Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains

Evo Morales, wearing a traditional hat, at a campaign rally. - JOSE JUIS QUINTANA/REUTERS

Bolivia: Revolution Through the Ballot? The first part of a series on Latin America

"I would rather be an illiterate Indio than a North American billionaire," said Che Guevara before he perished in the Andean foothills of Bolivia 38 years ago. Evo Morales, who won the Bolivian presidency by a landslide in the third week of December, is not exactly illiterate, even though the United States (U.S.) corporate media like to call him a high school dropout and a "narco-trade unionist". But he is an "Indio" all right, indeed the first man of full-blooded indigenous origin to be elected President of any Latin American country by universal suffrage. "I am not only a follower of Chavez, but a follower of Castro and a follower of Che as well," he exults immediately after his massive victory, but then introduces a note of caution: "This does not mean that I am going to implement their programmes here, because Bolivia is not Cuba."

Bolivia is no stranger to either seismic political upheavals or to revolutionary possibilities. Liberated from colonial rule and founded as a separate country in 1825, by Simon Bolivar, the legendary Latin American revolutionary hero of Venezuelan origin whose name is consecrated in the country's name itself, Bolivia has known no less than 200 coups in its tortured history and came close to a workers' revolution in the 1950s which failed but did open up the way for sweeping left-populist reforms. Both these legacies - the Bolivarian one of anti-colonial nationalism and continental resistance against North American domination, as well as that of the revolutionary populism of the 1950s and early 1960s - are palpable in today's Bolivian political imagination. That alone gives to Morales a certain affinity with Hugo Chavez who of course refers to his own revolutionary programme as a "Bolivarian revolution" and has even re-named his country as a "Bolivarian Republic" and now speaks of working toward a "socialism of the 21st century". Almost a decade before Chavez even uttered the word "socialism", Morales had founded a party in Bolivia which he called a "Movement Toward Socialism" and he consciously invokes that Bolivarian vision when he says, "I respect Chavez because Chavez talks of one big Latin American nation."

An anti-imperialist nationalist, a self-professed socialist as well as an authentic, full-blooded Indio, Evo Morales is in some ways a unique phenomenon. The son of cocoa farmers, he was raised in the lush but impoverished Altiplano region, where he himself worked as a coca farmer and llama herder before rising to prominence as the national leader of the cocoa-growers' union. In 1995, he founded the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), a political party which brings together three different Bolivian, and indeed Latin American - political currents: the historic hatred of what is generally known in Latin America as "gringo imperialism", a socialist inspiration which tends to erupt periodically in a variety of countries across the continent, and the explosive revolutionary politics of the indigenous peoples which is sweeping not only Bolivia but also Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and even parts of Mexico. He first ran for President on the MAS platform in 2002 and the imperious U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, let it be known publicly that the U.S. was likely to cut off aid if Morales got elected. His popularity shot up immediately and he eventually lost the election to the U.S. favourite, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, by less than two percentage points. Condoleezza Rice, the current U.S. Secretary of State, communicated her jitters from Europe on the eve of the recent elections. Only a little earlier, on October 21, Charles Shapiro, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, had e-mailed to Andres Oppenheimer of Miami Herald: "It would not be welcome news in Washington to see the increasingly belligerent Cuban-Venezuelan combo become a trio."

Well, the trio seems to be very much in the making. Morales often introduces cautionary words but his essential message has been repeated a thousand times. Just before the elections, he gave an extensive interview to a Swedish journalist where he summarised his platform well. "We will nationalise the forests and the petroleum and natural gas reserves," he said. "In several cases the management of the companies has been disastrous. To develop the country, we have to get rid of the colonial and neoliberal model. We want to tax the transnationals in a fair way, and redistribute the money to the small- and medium-size enterprises, where the job opportunities and ideas are. To get this on its way, we want to create a development bank. The properties of big land owners will have to be redistributed; we'll respect the productive land, but the unproductive land must be handed out to landless peasants - this will start a true process of economic redistribution... We will ask for the total [forgiveness] of the debt, negotiating with the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. We are looking into the possibility of presenting a demand that Bolivia be compensated for genocide and 500 years of oppression and violations of human rights. It would be a historic thing to do, especially for an indigenous government."

The distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" land in the above paragraph is inaccurately translated. What Morales means is that landowners can keep the land they actually cultivate but the uncultivated lands will have to be surrendered for redistribution. We shall return later to the immense difficulties that the Morales government, due to come into office on January 22, is likely to face in implementing so ambitious a project but there is no gainsaying the fact that in the boldness of its conception the project itself is revolutionary and remarkably similar to the one Chavez has already launched in Venezuela. And, like Chavez, Morales has a comprehensive vision that encompasses the whole of Latin America and recalls Bolivar's famous declaration that "the name of our country is America". In that same interview, he goes on to say, "There are many progressive leaders in Latin America right now; presidents like Fidel and Chavez, but also Kirchner [in Argentina], Lula and Tabarez Vasquez [in Uruguay]... I have a vision of integration, like the European Union, with a single market and a single currency and with the corporations subordinate to the state. . . If I become president Bolivia will support ALBA [Alternativa Bolivariana para las Amricas], the alternative to FTAA [Free Trade Area of the Americas] that was launched by Venezuela." Morales was in fact on Chavez's side during the huge demonstrations at Mar del Plata, in Argentina, in November during the Summit of the Americas where Bush tried and failed to push the U.S. project for the FTAA and describes the Bush proposal as "an agreement to legalise the colonisation of the Americas".

These positions are not new. In an interview in 2003, Morales had linked the rights of the indigenous people to the question of control over national resources and struggle against the corporate drive of the U.S: "After more than 500 years, we, the Quechuas and Aymaras, are still the rightful owners of this land. We, the indigenous people, after 500 years of resistance, are retaking the power. This retaking of power is oriented towards the recovery of our own riches, our own natural resources such as the hydrocarbons. This affects the interests of the transnational corporations and the interests of the neoliberal system. Nevertheless, I am convinced that the power of the people is increasing and strengthening. This power is changing presidents, economic models and politics. We are convinced that capitalism is the enemy of the earth, of humanity and of culture. The U.S. government does not understand our way of life and our philosophy. But we will defend our proposals, our way of life and our demands with the participation of the Bolivian people."

A herdsman and poor farmer by origin in the lush but impoverished Chapare region which produced some 90 per cent of the country's cocoa yield, Evo Morales rose to prominence as a leader of a farmers' union almost entirely comprised of indigenous people, in a country where the indigenous people were not even allowed to vote and were debarred from certain public places until the early 1950s even though the indigenous communities - mainly the Quechua and the Aymara - comprise some 65 per cent of the population, along with a Mestizo (mixed-blood) population of 25-30 per cent, while the heights of oligarchic and state power have been reserved primarily for the roughly 10 per cent who are of pure European, mainly Spanish, extraction. So, in his first speech after learning of his victory, Morales, himself an Aymara, said: "I want to tell the Aymaras, Quechuas, Chiquitanos and Guaranis that we are going to be presidents for the first time," but was quick to add, "I want to tell the businessmen, professionals, intellectuals and artists to not abandon us. Now we're talking about governing, not winning, and more than governing, satisfying the people's demands." This remained the theme in his victory speech: "The indigenous movement excludes no one; it is all-including. Our administration will bring an end to hatred, to contempt. The neoliberal state, the colonial state will come to an end." He then ended his speech speaking not Spanish but Quechua, not his own language but the language of the largest indigenous group: "Causachun coca, wanuchun yanquis" - Long live cocoa; out with the Yankees. (The cocoa leaf is of course the great symbol of Andean culture and production but it is also at the heart of the dispute between the Andean countries and the U.S.).

Aside from the explosive issues related to indigenous rights and state control over the natural resources of water, gas and oil, the electoral programme of Evo Morales also promised political decentralisation, regional autonomy with solidarity and reciprocity, and strengthening national unity based on cultural and regional diversity. Similarly, the programme includes a policy to fight corruption, with a proposed fortune investigation law to investigate private fortunes, especially of former presidents and other former top officials in power in the last 20 years. The agrarian reform programme includes elimination of large estates and speculative possession of lands, while providing farmers with plots of land and granting property titles to indigenous peoples, farmers, and small property owners. It also offers legal security to farmers and finance for agricultural producers to recover properties currently in the hands of the bank, seized for debts.

In his congratulatory message to Morales, Chavez picked up these themes of indigenous rights, Latin American solidarity and the struggle against neoliberalism. Bolivians had to wait 500 years until they were finally able to have an Aymara Indian as President, he said, and added that this represents "a real and true historical vindication". He then went on to say, "Without a doubt, Evo, our joy is also great: the Fatherland of Bolivar and of Sucre [liberation fighters of Latin America, Venezuelan and Bolivian by origin] begins its new and definitive battle for dignity and sovereignty, and the great family of peoples finds in your fatherland a new reason to affirm the cause of humanity and to negate the neoliberal fallacy of the end of history. It is time for the re-founding of Bolivia: it is a new beginning for history."

Similar messages came from elsewhere. Rigoberto Mench, the Nobel Peace Prize laureate from Guatemala and perhaps the most famous writer of indigenous origin, said that Morales has brought "a refreshing wind" for all aboriginal peoples. Morales "will always be able to count on his indigenous brothers and sisters. If we can counsel or support him in any way, we will do so", she further said but also warned that the new President will be confronting "a very complicated and complex task, because he will be leading a country where racism and discrimination are very deep-rooted", in addition to "serious economic problems, poverty and social and political divisions". For his part, the president of the powerful Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Luis Macas, said that Morales' victory is a historical landmark unlike anything seen "since the time of Spanish colonialism". In Ecuador of course, as in Bolivia itself, two Presidents have been overthrown in the past two years, by very similar popular uprisings and on identical demands.

The victory of Evo Morales is by any standards impressive and, on the face of it, his position appears unassailable. Indeed, his eventual election has seemed unstoppable since his narrow electoral defeat in 2002. Those earlier elections were held in the aftermath of the popular uprising that had converged on the city of Cochacamba in 2000 and had prevented the IMF-mandated privatisation of the public water system. Since then, Bolivia has been rocked again and again by massive public protests against a variety of neoliberal measures, such as tax increases, oil export deals, infringements on peasants' rights, foreign corporate control of gas production, and so on. Two Presidents have been overthrown in the streets even though one of them tried to impose a martial law. Coming in this insurrectionary atmosphere, Morales' electoral majority is unprecedented. In Bolivian elections, the winner must receive over 50 per cent of the vote. Otherwise, the National Congress selects a President, through closed-door horse-trading between parties based on oligarchic power. No Bolivian candidate for President has met this requirement in 180 years until Morales won 54 per cent of the vote, thus preventing those parties from determining the outcome in any manner. The U.S.-backed presidential candidate, Jorge Quiroga, received roughly half of that percentage. Morales' party seems also to have gained a majority in the Lower House of Parliament, the House of Representatives, but probably not in the Upper House, the Senate. He woefully lacks what Chavez commands: loyal support from the army, especially after the coup attempts have been quashed and disloyal officers weeded out. But Morales has something Chavez has taken years to build and is still building: a firm base in the unions, a decade-old political party and, even at the very threshold of his power, a fine rapport with the great majority of the insurrectionary masses. But the problems he faces are formidable. The party is called "Movement Toward Socialism" and the euphoria of victory is swirling across the country, but Morales and his running mate, the Vice President to be, Alvaro Garcia Linera, a former guerilla fighter and now a mass leader, are the first to temper both the immense enthusiasms of the Left as well as the exaggerated fears on the Right. "We should admit that Bolivia will still be capitalist in the next 50 to 100 years," Linera said wryly in a recent interview. Similarly, Morales told an interviewer before the elections; "If I'm elected President, unfortunately it will be my duty to respect those neoliberal laws. Some changes we will be able to make by decree, others through the legislature, but immediately there aren't going to be great changes because these are 20 years of neoliberal laws - that can't be erased in one swipe." Indeed, Bolivia has been the showcase of IMF-mandated privatisations over the past 20 years where national assets were sold off at throwaway prices, and the state is bound by national and international laws to respect those deals. Even on the key question of gas and oil assets, the MAS platform calls for a "nationalisation without confiscation", with proposals geared toward renegotiation of contracts on terms more favourable to Bolivia, while candidates further to the Left called for a more forceful "nationalisation without indemnisation".

Even on the key issue of hydrocarbons, we are likely to witness not Cuban-style expropriations but the kind of prolonged struggles to establish the supremacy of the state that Chavez is waging in the oil sector in Venezuela. Carlos Villegas, a researcher at the University of San Andres in La Paz who serves as an economic adviser to Morales puts it succinctly: "What we are talking about is changing the rules of the game. Bolivia owns the hydrocarbons only while they're in the ground; the minute they're extracted they belong to the transnationals and they can exploit them and price them as they see fit." His view is that the present contracts are illegal and must be renegotiated, if the companies involved are willing to do so. If they refuse to negotiate, Bolivia can turn to other sources, and informal exploratory talks have been held with diverse countries, notably China and Venezuela, while Brazil itself shall be brought in, since the Brazilian corporation, Petrobras, plays a considerable role in Bolvia's hydrocarbon sector. A new law was driven through Congress this year by the MAS, reasserting sovereignty on hydrocarbon reserves and raising taxes on the industry to 50 per cent. So far the government has failed to enforce this law and the incoming Morales government intends to enforce it and extend it further, very much as Chavez has been doing in Venezuela.

And, like Chavez, Morales intends to write a brand new Constitution and create an entirely different kind of state. "The refounding of Bolivia", as Chavez wrote to him. "The Constituent Assembly is our number one priority and main proposal in the campaign," he said before the elections. "The majority of people in this country - people from more than 30 indigenous groups - did not participate in the foundation of Bolivia in 1825. We have to refound Bolivia in order to end the colonial state, to live united in diversity, to put all our resources under state control, and to make people participate and give them the right to make decisions... If I become President, I have to swear to respect the laws - and if the laws are neoliberal, I can't do that."

That last sentence is a bit of a rhetorical flourish. The laws exist and, in forming the government through the ballot box, he has already agreed to swear by them, at least initially. Nor is it a matter of national laws that can be then changed through legislative action and constitutional change. Transnationals operate in Bolivia extensively by virtue of international legal regimes and bilateral investment agreements (BITs) which involve undertakings given to foreign governments as well as the IMF, the World Bank, and so on. The previous Bolivian governments have signed a total of 18 BITs and, in a fine piece on Znet, Susan Spork carefully analyses the implications of a lawsuit that Aguas del Illimani, the private consortium controlled by majority shareholder Suez, has brought against Bolivia for cancelling, under pressure of a mass uprising, a three-year contract it had received in 1997 to run the public water services in La Paz, the capital city, and nearby El Alto. Spork makes two key points. First, Suez has the protection of the World Bank because its private-sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation, purchased 8 per cent of the consortium's shares, and the case shall therefore probably be conducted at the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an international court founded by the World Bank. Second, Spork points out that big profit-making transnationals actually command far more financial resources and legal expertise, aside from imperialist backing, than do poor, deficit-strapped Third World countries like Bolivia, the poorest in Latin America. Suez alone has brought three such lawsuits against Argentina and the ICSID in October last year listed 145 such cases listed there. Any attempt at nationalisation or unilateral repudiation of contracts with multinationals would bring down on Bolivia the wrath of the imperialist states and the multilateral institutions of global finance.

Nor would the Morales government be immune to massive disruption and subversion, from internal as well as external sources, despite its massive majority at home. This can take five principal forms: the exercise of oligarchic power in creating economic chaos; the mobilisation of the U.S.-trained Bolivian army, which is bound to be disloyal to Morales; fanning of the regional separatist sentiments, especially in Santa Cruz, the centre of oligarchic power; exploiting the insurrectionary mood to fan the flames, under the guise of far-Left opposition, against the pace of change under Morales which shall be deemed "too slow"; and subversion from the neighbouring Paraguay, where the U.S. has been positioning arms and personnel in anticipation of Morales' electoral victory in Bolivia.

OLIGARCHIC power in Bolivia has essentially three overlapping components. One is the traditional wealth accumulated over the centuries through operation of silver and tin mines. The city of Potosi in the high altitudes of Andes was larger than London in the 16th century and some two-thirds of the world's silver went through it. More recently, tin production similarly enriched a small oligarchy aligned with foreign interests. Today, the export of oil, gas and narcotics feeds into that same centuries-old vicious circle. This is then supplemented by a close-knit system of vast landholdings by the semi-feudal latifundia. A single set of figures should clarify this pattern: According to the United Nations, as of October 2005, 100 families control over 25 million hectares of land in Bolivia while 2 million campesino families have, combined, access to 5 million hectares of land. Simply put, the top 100 landowners possess five times more land then 2 million small farmers. In a single land grant during the Banzer dictatorship of the 1970s, the notorious Elsner family and its patriarch received close to 200,000 hectares. Many of these landowners are involved in production and export of narcotics trade and they are deeply aligned with U.S. drug mafias. Their (perhaps less wealthy) counterparts played a prominent role in the successful counter-revolution in Chile and in the not-so-successful destabilisation campaigns in Venezuela. There is no reason to believe that similar attempts shall not be made in Bolivia as well, even if that leads to the tearing apart of the country as a whole.

Meanwhile, the U.S. has been intimately involved in the military affairs of the Bolivian state since the revolutionary days of the 1950s and 60s when it became obsessed with what it called "internal subversion" in Bolivia. Initial training programmes were conducted through U.S. surrogates in Argentina. By 1963, however, Bolivia had more graduates from the United States Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, than any other country in Latin America, while direct military aid increased, in currency values of that time, from $100,000 in 1958 to $3.2 million in 1964. In 1962-63 alone, a total of 659 officers were trained at the School of the Americas while 20 of the 23 senior-most officers of the Bolivian army were brought there for extended visits. The killing of Che was the high point of their success, and these men and their subordinates, backed by U.S. agencies, destroyed the revolutionary and populist forces of Bolivia and imposed a brutal military dictatorship which paved the way for oligarchic rule and neoliberal regimes for the next two decades. Since then, the Bolivian army has been the creature of the U.S. At present, that U.S. stranglehold on the security apparatus of Bolivia is conducted under the name of "war on drugs" upon which "war on terrorism" has been grafted more recently.

Over the past four years, as popular uprisings engulfed Bolivia, the U.S. is said to have poured more than $150 million a year in military and `social' aid, largely in the name of containing drug trafficking, though the real amounts are likely to be much higher. The main focus in the so-called "war on drugs" is of course on Colombia, which shares a strategic border with Venezuela, but in Bolivia itself this "war is conducted by about a dozen different agencies, all funded by the U.S., which go far and wide into Bolivian society to conduct this "war." Even so, and in addition to all that, U.S. training and equipping of Bolivian military and police forces skyrocketed again from 2003 onwards, as the rise of Morales became imminent, just as it had escalated in the revolutionary days of 40 years ago. Bolivia again became, next to Colombia itself, the second largest Latin American recipient of U.S. military training, and the number of Bolivian personnel receiving such training went up from 531 in 2000 to 2,054 in 2003. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also been positioning weapons and personnel in neighbouring Paraguay. The point here is that the combination of this U.S.-trained army and the U.S.-aligned oligarchic power is quite formidable. Morales may be able to defeat them but the going shall be tough. In comparison to the ordeals ahead, the heady ride to power at the head of a historic people's uprising may begin to feel like a mere picnic before tremors of an earthquake set in.

THIS article has been drafted as a quick response to the historic shift in the balance of force in the Andean countries, and in the whole of Latin America, heralded by Evo Morales' unprecedented electoral victory, at the head of a mass movement of great endurance and velocity. Much that is essential to understand the current situation in Bolivia has had to be omitted, for lack of space, and shall be covered in a later article. But there is also a larger setting. Bolivia shares militant movements of the indigenous people with its neighbour, Peru, while it also has Left-leaning neighbouring governments in Argentina and Chile to the south and in Brazil to the north, with which it shares an extensive border. On the other side of Brazil lie the revolutionary lands of Venezuela and Cuba. Nor should we forget little brave Uruguay, just below Brazil, which elected its first socialist President in 200 years. July 2006 shall bring the elections and the Leftist candidacy of Lopez Obrador in Mexico, and it is yet to be seen what relationship the Zapatistas of the Chiapas, the legendary movement of the indigenous peoples in Mexico, establish with that electoral campaign, if any; its leading commandante has recently announced a mysterious national tour. Lopez seems to be commanding a majority in Mexico, as are the Sandinistas in Nicaragua where elections are due in November 2006. Meanwhile, Ecauador itself has been, and still is, on the brink of a Leftist upheaval. As the U.S. sinks deeper in the quagmire of West Asia, an entire continent seems to be on the march in its own precincts. Future articles in this series shall try to take stock of this line of march.

"Fidel is my friend," Evo Morales says casually. Now is the time to take instruction from the grand old man of the Latin American revolution who lost his dearest comrade-in-arms, Che Guevara, to the revolution of yesteryears in Bolivia, the land which once had Bolivar as its President and is named after him. Morales has inherited a noble legacy.