR.
If the society continues like this, man will die in lack of food and ressorses.
Latin America is only little ahed of her time! Our time will come, we shall se red flags blistering in the wind once moore!

[norwegian commie]

Democratic socialism is always better than a dictatorship of the proletariat, I find. I hope Chavez moves it more in that direction.

I think the dictatorship of the proletariat is nessesary in new socialist countries.
Preventing the borgeise controll or influence over the goverment.
Then you will be one step closer to true communism, and the classes will be erased. Then there will be no proletariate and it will no longer be nessesary.

The borgeise will come back with guns, and political power after the revolution. Taking some measures to reduse their influence on society if only smart.

[chebol]

New Left Review 37, January-February 2006
http://www.newleftreview.net/Issue37.asp?Article=05
Bolivia’s new vice-president analyses the dual crisis of his country’s state. Exhaustion of the neoliberal primary-export model, and bankruptcy of a ‘colonial’ republican order founded on mestizo superiority.

ÁLVARO GARCÍA LINERA
STATE CRISIS AND POPULAR POWER

Three factors define the functioning, stability and representative capacity of a state. The first is the overall framework of social forces: the correlation between the different coalitions, both dominant and subordinate, contesting the reconfiguration of what Bourdieu called ‘state capital’—the ability to influence decisions on matters of common import. Secondly, there is the system of political institutions and rules that mediate the coexistence of hierarchical social forces. In effect, this institutional framework is a materialization of the founding correlation of forces that give rise to a particular state regime, and the means by which it legally reproduces itself. Thirdly, every state depends upon a structure of common categories of perception, a series of mobilizing beliefs that generates a degree of social and moral conformity among both ruling and ruled, and which takes material form through the state’s cultural repertoire and rituals.

When these three components of a country’s political life are visibly healthy and functioning, we can speak of an optimal correspondence between state regime and society. When one or all of these factors is suspended or ruptured, we are presented with a crisis of the state, manifested in the antagonism between the political world and its institutions on the one hand, and the opposing actions by large-scale social coalitions on the other. This is precisely what has been happening in Bolivia in recent years. The successive uprisings and popular upheavals that have rocked the country since 2000 may best be understood as symptoms of a profound state crisis.

This crisis has a double character. In the short term, it is a crisis of the neoliberal model, and the social and ideological basis on which it has been constructed in Bolivia. But it is also, to paraphrase Braudel, a crisis of the longue durée: an institutional and ideological crisis of the republican state, premised since its foundation on a colonial relationship to the indigenous majority of the Bolivian people. Let us examine how these aspects are manifested at the social, institutional and ideological levels in Bolivia today.

Framework of social forces

The starting point for analysis of the balance of social forces in Bolivia since the mid-1980s is the political and cultural defeat of the labour movement organized around the cob. [1] For decades after the popular revolution of 1953, this had articulated the needs of a wide front of urban and rural working classes, representing popular demands regarding the administration of the social surplus through structures such as union membership and workers’ joint management. After the dispersal of this labour movement, a social bloc consisting of business fractions connected to the world market, elite political parties, foreign investors and international regulatory bodies was consolidated, which then took centre stage in the definition of public policy. For the next fifteen years, these forces became the sole subjects of decision-making and initiative in public administration, reconfiguring the economic and social organization of the country under promises of modernization and globalization—first and second-generation structural reforms, privatizations, decentralization, tariff-cutting and so forth.

Since the turn of the millennium, this relationship of forces has been challenged from below, and the guaranteed elitism of the ‘neoliberal-patrimonial state’ thrown into question, as new forms of organization and politicization have reversed the footing of the subaltern classes. The protests and road blockades of April and September 2000, July 2001 and June 2002 signalled a regional reconstitution of social movements capable of imposing public policies, legal regimes and even modifications to the distribution of the social surplus through the strength of their mobilizations. [2] Laws such as No. 2029, which sought to redefine ownership of water, and laws enabling the sale of state enterprises into private hands, tax increases, etc, were annulled or modified under pressure from social movements and popular uprisings. Presidential decrees such as that closing the coca market or mandating interdiction in the Yungas had to be withdrawn for the same reason. Financial legislation was amended in line with the national demands of organized popular groups (indigenous communities, retirees, coca-growing peasants, co-operative miners, policemen), demonstrating the emergence of social blocs which, at the margins of parliament, and—following the mas successes in 2002—with support from within it, have the strength to stop the implementation of government policies, and impose the redistribution of public resources by non-parliamentary means.

The important thing to note about these popular groupings, hitherto excluded from decision-making, is that the demands they raise immediately seek to modify economic relations. Thus their recognition as a collective political force necessarily implies a radical transformation of the dominant state form, built on the marginalization and atomization of the urban and rural working classes. Moreover—and this is a crucial aspect of the current reconfiguration—the leaderships of these new forces are predominantly indigenous, and uphold a specific cultural and political project. In contrast to the period that opened with the 1930s, when the social movements were articulated around a labour unionism that held to an ideal of mestizaje, and was the result of an economic modernization carried out by business elites, today the social movements with the greatest power to interrogate the political order have an indigenous social base, and spring from the agrarian zones excluded from or marginalized by the processes of economic modernization. The Aymaras of the altiplano, the cocaleros of the Yungas and Chapare, the ayllus of Potosí and Sucre and the Indian people of the east have replaced trade unions and popular urban organizations as social protagonists. And despite the regional or local character of their actions, they share a matrix of indigenous identity that calls into question what has been the unvarying nucleus of the Bolivian state for 178 years: its monoethnicity.

In addition, the elite coalition is itself showing signs of fatigue and internal conflict. The economic programme of the past twenty years—privatization of public enterprises, externalization of profit, coca eradication—has resulted in a narrowing of opportunities for some sections of the national bourgeoisie, exacerbated by the shrinking of tax revenues owing to the growth of the informal sector. As their long-term outlook has darkened, the different elite fractions have begun to pull apart, squabbling over the reduction of profits transferred to the state, the refusal by foreign refiners to adjust the purchase price of petrol, the renegotiation of gas prices with Brazil, [3] land taxes, etc. Their shared project of the last decade is over.

The backdrop to the current crisis of the business bloc and to the insurgency of social movements is the Bolivian economy’s primary-export, enclave character. [4] The fact that industrial modernity is present only as small islands in a surrounding sea of informality and a semi-mercantile peasant economy limits the formation of an internal market capable of supporting value-added business activity, even if it reduces wage costs. Vulnerability to the fluctuations of world commodity prices is an endemic feature. In that sense we can say that the longue durée crisis of the state is the political correlate of an equally long-term economic crisis of the primary-export model, which is incapable of productively retaining surpluses, and hence unable to deploy the capital necessary for national development. Thus the Santa Cruz Civic Committees’ proposals for departmental autonomy, renewed every time there is a discussion about how income from hydrocarbons is to be allocated, or the demands for self-government by the indigenous communities, not only question the configuration of state power, but also reveal the underlying crisis of the established economic order.

Political institutions

Since 1985, Bolivia’s elite political parties have sought, with the authoritarian support of the state, to substitute themselves for the old regime of political mediation carried out by the trade unions, which had linked the communal heritage of traditional societies with the collective actions of workers in large-scale enterprises. The party system, under Bolivia’s particularly skewed constitution, was prescriptively defined as the mechanism through which the exercise of citizenship should function. However, it is clear that the old party groupings have not proved able to turn themselves into genuine vehicles for political mediation, capable of channelling social demands towards the state. They remain, above all, familial and business networks through which members of the elite can compete for access to the state administration as if it were a patrimonial possession; connections to the voting masses are largely organized around clientelist links and ties of privilege. [5]

With the syndical basis of Bolivian citizenship destroyed, and a new form of electoral participation barely perceptible, other popular forms of political mediation began to emerge with the turn of the century. Social movements, new and old, have asserted their own modes of deliberation, mass meetings and collective action. There are thus two types of institutional system in Bolivia today. In the Chapare, Yungas and Norte de Potosí regions, community forms are superimposed not only on party organization, but also on state institutions themselves, to the extent that mayors, corregidores and subprefects are de facto subordinated to peasant confederations. In the case of the northern altiplano, several subprefectures and police posts have disappeared over the last three years and ‘community police’ have been created in provincial capitals to preserve public order in the name of the peasant federations. During the blockades that accompanied the anti-privatization protests of 2003–05, hundreds of communities on the altiplano constituted what they call the ‘great indigenous barracks’ of Q’alachaca, an ad hoc confederation of militant ayllus and villages.

The Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta’s notion of the ‘apparent state’ is of clear relevance here. Due to the social and civilizational diversity of the country, large stretches of territory and sections of the population remain outside, or have not interiorized, the disciplines of the capitalist labour process; they recognize other temporalities, other systems of authority, and affirm collective aims and values different from those offered by the Bolivian state. [6] Through the political and economic struggles of the last five years, these layers have undergone a process of increasing institutional consolidation, in some cases permanent (politicized agrarian indigenous territories) and in others sporadic (urban areas of Cochabamba, La Paz and El Alto). As a result, the neoliberal state has been confronted with a fragmenting institutional order and robbed of governing authority. The alternative system, anchored in the world of indigenous experience marginalized by Bolivia’s uneven modernization process, is challenging the state’s centuries-long pretence at a modernity based on texts and institutions that are not even respected by the elites who propound them; and who themselves have never abandoned the methods of seigneurial and patrimonial politics. The generalized corruption in the state apparatus is nothing other than the modernized representation of these habits through which elites in power take on and reproduce state functions.

The liberal-capitalist political culture and institutions that are both being overtaken by the social movements, and traduced by the actual behaviour of the elites in power, presuppose the individuation of society: the dissolution of traditional loyalties, seigneurial relations and non-industrial productive systems. These processes, in Bolivia, have affected at most one third of the population. The Bolivian state, however, including its current ‘neoliberal’ variant, has, as a sort of political schizophrenia, constructed normative regimes and institutions that bear no correspondence to the ‘patchwork’ reality of our society which, in its structural majority, is neither industrial nor individuated. The effect of the indigenous and plebeian social movements, which in Habermasian terms stress ‘normative’ over ‘communicative’ action, is thus to call into question the validity of republican state institutions that present a mere simulacrum of modernity, in a society which still lacks the structural and material bases upon which such modernity might be based.

Mobilizing beliefs

Since 1985, the ideological blueprints offered to the Bolivian population have been the free market, privatization, governability and representative democracy. All these proposals were illusions, but well-founded ones, since although they never materialized in any substantial sense, they did bring about a realignment of actions and beliefs in a society which imagined that, through them and the sacrifices they demanded, it would be possible to attain wellbeing, modernity and social recognition. The upper, middle and subaltern urban classes—the latter having abandoned all expectations of protection from the state and workplace unions—saw in this offer a new path to stability and social betterment.

By 2000, the gulf between expectations and realities was driving a disappointed population into conflict with state authority. The promise of modernity had resulted only in intensified exploitation and an increase in informal labour (from 55 to 68 per cent in 20 years); that of social betterment, in a greater concentration of wealth and a refinement in forms of ethnic discrimination. Privatization, especially of hydrocarbons, far from expanding the internal market, has seen an accelerated flight of earnings into foreign hands. This breakdown between official schemas and lived reality has left large sections of the population highly receptive to new loyalties and mobilizing beliefs. Among these are the national-ethnic claims of the indigenous masses, which have produced a sort of indigenous nationalism in the Aymara section of the altiplano; state recovery of privatized public resources—water, hydrocarbons—and the broadening of social participation and democracy through recognition of non-liberal political practices of a collective and traditional bent (indigenous community, union, etc). These convictions are actively displacing loyalties to the liberal, privatizing ideology of the state.

We could say that the Bolivian state has lost its monopoly over the capital of recognition, and that we are passing through a period of transition in the structures of allegiance. A striking feature of the new movements is that they dispute both the discourses of neoliberal modernity and the founding certainties of the republican state—that there is an inherent inequality between indigenous and mestizos, and that Indians are not capable of governing the country. The fact that the Indians, accustomed to giving their votes to the ‘mist’is’ (mestizos), have over the past few years voted extensively for the emerging indigenous leaders, denotes a watershed in the symbolic structures of a profoundly colonial and racialized society. For indigenous social forces, the construction of urban hegemony is posed as a central strategic task, for it is here that their identity confronts its own hybridity or dissolution in face of the composition—not without ambiguities—of mestizo identities, both elite and popular.

In Bolivia, then, the pillars of both the ‘neoliberal’ model and the republican state have deteriorated rapidly. It is this conjunction of crises that helps to explain not just the radical nature of the political conflict over the past five years, but also its complexity and irresolution. Such crises cannot endure for long, because no society can withstand long periods of political vacuum or uncertainty. Sooner or later there will be a lasting recomposition of forces, beliefs and institutions that will inaugurate a new period of state stability. The question for Bolivia is what kind of state this mutation will create. There could be increased repression, leading to the introduction of a ‘neoliberal-authoritarian’ state as the new political form, which might perhaps solve the crisis of the courte durée, but not that of the longue durée, whose problems would soon manifest themselves again. Or there could be instead an opening of new spaces for the exercise of democratic rights (multicultural political forms, combined communitarian-indigenous and liberal institutions) and economic redistribution (a productive role for the state, self-management, etc), capable of addressing both dimensions of the crisis. In the latter scenario, a democratic resolution of the neoliberal state crisis will have to involve a simultaneous multicultural resolution of the crisis of the colonial republican state.

Hegemonies, Zavaleta argues, can grow tired: there are moments when the state ceases to be irresistible, when the population abandons the ideological frameworks that allowed it to accept the elite’s ordering of society as desirable. The uprising of October 2003 was the maximal expression of the masses’ dissent from the ‘neoliberal-patrimonial’ state, and hence of the exhaustion of its form of hegemony. [7] If each state crisis generally goes through four phases—manifestation of the crisis; transition or systemic chaos; conflictive emergence of a new principle of state order; consolidation of the new state—October, with its hundreds of thousands of Indians and urban masses in revolt in the cities of La Paz and El Alto, and its culmination in the flight of President Sánchez de Lozada, inescapably marked the Bolivian state’s entry into the transitional phase. The initial acceptance of the constitutional succession of Vice-President Carlos Mesa was due not so much to deference towards parliamentarism as to a popular attachment to the old prejudice of the personalization of power, the belief that a change of personnel is in itself a change of regime. But there was also a certain historical lucidity with regard to the further consequences implicit, given the present correlation of forces, in the abandonment of liberal-democratic institutions.

But if there can be no state domination without the consent of the dominated—progressively eroded in Bolivia since the blockades of 2000—there can be no successful opposition without the capacity to postulate an alternative order. This is precisely what the insurgents discovered: they were able to paralyse the state with their blockades but were unable to put forward an alternative and legitimate power project. Hence the ambiguous and confused truce of the Mesa period (2003–05), during which the distinguished broadcaster attempted to channel the insurgents’ minimum programme (resignation of Sánchez de Lozada, constituent assembly, new hydrocarbons law), while leaving in place the entire governmental machinery of neoliberal reforms.

Revolutionary epochs

It was Marx who proposed the concept of the ‘revolutionary epoch’ in order to understand extraordinary historical periods of dizzying political change—abrupt shifts in the position and power of social forces, repeated state crises, recomposition of collective identities, repeated waves of social rebellion—separated by periods of relative stability during which the modification, partial or total, of the general structures of political domination nevertheless remains in question.

A revolutionary epoch is a relatively long period, of several months or years, of intense political activity in which: (a) social sectors, blocs or classes previously apathetic or tolerant of those in power openly challenge authority and claim rights or make collective petitions through direct mobilizations (gas and water coordinadoras, indigenous, neighbourhood organizations, cocaleros, small-scale farmers); (b) some or all of these mobilized sectors actively posit the necessity of taking state power (mas, csutcb, cob); [8] © there is a surge of adherence to these proposals from large sections of the population (hundreds of thousands mobilized in the Water War, against the tax hike, in the Gas War, in the elections to support Indian candidates); the distinction between governors and governed begins to dissolve, due to the growing participation of the masses in political affairs; and (d) the ruling classes are unable to neutralize these political aspirations, resulting in a polarization of the country into several ‘multiple sovereignties’ [9] that fragment the social order (the loss of the ‘authority principle’ from April 2000 till today).

In revolutionary epochs societies fragment into social coalitions, each with proposals, discourses, leaderships and programmes for political power that are antagonistic to and incompatible with one another. This gives rise to ‘cycles of protest’, [10] waves of mobilization followed by withdrawals and retreat, which serve to demonstrate the weakness of those in power (Banzer in April and October 2000 and June 2001; Quiroga in January 2002; Sánchez de Lozada in February and October 2003). Such protests also serve to incite or ‘infect’ [11] other sectors into using mass mobilization as a mechanism to press their demands (teachers, the retired, the landless, students). At the same time, these mobilizations fracture and destabilize the social coalition of the ruling bloc, giving rise to counter-reactions (the so-called business-civic-political ‘crescent’ in the east of the country), which in turn produce another wave of mobilizations, generating a process of political instability and turbulence that fuels itself. Not every revolutionary epoch ends in a revolution, understood as a change of the social forces in power, which would have to be preceded by an insurrectionary situation. There are revolutionary epochs that lead to a restoration of the old regime (coup d’état), or to a negotiated and peaceful modification of the political system through the partial or substantial incorporation of the insurgents and their proposals for change into the power bloc.

The present political period in Bolivia can best be characterized as a revolutionary epoch. Since 2000, there has been a growing incorporation of broader social sectors into political decision-making (water, land, gas, Constituent Assembly) through their union, communal, neighbourhood or guild organizations; there has been a continual weakening of governmental authority and fragmentation of state sovereignty; and there has been an increasing polarization of the country into two social blocs bearing radically distinct and opposed projects for economy and state.

At one pole, the fundamental nucleus is the indigenous movement, both rural (peasant) and urban (worker) in composition; this clearly represents a different political and cultural project for the country to any that has previously existed. The economic programme of this pole is centred on the internal market, taking as its axis the peasant community, urban-artisanal and micro-business activity, a revitalized role for the state as producer and industrializing force, and a central role for the indigenous majority in driving the new state. At the other pole is the ascendant agro-export, financial and petroleum business bloc, which has played the most dynamic role in the liberalizing sectors of the economy. This bloc has a clear image of how Bolivia should relate to external markets and of the role of foreign investment, and it favours the subordination of the state to private enterprise and the preservation, or restoration, of the old political system. Anchored in the eastern and southeastern zones of the country, beyond the current organizational reach of the social movements, it deploys an openly racialized discourse.

This political polarity is this further structured by three underlying cleavages: ethno-cultural (indigenous/qaras-gringos), class (workers/businessmen) and regional (Andean west/Amazonian crescent). In the case of the ‘left’ pole, the mobilizing identity is predominantly ethno-cultural, around which worker identity is either dissolved (in a novel type of indigenous proletarianism) or complements indigenous leadership at a secondary level. For the ‘right’ pole, mobilizing identity is primarily regional in nature; hence the importance of the Civic Committees, agitating for regional autonomy, for these conservative forces.

This polarization has led to a dissociation between economic dominance and political dominance, creating a period of instability since the components of power are divided between two different zones, neither of which has any immediate possibility of displacing the other. Economic power has moved from west to east (reinforced by foreign investment in hydrocarbons, services, agro-industry), while the sociopolitical power of mobilization has been reinforced in the west, giving rise to a new geographical uncertainty at the level of the state. The interesting thing about the ‘paradox of October’, the period opened up by the insurrection that overthrew Sánchez de Lozada, is that this regional separation simultaneously expresses a confrontation of sharply differentiated ethnicities and classes: businessmen in the east (Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija), and the indigenous and mass sectors in the west (La Paz, Cochabamba, Potosí, Oruro), both waiting to pounce on a state administration which, in territorial, social and cultural terms, can no longer express the new economic and political configuration of Bolivian society. It is true that there are businessmen, indigenous, mestizos, workers and peasants in every part of Bolivia; but the ascendant discourses and identities articulated within each region are differentiated by these class, ethnic and territorial roots.

Overall, the map of sociopolitical forces in Bolivia shows a highly political field, with tendencies on both sides pushing for solutions through force, either by coup d’état (mnr) [12] or insurrection (csutcb/cob), or through electoral resolution, either via a restoration of the old regime (adn) [13] or its progressive transformation (mas). None of these tendencies has yet managed to construct a bloc with a majority over the other components, still less over the other sections of the population that would be indispensable for a social leadership capable of a long-term hold on state power.

From the point of view of the social movements and their prospects for an indigenous-popular transformation of the state, there are two alternatives: a path of gradual, institutional change by electoral means led by Evo Morales, and an insurrectional path for the revolutionary transformation of the state. The first would require the construction of an electoral bloc around Morales, negotiated with other leaders and social movements, that would be strong enough to generate a unified popular and indigenous pole with the ability to rule. The broad social backing needed would require proposals for change robust enough to attract those urban sectors—middle-class, upwardly mobile popular, and even business layers linked to the internal market—who are at present reluctant to accept an indigenous governmental solution, and without whose support an indigenous electoral triumph would be rendered unviable.

The two paths, electoral and insurrectionary, are not necessarily antagonistic; they could turn out to be complementary. On both, however, the indigenous-popular pole should consolidate its hegemony, providing intellectual and moral leadership of the country’s social majorities. There will be neither electoral triumph nor victorious insurrection without wide-ranging, patient work on the unification of the social movements, and a practical education process to realize the political, moral, cultural and organizational leadership of these forces over Bolivia’s popular and middle strata.

[1] Central Obrera Boliviana: organization of workers from large enterprises in different branches of production. In the wake of labour flexibilization, closures of businesses and privatizations implemented since 1985, its social base has been reduced to teachers, public hospital employees, university students and some urban guilds.

[2] [In 2000, a rate hike imposed on the department of Cochabamba’s newly privatized water supply led to massive protests, with strikes and blockades shutting down the city. On April 4, some 100,000 strikers and protesters broke through the military cordon surrounding the city’s central square and held a mass open-air assembly. On April 8, Aguas del Tunari’s contract on the water supply was revoked by the Banzer government. The same months saw the mobilization of cocaleros and peasant colonizers against the threat of coca eradication, with indigenous people’s organizations playing a leading role in mounting road blockades that threatened to cut food supplies to La Paz. In June 2001 cocaleros in the Yungas valleys succeeded in driving out the joint us–Bolivian eradication force. Two months later, Banzer ceded the presidency to his deputy, Quiroga—nlr.]

[3] [The state-owned Brazilian company Petrobras is a major purchaser of Bolivian natural gas, along with the Spanish Repsol—nlr.]

[4] José Valenzuela, ¿Qué es un patrón de acumulación?, Mexico City 1990.

[5] P. Chaves, Los límites estructurales de los partidos de poder como estructuras de mediación democrática: Acción Democrática Nacionalista, degree thesis in sociology, La Paz 2000.

[6] Luis Tapia, La condición multisocietal: multiculturalidad, pluralismo, modernidad, La Paz 2002.

[7] [Protests at the Sánchez de Lozada government’s scheme to export gas reserves through Chile (a national enemy since it had robbed Bolivia of access to the sea in the 1879–83 War of the Pacific), rather than process them domestically, escalated into a full-scale insurrection in La Paz and El Alto in October 2003, ending in the ouster of the president—nlr.]

[8] Movimiento al Socialismo: political organization led by the indigenous peasant leader Evo Morales. Rather than a party, it is an electoral coalition of several urban and rural social movements. csutcb: organization of indigenous and peasant communities founded in 1979, led by Felipe Quispe.

[9] Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992, Oxford 1993.

[10] Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics, Cambridge 1994.

[11] Anthony Oberschall, Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests and Identities, New Brunswick 1993.

[12] Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario: nationalist party that led the popular revolution of 1952 and in the 1980s pushed through the liberal reforms of the Washington Consensus.

[13] Acción Democrática Nacionalista: party founded in 1979 by the dictator Hugo Banzer, which he led in subsequent elections, gaining the presidency from 1997–2001.

[redstar2000]

Again, this seems to be the key point...


Originally posted by ÁLVARO GARCÍA LINERA
The liberal-capitalist political culture and institutions that are both being overtaken by the social movements, and traduced by the actual behaviour of the elites in power, presuppose the individuation of society: the dissolution of traditional loyalties, seigneurial relations and non-industrial productive systems. These processes, in Bolivia, have affected at most one third of the population. The Bolivian state, however, including its current ‘neoliberal’ variant, has, as a sort of political schizophrenia, constructed normative regimes and institutions that bear no correspondence to the ‘patchwork’ reality of our society which, in its structural majority, is neither industrial nor individuated. The effect of the indigenous and plebeian social movements, which in Habermasian terms stress ‘normative’ over ‘communicative’ action, is thus to call into question the validity of republican state institutions that present a mere simulacrum of modernity, in a society which still lacks the structural and material bases upon which such modernity might be based.

Bolivia is 2/3rds pre-capitalist...an untenable situation!

From a historical materialist viewpoint, there are only two possibilities. One is to simply split the country "down the middle"...the east becomes a modern capitalist country and the west is left to rot in pre-capitalist backwardness.

And the other, more likely, outcome is the emergence of a vigorous native bourgeoisie determined to modernize the whole country.

That means rejecting the neo-liberal model (a recipe for eternal servitude to imperialism) and embracing some version of the Keynesian model of economic development -- private capitalist, state capitalist, or some combination thereof.

If indigenous populations in Bolivia can compel the rejection of the neo-liberal model, it will be the most progressive thing they can do. By forcing the Bolivian bourgeoisie to embrace the Keynesian model, they will not succeed in preserving their "traditional values"...but they will force their way into the modern world.

And that will be excellent!

http://www.websmileys.com/sm/cool/123.gif

[norwegian commie]

hey guys i dont see the point of posting 5 pages of crap. that i cetanly aint going to read. try posting a link

[Guerrilla22]

I think that so fat it is too early to make any judgements about Morales. What I can say about Latin American politics is that despite the recent move to the left, if the overall conditions of the people in these countries doesn't improve, something like neo-liberalism is bound to become popular again because people are always looking for a quick fix. Hopefully Morales will get adequate time and opprotunity to do so.

[Ligeia]

Originally posted by [email protected] 14 2006, 08:27 AM


From the point of view of the social movements and their prospects for an indigenous-popular transformation of the state, there are two alternatives: a path of gradual, institutional change by electoral means led by Evo Morales, and an insurrectional path for the revolutionary transformation of the state. The first would require the construction of an electoral bloc around Morales, negotiated with other leaders and social movements, that would be strong enough to generate a unified popular and indigenous pole with the ability to rule. The broad social backing needed would require proposals for change robust enough to attract those urban sectors—middle-class, upwardly mobile popular, and even business layers linked to the internal market—who are at present reluctant to accept an indigenous governmental solution, and without whose support an indigenous electoral triumph would be rendered unviable.

The two paths, electoral and insurrectionary, are not necessarily antagonistic; they could turn out to be complementary. On both, however, the indigenous-popular pole should consolidate its hegemony, providing intellectual and moral leadership of the country’s social majorities. There will be neither electoral triumph nor victorious insurrection without wide-ranging, patient work on the unification of the social movements, and a practical education process to realize the political, moral, cultural and organizational leadership of these forces over Bolivia’s popular and middle strata.

Seems like Linera has read a lot of Gramsci's works.It seems all he is setting hope on is the building of hegemony out of indigenous movements but at the same time hegemony means there have to be compromises with every group in the society.
You could even say that Bolivia's civil society is that huge(at least organisations and syndicates)that the hegemonic way of transformation is a good way.

[chebol]

Morales: Constituent Assembly Will Be Set Up
http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID={2...F1}&language=EN (http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID={275CABE8-EF68-4888-ABD3-A6E9894AB8F1}&language=EN)
La Paz, Feb 11 (Prensa Latina) The constituent assembly boosted by
the Bolivian government will be a reality at any cost and despite
opposition from some sectors,President Evo Morales warned on Friday.

The statesman´s warning came at a time when the Congress was debating
the issue,based on a government-sponsored draft bill, according to
which 210 full-fledged assembly members will be elected at 70
elections districts in July.

<<snip>>

Over the past few days, President Morales warned that if the Congress
does not act rapidly - it requires two-third of legislative votes
that MAS will not win in spite of being a majority - the people´s
force and mobilization will compel the legislators to make the
constituent assembly viable.

hr/jg/pgh/mrs