Guerrilla22
12th February 2007, 11:09
Standoff in Bolivia
Evo Morales is caught between the forces of reaction and rebellion
By TOM LEWIS
AS THIS issue of the ISR went to press, Bolivia stood poised on the edge of a political precipice with partition of the country and civil war hanging in the balance. Governors of four out of the nine Bolivian states scheduled rallies and town meetings (cabildos) for the weekend of December 16–17 to determine whether to declare de facto autonomy from the federal government.
In response, President Evo Morales promised military intervention to defend the territorial unity of Bolivia, although he ruled out martial law for the moment. He called upon the rank and file of his Movement Toward Socialism party (MAS) to use street actions to block the potentially secessionist cabildos from taking place. Morales further urged MAS militants to set up human blockades encircling the opposition cities of Santa Cruz and Tarija.
The immediate cause of the worsening crisis between the MAS government and the gas-rich states of the “media luna”—Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, so called because their position on the map resembles a “half-moon”—concerned the percentage of votes needed to approve articles elaborated in the Constituent Assembly. All parties agree that a two-thirds majority is required to approve the final text of the new constitution. Delegates from the media luna and the opposition parties also argue that a two-thirds majority is required to approve individual articles as they come up for vote in assembly deliberations. MAS delegates, however, maintain that only a simple majority is needed to pass individual articles.
Settling the question will decide which social forces are best positioned to control the Constituent Assembly. In last July’s delegate election, MAS candidates won a majority, but not two-thirds, of seats in the assembly. While it expected to win two-thirds or more of the popular vote, it had earlier compromised with opposition parties on a complicated voting system that ensured it could receive at most 158 of the 255 assembly seats (a two-thirds majority would require 170). Without this compromise, the right wing would have continued to block the holding of the delegate election.
Thus, today, if it turns out that individual articles must be passed with a two-thirds majority, then the media luna, where the openly neoliberal parties have their strongest base, will be able to wield effective veto power in the assembly. If articles can be passed with a simple majority, however, MAS can dominate the process.
Recently MAS sought another compromise by offering to require a two-thirds majority for approval of articles of so-called foundational importance if the Right would allow a simple majority to suffice for approval of the rest. The Right quickly rejected the proposal, and the media luna today remains united behind a demand for a two-thirds majority across the board.
The failure of this second compromise reveals not only the right wing’s intransigence and its determination to engage in a “no holds barred” struggle, but it also demonstrates the MAS’s willingness to negotiate away any chance of achieving truly fundamental change. This basic pattern—obstructionism from the Right, concessions and piecemeal reform from the government—has become the defining characteristic of Bolivian politics since the MAS took over the government a year ago.
Pointless appeasement
Openly neoliberal parties—principally PODEMOS, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), and the National Unity party (UN)—dominate official politics in the media luna. These parties remain identified with the largely traditional creole oligarchy of petroleum, land, and mining interests that imposed neoliberalism in the mid-1980s and subsequently profited by allowing transnational corporations to exploit Bolivia’s natural resources and to privatize Bolivian industry and social services.
The neoliberal oligarchs fear that any change in the existing political constitution of the Bolivian state would benefit the majority of indigenous and working-class Bolivians at their expense. They have proven themselves willing to fight tooth and nail to block the tamest land reform as well as to prevent any reduction in their power to continue to strike independent deals with the energy and mining transnationals (deals that would exclude the altiplano and poorer regions to the west from sharing in the profits and other benefits of foreign investment).
From the outset the MAS government has bent over backwards to appease the oligarchy and media luna, along with the foreign investors and international financial institutions whom they serve. Its new agrarian reform law, for example, redistributes only land that is currently unproductive and thus ends up awarding peasants the least arable parcels. In fact, the latifundio system (large tracts held by a tiny elite of wealthy landowners) remains untouched as the infrastructure of Bolivian agriculture.
While the new petrochemical contracts negotiated by the MAS do assure marginally larger royalties flowing to the Bolivian treasury, they basically leave the gas and oil transnationals a free hand to exploit resources as they wish (i.e., with little concern for environmental damage or for workers’ rights). Fatally, the new contracts accomplish next to nothing toward facilitating the domestic industrialization of natural gas. Thus they leave Bolivia without any realistic hope of raising itself out of the trap of being an economy primarily based on the export of raw materials.
Morales continues to sell unprocessed natural gas to Argentina and Brazil at prices scandalously below market value (roughly $3.80 per MBTU instead of $15.40), resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. A similar sweetheart deal that also has the effect of perpetuating Bolivia’s economic dependency is the recent contract the government signed with an Indian transnational to exploit the Mutún iron and magnesium mine. The Mutún mine represents the world’s largest known deposit of iron ore and could provide a dramatic opportunity for advancing publicly owned and controlled mining and metals processing.
Nor has the MAS been reluctant to use violence to repress the social movements who actively criticize it. It happily summons the forces of the social movements when it wishes to mobilize the masses against the Right. But it fiercely resists any attempt from the Left to apply street pressure for significant social change.
Thus it fired on a demonstration of cocaleros earlier this year, killing several protesters, while earning brownie points from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Its reneging on campaign promises to rebuild the state-owned sector of the mining industry led to a fratricidal confrontation between public- and private-sector miners in Huanuni during October. The MAS government turned a deaf ear over the course of several months to entreaties from public-sector workers to move ahead on re-nationalization, as well as to warnings that transnational interests were inciting the private-sector workers to seize remaining publicly owned mines.
These moderate and, in some cases, retrograde measures have all been designed to show the Bolivian Right and international capital that Morales and the MAS are “reasonable” players on the domestic and global stages. But such steps have only served to embolden the Right while frittering away a favorable conjuncture for real and profound social change.
In the view of Oscar Olivera, a leader of the Cochabamba Gas War in 2000 and of the Coalition to Defend Bolivia’s Natural Resources today, the issues of land reform and transnational capitalism in Bolivia constitute a “social space in which the question of any fundamental transformation can only be decided by force.” Without an absolutely gigantic mobilization of the masses, Olivera believes that even “the Constituent Assembly is a process that is already dead.”
Three years ago Olivera suggested that the logic of events in Bolivia would lead sooner or later to civil war. An accelerating process of social polarization has indeed defined the intervening years. Civil war is not a certainty, Olivera states, since, if the MAS keeps following its path of attempting to appease the Right, Morales will end up squandering any chance for social transformation. “If civil strife does not eventually break out here,” he continues, “it will be because the government has done nothing that really threatens the interests of those who presently rule Bolivia.”
Evo Morales is caught between the forces of reaction and rebellion
By TOM LEWIS
AS THIS issue of the ISR went to press, Bolivia stood poised on the edge of a political precipice with partition of the country and civil war hanging in the balance. Governors of four out of the nine Bolivian states scheduled rallies and town meetings (cabildos) for the weekend of December 16–17 to determine whether to declare de facto autonomy from the federal government.
In response, President Evo Morales promised military intervention to defend the territorial unity of Bolivia, although he ruled out martial law for the moment. He called upon the rank and file of his Movement Toward Socialism party (MAS) to use street actions to block the potentially secessionist cabildos from taking place. Morales further urged MAS militants to set up human blockades encircling the opposition cities of Santa Cruz and Tarija.
The immediate cause of the worsening crisis between the MAS government and the gas-rich states of the “media luna”—Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija, so called because their position on the map resembles a “half-moon”—concerned the percentage of votes needed to approve articles elaborated in the Constituent Assembly. All parties agree that a two-thirds majority is required to approve the final text of the new constitution. Delegates from the media luna and the opposition parties also argue that a two-thirds majority is required to approve individual articles as they come up for vote in assembly deliberations. MAS delegates, however, maintain that only a simple majority is needed to pass individual articles.
Settling the question will decide which social forces are best positioned to control the Constituent Assembly. In last July’s delegate election, MAS candidates won a majority, but not two-thirds, of seats in the assembly. While it expected to win two-thirds or more of the popular vote, it had earlier compromised with opposition parties on a complicated voting system that ensured it could receive at most 158 of the 255 assembly seats (a two-thirds majority would require 170). Without this compromise, the right wing would have continued to block the holding of the delegate election.
Thus, today, if it turns out that individual articles must be passed with a two-thirds majority, then the media luna, where the openly neoliberal parties have their strongest base, will be able to wield effective veto power in the assembly. If articles can be passed with a simple majority, however, MAS can dominate the process.
Recently MAS sought another compromise by offering to require a two-thirds majority for approval of articles of so-called foundational importance if the Right would allow a simple majority to suffice for approval of the rest. The Right quickly rejected the proposal, and the media luna today remains united behind a demand for a two-thirds majority across the board.
The failure of this second compromise reveals not only the right wing’s intransigence and its determination to engage in a “no holds barred” struggle, but it also demonstrates the MAS’s willingness to negotiate away any chance of achieving truly fundamental change. This basic pattern—obstructionism from the Right, concessions and piecemeal reform from the government—has become the defining characteristic of Bolivian politics since the MAS took over the government a year ago.
Pointless appeasement
Openly neoliberal parties—principally PODEMOS, the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), and the National Unity party (UN)—dominate official politics in the media luna. These parties remain identified with the largely traditional creole oligarchy of petroleum, land, and mining interests that imposed neoliberalism in the mid-1980s and subsequently profited by allowing transnational corporations to exploit Bolivia’s natural resources and to privatize Bolivian industry and social services.
The neoliberal oligarchs fear that any change in the existing political constitution of the Bolivian state would benefit the majority of indigenous and working-class Bolivians at their expense. They have proven themselves willing to fight tooth and nail to block the tamest land reform as well as to prevent any reduction in their power to continue to strike independent deals with the energy and mining transnationals (deals that would exclude the altiplano and poorer regions to the west from sharing in the profits and other benefits of foreign investment).
From the outset the MAS government has bent over backwards to appease the oligarchy and media luna, along with the foreign investors and international financial institutions whom they serve. Its new agrarian reform law, for example, redistributes only land that is currently unproductive and thus ends up awarding peasants the least arable parcels. In fact, the latifundio system (large tracts held by a tiny elite of wealthy landowners) remains untouched as the infrastructure of Bolivian agriculture.
While the new petrochemical contracts negotiated by the MAS do assure marginally larger royalties flowing to the Bolivian treasury, they basically leave the gas and oil transnationals a free hand to exploit resources as they wish (i.e., with little concern for environmental damage or for workers’ rights). Fatally, the new contracts accomplish next to nothing toward facilitating the domestic industrialization of natural gas. Thus they leave Bolivia without any realistic hope of raising itself out of the trap of being an economy primarily based on the export of raw materials.
Morales continues to sell unprocessed natural gas to Argentina and Brazil at prices scandalously below market value (roughly $3.80 per MBTU instead of $15.40), resulting in the loss of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. A similar sweetheart deal that also has the effect of perpetuating Bolivia’s economic dependency is the recent contract the government signed with an Indian transnational to exploit the Mutún iron and magnesium mine. The Mutún mine represents the world’s largest known deposit of iron ore and could provide a dramatic opportunity for advancing publicly owned and controlled mining and metals processing.
Nor has the MAS been reluctant to use violence to repress the social movements who actively criticize it. It happily summons the forces of the social movements when it wishes to mobilize the masses against the Right. But it fiercely resists any attempt from the Left to apply street pressure for significant social change.
Thus it fired on a demonstration of cocaleros earlier this year, killing several protesters, while earning brownie points from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. Its reneging on campaign promises to rebuild the state-owned sector of the mining industry led to a fratricidal confrontation between public- and private-sector miners in Huanuni during October. The MAS government turned a deaf ear over the course of several months to entreaties from public-sector workers to move ahead on re-nationalization, as well as to warnings that transnational interests were inciting the private-sector workers to seize remaining publicly owned mines.
These moderate and, in some cases, retrograde measures have all been designed to show the Bolivian Right and international capital that Morales and the MAS are “reasonable” players on the domestic and global stages. But such steps have only served to embolden the Right while frittering away a favorable conjuncture for real and profound social change.
In the view of Oscar Olivera, a leader of the Cochabamba Gas War in 2000 and of the Coalition to Defend Bolivia’s Natural Resources today, the issues of land reform and transnational capitalism in Bolivia constitute a “social space in which the question of any fundamental transformation can only be decided by force.” Without an absolutely gigantic mobilization of the masses, Olivera believes that even “the Constituent Assembly is a process that is already dead.”
Three years ago Olivera suggested that the logic of events in Bolivia would lead sooner or later to civil war. An accelerating process of social polarization has indeed defined the intervening years. Civil war is not a certainty, Olivera states, since, if the MAS keeps following its path of attempting to appease the Right, Morales will end up squandering any chance for social transformation. “If civil strife does not eventually break out here,” he continues, “it will be because the government has done nothing that really threatens the interests of those who presently rule Bolivia.”