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CounterPunch
January
25, 2003
Left Turns in
South America
United
Opposition to Neoliberalism in Bolivia?
by FORREST HYLTON
"Instead of imitating Álvaro
Uribe, Sánchez de Lozada should learn from Lula."
Evo Morales
Excepting Colombia, as "traditional"
political parties and national economies disintegrate, South
America has moved swiftly left in the new millennium: just over
a year ago, Argentina witnessed a mass uprising of unprecedented
proportions, while neo-populist regimes are now in power in Brazil,
Venezuela, and Ecuador. In Bolivia, a country in which Left parties
have never obtained more than 3.5% of the vote, Evo Morales,
leader of the coca growers' trade union federation and the country's
chief opposition party, MAS (Movement Toward Socialism), won
20% of the vote. He lost the presidential elections in June 2002
by a narrow margin, and only because he refused to enter into
alliances with any of the neoliberal parties. When Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada, who ruled Bolivia from 1993-97, was sworn in as president
for a second time this past August, it was clear that neoliberalism
was hobbling on its last legs.
Sánchez de Lozada faced a different
political scenario than the one he helped create as Senator in
1985 with Decree 21060 and the New Economic Policy, which brought
full-blown neoliberalism to Bolivia. The communist tin miners'
movement-the core of Latin America's most combative proletariat
in the second half of the twentieth century-was broken by President
Victor Paz Estenssoro, the very man who had risen to power on
the strength of the miner-led national revolution in 1952. The
highland Aymara movement, which had resurfaced with force in
La Paz and the surrounding countryside during and after the dictatorship
of General Hugo Bánzer Suárez (1971-78), degenerated
into traditional clientelism and factionalism under the center-left
UDP coalition (1982-85). And the coca growers' movement of the
eastern lowlands had barely begun to form. The Tupac Katari
Guerrilla Army (EGTK), made up almost exclusively of highland
Aymara, made its appearance after 1986, but posed no threat to
the neoliberal onslaught, and was destroyed by the first Sánchez
de Lozada regime in 1993.
Under the advice of Harvard economist
Jeffrey Sachs, whose "shock treatments" would soon
be applied to Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, after
1985 the nationalized tin mines-the basis of the Bolivian economy
after 1952-were privatized. In conjunction with his British and
American business associates Sánchez de Lozada became
Bolivia's leading mining entrepreneur, with an estimated personal
fortune of $200 million. 20,000 miners were "relocated"
from the highlands, many of them to the Chapare, and as they
descended into the eastern lowlands to grow coca, they took with
them the traditions of radical trade unionism they had forged
in the mines and in mining communities in the previous half century.
In 1988-90, the coca growers' movement,
200,000-strong, established itself as the vanguard of resistance
to imperialism in Bolivia, as the U.S. ratcheted up the intensity
of the drug war in Andes. In 1989, Bolivia produced enough coca
paste to make 286 tons of cocaine, and in 1988, law 1008 made
traffickers guilty until proven innocent. Current U.S. ambassador
to Bolivia David Greenlee, then an employee of the CIA, overhauled
the strategy of coca eradication by integrating military and
police efforts. The coca growers, organized in trade union federations,
staged massive marches "for life and dignity," in which
they exalted the coca leaf, as distinct from cocaine, as part
of their millennial cultural tradition. They refused any connection
with drug trafficking and with rudimentary self-defense militias,
they fought the growing militarization of their region under
U.S. auspices. Their collective political strength grew in the
early 1990s, and when Sánchez de Lozada took over in 1993,
they had become a movement to reckon with. Hence their militants
were subject to more frequent torture, detention, and murder
than those of any other social movement in recent Bolivian history.
Yet Sánchez de Lozada issued a
series of reforms-privatization of pensions, the airline, the
telephone company and the oil company; flexibilization of labor;
municipal and land reform-that devastated that devastated rural
cultivators and urban workers alike. The coca growers, in the
absence of organized opposition in the valleys and highlands,
remained isolated in the eastern lowlands. Bolivia became a
neoliberal model, a laboratory-an IMF "success story."
But like those of that other model country, Argentina, Bolivia's
triumphs turned out to be costly mirages, and social conflict
exploded under former dictator Hugo Bánzer (1998-2001),
whose ties to the drug trade were extensive and whose governing
program consisted almost exclusively of "zero coca."
Bánzer's successor, Manuel "Tuto" Quiroga (2001-2),
claimed to have reduced potential cocaine production to 13 tons
annually. Both Bánzer and Quiroga killed more people
as democratically elected presidents than Bánzer had as
dictator.
In April 2000 in the city of Cochabamba
(pop. 500,000), a coalition of factory workers, high school and
university students, professionals, salaried employees, peasants
from the surrounding valley, peasant "irrigators" from
the highlands, schoolteachers, neighborhood committees, university
professors, non-salaried workers, the unemployed, and street
kids blocked the privatization of water through massive civil
disobedience. For the first time since the early 1980s, a popular
movement from below had scored a substantive victory in Bolivia,
defeating a North American multinational and its Bolivian servants
in government.
Protest spread in April and May 2000
to the highland Aymara, who shut down the region around La Paz
through road blockades, as Felipe Quispe, a former guerrilla
leader of the EGTK, breathed new life into the Aymara peasant
trade union federation. Though the coca growers-who know the
value of solidarity-supported the insurrection in Cochabamba
and the blockades around La Paz, they suffered serious setbacks
under Bánzer's forced eradication, and were rapidly losing
ground to empire. Coca cultivation in Colombia, meanwhile, tripled
to 162,000 hectares in 2000, whereas it had never covered more
than 46,000 hectares in Bolivia. (We should regard these statistics
with caution.) And an estimated $500 million dollars were lost
annually because of forced eradication.
The cycle initiated in April 2000 intensified
over the next two years and culminated with the resurgence of
the coca growers and the near-victory of Evo Morales in June
2002; this after former U.S. ambassador Manuel Rocha warned Bolivians
not to vote for Morales. Though the material basis of the coca
growers' movement (coca) has been eliminated to a remarkable
extent, MAS-which managed, in its discourse of radical nationalism,
to capture the disaffected urban middle class and proletarian
vote-regained lost territory. So did Felipe Quispe and the highland
Aymara, as the Indian Revolution* Party (MIP) obtained five seats
in Congress following a year of government incompliance with
the Island of the Sun Accords.
Despite the superior quality of its leadership
and the radically democratic nature of its organizational structure,
however, the Coordination for Life and Water in Cochabamba had
all but disintegrated. And while many of Felipe Quispe's supporters
voted for Evo Morales, in practical terms the lowland coca growers
and the highland Aymara were separated by an abyss that was widened
by constant caudillo feuding between Quispe and Morales. No
unity appeared on the horizon.
As one might have expected, given the
neo-colonial arrangements that have governed Bolivia since it
separated from Spain, MAS and MIP have achieved nothing in parliament,
other than the diversion of scarce resources away from the organization
of the movements. Six months after the beginning of the Sánchez
de Lozada regime, the balance is disastrous: several coca growers
killed in confrontations with the army; four landless peasants
killed by landlord militias; six more killed in the Chaco; five
conversations about forced eradication of coca with no results;
ongoing incompliance with the Island of the Sun Accords.
Exclusive blame for this depressing panorama
cannot be laid at the feet of Sánchez de Lozada, however,
since he had been willing to discuss the possibility of a temporary
halt to forced eradication and commit to a study of the market
for legal consumption of the coca leaf-until Bush's man for Latin
America, Cuban-American Otto Reich, arrived in early October.
Ever since, the dialogues between Evo
Morales and Sánchez de Lozada have been farcical, as there
is nothing left for them to talk about. Under great pressure
from the coca growers' assemblies, in late December Morales announced
road blockades for January-unless the government was willing
to reverse its policies on eradication and include the coca growers'
unions in the planning and execution of the study of the market
for coca leaf consumption. Morales had not consulted Felipe
Quispe, however, and broke a verbal agreement the two had made
to blockade in April, after the harvest season had passed
in the highlands. Oscar Oliveira, leader of the Coordination
for Life and Water, was not consulted either, even though Cochabamba
is the gateway to the Chapare.
Undaunted, Morales wasted no time in
assembling a list of organizations that would join the January
mobilization: debtors, domestics and household servants, teachers,
workers without retirement funds, peasant colonizers from the
Yungas, mining cooperatives, departmental workers' federations;
a range of groups whose demands were being ignored by the Sánchez
de Lozada administration. Morales began to focus his discourse
on issues that transcended sectoral concerns, such as privatization,
the export of Bolivian natural gas to the U.S. via Chile and
the FTAA, and he claimed to speak, with more credibility than
usual, in the national interest. It seemed as if Morales and
MAS would, first, fulfill their promise of consolidating a broad-based
Left opposition that brought the spatially and sectorally separate
social movements together and, second, get back to extra-parliamentary
roots.
Morales and the opposition sent Sánchez
de Lozada a letter on Christmas Eve outlining fifteen demands
for discussion and announcing a blockade for January 6, 2003.
They did not receive a reply. Instead, the government and media
invested their resources in producing and circulating anti-blockade
propaganda throughout the New Year season, proclaiming that the
blockades were anti-patriotic, punished the poorest, and threatened
"democracy."
Once the blockades began on Monday, January
13, it quickly became evident that of all the groups assembled
on Morales' list, only the coca growers had the collective power
to blockade; and that the government, backed by the nation's
principal newspapers and television stations as well as the U.S.
Embassy, would use excessive force to stop them. By Monday morning,
with the road from Sacaba (Cochabamba) to Yapacaní (Santa
Cruz) shut down, 7,000 troops had descended on the Chapare lowlands,
while in the highlands, 3,000 were dispatched to Oruro and La
Paz, 1,000 to Sucre and Potosí. 22,000 police were mobilized
nationwide and "dalmation" riot police from La Paz
were sent to Cochabamba, where they did battle with university
students in solidarity with the coca growers. By the end of
the day, 160 people, some of them parents registering their children
for school, had been detained and sent to air force bases, and
a young coca grower received a bullet to the jaw that, miraculously,
did not kill him.
Rómulo Gonzales, a 22 year-old
coca grower from the Chapare, was not so lucky: on the second
day of the blockade he was shot to death from a distance of 500m
near Colomi, one of the last towns before the road to Santa Cruz
drops thousands of meters into the Chapare. Sánchez de
Lozada, pretending that everything was under control, left for
the swearing-in ceremony of Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador, as the
media broadcast misleading images of cleared roads that prompted
people to travel where they had no business doing so. Felipe
Quispe and the highland Aymara peasantry negotiated the provision
of 500 tractors stipulated in the Island of the Sun Accords,
while senior citizens broke off conversations with the government
over law 2434 and the indexation of their retirement benefits
to the dollar, declaring that they would march on La Paz in protest.
Under control of media mogul and Vice-President
Carlos Mesa, on Wednesday, January 15, Bolivia lived through
one of its darkest days in recent memory: 40 km from Cochabamba,
Felix Ibarra was murdered by government snipers; Willy Hinojosa,
23, died from bullet wounds in the Villa Tunari hospital in the
Chapare; Victor Hinojosa died from bullet wounds in Llavín;
and coca growers militias' ambushed and injured eight soldiers
in Cristal Mayu. Most tragically, six senior citizens, forced
by the "dalmation" police to get on buses the government
had rented in order to disperse the march on La Paz in the wee
hours of the morning, died in an accident on the road to Oruro,
along with seven other passengers. The bus the government rented
did not have mandatory insurance and it is not clear who will
pay the survivors. Blockades extended partially from the Chapare
to Santa Cruz, Potosí and Oruro, while in El Alto, an
Aymara city of 500,000 on the upper rim of La Paz, students,
market vendors, and parents of conscripted soldiers marched with
local senior citizens. U.S. Ambassador David Greenlee arrived
in La Paz just as the situation appeared to have slipped out
of government control, but he declined to comment until Sánchez
de Lozada returned for the ceremony of protocol.
On Thursay and Friday, President Sánchez
de Lozada regained the initiative, inviting Evo Morales to dialogue
in Cochabamaba, and the senior citizens' leader met with the
vice president in La Paz. However, when Morales arrived in Cochabamba,
he was told that the president would not meet with him until
the blockade was lifted and was given three hours to take action.
In return, the government promised to lift what it called "control
measures", i.e. repression. The Defender of the People,
Ana María Romero, a government official, noted that such
short-term time limits could frustrate the chances for dialogue,
since it takes the popular movements much longer to arrive at
decisions through assembly and consensus.
The government betrayed its utter ignorance
of the participatory mechanisms through which popular democracy
works in Bolivia. Or perhaps the 3-hour time limit was designed
to make dialogue impossible. In any event, through the magic
of the media, Morales came off as intransigent and the government
as reasonable. Shrewdly, the government and media played the
senior citizens off against the coca-growers. Whereas the former
operated exclusively within the parameters of the constitution,
we were told, the latter were violent, human rights violators
seeking to destabilize the country at the expense of the impoverished
peasantry and urban proletariat.
On Friday, the senior citizens' march
arrived in La Paz with great media fanfare and received an astonishing
display of material solidarity and moral support from all sectors
of the urban population. Vice President Carlos Mesa sought to
redeem himself with the help of the cameras and the music. By
Friday's end, though, there were 700 people detained on various
air force bases throughout the country, government forces had
killed five people and were responsible for the deaths of six
more. Ana María Romero, Defender of the People, reported
that the prisoners were abused with racial epithets, and that
detained women were being raped and threatened with rape. Blockades
continued in the Chapare, Santa Cruz, and the semi-tropical Yungas
north of La Paz, but the highlands were firmly under government
control. Even though pressure from within the Aymara trade union
federation was mounting to join the mobilization, Felipe Quispe
announced blockades for February. On Saturday, 1500 miners marched
from Huanuni, surrounded by tanks and under surveillance from
the air, toward Oruro, but in Machamarquita 500 of them clashed
with government forces, and miner Adrían Martínez
was shot and killed.
In what looks to be the most significant
development since the rise of MAS, Evo Morales convened the Joint
Chiefs of Staff of the People in Cochabamba on Sunday, January
19. Only Felipe Quispe and Saturnino Mallku, the bankrupt leader
of the moribund Bolivian Workers' Central (COB), were left out.
What makes the group so important is that it could succeed in
cementing the unity that the miners lent to the COB in the golden
years of struggle before the 1980s. In those days, the COB formed
a solid wall of opposition to dictatorial military governments
and occasionally exercised dual power.
If the new COB that Morales is calling
for comes together, the popular movements might be exercising
dual power again in the not-too-distant future. The government
will almost surely declare a State of Siege, which makes opposition
politics illegal, the moment signs of such a development appear.
Cochabamba is already under a de facto state of siege, and the
industrialists and agro-exporters have called for the government
to implement one nationwide. Foreign NGOS have come in for criticism
for their alleged support for the mobilization, and their members
could be detained and/or deported as things go from bad to worse.
A key variable will be the morale of the army. Already parents
of conscripts have complained that their sons, who should have
returned home at the end of 2002, "are being used to kill
their coca-growing brothers." Food for the conscripts is
scarce and poor quality, and some of the parents do not know
the whereabouts of their sons.
After a two-day pause in which the Chapare
was cleared for traffic, the government still refused to discuss
popular demands under the pressure of direct action, and it looked
like the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the People was going to be
another case of unrealized possibility. But on Wednesday, January
23, Felipe Quispe became part of the leadership. Thus through
their trade union confederation, the highland Aymara peasants
have joined the departmental trade union federations (CODs);
a federation of Aymara and Quechua communities (CONAMAQ); factory
workers, the Coordination for Life and Water, peasant irrigators,
and university students in Cochabamba; peasant colonizers in
the Yungas; peasant federations from Sucre, Potosí, Cochabamba,
Oruro, and part of La Paz; the Bartolina Sisa women's peasant
federation; as well as the unemployed and miners' cooperatives.
In all likelihood, the flow of people
and goods will be paralyzed in Bolivia in the coming days, and
it is doubtful that the government will make concessions without
first raising the level of repression dramatically through State
of Siege legislation. If the opposition can maintain its fragile
unity, there is reason to hope that it will obtain the renunciation
of Sánchez de Lozada and Carlos Mesa-which would be a
popular victory of historic proportions. Rather than a carbon
copy replacement president, a Constituent Assembly, first put
on the table during the water wars of April 2000, might begin
to outline a new social order in Bolivia. Though it is impossible
to say how such complex processes will work themselves out, further
radicalization of the anti-neoliberal opposition seems inevitable
for the time being. Let us hope that Lula realizes that the
Bolivian conflict can be another staging ground for Brazilian
diplomacy as, under the umbrella of the World Social Forum, left
turns continue to reverberate throughout South America.
*The P in MIP is for Pachakutic,
from pacha, or space-time, and kutic means turning
around-revolution, in the sense of a world turned right side
up.
Forrest Hylton
is conducting doctoral research in history in Bolivia and can
be reached at forresthylton@hotmail.com.
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