Momento 24 - The Bolivian government is now promoting the nationalization of two hydroelectric dams operated by French companies as part of the change process to provide greater benefits for the population.
President Evo Morales stated that this is Corani and Santa Isabel plants, both in the central region of Cochabamba.
Corani, Guaracachi and Valle Hermoso hydroelectric plants were transferred 12 years ago to the private sector, and provide 1,146 megawatts of energy to the major Bolivian cities.
Corani is controlled by the French group GDF Suez, through its subsidiary Inversiones Ecoenergy Bolivia and Guaracachi, by the British group Rurelec PCL. Valley Hermoso is operated by The Bolivian Generatings Group, a subsidiary of Panamerican Bolivia.
Also, Bolivia has received a commitment from the Inter-American Development Bank, or IDB, for a $100 million loan to finance the construction of a hydroelectric plant in the central part of the country.
The plant is part of the Misicuni project in the province of Cochabamba.
Bolivia is very close to being able to export energy because there are places along its rivers where hydroelectric plants can be built to increase the production of electricity by 2,000 MW, the president said.
The Andean nation’s power plants currently produce 1,070 MW to fulfill nationwide demand of 940 MW.
Bolivian president says coup against Zelaya intimidation to ALBA
PORLAMAR, Venezuela, Sept. 27 (Xinhua) -- Bolivian President Evo Morales said on Sunday that the coup against deposed Honduran President Manuel Zelaya means an intimidation to the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA).
The coup of June 28 is a reminder of the American empire, under the doctrine to prevent further widening of the ALBA, said Morales at a news conference held in the Hilton hotel, venue of the Second Africa-South America Summit (ASA).
For Morales, the alliance established in 2004 is considered by some as the axis of evil, when in fact, it is the core of humanity.
It is the product of historic struggles of Fidel Castro, and most recently, of Hugo Chavez, he said.
Concerning the situation in
On Saturday, heads of state and government of ASA countries have approved a joint statement condemning the coup in
Evo Morales at UN press conference: The capitalist systems should recognize and pay for their climate debt
During a press conference at United Nations Headquarters this morning, Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma declared that “capitalist lifestyles” were at the root of climate change problems, as he discussed key proposals to protect the environment and bring to justice those who contributed to pollution.
In New York to take part in the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Summit ahead of the General Assembly’s annual general debate, Mr. Morales focused exclusively on environmental responsibility, arguing that “Mother Earth” was sacred and should not be turned into private enterprise by the “capitalist system”.
“We must change the capitalist lifestyle,” he said, since the capitalist system favored obtaining the maximum profit possible, without taking into due consideration the lives of others or the environment.
It was necessary to stop living for the purpose of pillaging or looting the Earth, as today, improving living standards was seen first and foremost as an accumulation of capital. Rather, we must consider in detail the “well-being” of human individuals while also guaranteeing the well-being of Mother Nature, he said, adding: “Mother Earth can exist without human life, but not the other way around.”
Noting the “deep divergence” of views between the West and other nations on protecting the rights of Mother Nature, Mr. Morales said he nevertheless planned to use the opportunity provided by the Climate Summit to submit three proposals, on: the responsibility of industrialized countries and transnational companies to acknowledge and pay their “climate debt”; the establishment of a climate change tribunal; and a declaration on “protecting the rights of Mother Earth”.
With respect to his proposal for a climate change tribunal, he said such a body would deal with those who failed to recognize the error of their ways. He went on to say it would be “very interesting” to discuss such issues in Copenhagen. As there was no permanent investigative body that could “bring to justice” Governments or companies that had harmed the environment, an authority must be established to protect the planet, and indeed “save humankind”. He added that, thus far, Northern countries had not extended their full cooperation to address climate debt.
Mr. Morales also said a declaration protecting the rights of Mother Earth must be developed within the United Nations. In Bolivia, every day there was a loss of biodiversity and a decline in the snow-capped peaks, and research into protecting these areas must be conducted.
While the twentieth century had seen the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, recently, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the new struggle must be to protect and uphold the rights of Mother Earth. He said that in order to have a clean existence, we must keep the planet clean and protect the right to harmony between all forms of life, as well as establish a community based socialism “in all countries of the world”.
When asked why indigenous peoples had more of a “moral stand on the planet”, Mr. Morales said that such groups lived in harmony with Mother Earth, and that theirs was a lifestyle which should be emulated. He said that in some places, water had been privatized, as transnational companies had taken possession of waterfalls to sell water to the people.
“Water cannot be planted, cannot be produced”, he said. “In our communities, we can live without candles but not without water.” That was why indigenous peoples find Mother Earth so essential. Development models which privatized and eliminated natural resources were thus a form of plunder, he added.
Regarding a question about the position of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) on the shared environmental burden of developing and industrialized countries, Mr. Morales said there was not yet a coordinated position on the issue.
Asked how he planned to present his proposal that capitalist systems should recognize and pay for their climate debt, Mr. Morales said the idea “is like a warm up” leading to Copenhagen, where a thorough analysis into which countries were hurting the environment could be made. Focus should be on those nations which bore the major responsibility, and who “hurt the environment in the name of industrial development”.
Responding to a question about the proposed tribunal to judge contaminating countries, Mr. Morales said there should not only be a court to defend the environment, but a team to investigate and study violations on a scientific basis.
In New York to take part in the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Summit ahead of the General Assembly’s annual general debate, Mr. Morales focused exclusively on environmental responsibility, arguing that “Mother Earth” was sacred and should not be turned into private enterprise by the “capitalist system”.
“We must change the capitalist lifestyle,” he said, since the capitalist system favored obtaining the maximum profit possible, without taking into due consideration the lives of others or the environment.
It was necessary to stop living for the purpose of pillaging or looting the Earth, as today, improving living standards was seen first and foremost as an accumulation of capital. Rather, we must consider in detail the “well-being” of human individuals while also guaranteeing the well-being of Mother Nature, he said, adding: “Mother Earth can exist without human life, but not the other way around.”
Noting the “deep divergence” of views between the West and other nations on protecting the rights of Mother Nature, Mr. Morales said he nevertheless planned to use the opportunity provided by the Climate Summit to submit three proposals, on: the responsibility of industrialized countries and transnational companies to acknowledge and pay their “climate debt”; the establishment of a climate change tribunal; and a declaration on “protecting the rights of Mother Earth”.
With respect to his proposal for a climate change tribunal, he said such a body would deal with those who failed to recognize the error of their ways. He went on to say it would be “very interesting” to discuss such issues in Copenhagen. As there was no permanent investigative body that could “bring to justice” Governments or companies that had harmed the environment, an authority must be established to protect the planet, and indeed “save humankind”. He added that, thus far, Northern countries had not extended their full cooperation to address climate debt.
Mr. Morales also said a declaration protecting the rights of Mother Earth must be developed within the United Nations. In Bolivia, every day there was a loss of biodiversity and a decline in the snow-capped peaks, and research into protecting these areas must be conducted.
While the twentieth century had seen the establishment of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and, recently, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the new struggle must be to protect and uphold the rights of Mother Earth. He said that in order to have a clean existence, we must keep the planet clean and protect the right to harmony between all forms of life, as well as establish a community based socialism “in all countries of the world”.
When asked why indigenous peoples had more of a “moral stand on the planet”, Mr. Morales said that such groups lived in harmony with Mother Earth, and that theirs was a lifestyle which should be emulated. He said that in some places, water had been privatized, as transnational companies had taken possession of waterfalls to sell water to the people.
“Water cannot be planted, cannot be produced”, he said. “In our communities, we can live without candles but not without water.” That was why indigenous peoples find Mother Earth so essential. Development models which privatized and eliminated natural resources were thus a form of plunder, he added.
Regarding a question about the position of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) on the shared environmental burden of developing and industrialized countries, Mr. Morales said there was not yet a coordinated position on the issue.
Asked how he planned to present his proposal that capitalist systems should recognize and pay for their climate debt, Mr. Morales said the idea “is like a warm up” leading to Copenhagen, where a thorough analysis into which countries were hurting the environment could be made. Focus should be on those nations which bore the major responsibility, and who “hurt the environment in the name of industrial development”.
Responding to a question about the proposed tribunal to judge contaminating countries, Mr. Morales said there should not only be a court to defend the environment, but a team to investigate and study violations on a scientific basis.
Bolivia: The president's football team
Evo Morales's plan to nationalise Bolivia's football team says a lot about his economic vision – and his love of the sport
Benjamin Dangl, Saturday 19 September 2009
Benjamin Dangl, Saturday 19 September 2009
Every Sunday night in La Paz, Bolivia the football stadium comes to life, with its bright lights dimming the stars. After the game, fireworks pound at the cool air and fans roam the streets shaking banners and cans of beer. This happens regardless of what political crisis or triumph the country is going through.
"Whether it's something we celebrate together, or a shipwreck that takes us all down, soccer counts in Latin America, sometimes more than anything else," Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano writes in Soccer in Sun and Shadow.
So when Bolivia's football team recently failed to qualify for the World Cup, devoted fan and socialist President Evo Morales suggested an approach he's taken when other businesses haven't thrived. To solve the team's problem, he said: "What better thing than the intervention of the state?"
Putting the football industry under state control would follow in the footsteps of other nationalisations the popular president has carried out in the gas, tin and telecommunications sectors.
"We're sorry about the performance of our team in the qualifiers," Morales told reporters in Bolivia. "Until now [football] has been [controlled] by private, autonomous entities ... but they aren't getting results." He said nationalisation would "dignify" the national team.
Though not always a fool-proof solution, recent history in Bolivia shows that state control of certain industries and companies has been more efficient than private control. Under Morales, the Bolivian state has often acted in the people's best interest more than, for example, a foreign gas corporation. State-controlled industries have also generated revenue for the impoverished government, providing funds for much-needed social programmes and development work.
Morales's plan for the country's football team says a lot about his economic vision for the country, a vision that buoys his popularity and, according to recent polls, ensures he will be elected president again by a wide margin in the December elections. It also speaks of his love for football, a sport that led him to the presidential palace.
When he was 13, Morales, a child of poor farmers, began a team called Fraternidad (Brotherhood) in his small community in the Bolivian highlands. He took on the role of captain, player, referee and fundraiser. Morales explained: "I was like the owner of the team. I had to do the sheep shearing, for the llama wool. My father helped me. He was really a sportsman, we sold the wool to buy balls, uniforms."
When his family was forced by drought to migrate to the Chapare region to become coca farmers, he was quickly elected as the director of sports for the local coca union. That role led to other union positions as he rose through the ranks of the political left, eventually becoming president in 2005.
He has since played in La Paz with Argentine football legend Diego Maradona, sending the ball used in the game to Fidel Castro, signing it: "With admiration for Fidel." Later, he skipped a dinner with Chilean President Michele Bachelet to play a game in Santiago. His team beat the Chilean pros by 8 to 1.
Morales is right in seeking to put Bolivia's football team under state control. This multi-billion dollar business has favoured corporate elites for decades, separating the sport from the Latin American working-class culture that embraces and sustains it.
"Soccer is an integrator," Morales told Fox News last year. "It doesn't just have to do with championships, trophies or medals. It means much more than that. Soccer makes us forget the politicians who are our specific problems. Even poverty, if only for 90 minutes, gives way to this social phenomenon."
Republished from The Guardian
Evo Morales Closes an Old Wound – The Bolivian President’s Speech at Leganés, Spain
Speech by Evo Morales Ayma, Constitutional President of the Pluri-national State of Bolivia, at Leganés (Madrid), September 13, 2009, translated by Machetera
Listen to Evo Morales and the public reaction to his speech at Leganés, here:
Honorable Mayor, Rafael Gómez, the city of Leganés, city officials, Spanish government officials, beloved Ambassador of Bolivia in Spain, greetings to all our Bolivian brothers. Many thanks for your presence and for receiving me here in Leganés, in Spain. I’m surprised by the presence of thousands and thousands of Bolivians, Ecuadorans, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Peruvian brothers, Cuban brothers, so many Latin Americans here together tonight. I want to give you my greatest thanks for this great mobilization, this great integration of all Latin Americans in Europe. But I also want to express our respect to the Spanish people. Thank you very much for your presence and for having organized this large meeting of people of the world.
Listening to the speeches given by various sisters and brothers from Spain, I’m surprised by how they’ve followed the process of liberation in Bolivia and in Latin America, surprised by their following of the deep social, economic and political transformations. Surely many of you here now know how we organized, first through the unions, socially and communally, in order to change Bolivia, and of course, to change Latin America. If we speak of change, one of the changes, justly, is the liberation of the people of Latin America.
In Bolivia, together with the Bolivian Worker’s Central, the different social movements, [it is] a permanent struggle against the economic models that have so damaged Bolivians. If we recall the situation of the policies implemented during the republic, before the republic, the original indigenous people, the Quechua, Aymara, the Guaraní, it is a permanent struggle against the looting of our natural resources, a permanent struggle for equality between indigenous, mestizos and criollos of those times, for a new way of life, of equality and dignity, but also a permanent struggle for the respect of our rights, the right above all of the indigenous people, the most abused sector in Bolivian history and the history of Latin America. A tough resistance, a rebellion against the colonial State, a rebellion of the people against the looting of our natural resources, a permanent rebellion against the forms of subjugation. And these struggles, I want to tell you, brothers and sisters of Bolivia, have not been in vain; from the union struggle, the social struggle, the communal struggle we went to an electoral struggle.
I remember perfectly well when I arrived at Chapare in 1980, when there were negotiations with the governors and when the union leaders, ex-union leaders brought up the idea of structural changes, and the response of the neoliberal governors was that the campesinos, the indigenous, had no right to political action and that our proposals to change the subject or the agenda of the negotiations were questioned, that they were of a political character. I remember that they told us (I was a delegate from the base), they told us, you are making political proposals and they will not be heard; they told us that the politics of the indigenous campesino movement in the tropical zone of Cochabamba were the axe and the machete. In other words, manual labor, and we did not have the right to political action. And in the altiplano, it was the shovel and the hoe; the shovel to work and the hoe to work as well. Little by little that social movement went about breaking the fear of politics. A few had the right to political action and the majority, the workers and laborers, we didn’t have that right and when a worker, a miner, during the sixties, seventies, eighties acted politically, he was accused of being a communist. We salute the Spanish Communist Party, the Socialist Party, we salute the humanists here, many thanks for having taught me how to defend life. We’ve had so many meetings, but I want you to know, brothers and sisters of Latin America, of Europe, social movements of this continent, our union leaders, in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s they were accused of being communists and persecuted, the coups d’etat, the military coups, in order to do away with the union leaders from the mining sector. So then, the doctrine of North American imperialism was to accuse them of being communists, and with that motive, there were massacres in the mining centers and many of the brothers who were mining leaders escaped, sometimes to Europe. I want to express my deep respect and admiration for the accommodation that was given to many of those mining brothers, campesinos who escaped to Europe in order to survive. Surely the humanist, communist, socialist governments have given them the shelter here of political asylum.
Afterwards there came another doctrine. This was the fight against drug trafficking. I remember perfectly well how in the eighties and nineties, the union leaders were [called] drug traffickers, another persecution by the empire, and after September 11, 2001, the union leaders were accused of being terrorists. Surely some brothers will recall that some said that Evo Morales was the Andean Bin Laden, that the cocaleros were the Taliban, and with this pretext, [came] another political doctrine of zero coca, as a way of expelling the campesino movement from the coca producing zone, and to say – I want you to understand me – that we’ve borne permanent interventions, at times of a military character, to attack this rebellion of our people in Latin America. These struggles, whether they be of workers or indigenous, these mestizo struggles, these struggles of intellectuals such as Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, these struggles of revolutionary fathers such as Luis Espinal, a Spaniard who gave his life for the poor of Bolivia and, like Luis Espinal, this struggle of military patriots such as Germán Busch, such as Lieutenant Colonel Gualberto Vallarroel, I want to tell you, brothers and sisters, it has not been in vain. A struggle, of course, peaceful, democratic, in order to reach the government, the Palacio Quemado,[2] and from there to change economic and social policy. Something happened, I want you to listen, Bolivian sisters and brothers: since 1940, Bolivia has never had a fiscal surplus, not until 2005, before I became president. Afterwards, in 2006, we nationalized and recovered our hydrocarbons, and in Bolivia in the first year of our government, 2006, we had a fiscal surplus. Bolivia’s status as a beggar, that had to borrow money to come up with petty cash, is over. In 2005 Bolivia’s international reserves were $1.7 billion. The day before yesterday, we were at the Bolivian Central Bank signing an internal loan and the president of the Central Bank of Bolivia told me that now we have $8.5 billion in international reserves. From $1.7 billion in international reserves. Imagine, sisters and brothers, during the twenty years of neoliberal government, how much money went out and where it went, surely to economists, experts in financial subjects in Europe and Spain and Latin America. I’d like you to help me investigate the looting of our natural resources. How much money has Bolivia or Latin America lost, in recent years, how much money have we lost, at the expense of so many social benefits? It wouldn’t take much but it would be a relief for many Bolivian families. Now we have the reserves and now we have the surplus.
Since last year we’ve been told that there’s an economic crisis of capitalism, a financial crisis. They’ve frightened us, they’ve brought fear to see how we will face it. I thought truthfully, sisters and brothers, that this financial crisis would affect us terribly. I imagined we’d not have a commercial surplus. I want to tell you, Bolivian sisters and brothers, that on July 30 of this year, the positive commercial balance was $300 million. Bolivia has never had a positive commercial balance. And this is why, sisters and brothers, I’m convinced about democratic structural changes, and when there is a sector in opposition, it’s better to take it to the Bolivian people, in a referendum. Now, Bolivians don’t only have the right to choose their national leaders or their departmental leaders, in addition to municipal leaders. Now the Bolivian people have the right to decide through any referendum, economic policies for the Bolivian people. They are referendums that we never had before. But also, thanks to the new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, Bolivians don’t only have the right to select their national, departmental, municipal or parliamentary leaders. Now with the vote, the same people have the right to revoke any president, vice-president, parliamentarian, prefect or mayor doing badly in their area, they have the right to revoke them through their vote. This is a deep democracy that is not just representative, it is participative, where decisions are taken with the vote of the conscience of the Bolivian people. But I also want to tell you, sisters and brothers, the norms, the procedures to administer the state may also be changed in Bolivia. For the first time in 183 years of republican life, the Bolivian people approved a new Constitution; that had never before been done, it was only the political class, the parties or in the end, the party with parliamentary representation who had the right to make reforms to the Constitution. Now the people with their vote have approved a new constitution for the Bolivian state. That is, we even change Constitutions.
I want to tell you, sisters and brothers, we have a great weakness, which is changing the mentality of public officials. There are still some who do not understand what it means to be a public official. I’ve said, I don’t need ordinary public officials, I need revolutionaries at the service of the people. There’s a mentality, I’d call it a colonial mentality, an inheritance of paternalism, of bosses, of looters, of exploiters; that mentality is not easily changed and it’s one of the weaknesses that Bolivia still has. However, despite these weaknesses we are beginning to change, it’s not enough, surely the participation of the social movements in these profound transformations will continue to be important. Recently our foreign minister from Spain said to me, “There’s a lot of movement happening in Bolivia, election after election, campaigns for referendums, sometimes revocations, sometimes to approve a new Constitution.” My answer was that before, there were coups and military coups, now there are elections and elections. I am very content, although there may be elections and referendums every year, but not coups d’etat.
But I also want to tell you, in our new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, approved by the Bolivian people, no kind of foreign military base whatsoever, even less one from the United States will be allowed. And I want you, brothers from Europe, from Spain, to understand me. In Latin America, where there are U.S. military bases, there are military coups, the peace is not guaranteed, democracy is not guaranteed, and I speak with great authority, because I have been a permanent victim throughout the ‘90’s and part of the ‘80’s, part of first decade of this century, of the presence of foreign armed military, particularly from the United States. Happily, thanks to the conscience of the Bolivian people, that has come to an end. I must ask the social movements of Europe and the world: help us to do away with military bases in Latin America. All in the interest of life, democracy and peace and social justice.
Thank you very much, sisters and brothers, I think you care for me more here in Spain than in Bolivia, thanks very much. I’m sure, sisters and brothers, the process of liberation, the process of profound transformation, not only in Bolivia, but in Latin America, is a one way path. The process of transformations in democracy is unstoppable in Bolivia. Why do I say this? You, as brothers who live here, ought to be aware, a number of times neoliberal groups from the fascist, racist rightwing, tried to remove me from the government and I remember it perfectly. The first year of my government, they said, poor little Indian, he’ll be there three, four, five, six months, he won’t be able to govern and then he’ll go, they’ll get rid of him. That was in 2006. In 2007, what did these groups say? I believe that this Indian is going to stay quite awhile, something’s got to be done. 2008. In 2008 they did something. And what did they do? First they tried to get me out by the vote of the Bolivian people – the vote to revoke my mandate. I accepted: let’s go to a vote. You know that we had won the elections with 54%. In this revocation referendum the Bolivian people ratified us by 67%. When they failed at that, when the revocation failed and they couldn’t revoke me through the conscience of the people, last year they tried with a civil, not military coup d’etat. And now I’d like to salute the European countries, defenders of democracy, UNASUR, and the United Nations for defending democracy – with their civil prefectural coup d’etat they failed as well. And so we have the great triumph of the Bolivian people in politics and constitutionally. And this year, thanks to the efforts and conscience of the people, a new Constitution has been approved. Now we are obliged to apply and implement this new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, which honestly, some European countries tell me that in regard to its social rights, is more advanced than any European country.
And of what rights do we speak? We’re not just talking about individual rights, we’re not just talking about political rights; this new political constitution of the Bolivian state also respects collective rights. For example, all basic services are a human right, and if it is a human right, it may not be a private business, but a public service.
Sisters and brothers, I can talk a lot about this new Constitution of the Bolivian state, but I’m also sure that there are some demands that we’ve been unable to resolve, particularly in foreign service. I found that the Bolivian state, as it is now known worldwide, is the pluri-national state; in this pluri-national state is the diversity of the human beings who inhabit this land of Bolivia. I found, for example, barely two [Bolivian consulates] in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona. Now we are opening another consulate in Murcia – I know it’s not sufficient; we’re talking about extending the consulates to six, in four or five cities in Spain, including the Canary Islands, Tenerife, or finally, Majorca, Menorca, that at times I’ve been able to visit, sisters and brothers, to attend to the problem that we have, the subject of migration and corresponding documentation. But I also want to tell you, sisters and brothers, surely from the embassy in Spain, where all the consulates report, thanks to the understanding of the Spanish government, about certain important subjects. The subject, for example of drivers’ licenses is well underway, even an agreement about reciprocal voting; that is, Bolivians resident in Spain may have the right to vote in municipal elections. We hope to reach agreement on that during this visit, the vote in Spain.
A subject that has been a permanent concern; the vote from abroad. I want you to know, sisters and brothers, that from the [presidential] palace, we are directing a project that resulted from a 2005 law in the National Congress. Happily, the chamber of deputies approved the vote from abroad without any limitation. But from 2006 to 2009 the Senate has not approved it and you know furthermore, why the Senate has not approved it: the neoliberal Senators are very afraid of the brothers who left Bolivia in search of better living conditions. At last, with so much pressure in Bolivia and Argentina, I know that here you’ll also mobilize to pressure the National Congress to approve a law that will allow for voting outside Bolivia, that was approved for the first time, even though it’s not as extensive as I wanted. It was approved up to a certain limit, but that will be fixed, sisters and brothers, the moment in which congressional representatives who share the feelings of many brothers who live outside Bolivia, now we’ll dedicate ourselves to seeing that the vote from abroad is not limited. I am not in agreement with the idea of limiting it; it’s a way of moving against human rights, the right of Bolivian citizens living abroad. But we will start this year, this year with the foreign, although limited, vote.
Sisters and brothers, until now you’ve listened to the subject of migration. I want to tell the countries of Europe and the world, especially of Europe, its governments, that there will also be a debate, as before, Europeans, Spaniards, came to Bolivia and our grandfathers never said they were illegal. Now that Latin Americans come to Europe they cannot be declared illegal, because everyone, we all have the right to inhabit any part of the world, we all have the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the norms of each country, but to declare us illegal is a great mistake; this is where I differ from the United Nations. Happily many countries are joining us in our proposals, and we hope that soon the United Nations will establish norms that will allow for these so-called immigrants to be recognized as legal persons, I repeat, respecting the norms of each country, whether they are investors or people who come looking for better living conditions, rest assured, sisters and brothers, this will be another battle, another battle for our sisters and brothers, whether they are Europeans in Bolivia, Latin America or Latin Americans in Europe. They must be declared legal persons who live by their labor, who live to improve their economic or social condition.
There’s another central subject, sisters and brothers, the subject of the environment. Surely there are plenty of Paceños[3] here. Imagine that Chacaltaya, our Chacaltaya has no more snow. In Potosí, Chorolque, there’s no more snow – I’m sure there are Potosinos here as well. These mountains of the Bolivian altiplano, of the La Paz altiplano, are daily losing their white poncho. We must ask ourselves who’s responsible. The capitalist development model, the exaggerated and unlimited industrialization of certain western countries [is responsible]. However, this problem affects all of humanity. Therefore I want to tell you, I’ve reached the conclusion, the following conclusion: right now, in this new millennium, it’s more important to defend the rights of mother earth than the rights of human beings. If we don’t defend the rights of mother earth, it’s useless to defend human rights. To our humanist brothers, to so many social movements, groups, intellectuals, personalities who dedicate themselves to defending the environment, as well as mother earth, I want to say, let’s come together, let’s work together, let’s help our presidents, our governments who defend the rights of mother earth and everyone who defends the environment, as well as the rights of the earth; defending planet earth in order to save humanity. If we do not come together, if we do not orient ourselves, if we don’t work together, 20, 30, 50 years from now, what will be the situation of any human being? I mean, whether they’re indigenous, laborers, business owners, corporations, life is not assured. The only way to guarantee the life of the human beings who inhabit this planet earth is by defending mother earth.
It’s time to take on this huge responsibility and we all have this noble and sacred assignment of defending the environment. I call on the so-called industrialized countries to begin to think seriously of canceling the climate debt, a historical debt resulting from having caused so much damage to the environment. I feel that in this millennium we must assume this responsibility in order to defend humanity.
Sisters and brothers, I know that you have come from many different places. Greetings to brothers who came from faraway cities in order to see us, to greet us, to applaud with everyone here, to the brothers who came from the islands, to the Latin American compañeros who came to share this moment and to the organizers, thank you to the mayor of Leganés for allowing us to gather here. For my part, I want to tell you, brothers, sisters, thank you very much for everything. Until we meet again, we will continue working for equality, for dignity and for the good of Bolivians and all Latin Americans, for their liberation that is beginning in South America. Thank you very much.
Notes
[1] The Diablada is a South American dance that was created in the Andean Altiplano but holds auto sacramental origins in Spain. The dance is practised throughout the Andean region, and is an important part of the cultural festivities of the nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. The dance stands prominent during the Fiesta de la Candelaria in Peru, the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia, and the Fiesta de la Tirana in Chile. However, the dance is also practiced in Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. (Wikipedia)
[2] Bolivia’s presidential palace.
[3] A person from La Paz.
Listen to Evo Morales and the public reaction to his speech at Leganés, here:
Honorable Mayor, Rafael Gómez, the city of Leganés, city officials, Spanish government officials, beloved Ambassador of Bolivia in Spain, greetings to all our Bolivian brothers. Many thanks for your presence and for receiving me here in Leganés, in Spain. I’m surprised by the presence of thousands and thousands of Bolivians, Ecuadorans, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Peruvian brothers, Cuban brothers, so many Latin Americans here together tonight. I want to give you my greatest thanks for this great mobilization, this great integration of all Latin Americans in Europe. But I also want to express our respect to the Spanish people. Thank you very much for your presence and for having organized this large meeting of people of the world.
Listening to the speeches given by various sisters and brothers from Spain, I’m surprised by how they’ve followed the process of liberation in Bolivia and in Latin America, surprised by their following of the deep social, economic and political transformations. Surely many of you here now know how we organized, first through the unions, socially and communally, in order to change Bolivia, and of course, to change Latin America. If we speak of change, one of the changes, justly, is the liberation of the people of Latin America.
In Bolivia, together with the Bolivian Worker’s Central, the different social movements, [it is] a permanent struggle against the economic models that have so damaged Bolivians. If we recall the situation of the policies implemented during the republic, before the republic, the original indigenous people, the Quechua, Aymara, the Guaraní, it is a permanent struggle against the looting of our natural resources, a permanent struggle for equality between indigenous, mestizos and criollos of those times, for a new way of life, of equality and dignity, but also a permanent struggle for the respect of our rights, the right above all of the indigenous people, the most abused sector in Bolivian history and the history of Latin America. A tough resistance, a rebellion against the colonial State, a rebellion of the people against the looting of our natural resources, a permanent rebellion against the forms of subjugation. And these struggles, I want to tell you, brothers and sisters of Bolivia, have not been in vain; from the union struggle, the social struggle, the communal struggle we went to an electoral struggle.
I remember perfectly well when I arrived at Chapare in 1980, when there were negotiations with the governors and when the union leaders, ex-union leaders brought up the idea of structural changes, and the response of the neoliberal governors was that the campesinos, the indigenous, had no right to political action and that our proposals to change the subject or the agenda of the negotiations were questioned, that they were of a political character. I remember that they told us (I was a delegate from the base), they told us, you are making political proposals and they will not be heard; they told us that the politics of the indigenous campesino movement in the tropical zone of Cochabamba were the axe and the machete. In other words, manual labor, and we did not have the right to political action. And in the altiplano, it was the shovel and the hoe; the shovel to work and the hoe to work as well. Little by little that social movement went about breaking the fear of politics. A few had the right to political action and the majority, the workers and laborers, we didn’t have that right and when a worker, a miner, during the sixties, seventies, eighties acted politically, he was accused of being a communist. We salute the Spanish Communist Party, the Socialist Party, we salute the humanists here, many thanks for having taught me how to defend life. We’ve had so many meetings, but I want you to know, brothers and sisters of Latin America, of Europe, social movements of this continent, our union leaders, in the ‘60’s and ‘70’s they were accused of being communists and persecuted, the coups d’etat, the military coups, in order to do away with the union leaders from the mining sector. So then, the doctrine of North American imperialism was to accuse them of being communists, and with that motive, there were massacres in the mining centers and many of the brothers who were mining leaders escaped, sometimes to Europe. I want to express my deep respect and admiration for the accommodation that was given to many of those mining brothers, campesinos who escaped to Europe in order to survive. Surely the humanist, communist, socialist governments have given them the shelter here of political asylum.
Afterwards there came another doctrine. This was the fight against drug trafficking. I remember perfectly well how in the eighties and nineties, the union leaders were [called] drug traffickers, another persecution by the empire, and after September 11, 2001, the union leaders were accused of being terrorists. Surely some brothers will recall that some said that Evo Morales was the Andean Bin Laden, that the cocaleros were the Taliban, and with this pretext, [came] another political doctrine of zero coca, as a way of expelling the campesino movement from the coca producing zone, and to say – I want you to understand me – that we’ve borne permanent interventions, at times of a military character, to attack this rebellion of our people in Latin America. These struggles, whether they be of workers or indigenous, these mestizo struggles, these struggles of intellectuals such as Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz, these struggles of revolutionary fathers such as Luis Espinal, a Spaniard who gave his life for the poor of Bolivia and, like Luis Espinal, this struggle of military patriots such as Germán Busch, such as Lieutenant Colonel Gualberto Vallarroel, I want to tell you, brothers and sisters, it has not been in vain. A struggle, of course, peaceful, democratic, in order to reach the government, the Palacio Quemado,[2] and from there to change economic and social policy. Something happened, I want you to listen, Bolivian sisters and brothers: since 1940, Bolivia has never had a fiscal surplus, not until 2005, before I became president. Afterwards, in 2006, we nationalized and recovered our hydrocarbons, and in Bolivia in the first year of our government, 2006, we had a fiscal surplus. Bolivia’s status as a beggar, that had to borrow money to come up with petty cash, is over. In 2005 Bolivia’s international reserves were $1.7 billion. The day before yesterday, we were at the Bolivian Central Bank signing an internal loan and the president of the Central Bank of Bolivia told me that now we have $8.5 billion in international reserves. From $1.7 billion in international reserves. Imagine, sisters and brothers, during the twenty years of neoliberal government, how much money went out and where it went, surely to economists, experts in financial subjects in Europe and Spain and Latin America. I’d like you to help me investigate the looting of our natural resources. How much money has Bolivia or Latin America lost, in recent years, how much money have we lost, at the expense of so many social benefits? It wouldn’t take much but it would be a relief for many Bolivian families. Now we have the reserves and now we have the surplus.
Since last year we’ve been told that there’s an economic crisis of capitalism, a financial crisis. They’ve frightened us, they’ve brought fear to see how we will face it. I thought truthfully, sisters and brothers, that this financial crisis would affect us terribly. I imagined we’d not have a commercial surplus. I want to tell you, Bolivian sisters and brothers, that on July 30 of this year, the positive commercial balance was $300 million. Bolivia has never had a positive commercial balance. And this is why, sisters and brothers, I’m convinced about democratic structural changes, and when there is a sector in opposition, it’s better to take it to the Bolivian people, in a referendum. Now, Bolivians don’t only have the right to choose their national leaders or their departmental leaders, in addition to municipal leaders. Now the Bolivian people have the right to decide through any referendum, economic policies for the Bolivian people. They are referendums that we never had before. But also, thanks to the new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, Bolivians don’t only have the right to select their national, departmental, municipal or parliamentary leaders. Now with the vote, the same people have the right to revoke any president, vice-president, parliamentarian, prefect or mayor doing badly in their area, they have the right to revoke them through their vote. This is a deep democracy that is not just representative, it is participative, where decisions are taken with the vote of the conscience of the Bolivian people. But I also want to tell you, sisters and brothers, the norms, the procedures to administer the state may also be changed in Bolivia. For the first time in 183 years of republican life, the Bolivian people approved a new Constitution; that had never before been done, it was only the political class, the parties or in the end, the party with parliamentary representation who had the right to make reforms to the Constitution. Now the people with their vote have approved a new constitution for the Bolivian state. That is, we even change Constitutions.
I want to tell you, sisters and brothers, we have a great weakness, which is changing the mentality of public officials. There are still some who do not understand what it means to be a public official. I’ve said, I don’t need ordinary public officials, I need revolutionaries at the service of the people. There’s a mentality, I’d call it a colonial mentality, an inheritance of paternalism, of bosses, of looters, of exploiters; that mentality is not easily changed and it’s one of the weaknesses that Bolivia still has. However, despite these weaknesses we are beginning to change, it’s not enough, surely the participation of the social movements in these profound transformations will continue to be important. Recently our foreign minister from Spain said to me, “There’s a lot of movement happening in Bolivia, election after election, campaigns for referendums, sometimes revocations, sometimes to approve a new Constitution.” My answer was that before, there were coups and military coups, now there are elections and elections. I am very content, although there may be elections and referendums every year, but not coups d’etat.
But I also want to tell you, in our new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, approved by the Bolivian people, no kind of foreign military base whatsoever, even less one from the United States will be allowed. And I want you, brothers from Europe, from Spain, to understand me. In Latin America, where there are U.S. military bases, there are military coups, the peace is not guaranteed, democracy is not guaranteed, and I speak with great authority, because I have been a permanent victim throughout the ‘90’s and part of the ‘80’s, part of first decade of this century, of the presence of foreign armed military, particularly from the United States. Happily, thanks to the conscience of the Bolivian people, that has come to an end. I must ask the social movements of Europe and the world: help us to do away with military bases in Latin America. All in the interest of life, democracy and peace and social justice.
Thank you very much, sisters and brothers, I think you care for me more here in Spain than in Bolivia, thanks very much. I’m sure, sisters and brothers, the process of liberation, the process of profound transformation, not only in Bolivia, but in Latin America, is a one way path. The process of transformations in democracy is unstoppable in Bolivia. Why do I say this? You, as brothers who live here, ought to be aware, a number of times neoliberal groups from the fascist, racist rightwing, tried to remove me from the government and I remember it perfectly. The first year of my government, they said, poor little Indian, he’ll be there three, four, five, six months, he won’t be able to govern and then he’ll go, they’ll get rid of him. That was in 2006. In 2007, what did these groups say? I believe that this Indian is going to stay quite awhile, something’s got to be done. 2008. In 2008 they did something. And what did they do? First they tried to get me out by the vote of the Bolivian people – the vote to revoke my mandate. I accepted: let’s go to a vote. You know that we had won the elections with 54%. In this revocation referendum the Bolivian people ratified us by 67%. When they failed at that, when the revocation failed and they couldn’t revoke me through the conscience of the people, last year they tried with a civil, not military coup d’etat. And now I’d like to salute the European countries, defenders of democracy, UNASUR, and the United Nations for defending democracy – with their civil prefectural coup d’etat they failed as well. And so we have the great triumph of the Bolivian people in politics and constitutionally. And this year, thanks to the efforts and conscience of the people, a new Constitution has been approved. Now we are obliged to apply and implement this new political Constitution of the Bolivian state, which honestly, some European countries tell me that in regard to its social rights, is more advanced than any European country.
And of what rights do we speak? We’re not just talking about individual rights, we’re not just talking about political rights; this new political constitution of the Bolivian state also respects collective rights. For example, all basic services are a human right, and if it is a human right, it may not be a private business, but a public service.
Sisters and brothers, I can talk a lot about this new Constitution of the Bolivian state, but I’m also sure that there are some demands that we’ve been unable to resolve, particularly in foreign service. I found that the Bolivian state, as it is now known worldwide, is the pluri-national state; in this pluri-national state is the diversity of the human beings who inhabit this land of Bolivia. I found, for example, barely two [Bolivian consulates] in Spain, in Madrid and Barcelona. Now we are opening another consulate in Murcia – I know it’s not sufficient; we’re talking about extending the consulates to six, in four or five cities in Spain, including the Canary Islands, Tenerife, or finally, Majorca, Menorca, that at times I’ve been able to visit, sisters and brothers, to attend to the problem that we have, the subject of migration and corresponding documentation. But I also want to tell you, sisters and brothers, surely from the embassy in Spain, where all the consulates report, thanks to the understanding of the Spanish government, about certain important subjects. The subject, for example of drivers’ licenses is well underway, even an agreement about reciprocal voting; that is, Bolivians resident in Spain may have the right to vote in municipal elections. We hope to reach agreement on that during this visit, the vote in Spain.
A subject that has been a permanent concern; the vote from abroad. I want you to know, sisters and brothers, that from the [presidential] palace, we are directing a project that resulted from a 2005 law in the National Congress. Happily, the chamber of deputies approved the vote from abroad without any limitation. But from 2006 to 2009 the Senate has not approved it and you know furthermore, why the Senate has not approved it: the neoliberal Senators are very afraid of the brothers who left Bolivia in search of better living conditions. At last, with so much pressure in Bolivia and Argentina, I know that here you’ll also mobilize to pressure the National Congress to approve a law that will allow for voting outside Bolivia, that was approved for the first time, even though it’s not as extensive as I wanted. It was approved up to a certain limit, but that will be fixed, sisters and brothers, the moment in which congressional representatives who share the feelings of many brothers who live outside Bolivia, now we’ll dedicate ourselves to seeing that the vote from abroad is not limited. I am not in agreement with the idea of limiting it; it’s a way of moving against human rights, the right of Bolivian citizens living abroad. But we will start this year, this year with the foreign, although limited, vote.
Sisters and brothers, until now you’ve listened to the subject of migration. I want to tell the countries of Europe and the world, especially of Europe, its governments, that there will also be a debate, as before, Europeans, Spaniards, came to Bolivia and our grandfathers never said they were illegal. Now that Latin Americans come to Europe they cannot be declared illegal, because everyone, we all have the right to inhabit any part of the world, we all have the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the norms of each country, but to declare us illegal is a great mistake; this is where I differ from the United Nations. Happily many countries are joining us in our proposals, and we hope that soon the United Nations will establish norms that will allow for these so-called immigrants to be recognized as legal persons, I repeat, respecting the norms of each country, whether they are investors or people who come looking for better living conditions, rest assured, sisters and brothers, this will be another battle, another battle for our sisters and brothers, whether they are Europeans in Bolivia, Latin America or Latin Americans in Europe. They must be declared legal persons who live by their labor, who live to improve their economic or social condition.
There’s another central subject, sisters and brothers, the subject of the environment. Surely there are plenty of Paceños[3] here. Imagine that Chacaltaya, our Chacaltaya has no more snow. In Potosí, Chorolque, there’s no more snow – I’m sure there are Potosinos here as well. These mountains of the Bolivian altiplano, of the La Paz altiplano, are daily losing their white poncho. We must ask ourselves who’s responsible. The capitalist development model, the exaggerated and unlimited industrialization of certain western countries [is responsible]. However, this problem affects all of humanity. Therefore I want to tell you, I’ve reached the conclusion, the following conclusion: right now, in this new millennium, it’s more important to defend the rights of mother earth than the rights of human beings. If we don’t defend the rights of mother earth, it’s useless to defend human rights. To our humanist brothers, to so many social movements, groups, intellectuals, personalities who dedicate themselves to defending the environment, as well as mother earth, I want to say, let’s come together, let’s work together, let’s help our presidents, our governments who defend the rights of mother earth and everyone who defends the environment, as well as the rights of the earth; defending planet earth in order to save humanity. If we do not come together, if we do not orient ourselves, if we don’t work together, 20, 30, 50 years from now, what will be the situation of any human being? I mean, whether they’re indigenous, laborers, business owners, corporations, life is not assured. The only way to guarantee the life of the human beings who inhabit this planet earth is by defending mother earth.
It’s time to take on this huge responsibility and we all have this noble and sacred assignment of defending the environment. I call on the so-called industrialized countries to begin to think seriously of canceling the climate debt, a historical debt resulting from having caused so much damage to the environment. I feel that in this millennium we must assume this responsibility in order to defend humanity.
Sisters and brothers, I know that you have come from many different places. Greetings to brothers who came from faraway cities in order to see us, to greet us, to applaud with everyone here, to the brothers who came from the islands, to the Latin American compañeros who came to share this moment and to the organizers, thank you to the mayor of Leganés for allowing us to gather here. For my part, I want to tell you, brothers, sisters, thank you very much for everything. Until we meet again, we will continue working for equality, for dignity and for the good of Bolivians and all Latin Americans, for their liberation that is beginning in South America. Thank you very much.
Notes
[1] The Diablada is a South American dance that was created in the Andean Altiplano but holds auto sacramental origins in Spain. The dance is practised throughout the Andean region, and is an important part of the cultural festivities of the nations of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile. The dance stands prominent during the Fiesta de la Candelaria in Peru, the Carnaval de Oruro in Bolivia, and the Fiesta de la Tirana in Chile. However, the dance is also practiced in Venezuela, Ecuador and Panama. (Wikipedia)
[2] Bolivia’s presidential palace.
[3] A person from La Paz.
Morales: U.S. Has No Right to Judge Bolivia’s Anti-Drug Fight
LA PAZ – Bolivian President Evo Morales said Wednesday that the United States “doesn’t have the authority or moral standing to question” his country’s battle against drug trafficking and he urged Washington to offer an accounting of its own anti-drug efforts.
Such was Morales’ response when asked at a press conference about a U.S. State Department report citing Bolivia for having failed to demonstrate its commitment to international counter-narcotics accords.
Bolivia, the president told reporters, is committed to a “all-out battle” with the drug trade, even though the U.S. government no longer provides anti-narcotics aid to La Paz.
Morales said that Bolivian authorities have seized 19.4 tons of cocaine and coca paste so far in 2009, compared with 11 tons during all of 2005, the year before he took office.
Bolivia’s interior ministry says that police have also destroyed 3,709 drug laboratories since Jan. 1.
The president stressed that all of those operations were carried out without any help from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which he expelled from Bolivia late last year after accusing DEA agents of engaging in unauthorized activity.
Downplaying the importance of the U.S. government’s annual evaluations of other countries’ performance in the war on drugs, he said that Washington used political considerations when deciding to label nations as cooperative or uncooperative.
He then asked why there is no certification of whether the United States is reducing its demand for illegal drugs.
“As long as there is a market for cocaine, however much we reduce coca leaf, part will always be diverted (to cocaine production): that is our reality,” the Bolivian president said.
He also repeated his proposal for a coordinated regional anti-drug policy and suggested that the 12-member Union of South American Nations could “certify or decertify the United States.”
“The struggle against drug trafficking cannot be an instrument of political control and geopolitical control,” Morales said.
Bolivia, like neighboring Peru, allows cultivation of coca in limited amounts to meet demand for legal, traditional uses in cooking, folk medicine and Andean religious rites.
Morales, who entered public life as the leader of a coca-growers union, came to office in January 2006 promising to end forced eradication of the leaf, a U.S.-directed program that had led to violent confrontations. EFE
Such was Morales’ response when asked at a press conference about a U.S. State Department report citing Bolivia for having failed to demonstrate its commitment to international counter-narcotics accords.
Bolivia, the president told reporters, is committed to a “all-out battle” with the drug trade, even though the U.S. government no longer provides anti-narcotics aid to La Paz.
Morales said that Bolivian authorities have seized 19.4 tons of cocaine and coca paste so far in 2009, compared with 11 tons during all of 2005, the year before he took office.
Bolivia’s interior ministry says that police have also destroyed 3,709 drug laboratories since Jan. 1.
The president stressed that all of those operations were carried out without any help from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which he expelled from Bolivia late last year after accusing DEA agents of engaging in unauthorized activity.
Downplaying the importance of the U.S. government’s annual evaluations of other countries’ performance in the war on drugs, he said that Washington used political considerations when deciding to label nations as cooperative or uncooperative.
He then asked why there is no certification of whether the United States is reducing its demand for illegal drugs.
“As long as there is a market for cocaine, however much we reduce coca leaf, part will always be diverted (to cocaine production): that is our reality,” the Bolivian president said.
He also repeated his proposal for a coordinated regional anti-drug policy and suggested that the 12-member Union of South American Nations could “certify or decertify the United States.”
“The struggle against drug trafficking cannot be an instrument of political control and geopolitical control,” Morales said.
Bolivia, like neighboring Peru, allows cultivation of coca in limited amounts to meet demand for legal, traditional uses in cooking, folk medicine and Andean religious rites.
Morales, who entered public life as the leader of a coca-growers union, came to office in January 2006 promising to end forced eradication of the leaf, a U.S.-directed program that had led to violent confrontations. EFE
Evo Morales: "Wherever a US base exists, there are military coups"
Telesur, September 13, 2009 - Bolivian president Evo Morales said this Sunday in
“In Latin America, wherever a
In front of 5 thousand Bolivians and citizens of other nationalities, the head of state recalled that the constitution of his country “does not allow any foreign military base, less so one belonging to the
The polemical agreement between
Regarding Europe’s immigration policy, Morales was of the opinion that it was a grave error to declare foreigners who arrive in
“We want to say to the countries of Europe and the world, especially Europe, to the governments: just as Europeans and Spaniards arrived in
The Bolivian head of state indicated that “everyone has the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the norms of each country,” and recalled that his government was working with the United Nations (UN) in support of the proposal of universal citizenship.
During his stay in
It is also expected that he will meet with business owners to sign various bilateral agreements.
This is the third time that the Bolivian head of state has carried out an official visit to
Bolivian Vice President defends MAS government’s record in office
Interview with with Álvaro García Linera, Vice-President of Bolivia, by Maristella Svampa, Pablo Stefanoni and Ricardo Bajo. Translation and notes by Richard Fidler
What is the explanation for the weakening of the opposition after more than two years of confrontations?
For President Evo’s government, the Constituent Assembly offered the possibility of arming a broad collective ensemble of all the country’s social forces. We placed ourselves at the head of this effort to build a new constitutional consensus. Internally, within the people, we had to pull together the popular bloc — not an easy task, because there was a lot of corporate diversity — and then we had to follow this up with the opening to the other social sectors, who are an important opposition albeit a minority.
And in doing so we indicated our willingness to be flexible in our political positions, to yield in our demands, and to include everyone. But the opposition social bloc had defined a strategy of blocking or suspending the constituent process, that is, of blocking a resolution of the power structure, and opted to reject the Assembly agreements in one way or another. Its objective was to prolong the crisis of the state that had first developed in 2000, to weaken the government in the hope that at some point the correlation of forces would allow the resolution of the crisis in its favour.
And even so, we for our part were insistent. The debate on the so-called “two thirds” at the end of 2006(1) was an initial symptom of what was at stake, and of the decision of a sector that was ill-disposed to accept its position as a democratic political minority. And in the two thirds and in the issue of the Constituent Assembly’s paramountcy, we yielded, we retreated, but at the same time, in return, we pushed for the consolidation of a social and political majority that also developed into a decision-making majority in the Assembly.
The second major moment of confrontation was on the issue of making Sucre the capital. It revived a century-old issue that had led to a civil war in 1899, spearheading efforts to bring about a suspension of the Constituent Assembly. Here the right-wing opposition bloc of civic leaders and prefects [department governors] revealed just how far it was willing to go — to jeopardize the lives of Assembly members and frustrate the possibility of reaching a national agreement. Confronted with this scenario, we again offered enormous concessions.
Viewed from a distance, the civic leadership in Sucre, backed by the elites in Santa Cruz, was gaining a large number of victories: almost one third of the sessions of the Congress to be held in Sucre; the offices of the Ombudsman, the Attorney General, perhaps the National Electoral Court, a set of institutions that endowed Sucre with administrative and economic relevancy, as well as more rapid access to construction of a set of infrastructure projects. But we weren’t going to accept that. And, realizing that nothing was to be gained by agreeing, or by battling indefinitely over this, we threw ourselves into the process of approving the New Constitution, in plenary in La Calancha, and then in Oruro(2). That is, we resolved to define the structure of state power, using our majority in the Constituent Assembly.
And at that time you talked about a “point of bifurcation”.
Yes, I am getting to that. Despite all this, we made a new attempt and we went looking for Rubén Costas, for Leopoldo Fernández at his estate, we went looking for Branko Marinkovic and, lastly, we proposed a process of détente to the people around Jorge Quiroga. At that point it was crystal clear that there was a minority sector that was going to impede by every means possible a solution via the national-popular project to the governmental crisis initiated in 2000.
And frankly, we needed the Constituent Assembly to build the new state, to anchor in enduring state institutions and relations of command the new correlation of forces reached by the Indigenous popular movement in the 2000-2005 cycle of mobilizations. Basically, what a Constitution does is to solidify a series of irreversible points of support, conquests and controls historically achieved through a society’s power struggles. And the ultimate proof of this commitment to confrontation of the minority right-wing opposition came when they initiated the call for departmental referendums on the autonomy statutes to be carried out in May 2008. What they were trying to do was to find a way to dispute, de facto, the regional political power, in the hope of achieving a regionalized dual power or hostile vertical split in the structure of the state. It had come to that, there was no point of return. The right wing was not prepared to be included in the national-popular project as a minority and subordinate force, and opted for territorial conflagration.
The struggle for power was being brought closer to the moment of its belligerent or ultimate resolution, in the sense that, in the last analysis, the state power is coercion. To what we have termed the “point of bifurcation”, or the moment when the crisis of the state, which began eight years earlier, would now be resolved either through a restoration of the old state power or through the consolidation of the new bloc of popular power. This is the moment when the new state order begins replicating itself.
And all this through the deployment, measurement or confrontation of naked force of the two polarized blocs. The point of bifurcation is the exceptional moment, of short duration, basic but decisive, when the “prince” abandons the language of seduction and asserts his authority through his belligerent coercive tactics. So the arrival of this day of force was a now a question of time and between May and September of 2008 we prepared for that moment.
It was a belligerent, or potentially belligerent, moment. The golpista [coup-mongering] right wing carried out its referendums and gradually began to form small regional powers that refused to recognize the government’s authority. We understood this signal and we resorted to an encircling strategy, as the military calls it, using both the coercive mechanisms of the state and social mobilization.
By May of 2008 we were engaged in an analytical evaluation, together with the social organizations and our Armed Forces, of the major risks that existed in the country and preparing contingency plans to confront a possible radicalization of the right-wing golpista strategy.
We drew up an initial contingency plan involving a huge national mobilization in defence of democracy that was not executed but was now elaborated on both the social and military planes. In August, they were betting on an electoral defeat of the government that would deprive us of democratic legitimacy, but we won the recall referendum. The government’s democratic support, far from receding, increased, from 54% [in the December 2005 presidential election] to 67%, consolidating a social majority throughout the national territory including in regions previously dominated by the opposition.
This unhinged the right. After two years of a strategy of constituent blockade, they had been hoping for a rapid return to power, starting from their base in some departments. But the recall vote expanded the national legitimacy of President Evo’s government and spread the political force of the Indigenous-popular bloc to all of the departments.
Instead of understanding the moment, the right decided to attack. The rules of war — and politics is the extension of war by other means — teach us that when an opponent is strong he should not be attacked directly, and when an army is weak it should never promote or agree to embark on a battle against a stronger army. Everything the right did was exactly the contrary of this ABC of the struggle for power. It blindly threw itself into a confrontation at the very moment when the government was strongest politically and electorally and the right was least likely to extend its base of support; and that was when its defeat began.
After the results of the August recall referendum, the civic-gubernatorial bloc began to escalate its golpista strategy: they seized institutions, we waited; they attacked the police, we waited; they destroyed and dismantled public institutions in four departments, we waited; they disarmed soldiers, we waited; they seized airports, we waited; they destroyed pipelines, we waited. They were running riot in a blind alley. They used violence against the state, providing the moral justification for a crushing response to them from the state, which it then began to deploy on a huge scale. And when they set fire to public institutions and destroyed them they lost their legitimacy in the eyes of their own social base, exposed in a matter of hours as a handful of violent punks. And then came the incidents in Pando....(3) The governor triggered the massacre in Pando in an attempt to provide a warning signal to the leaders of the mass movement — and in doing so exceeded the level of tolerance of Bolivian society as a whole.
The massacre of campesinos placed the governors on an equal footing with their mentors [former presidents] Sánchez de Losada or García Meza, and placed in the hands of the state the legal obligation to intervene quickly and overwhelmingly in defence of democracy and society.
And without a moment’s hesitation, it was to do so in the weakest link of the golpista chain, Pando. This was the first state of siege declared in defence and protection of the society, with the full support of the people horrified by the action of the golpistas.
Together with the international rejection of the golpistas, this stopped the civic-gubernatorial initiative in its tracks, resulting in its disorganized retreat. This was the moment of a popular counter-offensive, with the social and popular organizations in the front lines even in the department of Santa Cruz. It was not only the campesinos and colonizers [settlers] who mobilized but the inhabitants of the plebeian neighborhoods of Santa Cruz, and especially urban youth who, in memorable days of resistance to the fascist gangs, defended their districts and broke the clientelist domination of the Santa Cruz lodges.
The government’s firm and overwhelming political and military response to the coup, together with the strategy of social mobilization in and around Santa Cruz created a virtuous articulation of social and state forces seldom seen in Bolivia’s political history.
That was the dimension and general extension of the “army” and the “mobilized divisions” in opposition to the coup. That was the shock force that the Indigenous-popular project deployed for the defining moment of force.
The right wing saw that its shock forces were isolated and disorganized, realized that the Indigenous-popular command was politically prepared to go all the way, and chose instead to renounce its intentions and surrender. This brought to a close the cycle of state crisis and political polarization, and imposed, in a violent confrontation between the respective social forces, the lasting structure of the new state. Something similar happened in 1985, when the miners, who were the nucleus of the nationalist state, surrendered to the army divisions defending the neoliberal project.(4)
This time it was the turn of the business and landlord bloc to be defeated and give way to a new correlation of political forces in the society. In its own way, September-October of 2008 had the same state effect as the defeat of the “march for life” of the miners in 1986. Except that now it is the plebeian bloc that is celebrating the victory and the wealthy elites have to accept their historic defeat. And this was followed by the political validation by the parliament of this popular triumph. On top of the series of electoral and military victories, the Indigenous-popular government has institutionally entrenched the correlation of forces achieved in the moment of the “point of bifurcation”. And it did so through the congressional approval of the New Political Constitution of the State.
The Congress was transformed for several days into a kind of constituent Congress that combined the work completed by the Constituent Assembly nine months earlier, the government’s agreements with the minority bloc of conservative governors reached in the previous weeks, and the popular deliberation of the march from Caracollo to La Paz undertaken by the worker, Indigenous, compesino and popular organizations with president Evo at their head.(5) In the new circumstance it was clear that the Indigenous-popular axis of the government was imposing itself by its own weight on the constitutional order of the state. But at the same time, the remaining social sectors (middle classes, small and medium-sized business interests, etc.) were interacting on the basis of their own debate in the Constituent Assembly. Even the conservative bloc living off rents from the land, expressed politically by the governors and civic organizations, was taken into account, but of course as a social subject led by the new Indigenous-popular governmental nucleus, and to a lesser degree than it would have been had it accepted the call for a formal agreement issued by the government in 2006-2007. It cannot be overlooked that this political work also would serve to snatch from the right the banner of autonomy behind which it had concealed its defence of large estates and business profiteering.
That is how the national-popular bloc not only consolidated itself materially in the state structure, but took control of the three discursive axes of the new state order that will guide all the political debates of the following decades: plurinationality, autonomy, the leading role of the state in the economy. Seen from a distance, notwithstanding all the conflicts of the last three years, in terms of the enduring results, things could not have worked out better for the national-popular bloc now in power. In the end, the conditions conceded to the adversaries might have been much greater in an agreement reached in the Constituent Assembly than those recognitions and inclusions conceded to a defeated and retreating adversary, which proves that history is not always on the wrong side, as Hegel thought.
So the electoral victory was consolidated in August, the military victory in September, and the political victory in October, with the congressional approval of the constitutional referendum. And with that, the constituent cycle was definitively closed and from then on the structure of unipolar order of the new state order began to operate.
To what degree might this obvious debilitation of the opposition redirect tensions toward the interior of the pro-government bloc, given that an ambushed opposition is always very effective at uniting its own bases?
I do not think the opposition has been definitively routed, however. The opposition now has no agenda for power, it lacks a mobilizing discourse at the state level, but it still has great economic power, great power in the media and a huge veto power over many things.
It continues to be a dangerous adversary. In the economic sphere the state has certainly dealt it some powerful blows, dismantling some of the economic power of the conservative strata: the rentier and intermediary bourgeoisie no longer has the oil and gas enterprises as its generous financiers. The agrarian clientelist network that the rentier class have created in the agro-industrial sphere has been enormously weakened with the presence of EMAPA, the state company supporting food production(6), and the public presence in the soybean, wheat and rice chain, which accounts for some 20 to 30 percent of production. But the hard-line opposition bloc still retains other important spaces of agrarian, commercial and financial power, and that gives it an extensive capacity for combining forces, lobbying and confrontation. But today, and this can last for several years, what it lacks is an agenda for government; for how long this will be the case, no one knows, but it is committed to stopping the further progress of the popular agenda.
While the popular classes were defeated in 1985 and materially destructured, followed by a slow cycle of reorganization, the right is in a different situation. The right has suffered a political blow, it has lost its control of the state, it has lost the capacity to seduce the society through state power, but it still has great economic power. The form of consolidation of the point of bifurcation differs when it is the popular sector that is defeated politically and materially, because when it is the business sector that undergoes defeat it can lose politically but retain economic power that enables it to hold a permanent veto power. So this is a broken and disoriented adversary but one with a capacity to block things. Now, in this scenario, in which the fundamental contradiction has been smoothed over, weakened, there arise greater possibilities for temptations within the central nucleus, that is true.
But why should those splittist tendencies in the history of many parties not be expected to thrive within the leading nucleus?
For various reasons. In the first place, no doubt, because of the overwhelming leadership of President Evo in the political and social structure of the state and in society itself. The character, charisma and support brought by President Evo is now so great that it is an objective limit on the existence of any other leadership that might contest the social base of the government and society.
But there is another relevant factor that explains the material limits on factionalism within the government: the absence of factions with economic power. The control over government departments that might have influence, networks, that allow the formation of economic factions.
It should be borne in mind that ours is a state with a budget that has increased from 600 million to 2,300 or 2,400 million dollars, and it is normal that, in some place or other, factions of economic power, nuclei that control investments, decisions, factories, revenues, manpower, will arise. This has happened in Brazil, in Argentina, in Venezuela. But here there has been created, up to now, and in a systematic and supervised way, a governmental working structure that impedes, that has impeded, the strengthening of consolidated nuclei of influence and economic power, not to mention property, with an operational capacity and autonomous political presence within the government. A number of factors have been at work: a high degree of rotation of public employees, presidential control over the day-to-day functioning of the government departments, but also an internal morale, a kind of governmental Spartanism demanding an ethic of public service that has up to now limited the crystallization of the factions of economic power that would potentially introduce political factionalism.
Because of that, there is a very hard and unified nucleus around the President that helps to ensure that centrifugal tendencies do not emerge internally. This is the intention, to build a morale of public service in the decision-making core of the government. But what is happening at the base? Víctor Paz Estenssoro ascribed the end of the National Revolution to the existence of too many members of the MNR to fill the jobs available.
Couldn’t the same thing happen with the MAS government?(7)
Paz Estenssoro accepted this pressure of the self-seeking militant as a political habit, a perk in continuity with a political logic that he never tried to overcome. In Bolivia, ever since the 19th century, political activity has been seen as a means of social ascendancy more than a means to provide service to the res publica. In fact, the material structure of the social classes in Bolivia operates so that the processes of transition to and from a class depend not on whether or not one has the cultural capital for social advancement but on one’s political capital, that is, the political networks and influence that guarantee access to private property. That was an exclusive monopoly of caste and lineage until 1952, when it was extended to the middle classes and leadership levels of the trade unions.
Nowadays, there are sectors that press for greater “democratization” of this system and demand the right to public office as a perk for belonging to some regional leadership of the MAS. The government has responded to this pressure and degeneration of political militancy by severely rejecting and sanctioning it. Why did we expel Adriana Gil in 2006? Because a nucleus of MAS members had formed who would occupy an institution in order to demand that positions in it be awarded to them.(8)
In April of that year, we expelled some people who wanted to continue with the old practice of public office being contingent on party membership. From that time on, the President himself not only established a political ethic of public administration as a service, but made it very clear that the compañeros who joined the MAS should not hope to be part of the administrative structures of the state and that, on the contrary, they should strive to strengthen the organizational and ideological structure of the party.
If the changes in the personnel of the state are compared historically between our management of government and those before us, it will be found that we have not made 20 percent of the changes that previous administrations implemented. In the days of the MIR, ADN and the MNR(9), neither the caretakers nor the drapes in the Presidential Office were spared the party “sweep”. So it is of no concern to us that there are many members and few positions; on the contrary, you are a member, so you do not have a position. And we have emphasized this, consistent with the conception of politics as a kind of lengthy “military service” in the interest of society.
But doesn’t that impede the formation of cadres within the MAS itself?
This is a major problem, but not so much because of that. One of the major weaknesses of our political structure, of this process, is the absence of political and technical cadres. In the world revolutions the parties that formed the government have previously had decades of preparation and selection of cadres that enabled them to shoulder the changes in the society with greater organizational muscle.
The MNR itself, which was formed in the 1930s, had more than 15 years of training before acceding to government. But the MAS, which arose in 1995 as a local political structure, only recently, in 2000-2001, set out to build a national structure aimed at taking power, and by 2005 was elected to government.
It had barely four years of preparation. And that has generated difficulties, since in the basic political nucleus the MAS is not a cadre structure but a flexible coalition of social movements. It has worked to promote the organizational aspect of the cadres, but the rapid growth in urban levels has forced it to reassert the trade union membership discipline in the face of more liberal and patronage-ridden practices characteristic of urban levels. When the party was formed, the structure, for want of a better word, of functional urban cadres was parallel to the agrarian union structure and shared the political decision-making levels. But once in government, a part of the urban structure devoted itself to seeking posts, which is why, in order to limit this type of deviations and practices, it was decided in 2007 that in the national, departmental and regional levels the party structures would be under the control of the social organizations.
So how are positions filled?
Since we have become the government, the mechanisms for selection based on merit have been reinforced in the technical levels of the civil service, and politically sensitive positions are screened by the national social organizations. Since 2007, appointments to such positions are no longer processed through the departmental management lists.
What effect has the Santos Ramírez affair had on the government’s economic agenda, given that YPFB is an emblematic company in that process?(10)
YPFB is not only the emblematic company, it is the company that sustains the country economically and the material basis of our reconquered sovereignty. It has a cash flow of some 3,500 million dollars, and for Bolivia that is a lot of money. In terms of assets, YPFB controls between 2,200 and 2,300 million dollars on behalf of the state. Today, 50 percent of our exports are oil and gas and those exports go through YPFB. It is the crown of the Bolivian economy and must be one of the twenty largest businesses in Latin America.
The initial news about the corruption in YPFB was a very harsh blow since it struck the country’s emblematic business, but on top of that it was the work of a compañero who was potentially one of the most likely successors to President Evo in the MAS political leadership.
And we responded immediately and just as harshly: removing Ramírez forthwith from control of the company and publicly supporting the investigations by the state prosecutor. In doing so, we broke with the old tradition of the traditional parties of concealing, delaying or covering up corruption by their politically influential members. We decided to signal something new: in this government, and where the people’s interests are involved, there are no friends, no families, no militants, no pals or flunkies. There are those who serve and those who are corrupt, and the latter will be sent to jail, regardless. We cannot allow the least inkling of error or suspicion in the leading cadre. The order was clear: that justice take its course and that no one should exert pressure. Great care was taken to ensure that no level of the state would interfere, pressure, or suggest anything at all in favour of Santos. But the damage is done. It will take months before the wound is healed. But again, there is a notable lack of cadres.
That’s why we have had to adopt a law that allows salaries higher than the President’s for technical staff in strategic enterprises. It’s our local form of the Leninist NEP — the New Economic Policy in post-revolution Russia. The goal of the NEP, in addition to the alliance with the peasants, was fundamentally to recruit technicians to administer the subordinate levels of the state, given that while the state is a political structure it has bureaucratic-administrative and technical-scientific levels that require knowledge and skills that cannot be rapidly acquired or transformed.
To put an end to the economic catastrophe he faced in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Lenin had to rehire the technicians from the old state, until a simpler administration was gradually created. And he ordered that below each technician there be placed a youth who would learn, and we are doing the same thing.
We began this back in 2006, changing the organization and individuals at the decision-making levels of the civil service (ministers, deputy ministers and some managers), but we did not touch the secondary structure of the state administration until younger staff could be trained to substitute for the older ones. Now we have new challenges: state-owned companies that are getting much bigger within one, two or three years.
We need competent people, who have to be recruited in the labour market. Hence the route we have taken: political control vested in the decision-making levels and excellent technical staff, with salaries many times higher than the managers of the companies in which they are working. An example is Carlos Villegas, who makes 13,000 Bolivianos, and a manager in Andina can earn 60,000 Bolivianos....; at this point we have no other option, until we have managed to train a new generation of public service workers with substantial technical efficiency but, in addition, a political commitment that allows a new equalization of the salary scale.
There is a very strong narrative in the government concerning decolonization. How does this objective translate in terms of cultural and educational policies?
There are various dimensions to decolonization and it is a major component in the politics of the social movements. We have inherited a society that is colonized through and through: economically, we had to beg foreign countries to pay salaries; politically, we had to ask permission from foreign embassies to appoint ministers; spiritually, the people thought that power was an argument over skin colour and family names; mentally, people thought that whatever came from foreign universities was knowledge and the rest was folklore. To smash this crockery clogging the vital energy of Bolivians, the first step we took was political decolonization: to make decisions as a country without consulting foreign governments. In the past, a government minister had to get the approval of the United States embassy; the minister of housing, the approval of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.
A second moment is economic decolonization, which generally speaking means breaking with the outward flow of the surplus: the society generates a surplus in various ways — poetically, the open veins of Latin America — and this surplus would be transferred abroad in huge amounts.
So decolonization means staunching those bloodflows so that the surplus that is generated is reinvested within the country, which is what we have done with the nationalization decree and the gradual recovery of the public companies and the foreign exchange policies, the tax policies governing remittances of earnings, etc. The best example is the government take on oil and gas revenues. It varies between 65 and 77 percent, while previously it was 27 percent, that is, only 27 percent of the hydrocarbon profits remained in Bolivia. Today, for every 100 dollars in profits, between 65 dollars in the smaller fields and 77 dollars in the larger ones remains in the country. This is the material basis of economic sovereignty. Still to come is the other aspect, more enduring and more complicated, which is the cultural and spiritual decolonization of the society. This society broke with the colonizing paradigm by electing, for the first time in the history of this country, an Indigenous President. And from that moment on, all of the colonial system of symbols that imprisoned life and soul began to shatter irreversibly.
Now we have a campesino Indian governing Bolivia. Soldiers have to stand to attention before him; civil servants have to carry out his instructions; business people have to request audiences with him; and courts and rulers pay homage to him. Cultural decolonization has two axes, therefore, that must be addressed as complements. One has to do with the diversity of cultures, languages, histories and memories. And the other refers to the diversity of civilizations, that is, modes of production of the meaning of life, time, politics. Decolonization in the first of these axes, the cultural, is easier to achieve, and we now have experiences in other multicultural societies, such as Belgium, India or Canada: education in various languages, plurilingual public administration, plural historical narrative within the common national history, which comes to be a national history of various nations, etc. It will be mandatory for the schools and universities to teach such languages as Castilian Spanish (as a language of integration), a foreign language (as a language of communication with the world), and an Indigenous language that is dominant in the region (Aymara in La Paz, Quechua in Cochabamba, and Guaraní in Santa Cruz).
Within the state sphere, the civil servants have to learn one Indigenous language as well, depending on the region. Similarly, in government services, publications, speeches by public officials. And also in the realm of culture, the decolonization of memory, the official vindication or recovery of other heroes, and the dates commemorated by the Indigenous peoples. The diverse mestizo and Indigenous history must be officially recognized in textbooks. What is more complicated is decolonization from the civilizing standpoint; that has to be viewed now within the organizational and cognitive matrix of individuals. In the educational field, it involves reclaiming other knowledges, other discursive constructions, not necessarily written ones, of knowledge. How we are going to achieve this is part of a debate within the government; how we are going to preserve as public heritage what is written in the textiles (Aymara weavings), as state wisdom. It is a complicated debate.
In the area of healthcare, we have taken bigger steps, for example joining the doctor with the practitioner of traditional medicine, or placing the midwife alongside the nurse, for people to choose in the medical clinic. This is a prototype of wisdom and medical procedure that the state is beginning to institutionalize, even though there is no regulation yet of this local knowledge which is dispersed but corresponds to another civilization, not only to another culture.
Another logic, to understand what is death, life, blood, food. Politically, as well, we have made progress in incorporating communitarian democracy as one of the legitimate democracies in the mode of production of decisions in the state. Or the incorporation of social control via the trade-union, partnership and communitarian structures and even the state administration.
And in the economic sphere, we have incorporated, recognized, promoted and financed the communitarian structures as part of the productive area that must be decided on as a portion of the TGN investment.(11) This is a long and complicated process. But we have already begun to take decisive steps.
“Along with the law of the communities is the law of the state.” Listening to Evo Morales, we notice a discrepancy between his speeches in defence of Pachamama, the land and the territory, directed more toward the outside world, and a more developmentalist discourse within the country, including denunciations of the NGOs that promote a petroleum-free Amazon. How do you explain this?
Clearly, the campesino and communitarian productive logic is based on a type of productive rationality that is locally sustainable with nature, because it has as a foundation a logic of advances and returns between generations. Involved here is a material fact, that in order to guarantee the food that is present today, it is necessary to preserve the nutritional conditions for those who come after, which is conducive to a dialogical reading and a long-term sustainable relationship with nature.
The form in which this is rationalized and verbalized leads to the ritualized dialogue with nature, as a living body providing, by leave, whatever is necessary for reproduction, which is later returned and maintained to guarantee in the long term that metabolic exchange between human beings and nature. Adopting a concept of Marx in studying the rural commune in India in the Grundrisse, in the campesino civilization nature is presented, therefore, as an organic externalization of subjectivity. You cannot destroy your own body, therefore, as that would be suicidal. The campesino movement has defended and is going to defend a form of use of nature that we now call rational, as opposed to the processes of depredation peculiar to the civilization of surplus-value.
That’s why in Lain America, in the Indigenous-campesino movement, there has been a discursive construction of militant defence of the powers of nature in opposition to the expansive depredation of capitalist exploitation. With time, this agrarian and campesino productive logic became a political logic of confrontation with the neoliberal developmentalist state. The subject becomes more complex when the Indigenous campesinos, previously excluded from citizenship and economic power, become the leading bloc in the state and the communities become a part of the state, which is what has happened with us in Bolivia.
So, on the one hand, this logic of the dialogue with nature leads to state action; but at the same time, in as much as you are the state, you need resources and growing surpluses in order to meet basic necessities of all Bolivians including those most in need such as the Indigenous and popular urban and rural communities. And there, obviously, tension arises. Accordingly, you have to tread carefully. To expand environmental protection and the sustainable use of nature as a state policy, but at the same time you need to produce on a large scale, to implement processes of expansive industrialization that provide you with a social surplus that can be redistributed and support other processes of campesino, communitarian and small-scale modernization.
In the case of the gas and oil exploration north of La Paz, we are trying to produce hydrocarbons to balance geographically the society’s sources of collective wealth, to generate a state surplus and simultaneously preserve the spatial environment in coordination with the Indigenous communities. Today we are not opening a passage in the northern Amazon to allow the entry of Repsol or Petrobras. We are opening a passage in the Amazon to allow the entry of the state.
And who will ensure that the state will not be as destructive as the transnational companies?
We have to take care that it is not. Of course there will be a tension between social-state logic and a sustainable use of nature, and the social-state need to generate economic surpluses that are the state’s responsibility. It involves some tension, just like the “state of social movements”, between the democratization of power and a monopoly of decisions (social movement/state). We have to live with that vital contradiction of history. There are no recipes. Is it mandatory to get gas and oil from the Amazon north of La Paz? Yes. Why? Because we have to balance the economic structures of Bolivian society, because the rapid development of Tarija with 90 percent of the gas is going to generate imbalances in the long run.(12) It is necessary, accordingly, to balance in the long term the territorialities of the state. Likewise, we need economic surpluses in order to strengthen community structures, to expand them, to find means of modernization that are distinct alternatives to the destruction of the communal structures, as has been happening up to now. And at the same time it is necessary to promote, in agreement with the communities, a hydrocarbon production that is not destructive of the environment.
If the communities say no, is the state still going to enter?
Here is where the debate lies. What has happened? When we consulted the CPILAP(13), we were asked to go to negotiate in Brussels with its horde of lawyers and that we comply with some environmentalist statements published by USAID. How is that? Who is preventing the state from exploring for oil in the north of La Paz: the Tacanas Indigenous communities, an NGO, or foreign countries? That is why we have gone to negotiate community by community and there we have encountered the support of the Indigenous communities to drive ahead in petroleum exploration and development. The Indigenous-popular government has strengthened the long struggle of the peoples for land and territory.
In the case of the minority Indigenous peoples in the lowlands, the state has consolidated millions of hectares as historic territoriality of many peoples with a low population density. But combined with the right of a people to the land is the right of the state, of the state led by the Indigenous-popular and campesino movement, to superimpose the greater collective interest of all the peoples. And that is how we are going to go forward.
Published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Bolivian edition, in August 2009, original under the title “El punto de bifurcación es un momento en el que se miden ejércitos” (“The point of bifurcation is a moment when armies gauge their respective forces”). The Spanish text is also available at http://tinyurl.com/kle4vt.
Notes
(1) The opposition parties in the Constituent Assembly argued that each individual article in the new Constitution, as drafted, had to be adopted by a majority of two-thirds of the votes, that is, more than the combined vote of the MAS deputies and their allies.
(2) Owing to right-wing harassment and threats, the Assembly met for a while in La Calancha, a military base, and then in Oruro, where the new Constitution was adopted in December 2007 without the attendance of the opposition. Following departmental autonomy referendums and the presidential recall referendum in 2008, which registered a shift in the political relationship of forces in favour of the MAS government, the draft Constitution was adopted with amendments by the Congress, then ratified in a popular vote throughout Bolivia in January 2009.
(3) Bolivian rightists organized violent antigovernment demonstrations in several departments in September 2008. In Pando a massacre that resulted in dozens of deaths, mainly of campesinos, led to charges of genocide against the governor, who had allegedly promoted the clashes.
(4) In 1985, a collapse of tin prices led the MNR government of Paz Estenssoro to lay off 20,000 miners and implement a “shock treatment” austerity program.
(5) The reference is to a mass march of many thousands from Caracollo in the department of Oruro to La Paz, the capital — a distance of 200 kilometres — in support of the new Constitution adopted in 2007 by the Constituent Assembly.
(6) EMAPA: Empresa de Apoyo a la Producción de Alimentos.
(7) Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement toward socialism).
(8) Adriana Gil, a former supporter of the MAS in Santa Cruz, has since organized her own party, the Social Democratic Force, to campaign against the MAS government.
(9)Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR – Revolutionary Left Movement); Acción Democrática Nacionalista (ADN – Nationalist Democratic Action); Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR – Revolutionary Nationalist Movement).
(10) Santos Ramírez, the president of YPFB, the state oil and gas company, was fired and arrested in February 2009 following reports that he had received payments from a shell company represented by a Bolivian oil industry executive who had recently signed a multimillion dollar contract with YPFB.
(11) TGN is an Argentine gas pipeline carrier that transports gas from Bolivia.
(12) Tarija is the southernmost department of Bolivia.
(13) Central de Pueblos Indígenas de La Paz.
What is the explanation for the weakening of the opposition after more than two years of confrontations?
For President Evo’s government, the Constituent Assembly offered the possibility of arming a broad collective ensemble of all the country’s social forces. We placed ourselves at the head of this effort to build a new constitutional consensus. Internally, within the people, we had to pull together the popular bloc — not an easy task, because there was a lot of corporate diversity — and then we had to follow this up with the opening to the other social sectors, who are an important opposition albeit a minority.
And in doing so we indicated our willingness to be flexible in our political positions, to yield in our demands, and to include everyone. But the opposition social bloc had defined a strategy of blocking or suspending the constituent process, that is, of blocking a resolution of the power structure, and opted to reject the Assembly agreements in one way or another. Its objective was to prolong the crisis of the state that had first developed in 2000, to weaken the government in the hope that at some point the correlation of forces would allow the resolution of the crisis in its favour.
And even so, we for our part were insistent. The debate on the so-called “two thirds” at the end of 2006(1) was an initial symptom of what was at stake, and of the decision of a sector that was ill-disposed to accept its position as a democratic political minority. And in the two thirds and in the issue of the Constituent Assembly’s paramountcy, we yielded, we retreated, but at the same time, in return, we pushed for the consolidation of a social and political majority that also developed into a decision-making majority in the Assembly.
The second major moment of confrontation was on the issue of making Sucre the capital. It revived a century-old issue that had led to a civil war in 1899, spearheading efforts to bring about a suspension of the Constituent Assembly. Here the right-wing opposition bloc of civic leaders and prefects [department governors] revealed just how far it was willing to go — to jeopardize the lives of Assembly members and frustrate the possibility of reaching a national agreement. Confronted with this scenario, we again offered enormous concessions.
Viewed from a distance, the civic leadership in Sucre, backed by the elites in Santa Cruz, was gaining a large number of victories: almost one third of the sessions of the Congress to be held in Sucre; the offices of the Ombudsman, the Attorney General, perhaps the National Electoral Court, a set of institutions that endowed Sucre with administrative and economic relevancy, as well as more rapid access to construction of a set of infrastructure projects. But we weren’t going to accept that. And, realizing that nothing was to be gained by agreeing, or by battling indefinitely over this, we threw ourselves into the process of approving the New Constitution, in plenary in La Calancha, and then in Oruro(2). That is, we resolved to define the structure of state power, using our majority in the Constituent Assembly.
And at that time you talked about a “point of bifurcation”.
Yes, I am getting to that. Despite all this, we made a new attempt and we went looking for Rubén Costas, for Leopoldo Fernández at his estate, we went looking for Branko Marinkovic and, lastly, we proposed a process of détente to the people around Jorge Quiroga. At that point it was crystal clear that there was a minority sector that was going to impede by every means possible a solution via the national-popular project to the governmental crisis initiated in 2000.
And frankly, we needed the Constituent Assembly to build the new state, to anchor in enduring state institutions and relations of command the new correlation of forces reached by the Indigenous popular movement in the 2000-2005 cycle of mobilizations. Basically, what a Constitution does is to solidify a series of irreversible points of support, conquests and controls historically achieved through a society’s power struggles. And the ultimate proof of this commitment to confrontation of the minority right-wing opposition came when they initiated the call for departmental referendums on the autonomy statutes to be carried out in May 2008. What they were trying to do was to find a way to dispute, de facto, the regional political power, in the hope of achieving a regionalized dual power or hostile vertical split in the structure of the state. It had come to that, there was no point of return. The right wing was not prepared to be included in the national-popular project as a minority and subordinate force, and opted for territorial conflagration.
The struggle for power was being brought closer to the moment of its belligerent or ultimate resolution, in the sense that, in the last analysis, the state power is coercion. To what we have termed the “point of bifurcation”, or the moment when the crisis of the state, which began eight years earlier, would now be resolved either through a restoration of the old state power or through the consolidation of the new bloc of popular power. This is the moment when the new state order begins replicating itself.
And all this through the deployment, measurement or confrontation of naked force of the two polarized blocs. The point of bifurcation is the exceptional moment, of short duration, basic but decisive, when the “prince” abandons the language of seduction and asserts his authority through his belligerent coercive tactics. So the arrival of this day of force was a now a question of time and between May and September of 2008 we prepared for that moment.
It was a belligerent, or potentially belligerent, moment. The golpista [coup-mongering] right wing carried out its referendums and gradually began to form small regional powers that refused to recognize the government’s authority. We understood this signal and we resorted to an encircling strategy, as the military calls it, using both the coercive mechanisms of the state and social mobilization.
By May of 2008 we were engaged in an analytical evaluation, together with the social organizations and our Armed Forces, of the major risks that existed in the country and preparing contingency plans to confront a possible radicalization of the right-wing golpista strategy.
We drew up an initial contingency plan involving a huge national mobilization in defence of democracy that was not executed but was now elaborated on both the social and military planes. In August, they were betting on an electoral defeat of the government that would deprive us of democratic legitimacy, but we won the recall referendum. The government’s democratic support, far from receding, increased, from 54% [in the December 2005 presidential election] to 67%, consolidating a social majority throughout the national territory including in regions previously dominated by the opposition.
This unhinged the right. After two years of a strategy of constituent blockade, they had been hoping for a rapid return to power, starting from their base in some departments. But the recall vote expanded the national legitimacy of President Evo’s government and spread the political force of the Indigenous-popular bloc to all of the departments.
Instead of understanding the moment, the right decided to attack. The rules of war — and politics is the extension of war by other means — teach us that when an opponent is strong he should not be attacked directly, and when an army is weak it should never promote or agree to embark on a battle against a stronger army. Everything the right did was exactly the contrary of this ABC of the struggle for power. It blindly threw itself into a confrontation at the very moment when the government was strongest politically and electorally and the right was least likely to extend its base of support; and that was when its defeat began.
After the results of the August recall referendum, the civic-gubernatorial bloc began to escalate its golpista strategy: they seized institutions, we waited; they attacked the police, we waited; they destroyed and dismantled public institutions in four departments, we waited; they disarmed soldiers, we waited; they seized airports, we waited; they destroyed pipelines, we waited. They were running riot in a blind alley. They used violence against the state, providing the moral justification for a crushing response to them from the state, which it then began to deploy on a huge scale. And when they set fire to public institutions and destroyed them they lost their legitimacy in the eyes of their own social base, exposed in a matter of hours as a handful of violent punks. And then came the incidents in Pando....(3) The governor triggered the massacre in Pando in an attempt to provide a warning signal to the leaders of the mass movement — and in doing so exceeded the level of tolerance of Bolivian society as a whole.
The massacre of campesinos placed the governors on an equal footing with their mentors [former presidents] Sánchez de Losada or García Meza, and placed in the hands of the state the legal obligation to intervene quickly and overwhelmingly in defence of democracy and society.
And without a moment’s hesitation, it was to do so in the weakest link of the golpista chain, Pando. This was the first state of siege declared in defence and protection of the society, with the full support of the people horrified by the action of the golpistas.
Together with the international rejection of the golpistas, this stopped the civic-gubernatorial initiative in its tracks, resulting in its disorganized retreat. This was the moment of a popular counter-offensive, with the social and popular organizations in the front lines even in the department of Santa Cruz. It was not only the campesinos and colonizers [settlers] who mobilized but the inhabitants of the plebeian neighborhoods of Santa Cruz, and especially urban youth who, in memorable days of resistance to the fascist gangs, defended their districts and broke the clientelist domination of the Santa Cruz lodges.
The government’s firm and overwhelming political and military response to the coup, together with the strategy of social mobilization in and around Santa Cruz created a virtuous articulation of social and state forces seldom seen in Bolivia’s political history.
That was the dimension and general extension of the “army” and the “mobilized divisions” in opposition to the coup. That was the shock force that the Indigenous-popular project deployed for the defining moment of force.
The right wing saw that its shock forces were isolated and disorganized, realized that the Indigenous-popular command was politically prepared to go all the way, and chose instead to renounce its intentions and surrender. This brought to a close the cycle of state crisis and political polarization, and imposed, in a violent confrontation between the respective social forces, the lasting structure of the new state. Something similar happened in 1985, when the miners, who were the nucleus of the nationalist state, surrendered to the army divisions defending the neoliberal project.(4)
This time it was the turn of the business and landlord bloc to be defeated and give way to a new correlation of political forces in the society. In its own way, September-October of 2008 had the same state effect as the defeat of the “march for life” of the miners in 1986. Except that now it is the plebeian bloc that is celebrating the victory and the wealthy elites have to accept their historic defeat. And this was followed by the political validation by the parliament of this popular triumph. On top of the series of electoral and military victories, the Indigenous-popular government has institutionally entrenched the correlation of forces achieved in the moment of the “point of bifurcation”. And it did so through the congressional approval of the New Political Constitution of the State.
The Congress was transformed for several days into a kind of constituent Congress that combined the work completed by the Constituent Assembly nine months earlier, the government’s agreements with the minority bloc of conservative governors reached in the previous weeks, and the popular deliberation of the march from Caracollo to La Paz undertaken by the worker, Indigenous, compesino and popular organizations with president Evo at their head.(5) In the new circumstance it was clear that the Indigenous-popular axis of the government was imposing itself by its own weight on the constitutional order of the state. But at the same time, the remaining social sectors (middle classes, small and medium-sized business interests, etc.) were interacting on the basis of their own debate in the Constituent Assembly. Even the conservative bloc living off rents from the land, expressed politically by the governors and civic organizations, was taken into account, but of course as a social subject led by the new Indigenous-popular governmental nucleus, and to a lesser degree than it would have been had it accepted the call for a formal agreement issued by the government in 2006-2007. It cannot be overlooked that this political work also would serve to snatch from the right the banner of autonomy behind which it had concealed its defence of large estates and business profiteering.
That is how the national-popular bloc not only consolidated itself materially in the state structure, but took control of the three discursive axes of the new state order that will guide all the political debates of the following decades: plurinationality, autonomy, the leading role of the state in the economy. Seen from a distance, notwithstanding all the conflicts of the last three years, in terms of the enduring results, things could not have worked out better for the national-popular bloc now in power. In the end, the conditions conceded to the adversaries might have been much greater in an agreement reached in the Constituent Assembly than those recognitions and inclusions conceded to a defeated and retreating adversary, which proves that history is not always on the wrong side, as Hegel thought.
So the electoral victory was consolidated in August, the military victory in September, and the political victory in October, with the congressional approval of the constitutional referendum. And with that, the constituent cycle was definitively closed and from then on the structure of unipolar order of the new state order began to operate.
To what degree might this obvious debilitation of the opposition redirect tensions toward the interior of the pro-government bloc, given that an ambushed opposition is always very effective at uniting its own bases?
I do not think the opposition has been definitively routed, however. The opposition now has no agenda for power, it lacks a mobilizing discourse at the state level, but it still has great economic power, great power in the media and a huge veto power over many things.
It continues to be a dangerous adversary. In the economic sphere the state has certainly dealt it some powerful blows, dismantling some of the economic power of the conservative strata: the rentier and intermediary bourgeoisie no longer has the oil and gas enterprises as its generous financiers. The agrarian clientelist network that the rentier class have created in the agro-industrial sphere has been enormously weakened with the presence of EMAPA, the state company supporting food production(6), and the public presence in the soybean, wheat and rice chain, which accounts for some 20 to 30 percent of production. But the hard-line opposition bloc still retains other important spaces of agrarian, commercial and financial power, and that gives it an extensive capacity for combining forces, lobbying and confrontation. But today, and this can last for several years, what it lacks is an agenda for government; for how long this will be the case, no one knows, but it is committed to stopping the further progress of the popular agenda.
While the popular classes were defeated in 1985 and materially destructured, followed by a slow cycle of reorganization, the right is in a different situation. The right has suffered a political blow, it has lost its control of the state, it has lost the capacity to seduce the society through state power, but it still has great economic power. The form of consolidation of the point of bifurcation differs when it is the popular sector that is defeated politically and materially, because when it is the business sector that undergoes defeat it can lose politically but retain economic power that enables it to hold a permanent veto power. So this is a broken and disoriented adversary but one with a capacity to block things. Now, in this scenario, in which the fundamental contradiction has been smoothed over, weakened, there arise greater possibilities for temptations within the central nucleus, that is true.
But why should those splittist tendencies in the history of many parties not be expected to thrive within the leading nucleus?
For various reasons. In the first place, no doubt, because of the overwhelming leadership of President Evo in the political and social structure of the state and in society itself. The character, charisma and support brought by President Evo is now so great that it is an objective limit on the existence of any other leadership that might contest the social base of the government and society.
But there is another relevant factor that explains the material limits on factionalism within the government: the absence of factions with economic power. The control over government departments that might have influence, networks, that allow the formation of economic factions.
It should be borne in mind that ours is a state with a budget that has increased from 600 million to 2,300 or 2,400 million dollars, and it is normal that, in some place or other, factions of economic power, nuclei that control investments, decisions, factories, revenues, manpower, will arise. This has happened in Brazil, in Argentina, in Venezuela. But here there has been created, up to now, and in a systematic and supervised way, a governmental working structure that impedes, that has impeded, the strengthening of consolidated nuclei of influence and economic power, not to mention property, with an operational capacity and autonomous political presence within the government. A number of factors have been at work: a high degree of rotation of public employees, presidential control over the day-to-day functioning of the government departments, but also an internal morale, a kind of governmental Spartanism demanding an ethic of public service that has up to now limited the crystallization of the factions of economic power that would potentially introduce political factionalism.
Because of that, there is a very hard and unified nucleus around the President that helps to ensure that centrifugal tendencies do not emerge internally. This is the intention, to build a morale of public service in the decision-making core of the government. But what is happening at the base? Víctor Paz Estenssoro ascribed the end of the National Revolution to the existence of too many members of the MNR to fill the jobs available.
Couldn’t the same thing happen with the MAS government?(7)
Paz Estenssoro accepted this pressure of the self-seeking militant as a political habit, a perk in continuity with a political logic that he never tried to overcome. In Bolivia, ever since the 19th century, political activity has been seen as a means of social ascendancy more than a means to provide service to the res publica. In fact, the material structure of the social classes in Bolivia operates so that the processes of transition to and from a class depend not on whether or not one has the cultural capital for social advancement but on one’s political capital, that is, the political networks and influence that guarantee access to private property. That was an exclusive monopoly of caste and lineage until 1952, when it was extended to the middle classes and leadership levels of the trade unions.
Nowadays, there are sectors that press for greater “democratization” of this system and demand the right to public office as a perk for belonging to some regional leadership of the MAS. The government has responded to this pressure and degeneration of political militancy by severely rejecting and sanctioning it. Why did we expel Adriana Gil in 2006? Because a nucleus of MAS members had formed who would occupy an institution in order to demand that positions in it be awarded to them.(8)
In April of that year, we expelled some people who wanted to continue with the old practice of public office being contingent on party membership. From that time on, the President himself not only established a political ethic of public administration as a service, but made it very clear that the compañeros who joined the MAS should not hope to be part of the administrative structures of the state and that, on the contrary, they should strive to strengthen the organizational and ideological structure of the party.
If the changes in the personnel of the state are compared historically between our management of government and those before us, it will be found that we have not made 20 percent of the changes that previous administrations implemented. In the days of the MIR, ADN and the MNR(9), neither the caretakers nor the drapes in the Presidential Office were spared the party “sweep”. So it is of no concern to us that there are many members and few positions; on the contrary, you are a member, so you do not have a position. And we have emphasized this, consistent with the conception of politics as a kind of lengthy “military service” in the interest of society.
But doesn’t that impede the formation of cadres within the MAS itself?
This is a major problem, but not so much because of that. One of the major weaknesses of our political structure, of this process, is the absence of political and technical cadres. In the world revolutions the parties that formed the government have previously had decades of preparation and selection of cadres that enabled them to shoulder the changes in the society with greater organizational muscle.
The MNR itself, which was formed in the 1930s, had more than 15 years of training before acceding to government. But the MAS, which arose in 1995 as a local political structure, only recently, in 2000-2001, set out to build a national structure aimed at taking power, and by 2005 was elected to government.
It had barely four years of preparation. And that has generated difficulties, since in the basic political nucleus the MAS is not a cadre structure but a flexible coalition of social movements. It has worked to promote the organizational aspect of the cadres, but the rapid growth in urban levels has forced it to reassert the trade union membership discipline in the face of more liberal and patronage-ridden practices characteristic of urban levels. When the party was formed, the structure, for want of a better word, of functional urban cadres was parallel to the agrarian union structure and shared the political decision-making levels. But once in government, a part of the urban structure devoted itself to seeking posts, which is why, in order to limit this type of deviations and practices, it was decided in 2007 that in the national, departmental and regional levels the party structures would be under the control of the social organizations.
So how are positions filled?
Since we have become the government, the mechanisms for selection based on merit have been reinforced in the technical levels of the civil service, and politically sensitive positions are screened by the national social organizations. Since 2007, appointments to such positions are no longer processed through the departmental management lists.
What effect has the Santos Ramírez affair had on the government’s economic agenda, given that YPFB is an emblematic company in that process?(10)
YPFB is not only the emblematic company, it is the company that sustains the country economically and the material basis of our reconquered sovereignty. It has a cash flow of some 3,500 million dollars, and for Bolivia that is a lot of money. In terms of assets, YPFB controls between 2,200 and 2,300 million dollars on behalf of the state. Today, 50 percent of our exports are oil and gas and those exports go through YPFB. It is the crown of the Bolivian economy and must be one of the twenty largest businesses in Latin America.
The initial news about the corruption in YPFB was a very harsh blow since it struck the country’s emblematic business, but on top of that it was the work of a compañero who was potentially one of the most likely successors to President Evo in the MAS political leadership.
And we responded immediately and just as harshly: removing Ramírez forthwith from control of the company and publicly supporting the investigations by the state prosecutor. In doing so, we broke with the old tradition of the traditional parties of concealing, delaying or covering up corruption by their politically influential members. We decided to signal something new: in this government, and where the people’s interests are involved, there are no friends, no families, no militants, no pals or flunkies. There are those who serve and those who are corrupt, and the latter will be sent to jail, regardless. We cannot allow the least inkling of error or suspicion in the leading cadre. The order was clear: that justice take its course and that no one should exert pressure. Great care was taken to ensure that no level of the state would interfere, pressure, or suggest anything at all in favour of Santos. But the damage is done. It will take months before the wound is healed. But again, there is a notable lack of cadres.
That’s why we have had to adopt a law that allows salaries higher than the President’s for technical staff in strategic enterprises. It’s our local form of the Leninist NEP — the New Economic Policy in post-revolution Russia. The goal of the NEP, in addition to the alliance with the peasants, was fundamentally to recruit technicians to administer the subordinate levels of the state, given that while the state is a political structure it has bureaucratic-administrative and technical-scientific levels that require knowledge and skills that cannot be rapidly acquired or transformed.
To put an end to the economic catastrophe he faced in the immediate aftermath of the revolution, Lenin had to rehire the technicians from the old state, until a simpler administration was gradually created. And he ordered that below each technician there be placed a youth who would learn, and we are doing the same thing.
We began this back in 2006, changing the organization and individuals at the decision-making levels of the civil service (ministers, deputy ministers and some managers), but we did not touch the secondary structure of the state administration until younger staff could be trained to substitute for the older ones. Now we have new challenges: state-owned companies that are getting much bigger within one, two or three years.
We need competent people, who have to be recruited in the labour market. Hence the route we have taken: political control vested in the decision-making levels and excellent technical staff, with salaries many times higher than the managers of the companies in which they are working. An example is Carlos Villegas, who makes 13,000 Bolivianos, and a manager in Andina can earn 60,000 Bolivianos....; at this point we have no other option, until we have managed to train a new generation of public service workers with substantial technical efficiency but, in addition, a political commitment that allows a new equalization of the salary scale.
There is a very strong narrative in the government concerning decolonization. How does this objective translate in terms of cultural and educational policies?
There are various dimensions to decolonization and it is a major component in the politics of the social movements. We have inherited a society that is colonized through and through: economically, we had to beg foreign countries to pay salaries; politically, we had to ask permission from foreign embassies to appoint ministers; spiritually, the people thought that power was an argument over skin colour and family names; mentally, people thought that whatever came from foreign universities was knowledge and the rest was folklore. To smash this crockery clogging the vital energy of Bolivians, the first step we took was political decolonization: to make decisions as a country without consulting foreign governments. In the past, a government minister had to get the approval of the United States embassy; the minister of housing, the approval of the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank.
A second moment is economic decolonization, which generally speaking means breaking with the outward flow of the surplus: the society generates a surplus in various ways — poetically, the open veins of Latin America — and this surplus would be transferred abroad in huge amounts.
So decolonization means staunching those bloodflows so that the surplus that is generated is reinvested within the country, which is what we have done with the nationalization decree and the gradual recovery of the public companies and the foreign exchange policies, the tax policies governing remittances of earnings, etc. The best example is the government take on oil and gas revenues. It varies between 65 and 77 percent, while previously it was 27 percent, that is, only 27 percent of the hydrocarbon profits remained in Bolivia. Today, for every 100 dollars in profits, between 65 dollars in the smaller fields and 77 dollars in the larger ones remains in the country. This is the material basis of economic sovereignty. Still to come is the other aspect, more enduring and more complicated, which is the cultural and spiritual decolonization of the society. This society broke with the colonizing paradigm by electing, for the first time in the history of this country, an Indigenous President. And from that moment on, all of the colonial system of symbols that imprisoned life and soul began to shatter irreversibly.
Now we have a campesino Indian governing Bolivia. Soldiers have to stand to attention before him; civil servants have to carry out his instructions; business people have to request audiences with him; and courts and rulers pay homage to him. Cultural decolonization has two axes, therefore, that must be addressed as complements. One has to do with the diversity of cultures, languages, histories and memories. And the other refers to the diversity of civilizations, that is, modes of production of the meaning of life, time, politics. Decolonization in the first of these axes, the cultural, is easier to achieve, and we now have experiences in other multicultural societies, such as Belgium, India or Canada: education in various languages, plurilingual public administration, plural historical narrative within the common national history, which comes to be a national history of various nations, etc. It will be mandatory for the schools and universities to teach such languages as Castilian Spanish (as a language of integration), a foreign language (as a language of communication with the world), and an Indigenous language that is dominant in the region (Aymara in La Paz, Quechua in Cochabamba, and Guaraní in Santa Cruz).
Within the state sphere, the civil servants have to learn one Indigenous language as well, depending on the region. Similarly, in government services, publications, speeches by public officials. And also in the realm of culture, the decolonization of memory, the official vindication or recovery of other heroes, and the dates commemorated by the Indigenous peoples. The diverse mestizo and Indigenous history must be officially recognized in textbooks. What is more complicated is decolonization from the civilizing standpoint; that has to be viewed now within the organizational and cognitive matrix of individuals. In the educational field, it involves reclaiming other knowledges, other discursive constructions, not necessarily written ones, of knowledge. How we are going to achieve this is part of a debate within the government; how we are going to preserve as public heritage what is written in the textiles (Aymara weavings), as state wisdom. It is a complicated debate.
In the area of healthcare, we have taken bigger steps, for example joining the doctor with the practitioner of traditional medicine, or placing the midwife alongside the nurse, for people to choose in the medical clinic. This is a prototype of wisdom and medical procedure that the state is beginning to institutionalize, even though there is no regulation yet of this local knowledge which is dispersed but corresponds to another civilization, not only to another culture.
Another logic, to understand what is death, life, blood, food. Politically, as well, we have made progress in incorporating communitarian democracy as one of the legitimate democracies in the mode of production of decisions in the state. Or the incorporation of social control via the trade-union, partnership and communitarian structures and even the state administration.
And in the economic sphere, we have incorporated, recognized, promoted and financed the communitarian structures as part of the productive area that must be decided on as a portion of the TGN investment.(11) This is a long and complicated process. But we have already begun to take decisive steps.
“Along with the law of the communities is the law of the state.” Listening to Evo Morales, we notice a discrepancy between his speeches in defence of Pachamama, the land and the territory, directed more toward the outside world, and a more developmentalist discourse within the country, including denunciations of the NGOs that promote a petroleum-free Amazon. How do you explain this?
Clearly, the campesino and communitarian productive logic is based on a type of productive rationality that is locally sustainable with nature, because it has as a foundation a logic of advances and returns between generations. Involved here is a material fact, that in order to guarantee the food that is present today, it is necessary to preserve the nutritional conditions for those who come after, which is conducive to a dialogical reading and a long-term sustainable relationship with nature.
The form in which this is rationalized and verbalized leads to the ritualized dialogue with nature, as a living body providing, by leave, whatever is necessary for reproduction, which is later returned and maintained to guarantee in the long term that metabolic exchange between human beings and nature. Adopting a concept of Marx in studying the rural commune in India in the Grundrisse, in the campesino civilization nature is presented, therefore, as an organic externalization of subjectivity. You cannot destroy your own body, therefore, as that would be suicidal. The campesino movement has defended and is going to defend a form of use of nature that we now call rational, as opposed to the processes of depredation peculiar to the civilization of surplus-value.
That’s why in Lain America, in the Indigenous-campesino movement, there has been a discursive construction of militant defence of the powers of nature in opposition to the expansive depredation of capitalist exploitation. With time, this agrarian and campesino productive logic became a political logic of confrontation with the neoliberal developmentalist state. The subject becomes more complex when the Indigenous campesinos, previously excluded from citizenship and economic power, become the leading bloc in the state and the communities become a part of the state, which is what has happened with us in Bolivia.
So, on the one hand, this logic of the dialogue with nature leads to state action; but at the same time, in as much as you are the state, you need resources and growing surpluses in order to meet basic necessities of all Bolivians including those most in need such as the Indigenous and popular urban and rural communities. And there, obviously, tension arises. Accordingly, you have to tread carefully. To expand environmental protection and the sustainable use of nature as a state policy, but at the same time you need to produce on a large scale, to implement processes of expansive industrialization that provide you with a social surplus that can be redistributed and support other processes of campesino, communitarian and small-scale modernization.
In the case of the gas and oil exploration north of La Paz, we are trying to produce hydrocarbons to balance geographically the society’s sources of collective wealth, to generate a state surplus and simultaneously preserve the spatial environment in coordination with the Indigenous communities. Today we are not opening a passage in the northern Amazon to allow the entry of Repsol or Petrobras. We are opening a passage in the Amazon to allow the entry of the state.
And who will ensure that the state will not be as destructive as the transnational companies?
We have to take care that it is not. Of course there will be a tension between social-state logic and a sustainable use of nature, and the social-state need to generate economic surpluses that are the state’s responsibility. It involves some tension, just like the “state of social movements”, between the democratization of power and a monopoly of decisions (social movement/state). We have to live with that vital contradiction of history. There are no recipes. Is it mandatory to get gas and oil from the Amazon north of La Paz? Yes. Why? Because we have to balance the economic structures of Bolivian society, because the rapid development of Tarija with 90 percent of the gas is going to generate imbalances in the long run.(12) It is necessary, accordingly, to balance in the long term the territorialities of the state. Likewise, we need economic surpluses in order to strengthen community structures, to expand them, to find means of modernization that are distinct alternatives to the destruction of the communal structures, as has been happening up to now. And at the same time it is necessary to promote, in agreement with the communities, a hydrocarbon production that is not destructive of the environment.
If the communities say no, is the state still going to enter?
Here is where the debate lies. What has happened? When we consulted the CPILAP(13), we were asked to go to negotiate in Brussels with its horde of lawyers and that we comply with some environmentalist statements published by USAID. How is that? Who is preventing the state from exploring for oil in the north of La Paz: the Tacanas Indigenous communities, an NGO, or foreign countries? That is why we have gone to negotiate community by community and there we have encountered the support of the Indigenous communities to drive ahead in petroleum exploration and development. The Indigenous-popular government has strengthened the long struggle of the peoples for land and territory.
In the case of the minority Indigenous peoples in the lowlands, the state has consolidated millions of hectares as historic territoriality of many peoples with a low population density. But combined with the right of a people to the land is the right of the state, of the state led by the Indigenous-popular and campesino movement, to superimpose the greater collective interest of all the peoples. And that is how we are going to go forward.
Published in Le Monde Diplomatique, Bolivian edition, in August 2009, original under the title “El punto de bifurcación es un momento en el que se miden ejércitos” (“The point of bifurcation is a moment when armies gauge their respective forces”). The Spanish text is also available at http://tinyurl.com/kle4vt.
Notes
(1) The opposition parties in the Constituent Assembly argued that each individual article in the new Constitution, as drafted, had to be adopted by a majority of two-thirds of the votes, that is, more than the combined vote of the MAS deputies and their allies.
(2) Owing to right-wing harassment and threats, the Assembly met for a while in La Calancha, a military base, and then in Oruro, where the new Constitution was adopted in December 2007 without the attendance of the opposition. Following departmental autonomy referendums and the presidential recall referendum in 2008, which registered a shift in the political relationship of forces in favour of the MAS government, the draft Constitution was adopted with amendments by the Congress, then ratified in a popular vote throughout Bolivia in January 2009.
(3) Bolivian rightists organized violent antigovernment demonstrations in several departments in September 2008. In Pando a massacre that resulted in dozens of deaths, mainly of campesinos, led to charges of genocide against the governor, who had allegedly promoted the clashes.
(4) In 1985, a collapse of tin prices led the MNR government of Paz Estenssoro to lay off 20,000 miners and implement a “shock treatment” austerity program.
(5) The reference is to a mass march of many thousands from Caracollo in the department of Oruro to La Paz, the capital — a distance of 200 kilometres — in support of the new Constitution adopted in 2007 by the Constituent Assembly.
(6) EMAPA: Empresa de Apoyo a la Producción de Alimentos.
(7) Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement toward socialism).
(8) Adriana Gil, a former supporter of the MAS in Santa Cruz, has since organized her own party, the Social Democratic Force, to campaign against the MAS government.
(9)Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR – Revolutionary Left Movement); Acción Democrática Nacionalista (ADN – Nationalist Democratic Action); Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR – Revolutionary Nationalist Movement).
(10) Santos Ramírez, the president of YPFB, the state oil and gas company, was fired and arrested in February 2009 following reports that he had received payments from a shell company represented by a Bolivian oil industry executive who had recently signed a multimillion dollar contract with YPFB.
(11) TGN is an Argentine gas pipeline carrier that transports gas from Bolivia.
(12) Tarija is the southernmost department of Bolivia.
(13) Central de Pueblos Indígenas de La Paz.
Bolivia: ‘It is possible to build a better world’
Federico Fuentes, Sao Paulo
5 September 2009As Bolivia heads towards its December 6 national elections, the right-wing opposition has again turned to violence and disinformation to try to halt the process of change led by the country’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales.
On August 11, letter bombs sent to social movements were discovered and deactivated.
One of the bombs detonated in the hands of the wife of Fidel Surco, a leader of the National Coalition for Change, which unites most of Bolivia’s indigenous, peasant, worker and popular organisations. She was hospitalised and treated for severe damage to her hands and eyes.
Sergio Loayza, vice president of Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism party (MAS), said “[these] violent acts of terrorism are aimed at frightening our leaders” because the right wing knows “that they cannot win the elections”.
Together with Rosaria Apaza, from the MAS national leadership, Loayza spoke to Green Left Weekly at an international seminar organised in Sao Paulo, Brazil by the Socialism and Liberty Party over August 17-18.
The letter bombs came only months after a terrorist cell made up of foreign and Bolivian mercenaries was disbanded in April in the city of Santa Cruz, the heartland of the right-wing opposition.
The mercenaries were found with plans to assassinate Morales and members of his cabinet. A cache of rifles, munitions, and plastic explosives was also discovered.
Since then it has been revealed that right-wing opposition leaders had funded the terrorist cell.
In September 2008, the rich elites of Santa Cruz, together with right-wing prefects (governors) from the other opposition controlled departments (states) in Bolivia’s east, were involved in violent takeovers of government buildings in the region, as part of a coup attempt against the Morales government.
After the massacre of dozens of indigenous peasants in the state of Pando, the Morales government ordered the military to move in against the coup-plotters. At the same time, the nation’s progressive social movements mobilised to go to Santa Cruz, threatening to take over the city.
The combined action by the government and the social movements caused the defeat of the coup attempt.
This opened the way for the approval of a new constitution, which was ratified in a national referendum with 60% support in January.
The new constitution radically increased the rights of indigenous people and recognised state control of Bolivia’s natural resources.
“For us, the December 6 elections are very important”, said Loayza. “We want to ratify our indigenous President Evo Morales and our vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera, and above all guarantee a two-thirds majority” in the national assembly.
“Until now, although we have controlled the executive power, the government, this has not been enough. The judiciary is controlled [by the right wing]; they control the Senate too.
“That is why more than 100 laws that the executive has sent to the Senate have been blocked. It has only been due to the mobilisation of the social movements that we have been able to approve some laws. That is why it is important that we win a majority in the Senate.
“This is the body where we will be able to put the new constitution into practice. We want to consolidate this process and we will only be able to do this as long as we have the necessary support at the national level.
“That is why they know perfectly well that for them this is do or die, and for us as well.”
In this context, “the social organisations have begun to unite and become stronger than ever”, added Apaza.
“There is hope that the social organisations, the middle class, intellectuals and everyone united can guarantee the necessary two-thirds [needed] to approve the many laws we need to pass.”
According to a recent Gallup poll, Morales has 57.7% support among voters. His next closest competitor, millionaire Samuel Doria Media, has 9.7% support, followed by the former prefect for Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa, who was revoked from his post in a recall referendum in 2008, with 8.6%.
Loayza told GLW that the right wing has “no solid candidates <193> they don’t have political arguments.
“But we cannot underestimate them: they have economic powers, logistical powers and, what’s more, they count on the support of US imperialism.”
Private corporations control most of Bolivia’s media. Loayza said that they had used this power to “confuse and misinform the population”.
“The only thing they do is try to create confusion and disinformation. That is also why they appeal to terrorist acts to try to halt this revolutionary process.”
However, Loayza said, “we believe that these deep transformations have to be extended throughout all the Americas. This process, headed by Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, has to radiate throughout all of Latin America and transcend the borders of Latin America.
“We believe it is possible to build a better world and that is what the US empire does not want to understand.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Morales named "World Hero of Mother Earth" by UN General Assembly
EFE. August 31, 2009.
La Paz, Aug 29, 2009 (EFE via COMTEX) -- The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Rev. Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, on Saturday declared Bolivian President Evo Morales as "World Hero of Mother Earth" in a ceremony at the presidential palace in this capital.
With a medal and a parchment scroll, the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization named Morales "the maximum exponent and paradigm of love for Mother Earth" in the resolution for his decoration that was read during the ceremony.
The document added that the decision was taken "after extensive consultation" among representatives of the General Assembly's member countries.
D'Escoto recalled that Morales "was the one who most helped" the United Nations declare last April 22 as International Mother Earth Day, or "Pachamama" as Mother Earth is said in Bolivia's Aymara Indian tongue.
For his part, the president said that the honor is not for Evo Morales, "but for our ancestors and the native peoples" that "have always defended Mother Earth." He added that he will continue trying to get the international community to acknowledge the rights of Mother Earth.
Besides Morales, the former Cuban head of state Fidel Castro has been named "World Hero of Solidarity" and the late ex-president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, will be honored as "World Hero of Social Justice." "What we want to do is present these three people to the world and say that they embody virtues and values worth emulation by all of us," said D'Escoto, who like the socialist Morales is a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.
D'Escoto was elected president of the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly on June 4, 2008, and was Nigaraguan foreign minister during the first Sandinista government from 1979 to 1990.
La Paz, Aug 29, 2009 (EFE via COMTEX) -- The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Rev. Miguel D'Escoto Brockmann, on Saturday declared Bolivian President Evo Morales as "World Hero of Mother Earth" in a ceremony at the presidential palace in this capital.
With a medal and a parchment scroll, the General Assembly of the United Nations Organization named Morales "the maximum exponent and paradigm of love for Mother Earth" in the resolution for his decoration that was read during the ceremony.
The document added that the decision was taken "after extensive consultation" among representatives of the General Assembly's member countries.
D'Escoto recalled that Morales "was the one who most helped" the United Nations declare last April 22 as International Mother Earth Day, or "Pachamama" as Mother Earth is said in Bolivia's Aymara Indian tongue.
For his part, the president said that the honor is not for Evo Morales, "but for our ancestors and the native peoples" that "have always defended Mother Earth." He added that he will continue trying to get the international community to acknowledge the rights of Mother Earth.
Besides Morales, the former Cuban head of state Fidel Castro has been named "World Hero of Solidarity" and the late ex-president of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, will be honored as "World Hero of Social Justice." "What we want to do is present these three people to the world and say that they embody virtues and values worth emulation by all of us," said D'Escoto, who like the socialist Morales is a staunch critic of U.S. foreign policy in Latin America.
D'Escoto was elected president of the 63rd session of the UN General Assembly on June 4, 2008, and was Nigaraguan foreign minister during the first Sandinista government from 1979 to 1990.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
