The Sociologist As President, Or Vice-President

by Rachel Chan

With a shock of silver hair belying his age, Alvaro Garcia Linera stands out from the crowd of dark-haired Bolivian Aymaras and Quechuas. At only 44, Mr. Linera holds an impressive resume, among which highlights include a career as a former Marxist guerilla, mathematician, and a sociologist very much present in the media. An enigma, he appears the urbane, calm, and to some extent even effeminate man about town, while a chronology of the news reveals he has a grittier side most prominent during the time of his association with Felipe Quispe, a rival of Evo Morales in the Bolivian presidential elections. Mr. Linera has been a former political prisoner and victim of human rights abuses, incarcerated without trial from 1992 to 1997 on the accusation of attempting to blow up power lines and robbing a university. He then made full use of his time in Chochonchoro Maximum Security Prison to author a total of three books while studying for his PhD. Upon release (at the request of human rights demonstrators) Garcia found employment as a university professor (not in the university he allegedly robbed, of course) and continued to author more books. In 2004, he received the Augustin Cueva Sociology Award. Garcia continued to appear vigorously in talk shows, commenting on Bolivian politics. Evo Morales, during the 2006 Presidential Elections, aptly chose Garcia as his running mate due to his intellectual credibility and the fact that “he appeared to be the smartest man on TV” and “that people liked the fact that the smartest man on TV could become Vice-President”. Thus was secured an alliance leading to Bolivia’s first ever indigenous presidency with Garcia, a mestizo as second-in-command.

Often enough, Evo Morales’ charismatic authority has made him an icon to the people of Bolivia. While it is undeniable that the country continues to face political conflicts and demonstrations, especially the one sparked by public demand for the resignation of Manfred Reyes Villa, governor of Cochabamba, so far Morales’ term has appeared to be one of the more stable ones with public support relatively strong.. Bolivia has a history of short-lived presidencies. In the past six years, Bolivia has had five Presidents, most of them ousted on public demand. It is corrigible hence that Morales has had cause to make frequent trips abroad to secure diplomatic ties, leaving Mr. Linera behind to watch over the doors.

It is such that Mr. Linera often finds himself in the position of Acting President of Bolivia, or as the official title goes – “Presidente de Ejercicio de Bolivia”. It is quite a juggle, naturally, as Garcia will then have to tread the fine balance between making decisions especially in the face of the recent Reyes Villa conflict while not stepping over Morales’ policies. Some dissidents have already accused Garcia of imposing too strong an influence on Morales. It is commonly believed that Garcia is really the brains behind the presidency. Rumours spread that perhaps it was due to other party members’ dissatisfaction with this incident that Garcia opted to stay out of the Presidential Palace, where Morales and a number of party members dwell. Instead, Garcia lives in a modest apartment flooded with 25 000 books.

The only other President known to have previously been a sociologist would be fellow Latin American, Brazil’s former President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cardoso, an early supporter of the school of Dependency, realised the fallacies of the perspective’s tendency to tautologise economic relations while ignoring the role of political agency and embarked on a policy of capitalism as a step towards socialism. A sociologist in both theory and practice, Cardoso’s reign has proven him a sound statesman, refuting the remarks of Weber that the one who is equipped with intellectual capacity to become a successful academic has not the implied inferior qualities of the one who is destined to become a politician.

So, as Latin America continues to turn left, what are the prospects it will face? Surely a comparison of both Mr. Linera and President Cardoso is implicitly, an “imbalanced relation” in itself. But perhaps the coming of sociologists into the political “field” signifies something of importance. One could also knock it off as mere coincidence, but perhaps there is some truth in the common notion that sociologists tend to steer “left”. Will they?

Cardoso, certainly a pioneer long before Garcia, is perhaps too prolific to be described in a single article without doing some injustice to his oeuvre. It would perhaps do to refresh the reader that Cardoso, post-Presidency, is now a Professor-at-Large at Brown University. He is an avid fan of classical music who likes to tango, and speaks fluent English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Cardoso, being born into a comfortable middle-class existence, shares the same cultural capital as Garcia. His most notable works are on Dependency Theory, extending the interpretation of underdevelopment into a more sophisticated one, breaking the perception that “underdeveloped” regions are permanently “landlocked” in a merciless global economic system of relations. He led a new wave of dependentistas who believed in the capability of “associated-dependent development”. After all, supposedly former “underdeveloped” nations in the East such as China and Singapore have managed to come through capitalism to become forces of their own.

It is noteworthy that Garcia has also come up with a brand of capitalism as a path towards socialism while staying clear from the socialist radicalism of his past days as Marxist guerilla, in the now defunct Tupac Katari Guerilla Army. He has formulated a mixture of capitalism with nationalist tendencies called “Andean Capitalism”. Garcia makes it clear in his interviews with the media that socialism “is impossible to achieve given a short period of time”. Instead, he offers this concept of Andean Capitalism whereby Bolivia nationalizes its hydrocarbons in order to redistribute its profits to be injected into the local small industries, which are very much segmented due to a family-business model, which is why a straight road to socialism is hard to pave.

So far Bolivia has nationalised its oil, ironically to the consternation of Brazil, now under the presidency of Luis Ignacio Lula da Silva. This was a move in Bolivia’s plan to forward its own brand of capitalism, but perhaps at the cost of putting Brazil’s at a slight risk, as its oil companies are dependent on Bolivia’s natural resources. Nevertheless the larger picture is that of Bolivia’s natural wealth expropriation by foreign companies coming to an end. And of course there are voices saying that Morales is being courted by Hugo Chavez in its move towards invigorating the production and export of coca, a leaf with stimulating properties also used to make tea, and can be converted into cocaine. Bolivia has to face the hurdles, of course, imposed by the US’ war on drugs. It will have to promote the use of coca as a legal mild stimulant, and market it as such.

“We have taught the neoliberals a lesson in economics,” says Garcia in a recent speech, evaluating the performance of Andean Capitalism, also known as the Garcia Linera Project. Garcia, a scholar of Antonio Negri, envisions the Bolivian Government as a materialization of the “government of the multitude”. His formulation of Andean Capitalism is based on a pact between indigenous communities, unions, and the government on one side and MNCs and the national bourgeoisie on the other. However, of late, critics have proposed that Garcia’s Andean Capitalism is facing a crisis. Indeed, in the second term of Cardoso’s presidency his popularity declined due to criticisms of him steering right, apart from some other failed initiatives. Governing Bolivia is especially hard, says Jim Shultz, Director of the Center For Democracy in Bolivia. It is a racially polarized country, divided between the European descended mestizos and the indigenes. The nationalization project has not been a smooth one. The government has struggled to raise the funds to reclaim its share of the energy pie while assembling a solid team of competent and honest people to manage it. Negotiating with foreign firms, especially Spain’s Repsol and Brazil’s Petrobras have not been easy.

Indeed at times Morales and Garcia’s individual styles of governance seem to overlap.When Morales sent Garcia as negotiator to Washington to lobby for renewed trade preferences on textile exports, back home he announced that the US was plotting a conspiracy against him. And there is talk that Garcia displays a tendency towards the right, favouring the foreign business operators in negotiations when Morales is abroad.

So, has the Bolivian government and indeed, the sociologist turned right? It is undeniable that either an extreme right or an extreme left position is a hard one to maintain, and not only for the leaders, but the people who have to live under the policies. Castro’s policies, while a radical break from casino capitalism decades ago, appears today to have gone stale.

During Cardoso’s two term reign as President of Brazil, he succeeded in realizing economic reform which brought fiscal stability and significant social progress. Brazil achieved a stable currency, a rapid increase in primary education, and large-scale land redistribution. However, this was attained through a process of capitalism with a human face.

Cardoso is proud of his fruitful reign as President for eight years. He notes with pride that Lula is grateful to him for the improvements in economic, political, social, and welfare aspects in Brazil. He says sociology has given him the credibility throughout his years for Brazilians as “a President who actually knows what he is talking about”. And Garcia Linera responds to a question on whether becoming Vice-President has affected his career as a critical sociologist. “It has allowed me to see things from up here, and allows me to examine things with a Siberian coolness.”

Garcia is determined in his vision for an indigenous Bolivian government. This dream he has realized. The next step will be to reverse 20 years of market driven economic reforms that have put many of the nation’s resources, from water to gas, into the hands of foreign corporations. This is the Herculean task facing Garcia, and the rest of the Morales Administration. Will the fruits of his days spent reading Das Kapital and the other 24 999 Marxism books in his apartment translate into a new, economically liberated Bolivia? This is a longitudinal study of its own merit of the sociologist as Vice-President.