Pachakuti Movement on the Current Situation

Bolivia is currently living through the consequences of a process which began in 2000 and 2001, with the indigenous uprising and blockade of La Paz, the “Water War” in Cochabamba, and the “Gas War” in the provinces and city of El Alto in 2003. Evo Morales and the MAS represent the reformist wing of this process.

Given the exhaustion of the indigenous and popular masses, of the workers and the middle class, MAS has utilised this energy for the purposes of its own electoral triumph in 2005. Its duty was to comply with the mandate which motivated the popular uprising. Nevertheless, once in government, and despite having a majority in parliament and the Constituent Assembly, it has been characterised by inconsistencies and weaknesses in the tasks of decolonising this territory and structuring a new system of social justice. All its measures have been carried out attempting to maintain the privileges of the oligarchies and those groups from the neoliberal order that hold power.

That is why its measures, including those which government propaganda has tried to present as revolutionary, are mediocre, conciliatory or insufficient regarding the demands to reconstruct this country. Only popular pressure has pushed this government to put a radical varnish on its policies.

We shouldn’t forget that this government agreed to the type of autonomy proposed by the elites, and approved the two thirds majority for the Constituent Assembly. The problems which Evo Morales and its administration are currently facing are the fruit of its reformist weakness and of its inconsistency in applying the mandate coming from below.

The Movimiento Pachakuti (MP, Pachakuti Movement) is the initiator of this historic process, beginning with the leadership of Felipe Quispe during the mobilisations of 2000, 2001 and 2003, that is why it has the responsibility to defend it and deepen it, in front of the threats of secession from the national territory and retreating on the objectives of nationalisation of hydrocarbons, foundation of a new state, and elimination of all social discrimination, of gender and ethnicity. The current government is insufficient; the people must obtain full political power.
In front of the incoherence and lack of vital force coming from the MAS bureaucrats, the Pachakuti Movement defends national unity with a state model that guarantees the identity of all its inhabitants, founded on a political project of transformation based on the principles of our originaria societies, vitalised with the push coming from the working social classes and social sectors committed with a project of a just, egalitarian and reciprocal society.

La Paz, December 9. 2006

Felipe Quispe, National President of MP and members of the plenum of the National Political Committee of MP.