Federico Fuentes
Pledging to move the country towards “communitarian socialism”, Bolivian president Evo Morales proclaimed the death of the “colonial state” during the January 21 inauguration of his second term as president. He said “a new plurinational, autonomy and solidarity-based state is being born”.
First elected in 2005, Bolivia’s first ever indigenous president was sworn for his second term as head of the new “Plurinational State of Bolivia”. This title replaces the old “Republic of Bolivia” under the new constitution, drawn up by an elected constituent assembly and adopted by referendum, in recognition that the new state incorporates Bolivia’s 36 indigenous nations for the first time.
The inauguration was filled with symbolism to highlight his point. It took place under the gaze of indigenous resistance leaders, such as Tupak Katari and Bartolina Sisa, whose portraits now sit along side those of Simon Bolivar and Jose de Sucre, leaders of the fight for Bolivia’s independence from Spanish rule.
Morales handed over the old presidential sash, to be laid to rest in a museum, and received a new one lined with the colours of the Whipala flag — the traditional symbol of Bolivia’s indigenous people.
He took his oath with his right hand on his heart and with his left fist raised, swearing not on the bible but the new constitution, which incorporates many rights for the indigenous majority for the first time.
The newly elected Plurinational Legislative Assembly he addressed was filled with parliamentarians in indigenous attire and miners helmets — a further sign of changing times.
Morales recalled how only 50 years ago indigenous people were not even allowed in the plaza outside congress.
Women make up a record 30% of the new assembly and Morales’s newly appointed cabinet has an equal number of men and women.
Morales’s party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), now has the needed two-thirds majority in the assembly to approve laws previously blocked by the right-wing opposition. These laws aim to establish the legal framework to implement the new constitution’s objectives.
Morales said an immediate task was “a profound revolution in the judicial power”, which he said had worked to undermine his government. Under the new constitution, heads of the judicial system will be elected by the people.
He referred to the Armed Forces, “happily, now in the barracks”. Morales said: “Under the new doctrine of the Armed Forces, the internal enemy is not longer the indigenous person or the worker.”
However, Morales said: “Although the Armed Forces have participated in helping us attend to social demands, the recuperation of our natural resources, I feel something is missing ... unfortunately in some military institutes, they continue to teach that the enemy is socialism.
“We have to change that. The real enemy is capitalism, not socialism.
“We are not here to serve the capitalists; we are here to serve the people.”
Morales called the first cabinet meeting the next day, saying “I want to get a jump start on erecting the scaffolding of the new communitarian socialist state.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Bolivia: Movement for change strengthens
Federico Fuentes
The results of Bolivia’s December 6 national elections confirmed the support won by President Evo Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party for the profound changes underway.
Morales increased his vote from 53.7% in 2005 (a record at the time), winning 64.2% of the vote in a poll marked by the highest level of participation ever. Some 93.9% of registered voters took part.
A divided opposition with no clear project, whose traditional parties have all but disintegrated, was unable to contain the MAS landslide.
In the MAS strongholds in the Andean west, Morales scored 80.2% in La Paz, 79.4% in Oruro and 78.3% in Potosi.
His vote reached more than 90% in rural areas. Among Bolivians overseas, allowed to vote for the first time, Morales won almost 70%, including more than 90% among Bolivians in Argentina and Brazil.
He also increased his vote in the east, which is controlled by opposition prefects (governors). He won 56% in Chuquisaca and 51% in Tarija, as well as 44% in Pando, 37.6% in Beni and 40.9% in the opposition heartland of Santa Cruz.
The vote showed Morales maintains powerful support among his traditional base of indigenous peoples, campesinos and workers, and has extended his support further into middle-class sectors.
More than an election victory
Ironically, in a country that had been in a permanent state of convulsion with threats of civil war and disintegration, Bolivia appears one of the most stable countries in the region.
The reason lies in the resounding political defeat of a right-wing anti-government offensive in August-September 2008.
Morales was first elected in 2005, on the back of five years of intense social confrontations during which politics was defined more on the streets than in parliament.
Morales was quick to note that his election did not mean the poor majority had “won power”.
Once elected, Morales, together with the social movements (particular the indigenous and campesino organisations that make up the heart of the MAS), sought to implement the key demands that emerged from the peoples’ struggles: winning back control over Bolivia’s natural resources, in particular the nationalisation of gas; and a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to “decolonise” the state and end the political exclusion of the indigenous majority.
All of this was too much for the rich elite, which felt that it was losing power to the same people it had long exploited.
Almost immediately, the elite launched a fierce onslaught against the government, using its control by its representatives over the prefectures in the east, the right-wing majority in the senate, and its media and economic might.
This battle reached a climax in September 2008, after Morales’s crushing victory in a recall referendum on the presidency the previous month. Unleashing a campaign of terror, opposition leaders, the US embassy and some high ranking military officials attempted to carry out a coup.
This offensive was defeated by the combined action of the social movements and loyal soldiers, who were mobilised directly by Morales to areas where military commanders were refusing to stop the coup plotters.
The defeat of the coup created the political space for the adoption of the new constitution and Morales’s re-election. The MAS now enjoys a two-thirds majority in the senate.
On election night, Morales said the MAS’s parliamentary majority “obliges me to accelerate the process of change”.
“Now we have a free path to apply the constitution to the benefit of all ... now we have an enormous responsibility to deepen and speed-up the process of change and proclaim socialism.”
Breaking the elite’s economic power
Morales has begun increasingly implementing his land reform program. Until now, it had been stalled by the violent opposition of paramilitaries tied to agribusiness and the weakness of his government in the east.
In moving on land reform, it seems the Morales government is seeking to break the economic power of the large landowning oligarchy based in the east.
Only days after his re-election, Morales ordered the seizure of 12,500 hectares of land illegally acquired by the family of Branco Marinkovic, one of the country’s largest soybean magnates and a leader of the violent campaign to overthrow Morales.
With 20 police officers, the vice-minister for land walked onto the property and ordered it be handed over to the local Guarani indigenous people.
The Marinkovic family is also fighting a legal battle to keep control of a slightly bigger ranch.
A week later, the government took control of 2800 hectares of land belonging to Osvaldo Monaterios, the owner of the Red Unitel television network and a fierce Morales critic.
Despite the extreme weakness of the right-wing opposition, the struggle is far from over.
US imperialism remains a big threat, as it showed with the military coup by US-trained officers in Honduras last years and the current occupation of Haiti.
Dangers
There are also dangers within the process of change and the old state the Morales government inherited — of bureaucracy, corruption, inefficiency and disputes over positions of power.
In a visit to Pando last November, Morales raised these problems. “There are some leaders of my party who think they are the owners of the process”, he said, referring to sectors within MAS that protested the fact that some MAS-backed candidates for the election where not MAS members.
“The process of change belongs to all the citizens, be they MAS supporters or not, given that we do not want more corruption or neoliberalism in the country.”
Morales said: “The state bureaucracy, which remains as a vice from the old state, is still an internal enemy within the process of change that halts and delays decisions that require speed and efficiency.”
Vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera said in his January 21 swearing in speech that it was necessary to build a new state, “which the Bolivian people have proposed be built from below”.
The new state’s three pillars would be: “plurinationality” (recognition of indigenous equality); regional and indigenous autonomy within the framework of “a democratic decentralisation of power”; and a mixed economy in which the state plays the central role in strategic sectors.
Garcia Linera also noted the need to spread the socialist revolution internationally. “No revolution can triumph if it is not support by other revolutions in the world. The empire is a global demon, and the only way to defeat it is with another globalisation, otherwise the empire will impose itself.
“We are globalising the power of the people.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
The results of Bolivia’s December 6 national elections confirmed the support won by President Evo Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party for the profound changes underway.
Morales increased his vote from 53.7% in 2005 (a record at the time), winning 64.2% of the vote in a poll marked by the highest level of participation ever. Some 93.9% of registered voters took part.
A divided opposition with no clear project, whose traditional parties have all but disintegrated, was unable to contain the MAS landslide.
In the MAS strongholds in the Andean west, Morales scored 80.2% in La Paz, 79.4% in Oruro and 78.3% in Potosi.
His vote reached more than 90% in rural areas. Among Bolivians overseas, allowed to vote for the first time, Morales won almost 70%, including more than 90% among Bolivians in Argentina and Brazil.
He also increased his vote in the east, which is controlled by opposition prefects (governors). He won 56% in Chuquisaca and 51% in Tarija, as well as 44% in Pando, 37.6% in Beni and 40.9% in the opposition heartland of Santa Cruz.
The vote showed Morales maintains powerful support among his traditional base of indigenous peoples, campesinos and workers, and has extended his support further into middle-class sectors.
More than an election victory
Ironically, in a country that had been in a permanent state of convulsion with threats of civil war and disintegration, Bolivia appears one of the most stable countries in the region.
The reason lies in the resounding political defeat of a right-wing anti-government offensive in August-September 2008.
Morales was first elected in 2005, on the back of five years of intense social confrontations during which politics was defined more on the streets than in parliament.
Morales was quick to note that his election did not mean the poor majority had “won power”.
Once elected, Morales, together with the social movements (particular the indigenous and campesino organisations that make up the heart of the MAS), sought to implement the key demands that emerged from the peoples’ struggles: winning back control over Bolivia’s natural resources, in particular the nationalisation of gas; and a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to “decolonise” the state and end the political exclusion of the indigenous majority.
All of this was too much for the rich elite, which felt that it was losing power to the same people it had long exploited.
Almost immediately, the elite launched a fierce onslaught against the government, using its control by its representatives over the prefectures in the east, the right-wing majority in the senate, and its media and economic might.
This battle reached a climax in September 2008, after Morales’s crushing victory in a recall referendum on the presidency the previous month. Unleashing a campaign of terror, opposition leaders, the US embassy and some high ranking military officials attempted to carry out a coup.
This offensive was defeated by the combined action of the social movements and loyal soldiers, who were mobilised directly by Morales to areas where military commanders were refusing to stop the coup plotters.
The defeat of the coup created the political space for the adoption of the new constitution and Morales’s re-election. The MAS now enjoys a two-thirds majority in the senate.
On election night, Morales said the MAS’s parliamentary majority “obliges me to accelerate the process of change”.
“Now we have a free path to apply the constitution to the benefit of all ... now we have an enormous responsibility to deepen and speed-up the process of change and proclaim socialism.”
Breaking the elite’s economic power
Morales has begun increasingly implementing his land reform program. Until now, it had been stalled by the violent opposition of paramilitaries tied to agribusiness and the weakness of his government in the east.
In moving on land reform, it seems the Morales government is seeking to break the economic power of the large landowning oligarchy based in the east.
Only days after his re-election, Morales ordered the seizure of 12,500 hectares of land illegally acquired by the family of Branco Marinkovic, one of the country’s largest soybean magnates and a leader of the violent campaign to overthrow Morales.
With 20 police officers, the vice-minister for land walked onto the property and ordered it be handed over to the local Guarani indigenous people.
The Marinkovic family is also fighting a legal battle to keep control of a slightly bigger ranch.
A week later, the government took control of 2800 hectares of land belonging to Osvaldo Monaterios, the owner of the Red Unitel television network and a fierce Morales critic.
Despite the extreme weakness of the right-wing opposition, the struggle is far from over.
US imperialism remains a big threat, as it showed with the military coup by US-trained officers in Honduras last years and the current occupation of Haiti.
Dangers
There are also dangers within the process of change and the old state the Morales government inherited — of bureaucracy, corruption, inefficiency and disputes over positions of power.
In a visit to Pando last November, Morales raised these problems. “There are some leaders of my party who think they are the owners of the process”, he said, referring to sectors within MAS that protested the fact that some MAS-backed candidates for the election where not MAS members.
“The process of change belongs to all the citizens, be they MAS supporters or not, given that we do not want more corruption or neoliberalism in the country.”
Morales said: “The state bureaucracy, which remains as a vice from the old state, is still an internal enemy within the process of change that halts and delays decisions that require speed and efficiency.”
Vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera said in his January 21 swearing in speech that it was necessary to build a new state, “which the Bolivian people have proposed be built from below”.
The new state’s three pillars would be: “plurinationality” (recognition of indigenous equality); regional and indigenous autonomy within the framework of “a democratic decentralisation of power”; and a mixed economy in which the state plays the central role in strategic sectors.
Garcia Linera also noted the need to spread the socialist revolution internationally. “No revolution can triumph if it is not support by other revolutions in the world. The empire is a global demon, and the only way to defeat it is with another globalisation, otherwise the empire will impose itself.
“We are globalising the power of the people.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Bolivian MPs recommend setting up an external debt audit commission
On December 30th, the Lower House of the Bolivian Parliament approved a resolution to recommend the Pluri-National Legislative Assembly to set up a special commission to audit Bolivia’s external debt. The decision is part of a process engaging Members of Parliament (MPs) and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) including the Jubilee Foundation, in association with national and international networks.
According to a communiqué from the Bolivian Parliament, the commission must “investigate the process through which external public debt was entered into and renegotiated”. The communiqué also specifies that the audit should determine the “legitimacy, lawfulness, transparency, quality, effectiveness and efficiency” of debt processes and debt cancellation processes registered in Bolivia in recent decades.
MPs in support of the recommendation argue that during periods of dictatorship in Bolivia “external debt was entered into without people’s consent” and that indebtedness levels “continue to be alarming” in spite of debt cancellations. Furthermore, they stated that economic and social development projects and programmes funded with external resources have failed “to reduce the high levels of poverty and inequality” in the country.
“In view of the current global financial and economic crisis we consider it appropriate to gather past experiences to make policy recommendations for a new responsible external indebtedness”, the resolution states.
According to a report by the Central Bank of Bolivia, the country’s medium and long-term external public debt amounted to 2.8 billion dollars by September 2009 – exceeding the amount registered in December 2008 by 316 million.
The country’s debt with the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), which amounts to 987 million dollars, accounts for 35 per cent of the debt owed to multilateral institutions.
Meanwhile, the country’s main bilateral debt is owed to Venezuela and amounts to 247.7 million dollars.
Bolivian social organisations, including the Jubilee Foundation, have on several occasions suggested carrying out an external debt audit to discover the origin, conditions and impact of indebtedness.
Republished from Eurodad
According to a communiqué from the Bolivian Parliament, the commission must “investigate the process through which external public debt was entered into and renegotiated”. The communiqué also specifies that the audit should determine the “legitimacy, lawfulness, transparency, quality, effectiveness and efficiency” of debt processes and debt cancellation processes registered in Bolivia in recent decades.
MPs in support of the recommendation argue that during periods of dictatorship in Bolivia “external debt was entered into without people’s consent” and that indebtedness levels “continue to be alarming” in spite of debt cancellations. Furthermore, they stated that economic and social development projects and programmes funded with external resources have failed “to reduce the high levels of poverty and inequality” in the country.
“In view of the current global financial and economic crisis we consider it appropriate to gather past experiences to make policy recommendations for a new responsible external indebtedness”, the resolution states.
According to a report by the Central Bank of Bolivia, the country’s medium and long-term external public debt amounted to 2.8 billion dollars by September 2009 – exceeding the amount registered in December 2008 by 316 million.
The country’s debt with the Andean Development Corporation (CAF), which amounts to 987 million dollars, accounts for 35 per cent of the debt owed to multilateral institutions.
Meanwhile, the country’s main bilateral debt is owed to Venezuela and amounts to 247.7 million dollars.
Bolivian social organisations, including the Jubilee Foundation, have on several occasions suggested carrying out an external debt audit to discover the origin, conditions and impact of indebtedness.
Republished from Eurodad
Morales deplores US 'occupation' of Haiti
Carlos Valdez, Associated Press
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- President Evo Morales said Wednesday that Bolivia would seek U.N. condemnation of what he called the U.S. military occupation of earthquake-stricken Haiti.
"The United States cannot use a natural disaster to militarily occupy Haiti," he told reporters at the presidential palace.
"Haiti doesn't need more blood," Morales added, implying that the militarized U.S. humanitarian mission could lead to bloodshed.
His criticism echoed that of fellow leftist, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who said Sunday that "it appears the gringos are militarily occupying Haiti."
Washington has dispatched some 11,500 troops to the poor Caribbean nation since the Jan. 12 quake and says the number could reach 16,000 by the weekend.
It says their primary mission is to speed distribution of aid, in part by providing security at distribution points and escorting aid convoys.
When asked Wednesday about the possibility of the U.N. General Assembly condemning the U.S., assembly spokesman Jean Viktor Nkolo pointed to previous U.N. statements expressing gratitude for U.S. help in Haiti.
The United Nations will soon sign an agreement with the U.S. stipulating the U.N. as the lead organization for security in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, acting U.N. special envoy to Haiti, said Tuesday.
The U.N. also resolved to add 3,500 international military and police peacekeepers to the 8,100-strong contingent already in Haiti, which includes Bolivians.
---
Associated Press Writer Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- President Evo Morales said Wednesday that Bolivia would seek U.N. condemnation of what he called the U.S. military occupation of earthquake-stricken Haiti.
"The United States cannot use a natural disaster to militarily occupy Haiti," he told reporters at the presidential palace.
"Haiti doesn't need more blood," Morales added, implying that the militarized U.S. humanitarian mission could lead to bloodshed.
His criticism echoed that of fellow leftist, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who said Sunday that "it appears the gringos are militarily occupying Haiti."
Washington has dispatched some 11,500 troops to the poor Caribbean nation since the Jan. 12 quake and says the number could reach 16,000 by the weekend.
It says their primary mission is to speed distribution of aid, in part by providing security at distribution points and escorting aid convoys.
When asked Wednesday about the possibility of the U.N. General Assembly condemning the U.S., assembly spokesman Jean Viktor Nkolo pointed to previous U.N. statements expressing gratitude for U.S. help in Haiti.
The United Nations will soon sign an agreement with the U.S. stipulating the U.N. as the lead organization for security in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, acting U.N. special envoy to Haiti, said Tuesday.
The U.N. also resolved to add 3,500 international military and police peacekeepers to the 8,100-strong contingent already in Haiti, which includes Bolivians.
---
Associated Press Writer Edith Lederer at the United Nations contributed to this report.
Evo Morales says that in Latin America there exist those that are socialists “in name only” or “pro-capitalist”
EFE - Bolivian president Evo Morales affirmed today that in Latin America there exist “anti-imperialist” socialists but also those that are socialists “in name only” and “pro-capitalist” and believes that the “real ones” can be identified by looking at their positions on how to save the planet in the face of climate change.
Morales made these reflections in a press conference in La Paz, after being consulted by the press in regards to where he believes the victory of right winger Sebastián Piñera in Chile supposes a weakening of the “socialist” bloc in Latin America.
The head of state responded by saying he would not “classify” different presidents or governments in the region, but said that he is convinced that there exists a “rebellion of the peoples, of the social movements, against capitalism. That is unstoppable.”
According to Morales, when the issues of the environment and climate change are debates, the “peoples of the world”, the ecologists, scientists and leftists indentify “capitalism as the common enemy of humanity”.
“Therefore, the peoples of the world have a banner of struggle to defend life, the planet… to save humanity. That is where we can differentiate the real socialists from those in Latin America who are socialist in name only” said Morales.
The leftist Bolivian president belongs to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) bloc, led by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who proposes the construction of a “21st century socialism.”
Translated from ADN
Morales made these reflections in a press conference in La Paz, after being consulted by the press in regards to where he believes the victory of right winger Sebastián Piñera in Chile supposes a weakening of the “socialist” bloc in Latin America.
The head of state responded by saying he would not “classify” different presidents or governments in the region, but said that he is convinced that there exists a “rebellion of the peoples, of the social movements, against capitalism. That is unstoppable.”
According to Morales, when the issues of the environment and climate change are debates, the “peoples of the world”, the ecologists, scientists and leftists indentify “capitalism as the common enemy of humanity”.
“Therefore, the peoples of the world have a banner of struggle to defend life, the planet… to save humanity. That is where we can differentiate the real socialists from those in Latin America who are socialist in name only” said Morales.
The leftist Bolivian president belongs to the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) bloc, led by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who proposes the construction of a “21st century socialism.”
Translated from ADN
Bolivia rejects US blame game on Copenhagen
(New York, 18 January 2010) In response to US climate envoy Jonathan Pershing’s attempts to blame countries of the Latin American ALBA block for the failure of the Copenhagen climate talks and the US decision to therefore sideline the UN in future climate talks, Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN said the following:
“The US’ deliberate attempts to sideline both democracy and justice in the climate policy debate is holding humanity hostage – and will be viewed as both reckless and immoral by future generations.”“It is time the US read the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s own reports, which in the Fourth Assessment clearly noted that ‘Adaptive capacity is intimately connected to social and economic development, but it is not evenly distributed across and within societies.’ Furthermore it states: ‘Vulnerability to climate change can be exacerbated by …poverty, unequal access to resources, food insecurity, trends in economic globalization, conflict and incidence of diseases such as HIV/AIDS.’”
“The only solution to climate change is one based on justice otherwise we are making a decision to sacrifice more than half of humanity. Climate Justice will mean radical reduction of emissions in industrialized countries and the transfer of resources and technology to developing countries. If the US and other governments can so easily find money for endless wars, bank bailouts and bonanza bonuses for the rich, they clearly have the resources to help save lives and protect future generations.”
Solon added: “The US admission that it wants to exclude the vast majority of the planet from decisions about climate change is deeply offensive, when the climate crisis will fall first on those who are most vulnerable. The earthquake in Haiti has shown very clearly how vulnerable impoverished countries will be to environmental crises. The US decision to ignore our voices is the attitude of a colonial ruler. It is certainly not change we can believe in.”
“The US climate envoy Pershing must be very deaf if he thinks that only a small minority of countries opposed the Copenhagen Accord. The agreement was roundly condemned in almost every quarter of the world, because it patently fails to tackle the climate crisis. The leaders of the world’s largest polluting nations have failed us. That is why Bolivia is organizing a Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change in April to put forward effective proposals for saving humanity from climate chaos. We invite all people committed to saving our planet to join us.”
For more information or to arrange interviews, please contact:
Nick Buxton – Email nicholasbuxton@gmail.com or ring +1 530 902 3772
————————————————————
Notes:
1. Jonathan Pershing said: “Who were they? Bolivia, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba. These are countries that are part of the ALBA group, a group that sees this process not so much as a solution to climate change, but in fact as a mechanism to redistribute global wealth. And they don’t like the fact that this did not do that. It didn’t do that, and they objected to that fact. Well, surprise, surprise, surprise, the rest of the world doesn’t want to do it that way. But they couldn’t get an agreement, because this group, this narrow group, was blocking it.” Pershing says future talks should center around the world’s largest polluters instead of trying to go through the UN process. He said, “It is…impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail.”
http://www.democracynow.org/2010/1/14/headlines
2. The Peoples Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights will take place 19-22 April 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia (For more information http://cmpcc.org/)
Republished from The Peoples Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights website
Bolivia to send medicine, blood, food to Haiti
LA PAZ, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Bolivian government will send 11 tons of medicine, blood and food, as well as 20 doctors specialized in natural disaster to quake-hit Haiti, Bolivian Health Minister Ramiro Tapia said on Friday.
Tapia said that to the moment Bolivia has collected more than 500 units of blood to be sent to Haiti, a country that was devastated on Tuesday by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
Tapia said that the blood collection work will be done by Saturday, and it is expected to collect some 800 units of blood.
"Everybody has been affected by the tragic situation that Haitian people are living and we cannot be indifferent," Tapia said.
The Bolivian Health Ministry began a blood donation campaign on Thursday.
"We are coordinating for our aid to be effective, but we have extra will and solidarity and we will be immediately collaborating with our brothers of Haiti," Tapia added.
The humanitarian aids to be sent to Haiti include five tons of medicine, five tons of food and 1 ton of blood plasma as well as the equipments to preserve blood in good condition.
The Haitian authorities estimate that there are at least 100,000 deaths and 3 million victims caused by the devastating earthquake.
Bolivia to send medicine, blood, food to Haiti
LA PAZ, Jan. 15 (Xinhua) -- The Bolivian government will send 11 tons of medicine, blood and food, as well as 20 doctors specialized in natural disaster to quake-hit Haiti, Bolivian Health Minister Ramiro Tapia said on Friday.
Tapia said that to the moment Bolivia has collected more than 500 units of blood to be sent to Haiti, a country that was devastated on Tuesday by a 7.0-magnitude earthquake.
Tapia said that the blood collection work will be done by Saturday, and it is expected to collect some 800 units of blood.
"Everybody has been affected by the tragic situation that Haitian people are living and we cannot be indifferent," Tapia said.
The Bolivian Health Ministry began a blood donation campaign on Thursday.
"We are coordinating for our aid to be effective, but we have extra will and solidarity and we will be immediately collaborating with our brothers of Haiti," Tapia added.
The humanitarian aids to be sent to Haiti include five tons of medicine, five tons of food and 1 ton of blood plasma as well as the equipments to preserve blood in good condition.
The Haitian authorities estimate that there are at least 100,000 deaths and 3 million victims caused by the devastating earthquake.
The Multinational State and the People, an Unprecedented Construction in Bolivia
Ximena Soruco Sologuren
Translated by Marcelo Virkel
Republished from Upside Down World
In January 2009 Bolivians adopted a New State Political Constitution, in which converged many histories and memories that coexisted during different cycles: the crisis of political parties, representative democracy and the neoconservative economic model caused pleas for the nationalization of resources and social control that echoed the 1952 Revolution -when miners, peasants and the middle class mobilized against the anti-nation (the conservative miner State). But also the memory of the anti-colonial struggles that transcended and confronted the Bolivian nation-state emerged with an unprecedented force: Tomás Katari, Tupac Katari (1781), Zárate Willka (1899), Guarayan leader Andrés Guayocho (1887), the battle of Kuruyuki de los guaraníes (1892), the movement of the empowered leaders (1900-1930), the Indigenismo and Katarismo (1970s), the demand for land and territory by lowlands indigenous people (1990s), etcetera.
Evo Morales embodies the intersection of the national-popular scope that emerged from within the nation-state during the Chaco War (1932-1936) and condensed during the 1952 Revolution, and the anti-colonial scope, whose resistance began during the conquest's early years and had its highest point in 1781, with incidents that were profound -because they emerged from outside of the nation-state-, but have not been so geographically widespread during the two hundred years of republican history, until now.
Is this an unprecedented intersection, in the sense that both scopes have been running in a parallel way without touching? If so, what is this intersection in reality and what are the alternatives of political construction open to us nowadays? The uprisings we mention have never been “pure” since they took place within the colonial context to which the national context latter superimposed, a fact that continued and intensified old contradictions in new ways; but certainly there was more symbolic weight in one scope or the other depending on who was leading the uprisings and forming the alliances, and if they were indigenous or mestizo. However, both scopes had to face the “colonial-national situation” that had created the clutter, that is, individuals experiencing different (ethnic, class, gender) dominance conditions within the system, and whose relationship with one another was one of a chained (self)denial (everyone on top of and against each other).
Thus, the expressions of anti-colonial resistance opted for subordinated alliance strategies with mestizo groups, villagers, artisans, miners, workers, and intellectuals. These alliances could dissolve due to their internal contradictions, until reaching a state of total confrontation. Similarly, national movements needed to address and organize the indigenous people as subordinates in order to achieve the proposed changes. Although these mestizo alliances in the national-popular scope had better success because they built new political systems, they ended up reproducing the modern nation-state that continued the colonial and capitalist dominance: the Republic's Independence, the Conservative State of 1899, the Nationalist State of 1952, and the Neoconservative State of 1985.
What are the possibilities of building something unprecedented, that is, to break the routine of the historical determinations and the gradual racial dominance that appears with unequal insertions under capitalism and modernity? What kind of organization among the groups that make up the motley of Bolivia will allow the achievement of hegemony without domination, but with enough strength to build a new political system? The challenge of this historical period seems to be the transformation of the clutter or the national-colonial situation into a complex organization without domination, an intersection between the indigenous and national-popular scopes strong enough to build something unprecedented. Neither decolonization understood only as “restitution” of the indigenous cultural identities nor realization of the modernity's unfulfilled promises. But what then?
The new Bolivian constitution raises this project -that still requires a political theory, an institutional engineering, and most importantly, the formation of new political subjetivities- of a multinational state. The preamble of the constitution recognizes these memories of resistance in order to build a new state: “The Bolivian people, of plural composition since the depth of history, inspired by past struggles; anti-colonial indigenous rebellion; independence; popular liberation struggles; indigenous, social and trade union marches; water and October wars; struggles for land and territory; with the memory of our martyrs, we build a new State.”
The alluded depth of history refers to the sources of resistance we had pointed out, both popular and indigenous; that is, it lies as a vertical rupture that crosses the layers of dominance: those of the colonial times that also burst into national cycles, and those of the national times that responded to the continual metamorphosis of dominance, but at the same time built new and shared senses of resistance.
But if the memory of the popular and indigenous past reactivates in the present as a power capable of paralysing the established order as it was by 2003 and building a new state as proposed in the constitution, an exercise of creation of alternatives appears. We think of this exercise as a relationship between people, state and pluralism that uses the nation-state as the general framework although reconfigured, because it considers the heterogeneity from an indigenous social and symbolic organization, that is, from a scope that is not modern.
The separation of scopes
The separation between what Zavaleta Mercado called “national-popular” and the anti-colonial rebellions occurred between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but as a posteriori interpretation, that is, an interpretation made by the republican historiography that defined -under the frameworks of meaning at the time- which were and which were not pro-independence movements. The recognition of the struggles for independence in 1809 in what is now Bolivia, but which took place across the continent, separates from the anti-colonial indigenous tradition due to the concept of emancipation that it proposed. While Tupac Amaru and Tupak Katari were thinking about returning to a time prior to the Spanish colony, the pro-independence figures chose the project of the American Independence and the French Revolution: the establishment of a modern nation-state.
However, this separation is to be reviewed in our historiography -even the critical branch- because, for instance, Tupak Katari's rebellion cannot be considered only an attempt to return to a time before the Spaniards; it should be seen as the search to continue the civilizing development stopped by the conquest. But this continuity meant a rupture -even of the prehispanic tradition-, a democratization of the indigenous communities that broke not only the Spanish dominance but also the precolonial system of hereditary chiefs that had been included into the Spanish state machinery. It was not an archaic response, but something novel for the time. During this rebellion cycle in Upper Peru it was proposed that everybody “can rule through the king” and -probably for the first time- a rotation system to democratize the political power within the communities was installed -even before the French Revolution and without having had any contact with the independence ideas in the United States, since Tupak Katari did not speak or read Spanish, and therefore he could not have been familiar with such texts.
The profound questioning of this indigenous rebellion against the colonial and precolonial political systems, and its network of relations with the mestizo population was denied by the Creoles, who assumed (following the death and exclusion of popular pro-independence sectors) the leadership of the republic. Since then, the official perspective considered the cycle of indigenous rebellions as a “war of races” and not as a precedent for independence that aimed to achieve freedom from the colony, although with a scope that was different from the modern nation-state.
Following this early exclusion of the indigenous people, and until the second half of the twentieth century, a political system of citizenship for a Creole, literate, male and proprietor minority was built. This state lived off the tax imposed on indigenous people, enabled the usurpation of communal lands (which had even survived the Spanish colonial state) and, since the heyday of tin mining, joined the international market and system under construction through the exploitation of raw material and the disciplining of the workforce.
The 1952 Revolution, as a second national constituent moment, emerged under this context of dominance. The miners, sons of the tin capitalist enclave, managed to organize the indigenous people that had been mobilized to recover their land, and the middle class and urban workers who had been excluded from citizenship and the wealth they produced. The nationalization of mines, the declaration of universal citizenship, the destruction of ranches and the agrarian reform, and universal education had been achieved by the popular and indigenous movement, although it did not have its own political project. The revolution was offered to the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), a political party that built a state capitalism, an agroindustrial bourgeoisie in the East, and an homogeneous nation through the mixing of races.
The colonial rule (denial of the indigenous people) and the capitalist domination (formal subsuming of labour and disruption of “precapitalist” economies) were reproduced in new ways. The indigenous community ended up being conceived as fragmented peasants with individual land deeds, hereditary fragmentation and consequent migration toward the cities; its new political form, the trade union, was corrupted by the military-peasantry pact. This political form legitimized dictatorial governments, the repression of miners and their insertion in the nation as mestizos, that is, the insertion required the denial of their origins and ways of life. The continuity of the state capitalism was only possible under military dictatorships that victimized the miner movement, privatized the land in the east of the country and, since 1985, dismantled the state enterprises. State capitalism, through dictatorship, ended in neoconservatism.
This history of social mobilizations that end up being functional to the dominance was repeated in this neoconservative cycle. The miner actor from the national-popular line had disappeared after the closure of the mines and the anti-colonial indigenous line was initially co-opted by the multicultural discourse. The privatization of state enterprises and of the Bolivian economy sought legitimization through multicultural social reforms, although these were subordinated to the transnational capital.
The end of the story in this country appeared as the abstract inclusion of the citizenship in diversity, individual and collective rights, standardized education -although bilingual. It was the image of a minimal state and of a nation as an amorphous mass of individuals organized by the markets, with the promised recognition of their economic, social, cultural and ethnic capitals as means of social advancement. In reality, producers and consumers numbered the fewest; the rest -in cities and in the countryside- were the indigenous people, and the poor and informal mestizos who could be disposed by the system.
The political crisis (that began in 2000 with the protest against the privatization of water, continued with the indigenous mobilizations against the excluding multiculturalism and the affirmation of both sides of Bolivia, and brought together all the indigenous and popular sectors behind the demand of gas nationalization), was the result of old and new unresolved contradictions. With different characteristics, the indigenous movement addressed and organized the popular sectors and faced its own political project: the construction of a multinational state.
How could the indigenous movement amalgamate other actors under a common project that was strong enough to topple the former order, overcome the opposition that was determined to end up in civil war and separatism, and adopt a new constitution? The long and painful path to the Constituent Assembly and the approval of the text demonstrate that, for the first time in republican history, the indigenous actor was able to organize the national-popular line with its scope of self-government in the construction of a new state. This unprecedented capacity of indigenous representation of the Bolivian nation (within the framework of a modern nation-state) had two conditions: the depletion of national representation, achieved by the decompopsition of the traditional national actors -mestizos and Creoles- and the rise of a new social relation within the clutter, viewed from the indigenous perspective. Let's see.
The depletion of national representation
The transformations in the political system that took place during the republican life were achieved through either popular or indigenous massive mobilizations; however, they always ended trapped in the reproduction of the colonial and capitalist contradictions. It seemed that while the questionings to the political system were made within the nation-state, the Creole mestizo leadership, that represented this political form since independence, was able to reposition in power. That is, despite the questioning of the elite actors (organized in conservative or protectionist versions, in regions as Chuquisaca and then La Paz, in different political parties), a new Creole-mestizo actor was able to channel the mobilizations and to achieve the representation of a national project.
Zavaleta Mercado uses the term “majestic paradox” to describe this “unprecedented ratification capacity of the ruling class across different state phases, immense social changes and even several modes of production. Thus, the same way a national revolution is similar to a bourgeois revolution made against the bourgeoisie, its own development places the factors at the service of the oligarchical-majestic reposition. The majestic charge is a true constant in the development of the history of Bolivia.”
However, something that could not have been foreseen until 2000, but had been born in the 1952 Revolution was the fact that this oligarchical-majestic reposition stopped being national-wide. When the MNR, and then Banzer's dictatorship gambled on the construction of a national agroindustrial bourgeoisie in the Bolivian East and a unifying miscegenation they did not imagine that this bourgeoisie would end up denationalized, unable to build a national project; in other words, there is a majestic recreation through regional, but not national miscegenation (cruceñidad -from Santa Cruz). That is why, although the political opposition to Evo Morales initially tried to organize several regions by demanding autonomy (the Media Luna -half moon-), it became a separatist project, a project to constitute a new nation-state.
This decomposition of the traditional national actor, and its inability to represent -not even in an apparent manner- a new national project, configures an unprecedented call to the indigenous actor to take charge of the nation. Based on the analysis we conducted, this call is the possibility of organizing actors under the national-popular scope (miners, workers, intellectuals, middle classes, teachers, regional identities) in a common project. This is the context of the rise of the multinational state.
Two important lessons of the history of social movements in the twentieth century are that there are no social laws or inevitable processes, that is, no changing process is guarantied; and secondly, that there is not only one actor -one collective actor is not enough to make transformations, especially in cluttered contexts as the Bolivian one where several ways of world organization, modes of production, constitution of subjetivities, political forms and heterogeneous (or not completely subsumed to capital) social densities coexist in contradiction. Thus, the multinational state is an attempt to build a political system that is able to coordinate these modes of world organization, these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures, beyond the capitalist colonialism. But this attempt, captured in the new state political constitution, is a starting point -not an ending point- that needs enough strength to become hegemonic, in the common sense of the majority, to be able to build a political institutionalization and to preserve in time (education). This strength is only possible if the indigenous actor does not think of itself as the only actor; in other words, if instead of becoming self-referential it is able to congregate other actors, worldviews, exclusions and needs, and so on, around the multinational state project.
Now the problem is that the organization of several actors in Bolivian history has taken place in moments of resistance -when the established order loses its legitimacy and becomes violent in its response to criticism- but gets weak and fragments once it has managed to construct a new political system. This happens also due to the fact that the moments of massive mobilization cannot be permanent because actors organized and mobilized around unifying questionings (nationalization of resources, land recovery) return to their private spheres, to their daily survival and specific demands. This demobilization allowed the majestic recreation in previous political cycles. So, what kind of aggregation would allow a more stable organization among several actors that could be maintained? We think that one possibility would be the coordination that has been done between the new multinational state and the autonomies as local communal and civic governments (in the regions). This constant organization, which does not consider the state as the synthesis of society, could be the contribution from the self-government indigenous scope.
However, before considering how we understand this scope, it is necessary to take up the lesson about the non-inevitability of history once more; not only because of the capability of reproduction that the dominance has, but also because it is possible to construct alternatives. I appeal to this lesson to avoid any static or dogmatic interpretation of the nation-state as a modern political form, dominant on its own right.
The modern nation-state -that had been born also from social revolutions against the Western feudal dominance, and from anti-colonial revolutions in the “Third World”- became the central political device to constitute the industrial capitalism world system, but today the nation-state (that sometimes even blocks globalization) is no longer needed by globalized financial capital. The global and local orders show this metamorphosis of capital, which tends to constitute strong political blocs and small political units that are defenceless against capital circulation.
This means that it is necessary to rethink the nation-state against capitalism and colonialism in the global context. Not doing so could result in a dangerous extrapolation (the mechanic application of the functionality of the nation-state for industrial capitalism to financial capitalism) that can be used by the right in Bolivia and Latin America. But we also believe that a way to rethink the nation-state is by overcoming the ethnocentrism that built it from a single and universal (bourgeois, proletarian, western) actor, and that projected the total homogenization of society by capital, and a single cultural and civilizing pattern.Translated by Marcelo Virkel
Republished from Upside Down World
Bolivia launches traditional medicines programs
Rick Kearns, Jan 14
LA PAZ, Bolivia – The Bolivian government is promoting traditional indigenous medicine by sponsoring two intercultural pharmacies and by pledging $10 million towards the development of a larger “pharmaceutical enterprise” according to press statements.
Bolivia’s Health Minister Ramiro Tapia announced Dec. 29 the opening of the two pharmacies that will offer “ancestral medicine” prescribed by traditional healers known as kallawayas as well as modern Western drugs ordered by contemporary physicians.
The conference began with a blessing ceremony where kallawayas “prayed for good results to Pachamama (mother earth)” and burned sweet herbs, coca leaves and other items of significance in Andean indigenous cultures.
“The initial launch will take place in La Paz,” said Amilcar Rada, medications director for the Ministry of Health, “but the two first Inter-institutional Intercultural Municipal Pharmacies will operate in the Andean towns of Patacamaya and Orinoca [which is the hometown of President Evo Morales].”
Rada explained that the intercultural pharmacies will offer remedies developed by modern laboratories that are registered with the Health Ministry, and that in the connected health centers there will be modern doctors and kallawayas that will be available for consultation. He noted that the Health Ministry has already registered traditional medicines such as coca leaf syrup, maca (an Andean tuber) powder used as a stimulant, valerian root oil, which is a sedative or calmative used for anxiety, and torunco ointment that is used for treating rheumatism.
Rada also noted that the Ministry is in the process of registering other traditional medicines “by regions and type of products for each illness and in accordance with the peoples’ needs.”
In the week following the press conference about the pharmacies, the Health Ministry also announced that the Bolivian government would invest $10 million into a pharmaceutical enterprise involving the traditional remedies.
The Health Minister, on behalf of the government, signed an agreement with a group of kallawayas and a representative of the Major University of San Andres that will allow researchers to investigate and then formally register natural medicines that are being used in Bolivia already but without any official monitoring or control.
Tapia said the agreement was put together for the purpose of reasserting the value of traditional medicines “as was ordered by the new Constitution.”
He also stated that national surveys indicated that 60 percent of Bolivians turn to natural prescriptions before going to a modern physician.
“What we will be doing is to guarantee access to formally registered medications, that are scientifically proven and lawfully dispensed,” said Igor Pardo, a director at the Health Ministry.
“On top of that the state will recover the initiative in a time when many are complaining that some of these same natural elements are being patented by foreign entities.”
Towards that end, the university’s faculty of pharmaceutical science and biochemistry will develop a germplasm – defined as “the hereditary material of germ cells” – bank and a herbarium where scientists would collect and study a variety of plant specimens to be potentially used by the intercultural medications industry.
Pardo also noted that upon winning the election in 2006, Morales has directed the Health Ministry to develop programs connecting Western medicine with indigenous practices. Since the onset of this policy, modern doctors in Bolivia have often turned to kallawayas to accompany them on journeys to remote Andean regions to assist in delivering babies; and it is in those areas that people traditionally have more trust in natural healers.
That same mandate led Morales to institute a Vice Ministry of Traditional and Intercultural Medicine that was charged with “promoting, protecting and looking after the preservation and strengthening of traditional medicines, in accordance with the knowledge and wisdom of the indigenous cultures,” according to Bolivia’s Health Ministry Web site.
The official site also lists policy objectives such as “strengthening traditional medicine through investigations into the factors involved with treatment of illnesses from the perspective of rural peoples, and to protect traditional medical knowledge through legislation that would recognize intellectual property rights of those healers.”
LA PAZ, Bolivia – The Bolivian government is promoting traditional indigenous medicine by sponsoring two intercultural pharmacies and by pledging $10 million towards the development of a larger “pharmaceutical enterprise” according to press statements.
Bolivia’s Health Minister Ramiro Tapia announced Dec. 29 the opening of the two pharmacies that will offer “ancestral medicine” prescribed by traditional healers known as kallawayas as well as modern Western drugs ordered by contemporary physicians.
The conference began with a blessing ceremony where kallawayas “prayed for good results to Pachamama (mother earth)” and burned sweet herbs, coca leaves and other items of significance in Andean indigenous cultures.
“The initial launch will take place in La Paz,” said Amilcar Rada, medications director for the Ministry of Health, “but the two first Inter-institutional Intercultural Municipal Pharmacies will operate in the Andean towns of Patacamaya and Orinoca [which is the hometown of President Evo Morales].”
Rada explained that the intercultural pharmacies will offer remedies developed by modern laboratories that are registered with the Health Ministry, and that in the connected health centers there will be modern doctors and kallawayas that will be available for consultation. He noted that the Health Ministry has already registered traditional medicines such as coca leaf syrup, maca (an Andean tuber) powder used as a stimulant, valerian root oil, which is a sedative or calmative used for anxiety, and torunco ointment that is used for treating rheumatism.
Rada also noted that the Ministry is in the process of registering other traditional medicines “by regions and type of products for each illness and in accordance with the peoples’ needs.”
In the week following the press conference about the pharmacies, the Health Ministry also announced that the Bolivian government would invest $10 million into a pharmaceutical enterprise involving the traditional remedies.
The Health Minister, on behalf of the government, signed an agreement with a group of kallawayas and a representative of the Major University of San Andres that will allow researchers to investigate and then formally register natural medicines that are being used in Bolivia already but without any official monitoring or control.
Tapia said the agreement was put together for the purpose of reasserting the value of traditional medicines “as was ordered by the new Constitution.”
He also stated that national surveys indicated that 60 percent of Bolivians turn to natural prescriptions before going to a modern physician.
“What we will be doing is to guarantee access to formally registered medications, that are scientifically proven and lawfully dispensed,” said Igor Pardo, a director at the Health Ministry.
“On top of that the state will recover the initiative in a time when many are complaining that some of these same natural elements are being patented by foreign entities.”
Towards that end, the university’s faculty of pharmaceutical science and biochemistry will develop a germplasm – defined as “the hereditary material of germ cells” – bank and a herbarium where scientists would collect and study a variety of plant specimens to be potentially used by the intercultural medications industry.
Pardo also noted that upon winning the election in 2006, Morales has directed the Health Ministry to develop programs connecting Western medicine with indigenous practices. Since the onset of this policy, modern doctors in Bolivia have often turned to kallawayas to accompany them on journeys to remote Andean regions to assist in delivering babies; and it is in those areas that people traditionally have more trust in natural healers.
That same mandate led Morales to institute a Vice Ministry of Traditional and Intercultural Medicine that was charged with “promoting, protecting and looking after the preservation and strengthening of traditional medicines, in accordance with the knowledge and wisdom of the indigenous cultures,” according to Bolivia’s Health Ministry Web site.
The official site also lists policy objectives such as “strengthening traditional medicine through investigations into the factors involved with treatment of illnesses from the perspective of rural peoples, and to protect traditional medical knowledge through legislation that would recognize intellectual property rights of those healers.”
High in the Andes
James McEnteer
After thirty years of the “war on drugs,” more people are in jail, and more drugs are available than ever before. It's a “phony war,” as Evo Morales has said, a cover for the United States to project a militaristic presence into foreign countries, and for authorities in countries like Bolivia to control their own people. In the sense that “illicit drugs” are a bogeyman, Agentes y Activos fits the horror genre, all the more frightening because the monster's many victims are real.
Taking a show about the war on drugs to Bolivia seemed like risky business but was far more sensible than recent U.S.-Bolivian diplomacy.
John Malpede has never worried much about transgressing the line between brave and crazy. Otherwise, he would not have started a theater company in Skid Row Los Angeles in the mid-1980s, when few services existed there, and most people, including his own theater members, predicted the idea would never fly. Nor would he have thought it a cool idea to join members of his L.A. troupe with Bolivian actors this August to tour Bolivia—where coca is a major cash crop—with a play about the War on Drugs. That notion seems an especially quixotic idea at this moment, as relations between the United States and Bolivia have reached a nasty pass, largely because of drug issues.
Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, also heads the Federation of Coca Growers. Morales often pleads the case for coca—as he did at the United Nations—as a plant of traditional importance in Bolivian culture that has been unjustly vilified. He and other Bolivians like to stress the difference between coca and the drug cocaine, first synthesized from coca by a nineteenth-century European chemist. Bolivians compare themselves to the French who grow grapes: they can’t really be blamed for the alcoholics who abuse wine.
The Bush administration faulted Morales for failing to curb coca production or deter the manufacture of cocaine. Morales accused the United States of meddling in Bolivian affairs and plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government. The countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. Citing lack of drug enforcement cooperation, the United States ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees, including the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the Peace Corps.
Some Bolivian and U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But Morales has accused the United States of complicity in the recent Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.
So John Malpede wondered if touring a play about the Drug War along the front lines of that war might stimulate more constructive dialogue about drugs and drug policies than the two governments have thus far managed. Would Americans who had been affected by drugs and anti-drug sanctions find common ground with Bolivians who live where coca has long grown, but where cocaine use is also a growing problem? As the foreign actors would find out, the war on drugs has claimed many victims in Bolivia as well.
Members of the Malpede’s Skid Row theater troupe, the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD), landed in mid-July at El Alto airport, one of the world’s highest, at 13,000 feet, near Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. Coming from sea level in Los Angeles, Tony Parker felt dizzy and short of breath. After quaffing some coca tea, the local remedy for altitude sickness, Tony was soon all right again.
But LAPD member Kevin Michael Key, a recovering cocaine addict, refused the tea, though his doctor had assured him that coca does not possess the addictive properties of the drug made from it. Kevin ordered up some oxygen instead, which the airport keeps stocked for afflicted visitors.
Malpede and his wife, Henriette Brouwers, had less trouble adjusting to the thin altiplano atmosphere above La Paz. They had just arrived from Huancayo, Peru, visiting the family of Nilo Berrocal. Nilo grew up in Peru, but emigrated to Holland, where he has lived and worked for more than twenty years, as a theater director in Utrecht. Part of Nilo’s task was to bring other cast members up to speed in the language, since the drug war play—Agents & Assets—was being staged for the first time ever in Spanish.
John Malpede started the LAPD (whose initials mock the police force that harassed many of their members) in 1985. A rising theater performer of national reputation, Malpede took a detour from his personal career to share his theatrical knowledge with the homeless and formerly homeless denizens of Skid Row, the poorest section of Los Angeles. Branded as losers and welfare cheats by the Reagan administration, residents of Skid Row had no voice in their own destinies.
Malpede empowered some of them with theatrical skills, enabling them to communicate their dilemmas publicly and powerfully. Over decades, the group has become increasingly articulate and sophisticated, gathering information from other poor communities in the United States and beyond, making connections among poverty, globalization, and militarization. LAPD members know how the drug war profits a few and victimizes many.
Malpede wrote the playscript, Agents & Assets, based on a 1998 U.S. Congressional hearing. The House Intelligence Committee was looking into allegations of CIA complicity in the smuggling and dealing of crack cocaine in the United States by agents of the anti-government forces in Nicaragua, known as the Contras. Backed by the Reagan administration, the Contras fought against the democratically elected, leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan called the Contras “freedom fighters,” but Congress denied them U.S. funding.
So the Contras turned to drug smuggling to fund their anti-Sandinista military actions, with the acquiescence of the CIA and White House shadow operative Oliver North, who permitted and abetted the Contra drug operation. As journalist Gary Webb detailed in an explosive 1996 newspaper series, “Dark Alliance,” (which, in 1999, became a book) the CIA enabled huge shipments of cocaine to enter the United States to raise money for the Contras.
Malpede told a Bolivian audience after one performance: “We work in the poorest part of Los Angeles, where people come when they have no place else to go and end up living in the streets. LAPD lives and works in an area affected by drugs. It was the anger of Los Angeles citizens—that the CIA might have been involved in smuggling crack cocaine into the country—that sparked these legislative hearings. These hearings are also a metaphor for all things the U.S. government does all around the world that they shouldn’t, instead of taking care of their own people.”
As the play shows, in 1998 CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz denied and obfuscated the CIA’s connection to Contra drug smuggling. And, in 2009, as the play toured Bolivia, the Agency finally released a highly redacted 2004 CIA Inspector General’s report about CIA torture techniques. Ironically, some of the same players were involved in both real life and dramatized episodes. Porter Goss, for instance, chairman of the hearing depicted by the LAPD, played down the allegations of CIA-Contra malfeasance. Later Goss, as CIA director under George W. Bush, lobbied for keeping the 2004 torture report secret, to avoid damaging U.S. reputation and CIA morale.
The dramatized 1998 Congressional hearing reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they, in attempts to abet an illegal war, refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts. Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. LAPD actors and others, who play committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction and/or incarceration. By speaking the very words of deceitful lawmakers who permit this systemic abuse, the actors bear witness against them.
Agents & Assets began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. The “second act” of the show is a discussion, led by a moderator and a couple of speakers, who relate current and/or local issues to the themes of the play. So each performance is a unique event. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the show revealed its political potency. Agents & Assets also proved relevant in Utrecht, a Dutch city that suffers its own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws. For its South American premiere, the Spanish-language version of the play was titled Agentes y Activos.
Malpede and Brouwers found congenial Bolivian artistic partners in Wiler Vidaurre and his wife, Zulma, who are professional actors onstage and in films. They run a school of “Artes y Talentos” in Cochabamba. The couple came to Malpede’s attention because of an innovative theater program they have run in local prisons for the past eight years. Many of their prisoner-performers, incarcerated under the local anti-drug law 1008, have “graduated” to parole or to full liberty outside their jails, thanks in part to the rehabilitative aspects of their theater experiences.
It was important to John Malpede and Wiler Vidaurre to feature Bolivians—who, like their fellow players from Los Angeles, have felt the impact of their country’s drug policies—playing bureaucrats. Wiler had a couple of actors in mind for parts in the play, but one of them was still on restricted parole, only being allowed out of prison during the day to work, and having to return to his cell each night. Wiler appealed to a judge he knew from this prison work to let this actor rehearse in the evenings and travel when the group took the show on the road.
The judge, Yolanda Ramirez, who is responsible for supervising about 2,000 prisoners in various stages of incarceration or parole, decided to see the group for herself. She came to the first rehearsal, met the visiting gringo artists, and talked with them about the play. Yolanda told them she had some theatrical training herself, and asked if she too might join the cast. When she read the part of one of the more indignant members of the Congressional Committee—Juanita Millinder-McDonald of California—she found a sympathetic point of view. So Agentes y Activos featured a convicted felon in its cast, as well as a judge who sentenced and supervised convicted felons. In the many incarnations of the show, this was a first.
The linguistic obstacles to this project were almost as formidable as the political ones. Several of the foreigners barely spoke Spanish, and had to learn their parts phonetically. And so, every morning, Nilo tutored the foreign actors in Spanish. Every night, the combined cast of foreigners and Bolivians rehearsed the play.
The language of the play was also tricky to decode. Legislators tend to converse in a demagogic doublespeak, which audiences must first comprehend in order to see through and discount. The point is to grasp the evasions and outright lies beneath the polite, empty rhetoric and parliamentary niceties, which morph, as the hearing progresses, into grotesque absurdities that would be comic but for their real-world consequences. The devil is in the details of this discourse, full of sound and fury, signifying, sometimes much less; sometimes even the opposite, of what is actually said.
Layers of meaning in the play might have disappeared or become muddled in translation. Fortunately, Bolivian culture, despite its low literacy rate, is exceptionally eloquent. Ordinary Bolivians, despite a lack of education, are often articulate public speakers. Americans tend to hem and haw in public; Bolivians can speak cogently at length, because they have learned to enunciate their needs clearly out loud, in order to reach a community consensus. As a society of practiced public speakers, Bolivians are able to spot the hypocrisy beneath the bombast of public rhetoric.
Agentes y Activos had its first public performance in the maximum-security “El Abra” prison near Cochabamba. Set in dry desert mountains, the prison is bound by brick walls topped with barbed wire and guard towers. On this bright, hot, sunny, early August day, the brown, ragged peaks pushed against the flawless blue sky. Tony Parker, who has performed in various productions of Agents & Assets over the years in many cities, pronounced this setting “the strangest place of all.”
The performance space was the brick-and-glass pentagonal Roman Catholic chapel. Large religious paintings festoon the chapel walls, between large windows. Behind the altar is a huge, floor-to-ceiling triptych of Christ, risen and joyous and nearly naked, below God the Father, with arms outstretched and flanked by adoring angels. The long, cloth-covered hearing table with pitchers and water glasses, name plates and eleven chairs, backed by a dozen American flags, set before the garish altar, resembled its own sort of Last Supper. Hundreds of men filled up the four-tiered bleachers to see the show, and at least a dozen kids, whose shrieks and eruptions punctuated the cavernous acoustics.
When Wiler, as the CIA inspector general, told the Committee that he had found no Contra-drug connections, some members of Congress snorted in disbelief, causing the attentive captive audience to “shush” the actors! After the performance, Kevin Michael Key told the inmates: “I used drugs for forty years, and sold them. I’ve also been a criminal defense attorney. I’ve been free of drugs and alcohol since 2002, for seven years. This penitentiary looks like the place I did time in [Tehachapi, California]. Since the war on drugs began, the prison population of the United States has increased dramatically, especially among minorities.”
Someone asked him whether there was any difference between the people in prison in Bolivia and the United States. Kevin said, “They’re the same, mostly poor, working-class folks.” Someone else asked, “If the United States wants to eradicate illegal drugs, but most illegal drug users are there, what are they really doing?” That question hung in the air and still does.
After rehearsals and performances in Cochabamba, the show played the Bolivian cities of Oruro, La Paz, El Alto, Sucre, and Santa Cruz. Questions and comments in every city reflected the intense emotions that the issues of the play raise about the drug war, notions of justice, and international relations.
Bolivian historian, activist, and ex-government official Rafael Puente told audiences in Cochabamba that events in the play might seem remote, but similar things were happening here in Bolivia at the same time. In 1980, the CIA enabled the violent “narco golpe de estado” (drug coup) of General Luis Garcia Meza. As Puente noted, former DEA agent Michael Levine recounted these events in his book, The Big White Lie.
In 1980, ex-Gestapo honcho Klaus Barbie emerged from his Bolivian hiding place to oversee the arbitrary arrests, torture, and disappearances of the narco dictator García Meza’s political opponents. Cocaine exports reportedly totaled US$850 million in the 1980-81 period of the Meza regime, twice the value of official government exports. Puente described the huge CIA cocaine processing plant at Huanchaka, in eastern Bolivia, where the drugs were produced to help finance this repressive regime.
The United States has always maintained a duplicitous drug policy. Officially, the United States expresses moral outrage about the manufacture and importation of illicit substances. For thirty years, the “war on drugs” has consumed enormous human and financial resources. Unofficially, the CIA has an even longer history of dealing drugs to finance covert wars around the world that the United States prefers not to acknowledge. (See The Politics of Heroin by frequent Agents & Assets panelist Alfred W. McCoy [Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991].) Most Americans seem unaware of this dark history. But, as one Bolivian audience member put it, “Everybody knows the CIA is the biggest drug trafficker in the world.”
Kevin Michael Key told a Santa Cruz audience, “It’s in the interest of the governments to continue narco-traffic as a means of controlling the people. Criminalization is the American way. Though rehabilitation exists, many drug users are simply locked up in jail. The demand for rehabilitation has to come from the people.”
A Bolivian man asked whether things will change under Obama. John Malpede opined that “Changing drug policy is not a high priority for Obama. Changes in drug policy have to come from communities or states in defiance of federal law, to reduce penalties and put treatment in place of jail time.” Malpede’s tag line for the show, that “The war on drugs imposes a military solution on a social and public health issue,” was widely printed in the Bolivian press.
Bolivians have their own repressive drug war in place, thanks in large part to Law 1008, passed in 1988 under intense pressure from the United States. Anyone accused of drug violations, under what one former law school dean calls “this inhumane law,” loses basic human rights, such as the presumption of innocence, the safeguards against self-incrimination, the right to a defense, or to an impartial judge, or to due process, or to a speedy trial. Law 1008 expands the definition of “trafficking” to mean “to produce, possess, keep, store, transport, deliver, administer or give as a gift.” Judges routinely hand out harsh sentences—since an accusation is tantamount to a judgment of guilt—and they fear public outrage for giving lesser punishments.
Law 1008 rewards denuncias or snitches. These snitches often turn people in for the reward money, or for grudges unrelated to drugs. Police routinely resort to torture to extricate confessions from the accused. Such forced confessions are all that is needed for proof of guilt in Bolivian judicial proceedings. In its book, The Weight of Law 1008 (1996), the Andean Information Network compiled heartbreaking narratives of poor, illiterate Bolivians hounded into prison because they could not pay the bribes that were demanded by officials to make their cases disappear. Several of these drug war victims report being tortured under the direction of U.S. DEA agents.
During the post-show panel at one of the Oruro performances, two drug officials parried questions from the audience about Bolivia’s war on drugs. Alex Alfaro, Departmental Director of the Special Police Force to Fight Drug Trafficking, said drug production was rising in Oruro. His forces have found seventeen cocaine labs in the past year. As of September 2009, the police have confiscated more than a ton of cocaine, as much as in all of 2008.
Alfaro said a kilo of marijuana costs one hundred dollars (U.S.) and a kilo of cocaine, $1,200. He handed out anti-drug pamphlets, warning of dire, organic consequences from using marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol, and inhalants. Members of the audience, unaccustomed to seeing these usually invisible officials, began to ask penetrating questions.
What did Alfaro, or Franz Villegas, the public prosecutor appearing with him, think of Law 1008? Villegas fudged his opinion, merely describing it as a drug law. Kevin Michael Key asked if the men thought the CIA was really involved in drug trafficking in the 1980s, as the play alleged. They did not know. Was it good or bad for Bolivia that the Morales government had expelled the DEA? Alfaro said it was a national government decision, not his. He said he had worked with the DEA and “they supported us. Now the national government helps us fight drugs.”
A Bolivian woman said: “You are preoccupied with drug consumption and apprehension. Is there any attention being paid to the health aspects of this problem?” The two officials made no attempt to respond. Someone else asked, “Is drug enforcement a form of social control?” The public prosecutor answered, “Drug enforcement involves citizen participation. It’s everyone’s fight. Denuncias are an important part of the system.”
Someone else asked: “What about innocent people caught up and arrested under Law 1008? Like a taxi driver whose passenger might have drugs without the driver’s knowledge?” Most of the personal stories in The Weight of Law 1008 center on and decry false accusations. Villegas said: “We don’t accuse people just to accuse them. I don’t know of a single case where a taxi driver has been unfairly jailed.”
And so it went that night in Oruro, as the drug officials evaded questions and shaded their responses in ways that precisely mirrored the dynamics of Agentes y Activos, in which the CIA Inspector General dances around issues, answers questions he has not been asked, or flat-out lies about the CIA’s links to the Contra cocaine scandal. The show was not only relevant but was also being replayed immediately afterward in an updated, Bolivian mode, right out where everyone—except the officials themselves—could see it.
Agentes y Activos played theaters and schools, public plazas, and even a prison. The post-show conversations showed that the real struggle is not between Bolivia, where coca grows, and the United States, where cocaine is consumed. The greater problem lies within each country, between each government and its own people.
By declaring war on drugs, the United States and Bolivia have declared war on their own populations, but only against the small-time users and dealers, not the powerful few who profit most from the ongoing, proliferating traffic in illicit drugs. With the U.S. and Bolivian governments entrenched in socially self-defeating policies on drugs, John Malpede displayed courage and creativity in using theater as a way to initiate people-to-people conversations about the issue.After thirty years of the “war on drugs,” more people are in jail, and more drugs are available than ever before. It's a “phony war,” as Evo Morales has said, a cover for the United States to project a militaristic presence into foreign countries, and for authorities in countries like Bolivia to control their own people. In the sense that “illicit drugs” are a bogeyman, Agentes y Activos fits the horror genre, all the more frightening because the monster's many victims are real.
James McEnteer (jmcenteer@wesleyan.edu) is the author of Shooting the Truth: the Rise of American Political Documentaries (Praeger). His book about the LAPD, Acting Like It Matters, needs a caring publisher. He lives in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The Agentes y Activos tour was made possible in part by grants from The Performing Americas Program of The National Performance Network and the Cultural Exchange Initiative (CEI) of the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of Los Angeles
Republished from Monthly ReviewBOLIVIA: Evo Morales, the Best Ally of the Middle Class
Franz Chávez, La Paz, Jan 8 , 2010 (IPS) - Just five years ago, an alliance between an indigenous leader and Bolivia's small but influential middle class seemed virtually impossible.
But left-wing President Evo Morales was re-elected last month with an even more impressive landslide victory than his already unprecedented triumph in 2005, clearly reflecting growing support among the middle class.
In upper middle-class circles in Bolivia, it is fashionable to be vehemently anti-Morales. Nevertheless, the president took 64 percent of the vote in the Dec. 6 elections, compared to just under 54 percent in December 2005 - in a country where leaders are often elected with less than half that level of support.
Nearly three million of a total 4.85 million voters expressed their support at the ballot box for Morales, the leader of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, while 1.9 million distributed their votes among seven different opposition candidates.
In Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population of 9.7 million are Amerindians, the lighter-skinned middle class, made up of business families, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, have often played a key political role in the country's history.
That was the case, for example, during the so-called "gas war" of October 2003 - a month of protests against the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's (1993-1997 and 2002-2003) plans for foreign oil companies to export huge quantities of Bolivia's natural gas to the United States and Mexico.
It was not just the strikes and roadblocks by indigenous and labour groups in El Alto, a vast working-class suburb of La Paz, but the presence of middle-class demonstrators on the streets of upscale neighbourhoods in the capital as well, that finally toppled Sánchez de Lozada - but not until some 60 people had been killed when the army was called out to squelch the protests.
There are no statistics showing the proportion of families that would be considered middle class in Bolivia, but this segment of the population has had a heavy presence in and influence on both dictatorial and democratic governments throughout Bolivian history.
The same holds true today. While Morales' support base is made up of the urban working class and poor coca farmers and other peasants, his cabinet is comprised of a large portion of ministers from the middle class.
In his reelection campaign, the president - whose second term starts on Jan. 22 - focused this time around on wooing middle-class voters, by incorporating personalities like Ana María Romero on his party's list of candidates for Congress.
Romero, a former ombudsperson with a middle-class - as opposed to rural or labour - background, is first senator for La Paz and will possibly become Senate president.
In 2003, Romero headed peaceful demonstrations in residential neighbourhoods against the Sánchez de Lozada administration's bloody repression of protests.
Just three of Morales' 20 ministers are indigenous people: Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, Justice Minister Celima Torrico, and Minister of Rural Development and Land Julia Ramos, all of whom come from poor peasant families.
Trade unionists hold two positions in the cabinet: Public Works Minister Walter Delgadillo and Labour Minister Calixto Chipana.
The rest of the cabinet posts are held by professionals and technocrats.
Vice President Álvaro García Linera himself is a middle-class intellectual, and a firm believer that it was time for Bolivia to finally have an indigenous president.
Besides García Linera, MAS leaders include intellectuals with a background in the Communist Party, whose influence waned when it flirted with the insurgent movement led by legendary Cuban-Argentine guerrilla leader Ernesto Ché Guevara - before he was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967 - and after its brief interlude in government as part of the centre-left Popular and Democratic Unity (UDP) coalition, which governed from October 1982 to August 1985.
In last month's elections, the governing MAS won 114 of 166 seats in Congress - a large enough majority to enable the Morales administration to push through far-reaching reforms needed to fully implement the new constitution, which was approved by voters in a January 2009 referendum and went into effect a month later.
The new constitution empowers the impoverished indigenous majority, historically discriminated against in Bolivia, South America's poorest country. Native people were not even allowed to vote until 1952.
Morales' main rival in the Dec. 6 elections was right-wing candidate Manfred Reyes Villa, who garnered 1.2 million votes, 26.4 percent of the total.
Cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina, Bolivia's richest man, a centre-right politician who has sought to portray himself as a moderate, came in a distant third, with 5.6 percent (less than 300,000 votes).
Morales not only took 10.5 percent more votes than he did four years ago, but the actual number of votes nearly doubled: from 1.54 to 2.9 million, out of a total number of registered voters that increased from 3.6 to 4.85 million over the last four years.
That leap was due to the government's successful nationwide voter registration drive, carried out with a transparent system that includes fingerprints and a photograph identifying each voter.
Many of the 1.5 million new voters who backed Morales had abandoned rightwing positions, at least partly because the economic results achieved over the last four years have been so much more outstanding than anything accomplished by the rightwing administrations that have governed since 1985.
Besides the continued solid support Morales reaped from the urban and rural poor and working-class sectors, he earned the backing this time around of a considerable number of middle-class voters, as indicated by the figures provided by the electoral authorities.
For example, in the department or province of La Paz, a bastion of Morales support, he not only won a majority of votes in poor areas like El Alto, but also in traditional rightwing districts. In the province, eight out of 10 voters supported MAS.
Despite the global crisis, Bolivia boasted one of the highest growth rates in Latin America in 2009, with GDP growth of three percent, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and 2.8 percent according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which praised the Morales administration's balanced management of public finances.
According to a study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington-based think tank, Bolivia’s economic growth in the last four years has been higher than at any time in the last three decades, averaging 5.2 percent a year since Morales took office in January 2006.
The report also points to Morales' reversal of the privatisation of the country's natural gas reserves - the second-largest in the region, after Venezuela's - by an earlier administration, a move that boosted government revenues from hydrocarbons from 5.6 percent of GDP in 2004 to 25.7 percent in late 2008.
In addition, Bolivia's foreign reserves climbed from less than two billion dollars in 2005 to more than eight billion in 2008, the CEPR study underlines.
The global recession has not hit Bolivia as hard as many other countries. Unemployment, for instance, has only risen slightly, from 10.2 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2009, according to the Centre for Research on Labour and Agrarian Development (CEDLA), a La Paz-based think tank.
Savings, meanwhile, increased by 581 million dollars in the first half of 2009, 10.2 percent more than in the first six months of 2008, with deposits rising to nearly 6.3 billion dollars, the private banking association, Asoban, reported.
By July 2009, Bolivia's banks had earned a record 148 million dollars, according to the Central Bank, outstripping forecasts.
Although other sectors of the economy have complained about a lack of incentives for their economic activities, the country's banks, based in the relatively prosperous eastern province of Santa Cruz, with interests in industry and large-scale production of soy, cotton and other commodities for which international demand is high, have particularly prospered under the Morales administration.
And while some analysts say drug production and trafficking have grown substantially, with an estimated 100 million dollars in purchases of coca leaves and services, that figure pales in comparison to the country's 19 billion dollars in GDP for 2009 or the total bank deposits.
The influx of contraband goods, informal trade and the activities of small businesses and craftmakers helped offset the low level of job creation by large investments.
Another sign of growth is the 23 percent increase in tax revenues, which rose from 1.86 billion dollars in 2008 to 2.28 billion in 2009, as Bolivia's national tax service reported in December.
Despite continued heavy resistance and opposition from big business and the elites, and with the painful memories of the economic disasters of the 1980s, the quiet confidence in Morales is apparently growing, and 4.5 percent GDP growth is projected for 2010.
Conditional cash transfers to poor families, a universal minimum pension, and payments to pregnant women and nursing mothers who follow a strict schedule of doctors' visits, along the lines of programmes carried out in Brazil and Chile, as well as a moderate, patient governing style similar to those of Chile's socialist President Michelle Bachelet and Brazil's leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seem to be another key to the undeclared social pacts and alliances that brought Morales back for a second term
Republished from IPS News
But left-wing President Evo Morales was re-elected last month with an even more impressive landslide victory than his already unprecedented triumph in 2005, clearly reflecting growing support among the middle class.
In upper middle-class circles in Bolivia, it is fashionable to be vehemently anti-Morales. Nevertheless, the president took 64 percent of the vote in the Dec. 6 elections, compared to just under 54 percent in December 2005 - in a country where leaders are often elected with less than half that level of support.
Nearly three million of a total 4.85 million voters expressed their support at the ballot box for Morales, the leader of the Movement to Socialism (MAS) party, while 1.9 million distributed their votes among seven different opposition candidates.
In Bolivia, where over 60 percent of the population of 9.7 million are Amerindians, the lighter-skinned middle class, made up of business families, doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals, have often played a key political role in the country's history.
That was the case, for example, during the so-called "gas war" of October 2003 - a month of protests against the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada's (1993-1997 and 2002-2003) plans for foreign oil companies to export huge quantities of Bolivia's natural gas to the United States and Mexico.
It was not just the strikes and roadblocks by indigenous and labour groups in El Alto, a vast working-class suburb of La Paz, but the presence of middle-class demonstrators on the streets of upscale neighbourhoods in the capital as well, that finally toppled Sánchez de Lozada - but not until some 60 people had been killed when the army was called out to squelch the protests.
There are no statistics showing the proportion of families that would be considered middle class in Bolivia, but this segment of the population has had a heavy presence in and influence on both dictatorial and democratic governments throughout Bolivian history.
The same holds true today. While Morales' support base is made up of the urban working class and poor coca farmers and other peasants, his cabinet is comprised of a large portion of ministers from the middle class.
In his reelection campaign, the president - whose second term starts on Jan. 22 - focused this time around on wooing middle-class voters, by incorporating personalities like Ana María Romero on his party's list of candidates for Congress.
Romero, a former ombudsperson with a middle-class - as opposed to rural or labour - background, is first senator for La Paz and will possibly become Senate president.
In 2003, Romero headed peaceful demonstrations in residential neighbourhoods against the Sánchez de Lozada administration's bloody repression of protests.
Just three of Morales' 20 ministers are indigenous people: Foreign Minister David Choquehuanca, Justice Minister Celima Torrico, and Minister of Rural Development and Land Julia Ramos, all of whom come from poor peasant families.
Trade unionists hold two positions in the cabinet: Public Works Minister Walter Delgadillo and Labour Minister Calixto Chipana.
The rest of the cabinet posts are held by professionals and technocrats.
Vice President Álvaro García Linera himself is a middle-class intellectual, and a firm believer that it was time for Bolivia to finally have an indigenous president.
Besides García Linera, MAS leaders include intellectuals with a background in the Communist Party, whose influence waned when it flirted with the insurgent movement led by legendary Cuban-Argentine guerrilla leader Ernesto Ché Guevara - before he was captured and killed in Bolivia in 1967 - and after its brief interlude in government as part of the centre-left Popular and Democratic Unity (UDP) coalition, which governed from October 1982 to August 1985.
In last month's elections, the governing MAS won 114 of 166 seats in Congress - a large enough majority to enable the Morales administration to push through far-reaching reforms needed to fully implement the new constitution, which was approved by voters in a January 2009 referendum and went into effect a month later.
The new constitution empowers the impoverished indigenous majority, historically discriminated against in Bolivia, South America's poorest country. Native people were not even allowed to vote until 1952.
Morales' main rival in the Dec. 6 elections was right-wing candidate Manfred Reyes Villa, who garnered 1.2 million votes, 26.4 percent of the total.
Cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina, Bolivia's richest man, a centre-right politician who has sought to portray himself as a moderate, came in a distant third, with 5.6 percent (less than 300,000 votes).
Morales not only took 10.5 percent more votes than he did four years ago, but the actual number of votes nearly doubled: from 1.54 to 2.9 million, out of a total number of registered voters that increased from 3.6 to 4.85 million over the last four years.
That leap was due to the government's successful nationwide voter registration drive, carried out with a transparent system that includes fingerprints and a photograph identifying each voter.
Many of the 1.5 million new voters who backed Morales had abandoned rightwing positions, at least partly because the economic results achieved over the last four years have been so much more outstanding than anything accomplished by the rightwing administrations that have governed since 1985.
Besides the continued solid support Morales reaped from the urban and rural poor and working-class sectors, he earned the backing this time around of a considerable number of middle-class voters, as indicated by the figures provided by the electoral authorities.
For example, in the department or province of La Paz, a bastion of Morales support, he not only won a majority of votes in poor areas like El Alto, but also in traditional rightwing districts. In the province, eight out of 10 voters supported MAS.
Despite the global crisis, Bolivia boasted one of the highest growth rates in Latin America in 2009, with GDP growth of three percent, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and 2.8 percent according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which praised the Morales administration's balanced management of public finances.
According to a study by the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a Washington-based think tank, Bolivia’s economic growth in the last four years has been higher than at any time in the last three decades, averaging 5.2 percent a year since Morales took office in January 2006.
The report also points to Morales' reversal of the privatisation of the country's natural gas reserves - the second-largest in the region, after Venezuela's - by an earlier administration, a move that boosted government revenues from hydrocarbons from 5.6 percent of GDP in 2004 to 25.7 percent in late 2008.
In addition, Bolivia's foreign reserves climbed from less than two billion dollars in 2005 to more than eight billion in 2008, the CEPR study underlines.
The global recession has not hit Bolivia as hard as many other countries. Unemployment, for instance, has only risen slightly, from 10.2 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2009, according to the Centre for Research on Labour and Agrarian Development (CEDLA), a La Paz-based think tank.
Savings, meanwhile, increased by 581 million dollars in the first half of 2009, 10.2 percent more than in the first six months of 2008, with deposits rising to nearly 6.3 billion dollars, the private banking association, Asoban, reported.
By July 2009, Bolivia's banks had earned a record 148 million dollars, according to the Central Bank, outstripping forecasts.
Although other sectors of the economy have complained about a lack of incentives for their economic activities, the country's banks, based in the relatively prosperous eastern province of Santa Cruz, with interests in industry and large-scale production of soy, cotton and other commodities for which international demand is high, have particularly prospered under the Morales administration.
And while some analysts say drug production and trafficking have grown substantially, with an estimated 100 million dollars in purchases of coca leaves and services, that figure pales in comparison to the country's 19 billion dollars in GDP for 2009 or the total bank deposits.
The influx of contraband goods, informal trade and the activities of small businesses and craftmakers helped offset the low level of job creation by large investments.
Another sign of growth is the 23 percent increase in tax revenues, which rose from 1.86 billion dollars in 2008 to 2.28 billion in 2009, as Bolivia's national tax service reported in December.
Despite continued heavy resistance and opposition from big business and the elites, and with the painful memories of the economic disasters of the 1980s, the quiet confidence in Morales is apparently growing, and 4.5 percent GDP growth is projected for 2010.
Conditional cash transfers to poor families, a universal minimum pension, and payments to pregnant women and nursing mothers who follow a strict schedule of doctors' visits, along the lines of programmes carried out in Brazil and Chile, as well as a moderate, patient governing style similar to those of Chile's socialist President Michelle Bachelet and Brazil's leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, seem to be another key to the undeclared social pacts and alliances that brought Morales back for a second term
Republished from IPS News
Bolivian President Evo Morales praises anti-capitalist message in 'Avatar'
Associated Press
LA PAZ, Bolivia — Bolivia's first indigenous president is praising "Avatar" for what he calls its message of saving the environment from exploitation.
A self-proclaimed socialist, Evo Morales says he identifies with the film's "profound show of resistance to capitalism and the struggle for the defence of nature."
James Cameron's "Avatar" tells of the mystic, nature-loving Na'vi - tall blue creatures who inhabit the planet Pandora and must contend with humans intent on grabbing its resources.
It has earned more than $1.1 billion worldwide since its release last month.
Morales' comments were reported Tuesday by the official news agency ABI.
ABI said he watched the film with his daughter Sunday in his third-ever trip to the movies.
Bolivian Indians see rocky exodus from serfdom
Frank Bajak Associated Press
January 3, 2010LAGUNILLAS, Bolivia — Juan Vasquez didn't have much of a childhood. He never wentto school, began to work as a ranch hand at age 12, married three years later and has nine children.
But in all his 55 years, Vasquez says with moistening eyes, he never got paid — not unless a daily meal from a communal pot can be called compensation; or a twice-yearly allotment of used clothing.
"I didn't know what it was to earn money," Vasquez says through a half-set of teeth stained evergreen from chewing coca leaf.
With re-election last month of Evo Morales, Bolivia's first Indian president, and with Indians of Vasquez's Guarani people winning seats in congress for the first time, the end may soon be at hand for a system the U.N. has classified as "forced labor and servitude."
Though the Guarani account for only about 85,000 of Bolivia's more than 6 million Indians, they have been the most downtrodden, and that makes them a priority for Morales in his mission of eradicating all vestiges of colonial repression.
For now, several thousand newly "liberated" Guarani, including Vasquez, live in a penniless limbo, waiting for the government to make good on its promises to give them land.
But Bolivia already has taken giant steps toward ending a centuries-old legacy of what Morales calls endemic mistreatment of its third-largest ethnic group by white overlords.
His landslide re-election was a ringing endorsement.
Another expression of the Guaranis' political awakening came in the same election, when voters approved autonomy for Indians in two Guarani-dominated municipalities. In April, the Guarani are poised to win a number of mayoral races for the first time here in their traditional homeland in southeastern Bolivia, where Andean foothills meet broad plains of dry scrub that extend east to Paraguay and south to Argentina.
Since the Dec. 6 election the government has seized ranches totaling 15,500 hectares (60 square miles) from two powerful white opposition leaders in Bolivia's eastern lowlands, stronghold of Morales' most bitter foes. The government said the land met the main criteria for confiscation — obtained by fraud and serving no "social or economic purpose."
With the electoral rise of the Guarani, the opposition's grasp on power is rapidly eroding in the Alto Parapeti region, at the intersection of Santa Cruz, Tarija and Chuquisaca states where the government says exploitation of the Guarani has been most severe.
Juan Vasquez is at the epicenter of the struggle. He walked away from one of five ranches encompassing 37,000 hectares (143 square miles) in the Alto Parapeti whose owners are fighting government expropriation orders.
The government says it found servitude on those ranches. The ranchers, who include American Ronald Larsen and his son Duston, deny it.
"We're hoping for the best. That's all we can do," Duston Larsen, 31, told the AP of the legal battle to save the family's 58-square-mile (15,000-hectare) spread.
He said they had always paid their workers twice the minimum wage and provided free health care and schooling — but were now down to about 15 workers from twice as many in 2007.
Along with the other cases, the Larsens' is stalled in the National Agricultural Tribunal since last year. But the new, pro-Morales congress is expected to abolish that court and replace it with a new tribunal of popularly elected judges.
"There has been an uprising, to reclaim the right to land and liberty," says Celso Padilla, a senior official with the Guarani People's Assembly, his people's national governing body.
Under Morales, of the Aymara, the largest Indian group, this poor South American country has been steadily chiseling away at white minority control of politics.
The keystone is a new constitution, enacted in February, that established Bolivia as a "plurinational republic." It gives the country's 36 ethnic groups, well over 60 percent of the population, the right to self-determination at municipal level. Eventually there will be autonomous territories, though the new congress still needs to define how that will work.
The Guarani, Bolivia's third-largest ethnic group, are now rattling ranchers far beyond the Alto Parapeti.
Many ranchers are treating their workers better and have begun to pay the minimum wage of 647 bolivianos ($92) a month, after previously paying only half as much, says Walter Herrera, an official with the Guarani's Capitania, or local council, in Monteagudo in hills to the west.
"A lot remains to be done, but the human rights situation is improving," he said.
But other ranchers have simply fired their workers with severance payments averaging $565, while as many as 350 Guarani families still live as peons on smaller ranches deeper in the hills, economic prisoners of their bosses, Herrera added.
The claims of serfdom are unfounded, said Javier Antunez, president of the cattlemen's association based in nearby Camiri.
"The government has made a lot of proclamations about servitude but it hasn't produced anything solid to be able to prove it irrefutably," he said in an interview.
Antunez dismissed Bolivia's indigenous empowerment as "a new experiment born in Europe," because German, Swiss and Spanish non-governmental organizations have helped the Guarani.
He said it could impede Bolivia's development, putting the country at a competitive disadvantage with neighboring Brazil and Argentina.
Some ranchers violently resisted the government inspections that led to the expropriation orders. Several times in 2008, ranchers shot out or slashed tires of government inspectors accompanied by Guarani.
In one incident, 46 Guarani and officials were injured — 11 of them seriously — when ranchers hurled rocks at them in Alto Parapeti, the U.N. noted in a May report.
An Uruguayan Roman Catholic priest, Rev. Nacho Aguirre, delivered food and medicine afterward to those still living in servitude in remote communities only accessible by four-wheel-drive vehicle.
But he left Bolivia this year after the bishop of Camiri, his superior, e-mailed him that the ranchers hated him and "swore they would kill you."
No rancher interfered with an AP reporter's trip to Alto Parapeti in December for interviews with Vasquez and others who said they had lived most of their lives trapped in abusive labor relationships with ranchers.
"I earned 5 kilos (11 pounds) of sugar a week, plus some herbs and a bar of soap. Those were my wages," said Felicia Florez, 78. She said she was born into forced labor on the ranch of Ernesto Chavez, working first as a nanny, then as a cook.
Speaking to the AP by phone, Chavez's son, Roberto, accused Florez and Vasquez of lying. But when asked how much they were paid, he gave no answer.
Miriam Campos, who led anti-servitude efforts in the Justice Ministry for a decade until recently stepping down, said she had confirmed Vasquez's story and many similar cases — "testimony we could not publish precisely because of people's security, because they've been threatened."
A mission of the Organization of American States in June 2008 determined that "people of all ages, including boys, girls, adolescents and seniors" had for decades been subject to "excessive physical labor," in some cases under threat of corporal punishment. Mission members were also told that "in many cases, the (ranch) owners were either local political leaders or directly connected to them."
Indian servitude dates back to Bolivia's 1825 independence from Spain. Until then, even the Incas who once dominated the Andean highlands couldn't conquer the Guarani. But their gradual subjugation was final by 1892, when some 6,000 were killed in an uprising against ranchers, who Padilla says treated the Guarani "like animals," buying and selling their land as if they didn't exist.
It was so thorough that the Alto Parapeti's landlords were spared in a 1952 land reform that broke up large estates elsewhere in Bolivia and continued to take advantage of the politically inert Guarani.
Che Guevara, the Argentine revolutionary, tried to organize a leftist uprising in southeastern Bolivia in the following decade. But the Guarani didn't join, and Guevara was captured by the army and killed.
The Guarani didn't organize until the early 1980s after the fall of Bolivia's right-wing dictatorship.
Government efforts to finally end the servitude with a 1996 land reform law were fitful, prompting the Catholic church to step in and buy land for the Guarani.
But real momentum came in 2005, the year Morales was first elected, when a government study found that 1,049 Guarani families were living in servitude. Morales vowed to put an end to that.
Advocates say so far the government has given little more than $2 million — much of it in seed corn — to help the newly liberated Guarani.
"It still hasn't attacked this in a structured way," says Campos, who now works with a Swiss aid group.
But the Guarani are among those benefiting from a 2007 government plan to redistribute some 20 million hectares of fallow, underused or disputed land — a 77,000-square-mile area the size of Nebraska — to poor Indians and peasants nationwide by 2013.
To date, nearly three-quarters of that land has been given out, said Martin Basurco of the Vice Ministry of Land.
That includes several thousand hectares in the Alto Parapeti to which a handful of Guarani communities now hold title.
Jose Yamangay, a crafty, energetic 37-year-old, has been among those leading the fight for that land.
He left his family as a teenager at a ranch whose owner he said kept workers pacified with alcohol and coca leaf.
Ever since, Yamangay has been obsessed with obtaining a small, fertile parcel for his family.
"That's what I live for," he says, smiling broadly on a bumpy drive through hills of sandy soil where his ancestors hunted, fished and farmed — disputed for now but soon, he believes, to be returned to the Guarani.
"My father was a peon. My grandfather was a peon. My great-grandfather was a peon," he says. "I wasn't going to be a peon, too."
_______
Associated Press Writer Carlos Valdez contributed to this report from La Paz.
Call by Evo Morales for Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights
Considering that climate change represents a real threat to the existence of humanity, of living beings and our Mother Earth as we know it today;
Noting the serious danger that exists to islands, coastal areas, glaciers in the Himalayas, the Andes and mountains of the world, poles of the Earth, warm regions like Africa, water sources, populations affected by increasing natural disasters, plants and animals, and ecosystems in general;
Making clear that those most affected by climate change will be the poorest in the world who will see their homes and their sources of survival destroyed, and who will be forced to migrate and seek refuge;Confirming that 75% of historical emissions of greenhouse gases originated in the countries of the North that followed a path of irrational industrialization;
Noting that climate change is a product of the capitalist system;
Regretting the failure of the Copenhagen Conference caused by countries called “developed”, that fail to recognize the climate debt they have with developing countries, future generations and Mother Earth;
Affirming that in order to ensure the full fulfillment of human rights in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to recognize and respect Mother Earth’s rights;
Reaffirming the need to fight for climate justice;
Recognizing the need to take urgent actions to avoid further damage and suffering to humanity, Mother Earth and to restore harmony with nature;
Confident that the peoples of the world, guided by the principles of solidarity, justice and respect for life, will be able to save humanity and Mother Earth, and
Celebrating the International Day of Mother Earth,
The Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia calls on the peoples of the world, social movements and Mother Earth’s defenders, and invites scientists, academics, lawyers and governments that want to work with their citizens to the Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights to be held from 20th to 22nd April 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
The Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights has as objectives:
1) To analyze the structural and systemic causes that drive climate change and to propose radical measures to ensure the well-being of all humanity in harmony with nature
2) To discuss and agree on the project of a Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights
3) To agree on proposals for new commitments to the Kyoto Protocol and projects for a COP Decision under the United Nations Framework for Climate Change that will guide future actions in those countries that are engaged with life during climate change negotiations and in all United Nations scenarios, related to:
- Climate debt
- Climate change migrants-refugees
- Emission reductions
- Adaptation
- Technology transfer
- Finance
- Forest and Climate Change
- Shared Vision
- Indigenous Peoples, and
- Others
4) To work on the organization of the Peoples’ World Referendum on Climate Change
5) To analyze and develop an action plan to advance the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal
6) To define strategies for action and mobilization to defend life from Climate Change and to defend Mother Earth’s Rights.
Bolivia, January 5th, 2010
Evo Morales Ayma
President of the
Plurinational State of Bolivia
More info: info@cmpcc.org
Noting the serious danger that exists to islands, coastal areas, glaciers in the Himalayas, the Andes and mountains of the world, poles of the Earth, warm regions like Africa, water sources, populations affected by increasing natural disasters, plants and animals, and ecosystems in general;
Making clear that those most affected by climate change will be the poorest in the world who will see their homes and their sources of survival destroyed, and who will be forced to migrate and seek refuge;Confirming that 75% of historical emissions of greenhouse gases originated in the countries of the North that followed a path of irrational industrialization;
Noting that climate change is a product of the capitalist system;
Regretting the failure of the Copenhagen Conference caused by countries called “developed”, that fail to recognize the climate debt they have with developing countries, future generations and Mother Earth;
Affirming that in order to ensure the full fulfillment of human rights in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to recognize and respect Mother Earth’s rights;
Reaffirming the need to fight for climate justice;
Recognizing the need to take urgent actions to avoid further damage and suffering to humanity, Mother Earth and to restore harmony with nature;
Confident that the peoples of the world, guided by the principles of solidarity, justice and respect for life, will be able to save humanity and Mother Earth, and
Celebrating the International Day of Mother Earth,
The Government of the Plurinational State of Bolivia calls on the peoples of the world, social movements and Mother Earth’s defenders, and invites scientists, academics, lawyers and governments that want to work with their citizens to the Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights to be held from 20th to 22nd April 2010 in Cochabamba, Bolivia.
The Peoples’ World Conference on Climate Change and Mother Earth’s Rights has as objectives:
1) To analyze the structural and systemic causes that drive climate change and to propose radical measures to ensure the well-being of all humanity in harmony with nature
2) To discuss and agree on the project of a Universal Declaration of Mother Earth Rights
3) To agree on proposals for new commitments to the Kyoto Protocol and projects for a COP Decision under the United Nations Framework for Climate Change that will guide future actions in those countries that are engaged with life during climate change negotiations and in all United Nations scenarios, related to:
- Climate debt
- Climate change migrants-refugees
- Emission reductions
- Adaptation
- Technology transfer
- Finance
- Forest and Climate Change
- Shared Vision
- Indigenous Peoples, and
- Others
4) To work on the organization of the Peoples’ World Referendum on Climate Change
5) To analyze and develop an action plan to advance the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal
6) To define strategies for action and mobilization to defend life from Climate Change and to defend Mother Earth’s Rights.
Bolivia, January 5th, 2010
Evo Morales Ayma
President of the
Plurinational State of Bolivia
More info: info@cmpcc.org
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