People's Voices Must be Heard in Climate Negotiations: Official UNFCCC Negotiating Text Ignores World People's Conference Solutions

This is the pronouncement of the World People's Movement, which demands that United Nations climate change negotiations be inclusive, transparent, and equitable, and include the proposal expressed by the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (Cochabamba, Bolivia, April 20 - 22). Join the call and help make the voice of the people hear by signing, in the web side: http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/movement-for-mother-earth

People's Voices Must be Heard in Climate Negotiations

Official UNFCCC Negotiating Text Ignores World People's Conference Solutions

In April 2010 more than 35,000 people from 140 countries gathered in Cochabamba, Bolivia and developed the historic Cochabamba People's Agreement a consensus-based document reflecting substantive solutions to the climate crisis. We, the undersigned organizations, both participated in and/or supported this historic process.

Reflecting the voices of global civil society and the agreements reached in 17 working groups, the Plurinational State of Bolivia made an official proposal, comprised of the core components of the Cochabamba People's Agreement, to the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action (AWG-LCA) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Since then, the accord has gained support and recognition by various nations and regional bodies including ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of Our Americas) and UNASUR (Union of South American Nations).

We are therefore deeply concerned that the new text proposed in the AWG-LCA as a basis for climate change negotiations does not reflect any of the main conclusions reached in Cochabamba.

The Chair and the Vice Chair of the AWG-LCA (from Zimbabwe and the United States respectively) have instead incorporated all of the proposals of the Copenhagen Accord, which does not even have the consensus of the United Nations.

We urge the UNFCCC to embrace the conclusions reached by social movements, indigenous peoples and international civil society in Cochabamba. It is both undemocratic and non-transparent to exclude particular proposals from the negotiations, and it is imperative that the United Nations listens to the global community on this issue critical to humanity.

We call on all countries in the United Nations, and in particular the President and Vice-President of the AWG-LCA, to include the core conclusions of the Cochabamba People's Accord in the negotiations in the run-up to Cancun. These life- and earth-saving proposals include:

1. A 50% reduction of domestic greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries for the period 2013-2017 under the Kyoto Protocol, domestically and without reliance on market mechanisms.

2. The objective of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations at 300ppm.

3. The need to begin the process of considering the proposed Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to reestablish harmony with nature.

4. The obligation of developed countries to honor their climate debt toward developing countries and our Mother Earth.

5. The provision of financial resources equal to 6% of GDP by developed countries to help confront the climate change crisis.

6. The creation of a mechanism for the integral management and conservation of forests that, unlike REDD-plus, respects the sovereignty of states, guarantees the rights and participation of indigenous peoples and forest dependent communities, and is not based on the carbon market regime.

7. The implementation of measures for recognizing the rights of Indigenous peoples must be secured in accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and applicable universal human rights instruments and agreements. This includes respect for the knowledge and rights of indigenous peoples; their rights to lands, territories and resources, and their full and effective participation, with their free, prior and informed consent.

8. The incentivizing of models of agricultural production that are environmentally sustainable and that guarantee food sovereignty and the rights of indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers.

9. The protection and recognition of the rights and needs of forced climate migrants.

10. The promotion of the establishment of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal.

11. The consideration of a World Referendum on Climate Change that allows the people to decide what will be done about this issue, which is of vital importance to the future of humanity and Mother Earth.

We demand that the conclusions established by the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, which protect life and Mother Earth, be incorporated into the negotiating text during the negotiations in Bonn, Germany, from May 31st to June 11th, 2010.

There cannot be an equitable, transparent, and inclusive negotiation process, nor true solutions to the urgency of the climate crisis, if the AWG-LCA negotiating text ignores the voices of the peoples of the world that the negotiators should be representing.

Bolivia: Elections Deepen Local Democracy

Emily Achtenberg

While the results of Bolivia’s April 4 regional and local elections are now officially certified, their significance—who really won and lost—continues to be debated. For President Evo Morales, the vote confirms the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party as the sole political force with strong support throughout the nation. For re-elected Santa Cruz governor Rubén Costas, leader of the regionally-based conservative opposition, his victory means that “the forces of democracy have defeated tyranny.”

However, the elections have exposed a diverse political reality in Bolivia that is more complex than these competing official claims suggest. While MAS has extended the geographic reach of its support, the vote shows that it is far from a hegemonic political machine. Moreover, the major political challenge confronting MAS today is coming not from the largely discredited right, but from emergent new forces on the left, including the growing national Movement Without Fear (MSM) party as well as local grassroots initiatives.

In April, voters elected governors (formerly known as prefects) and legislative assemblies in each of Bolivia’s nine departments, as well as mayors and local councils in 337 municipalities. These will be the first elected regional and local bodies with the power to legislate within the autonomy (decentralization) framework established by the 2009 Constitution. Departmental assemblies are now elected based on a system of mixed popular, provincial, and indigenous representation determined by each department.

For the past five years, opposition to Evo Morales’ government has been headed by prefects of the four lowlands departments, where Bolivia’s natural resource wealth (especially natural gas) is concentrated. In occasional alliance with their counterparts from other regions, this anti-MAS power bloc exploited the regional autonomy issue to bring Bolivia to the brink of a “civil coup” in 2008, demanding departmental control of land and hydrocarbons revenues to benefit local elites. The crisis was eventually contained by adoption of the new Constitution.

In the elections, MAS showed impressive strength by capturing six out of nine governorships, up from three in 2005. In addition to prevailing easily in the western highlands strongholds of Oruro and Potosi, MAS consolidated its hold in La Paz, Cochabamba and the contested department of Chuquisaca by comfortable margins.

The most significant victory for MAS was the governorship of Pando, a lowlands department controlled by the right for the past 28 years. Pando’s ex-prefect Leopoldo Fernández, accused of spearheading the massacre of a dozen MAS supporters in September 2008, has been in jail for the past 19 months. The MAS gubernatorial vote in Pando increased from 6% in 2005 to 50% in 2010.
This victory, along with substantial MAS gains in the other lowlands departments (Tarija, Beni, and even Santa Cruz) has significantly fractured the hold of the regionally based conservative opposition. Except for a strong win in Santa Cruz, the margin of opposition victories in these departments was less than 10%. This will allow significant MAS representation in all nine legislative assemblies, where new statutes clarifying how autonomy will work will soon be up for consideration.

Despite these successes, nationally, MAS won only 50% of the gubernatorial vote, compared to 64% of the presidential vote in last December’s election. This represents a loss of one million votes in just four months. MAS gained the two-thirds vote necessary for control of important legislative assembly matters only in the five western departments.

Locally, while MAS mayoral candidates prevailed in two-thirds of Bolivia’s 337 municipalities—up from 30% in 2004—they were defeated in seven out of 10 major cities (although none who lost were incumbents). In the capital city of La Paz, MAS lost the mayoralty with 35% of the vote—‘14 points behind the victorious MSM party, a center-left progressive force that broke with MAS earlier this year. In comparison, Morales won 80% of the La Paz vote last December.

In the neighboring indigenous city of El Alto, whose voters backed Morales last year by a margin of 90%, the MAS mayoral candidate prevailed but with only 39% of the vote. A 29-year old indigenous female candidate—political outsider “La Sole”—captured 30% of the vote, followed by the MSM candidate with 24%. The MSM—a regional urban party virtually unknown outside La Paz before the elections-also won unexpected victories in Oruro and in indigenous mining communities north of Potosí, which have long been bastions of MAS loyalty. The MSM has been critical of MAS for perceived anti-democratic tendencies, which it claims are subverting the principles of the new Constitution. In total, MSM elected 20 mayors and emerged as a presence in 120 municipalities, drawing many successful candidates from the ranks of popular ex-MAS dissidents. It is now the second largest party in Bolivia.

In many cases (both urban and rural), MAS candidates were defeated by emergent new micro-local political organizations. In the western highlands community of Achacachi, home of the militant indigenous Ponchos Rojos (Red Ponchos)—where Morales won 98% of the vote in December—the MAS mayoral candidate placed third behind a local party and the MSM. In the coca-growing Yungas region, a new party led by dissident local coca farmers (and an ex-MAS Senator) prevailed in six localities. MAS also lost in Plan Tres Mil, a poor indigenous district of Santa Cruz whose residents led massive demonstrations in support of the government in 2008.

Many of these local defections—and MSM gains or victories—occurred where the MAS party hierarchy imposed unknown or unpopular candidates on its base organizations, ignoring grassroots preferences. In Santa Cruz, MAS promotion of a former opposition leader as mayoral candidate and recruitment of ex-fascist Santa Cruz Youth Union members as party cadre alienated many indigenous supporters. A former beauty queen imposed by the party leadership in Beni lost a key gubernatorial race for MAS after proposing that convicted murderers should work in the mines (threatening the job security of the existing labor force).

Another MAS tactic that backfired was the party’s ferocious attack on the MSM for its decision to campaign independently, including accusations of a “neoliberal conspiracy” and charges of corruption against MSM leader Juan del Granado. Del Granado, the former La Paz mayor, is a respected human rights lawyer who successfully prosecuted dictator Luis Garcia Meza in the early 1980s at great personal risk. As political scientist Miguel Centellas has commented, the “heavy-handed MAS rhetoric that tarnishes all opponents with one brush” alienated many local voters.

Whether the strong MSM showing in April signals the rise of a “democratic left opposition” in Bolivia, as some analysts have suggested or merely reflects a transitory protest vote, remains to be seen. Del Granado has denied future presidential aspirations. Moreover, he emphasizes says, the MSM will support them. that MSM will not be a traditional opposition to MAS “because we are part of the process of change and transformation.” If the MAS government acts in accordance with the new Constitution, del Granado

More fundamentally, the April vote can be viewed as demonstrating the persistent independence and political diversity of the Bolivian electorate, especially at the local level. As Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network told NACLA, “Bolivian voters build in their own checks and balances by electing leaders from different parties at different levels of government.” The same voter may have different priorities in national and local elections.

In the past, Ledebur says, this vote-splitting practice has frequently led to stalemates and blocked governmental initiatives. In the major cities and departmental capitals, where close April races have resulted in divided representation on municipal councils, third-place candidates will now have crucial “swing votes” and effective veto power. Whether these new configurations will lead to compromise or paralysis, she notes, remains to be seen.

Ledebur cautions against viewing the diversity of voters’ regional and local preferences as a rejection of the MAS government. While Bolivians are not inclined to give MAS or Evo Morales a “blank check,” they have repeatedly ratified the advance of the government’s political and economic project, including in the most recent election. This is not inconsistent with the vote for MSM, which largely supports the MAS program.

But the April vote raises a warning signal about how the process of change is being carried out. The electorate clearly wants less concentration of power, more dialogue, and more respect for local initiative. How the MAS government chooses to respond to this challenge is an important issue for the future.

If there is a clear message from the April elections, it is that local democracy is alive and well in Bolivia.

Emily Achtenberg is an urban planner and a NACLA research associate.

Republished from NACLA

Bolivia: The other debt crisis - Climate debt

Bolivia: Evo Morales Caught Between Gas Revenues and Indigenous Demands

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, May 24, 2010 (IPS) - The Bolivian government negotiated with native groups to head off major marches and roadblocks aimed at demanding protection of indigenous land rights and conservation of the environment in their territories.

Thanks to a last-minute agreement with the Evo Morales administration, a 1,000-km march from the city of Riberalta in the extreme north to La Paz in the western highlands by indigenous groups from the Amazon jungle region was called off.

And negotiations with government officials put an end to a four-day roadblock by Guaraní Indians on a key highway that connects Bolivia with Argentina to the south.

On Sunday, an agreement was signed after two days of talks between representatives of the Guaraní community and the ministers of hydrocarbons, autonomy and rural development and land.

Native groups who live in areas rich in timber, water, minerals and oil are demanding government protection of their ancestral lands, in line with the defence of Pachamama or Mother Earth voiced by Morales at the World People's Conference on Climate Change held a month ago in the central city of Cochabamba.

Morales, the first-ever indigenous president in this country where native people comprise a majority of the population, is caught between demands for the conservation of forests, water sources, and traditional lands, and the government's heavy dependency on natural gas, its main source of revenue, which brought in 1.46 billion dollars in 2008.

Bolivia has South America's second largest natural gas reserves, after Venezuela', with an estimated volume of 49 trillion cubic feet.

"It is hard to exploit natural resources without hurting the environment," Armengol Caballero, the head of the Centre for Research and Advancement of Small Farmers (CIPCA), told IPS. "The exploitation of oil and gas implies deforestation as roads and pipelines are put in to bring out the fuel."

Caballero accuses Morales of a "double discourse".

But he also argued the need to exploit the country's natural resources, in order to generate revenues for the benefit of indigenous peoples themselves, instead of leaving the oil, gas and minerals underground.

"The government is promoting economic policies based on extractive industries with high costs to the environment and to its own image, which is based on promises of change," Edwin Alvarado, national communications secretary of the Environmental Defence League (LIDEMA), Bolivia's leading environmental coalition, commented to IPS.

A ministerial commission and leaders of the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB), which represents one million members, held talks last week, in which the government promised to speed up the process of demarcating the lands of native communities in the Amazon jungle region and granting them collective land titles.

In response, CIDOB called off its plans for a 1,000-km march to La Paz.

The government also announced that it will push for a new forestry law, and that the concessions of mining and lumber companies that do not respect Bolivia's regulations and standards will be cancelled.

The Morales administration's commitment includes the drafting of specific regulations for carrying out prior consultations among indigenous communities before authorising the construction of roads, hydroelectric dams, and the exploration and production of minerals, oil and natural gas.

The government also reiterated that it would fully comply with International Labour Organisation (ILO) Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

But the government's commitment to "free, prior and informed consent" from native communities, as established by Convention 169, would seem to run counter to its authorisation of projects like a stretch of the Trans-Oceanic Highway -- an infrastructure megaproject jointly undertaken by Bolivia, Brazil and Peru -- between the towns of Villa Tunari in the central province of Cochabamba and San Ignacio de Moxos in the northern province of Beni, Alvarado said.

More than 60 native communities in the Isiboro Sécure National Park will be affected by the project, because they depend on sustainable hunting, food gathering, and the use of natural sources of water, he said.

The LIDEMA spokesman said the park was one of the few areas in the Andean foothills of South America where the local indigenous inhabitants live according to their traditional way of life in an area that they consider sacred.

"The environmental policies of the current government are supposedly based on respect for Mother Earth," the head of the environmental group Kandire, Daniela Leytón, told IPS.

"However, there is a counter-discourse in favour of the accelerated incursion of megaprojects in the name of development that undermine indigenous rights, under policies that are unethical in terms of the application of consultation methods and justifications," she maintained.

Leytón noted that Bolivia is a country with a low industrial capacity and high dependence on natural resources, "which fuels major extractive industry activity and exports concentrated in natural gas and minerals."

The activist said that while GDP has increased 20 percent thanks to a rise in natural gas revenues since Morales first took office in 2006, the poverty rate has not dropped below 60 percent.

She also pointed to the government's difficulties in meeting the payments to pregnant and nursing mothers, which forced it to obtain a 20 million dollar 40-year loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Republished from IPSNews

BOLIVIA: Do Indigenous Concepts Help or Hinder in Fighting the World’s Climate Crisis?

A LeftViews Debate between Pablo Stefanoni and Hugo Blanco
Translated and introduced by Richard Fidler

The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth¹, held in Cochabamba, Bolivia in April, has fueled a growing debate in Latin America over the validity and usefulness of traditional Indigenous value systems and forms of organization in resolving the pressing social problems of the region, not least the challenges posed by the climate crisis. We publish here two differing assessments.

• Pablo Stefanoni is the editor of the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique.
• Hugo Blanco is a longstanding indigenous leader of the peasant movement in Peru and editor of the newspaper La Lucha Indígena.

The Cochabamba conference was called by Bolivian President Evo Morales in the wake of the disastrous United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen last December. It was attended by more than 30,000 activists from over 100 countries. They adopted a People’s Agreement² that assigns responsibility for the climate crisis to the capitalist system and rejects the use of market mechanisms in combating climate change.

Conference participants were critical of the dependency of most semicolonial “Third World” countries on resource-based export strategies that devastate local environments while frustrating attempts at endogenous development in the interests of local and national communities. However, they identified the main culprit as the uneven development intrinsic to imperialism, a system “that has led the richest countries to have an ecological footprint five times bigger than what the planet is able to support.” And they concluded:

“It is imperative that we forge a new system that restores harmony with nature and among human beings. And in order for there to be balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings. We propose to the peoples of the world the recovery, revalorization, and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of Indigenous Peoples, which are affirmed in the thought and practices of ‘Living Well,’ recognizing Mother Earth as a living being with which we have an indivisible, interdependent, complementary and spiritual relationship.”

Mother Earth, in the Indigenous languages of Latin America, is known as Pacha Mama. Prominent among the conference participants were Indigenous peoples, and their thinking and influence were clear in its decisions.

Evo Morales followed up the Cochabamba Conference by presenting its proposals in a major speech at the United Nations³ before the G77 + China, a group of the world’s poorest countries (plus China) that (as he put it) “are the least responsible for climate change and, nonetheless, the most affected by the dire impacts of global warming.” The other South American heads of state, gathered at the UNASUR conference in Buenos Aires on May 4, endorsed the Cochabamba People’s Agreement⁴, urged other member governments to join the effort “to open spaces on the subject of climate change,” and agreed to discuss further such actions at their scheduled meeting in Cancún, Mexico later this year.

The Bolivian government, along with its partners in UNASUR and the anti-imperialist Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), has sought to use tribunes like Cochabamba’s as a means to enhance consciousness and build international support that can help provide these oppressed and exploited countries with greater latitude to resist imperialism and develop their own people-oriented alternative development strategies. The Cochabamba Conference marked an important step forward in this process.

However, that is not the view of Pablo Stefanoni, whose newspaper is the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Dipomatique, the Paris monthly magazine that is influential in the broad left, including in the milieus that organize the World Social Forums. Stefanoni saw the Cochabamba Conference as a diversion from the pressing tasks facing Bolivia. In his opinion, its dominant Indigenous discourse, which he scornfully dismisses as pachamamismo, is an obstacle to efforts to free Bolivia from dependency on resource exports and “prevents Bolivia from being a serious player in the big international leagues.”

Hugo Blanco, responding to Stefanoni, offers a very different, positive assessment of the contribution of Indigenous thinking to the world struggle against the climate crisis.

Related reading: Ian Angus, “Cochabamba: Climate Justice Has a New Program and New Hope for Victory,”⁵ Socialist Voice, April 29, 2010

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WHERE IS PACHAMAMISMO TAKING US?

by Pablo Stefanioni
Rebelión, April 28, 2010⁶

The Tiquipaya summit[1] — over and above the chickens, gays and bald men that were given such extensive media coverage, over what could be interpreted as a presidential slip[2] — revealed something of relevance to the future: The process of change is too important to be left in the hands of the pachamámicos. The affectation of ancestral authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tourists in search of Latin America’s “familiar exoticism” and even more so Bolivia’s (according to Marc Saint-Upéry[3]) but it does not seem capable of contributing anything significant in terms of building a new State, instituting a new model of development, discussing a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and mass participation.

What is more, pachamamismo — a sort of stylish newspeak — serves to dissolve Bolivians’ profound yearnings for change in the deaf ear of a supposed alternative to Western philosophy, even though it is learned in such global spaces as NGO workshops, in the calm of Duke University or in the courses supervised by Catherine Walsh in the Universidad Andina[4] or the FLACSO Ecuador. In the last analysis, as becomes more obvious each time, we are presented with a global new-age Indigenous discourse with scant capacity to reflect the actually existing ethnicities. And, as in the countries of actually existing socialism, this “newspeak” can infinitely expand the hiatus between discourse and reality (why do they say nothing about extractivism and the reprimarización of the economy,[5] for example?), weakening the transformative energies of the society.

So, instead of discussing how to combine developmental expectations with an intelligent eco-environmentalism, the pachamámico discourse offers us a cataract of words in Aymara, pronounced with an enigmatic tone, and a naïve reading of the crisis of capitalism and western civilization. Or directly, in interpretative broadsides like that of Fernando Huanacuni, a foreign office official, who told an Argentine newspaper that the earthquake in Haiti was a small warning of the economic-global-cosmic-telluric-educational impetuousness of the Pacha Mama.

Do the politics of Edgar Patana [the elected mayor of El Alto and disputed labour leader] reflect a new spirituality? Does Isaac Ávalos [the senator and peasant leader] intervene in the Senate asking leave of Grandmother Cosmos? Or does Gustavo Torrico [the deputy interior minister] base his management of the police on the criterion that the rights of Pacha Mama (and ants) are more important than human rights?

In Europe there is much greater awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic products) than there is in our country, where in many ways everything remains to be done, and an informed and technically solid environmentalism seems much more effective than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed First Nations’ philosophy, often an excuse of some urban intellectuals for not addressing the urgent problems facing the country. Many of the official mistakes in the summit are not unrelated to its having handed over the theme of climate change to the pachamámicos, whose irresponsibility prevents Bolivia from being a serious player in the big international leagues. For many intellectuals, the Bolivian laboratory may provide enormous material for their own investigations, and many NGOs are delighted to fund all kinds of social experiments. But for Bolivians the cost of a new lost opportunity could not be covered by all the cooperation projects combined.

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INDIANISMO AND PACHAMAMISMO

by Pablo Stefanoni
Rebelión⁷, May 05, 2010⁷

My previous column in this newspaper provoked an irate reply from some comrades who (without saying so) consider themselves part of the pachamámica current, which — without any evidence — they seek to transform into a synonym for Indigenous and the sole ideological basis of the current process of change. In reality, indianismo did not exist in the Chapare, and in the Altiplano, Felipe Quispe talked less of Pacha Mama and Pacha Tata[6] than he did of tractors, the Internet, and rural development projects for the commune residents, in the framework of an Aymara nationalist project. Kataristas and Indianistas engage in politics; the pachamamicos the cult of the esoteric. I have never seen a blockade for vivir bien [to live well], although I could be mistaken.

Nor was pachamamismo the discursive basis of the Indigenous rebellions of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, as Forrest Hylton shows in relation to Chayanta (1927),[7] where the representative chiefs were demanding education and recognition of their authorities and lands in alliance with sectors of the urban left, their pleas laden with modern/western anti-slavery discourse. And in the Forties and Fifties the unions in many regions broke with the conservative role of the traditional authorities in the preservation of a neocolonial status quo.

Many of their categories, such as the chacha-warmi to mention only one,[8] do not stand up to historical investigation, and according to Milton Eyzaguirre have more to do with the imposition of the Catholic vision of marriage than they do with ancestral customs. Does decolonization mean returning to the two republics of the Viceroy Toledo?[9] In the last analysis, there are non-Indigenous pachamámicos and non-pachamámicos Indigenous — possibly the majority — so there is no basis for labelling just any criticism as racist. While it seems profoundly radical, its “philosophical” generality provides no clue to overcoming dependent capitalism, extractivism and rentismo,[10] nor to the construction of a new State or the need for “post-clientelist” forms of politics. While it has little impact in the Government, pachamamismo is a useful discourse for turning any serious debate into hollow “philosophical” rhetoric.

The debate over decolonization cannot overlook the tension between the survival of the ghetto (in the form of preservation of “ancestral” identity and culture or theories of the “good farmer” Indian or, directly, the good Avatar-like ecological savage) and assimilation: access to “universal” culture. Possibly, intermediate between both extremes, there might arise a successful road to decolonization and social and cultural mobility. (In some haciendas the landlords, not exactly supporters of pluriculturalism or multiculturalism, would only allow entrance to priests who would speak Aymara with their Indian tenants; otherwise the latter would learn Castellano and leave.)

Pachamamismo inhibits any serious discussion, for example, of what it is to be Indigenous in the 21st century. How can the Aymara owner of a fleet of minibuses in El Alto and convert to Pentacostalism be compared simply with the resident of a commune in the north of Potosí who continues to produce in the context of an ethnic economy? How is it possible to apply the communitarian model in a country that is majority urban and criss-crossed by all types of hybridization/migration/insertion in global markets, and the rise of an Indigenous/mestizo commercial bourgeoisie? And finally, who elected the globalized pachamámico intellectuals to speak on behalf of the Indigenous of Bolivia and the world? Yes, these are the words of a “mono-thinker”, but they may be worth a response.

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REPLY TO PABLO STEFANONI’S
‘INDIANISMO AND PACHAMAMISMO’

by Hugo Blanco
Lucha Indígena, May 11, 2010⁸

Pablo Stefanoni begins his article “Where is pachamamismo taking us?” by taking his distance from the stupid assessment that the right wing made of the Cochabamba Summit. It seemed that he would analyse the meeting, but apparently anti-Indigenous racism has blinded him and there is no serious assessment.

Let us see what Silvia Ribeiro, a researcher, journalist and coordinator of environmental campaigns in Uruguay, Brazil and Sweden, has to say about this meeting. She is an international lecturer on those subjects and has followed the negotiation of various United Nations environmental treaties:

“The response to the official call for this summit exceeded all expectations, both in numbers attending (35,000) and in content, making it an historic landmark in the international debate on the climate crisis. Faced with the maneuvers of the powerful governments in Copenhagen, Bolivia appealed to the grassroots of the world’s societies to demonstrate their positions and present them to the governments. In both respects it was an overwhelming success. And it strengthened the networks and interactions among the movements….

“A common basis was created for developing understanding, critical analysis and strategies in relation to the climate crisis, enriched by various perspectives from many cultures, peoples, and interest groups on the continent and around the world. The Cochabamba People’s Agreement reflects this.” (http://tinyurl.com/266zcgc⁹)

A serious analysis would have begun by specifically evaluating the conclusions of the meeting, the People’s Agreement mentioned by Ribeiro. Stefanoni does not do that; the only comment he makes of the meeting in another article of his is that “the summit would be of little advantage if it served only to confirm the (deserved) international popularity of our President and to engage in emotional anticapitalism in a tumultuous collective catharsis.”[11]

Stefanoni says “Many of the official mistakes in the summit are not unrelated to its having handed over the theme of climate change to the pachamámicos….”

Who handed it over? Morales, following his correct intervention in Copenhagen, which precisely corresponded to the sentiment of the 100,000 persons who were protesting the inaction of the governments, was the only president who called the summit, not only for the Indigenous but for the people of the world.

No one has handed over the subject of climate change to the Indigenous. They are the ones who day after day are fighting and dying, as they have in Bagua, Peru, in defence of Mother Earth and against the environmental pollution resulting from the action of the big multinational corporations. Currently, the Indigenous peoples of Ecuador have shifted towards opposing Correa’s “Socialism of the 21st Century” because of his resource extraction policy. But these ecological battles are of no importance for Stefanoni; they do not amount to civilized ecology. “In Europe there is much greater awareness of the recycling of garbage (including plastic products) than there is in our country, where in many ways everything remains to be done, and an informed and technically solid environmentalism seems much more effective than managing climate change on the basis of a supposed First Nations’ philosophy….”

We agree with the criticisms by the compañeros of Mesa 18 [Working Group 18][12] of the continued resource extraction practices of the Bolivian government. They criticized the government specifically for not being, as Stefanoni puts it, consistently “pachamamista”.

Stefanoni says, among other things, “I have never seen a blockade for ‘vivir bien’, although I could be mistaken.” In Peru, the environmental battles I mentioned are waged on behalf of “buen vivir” in opposition to capitalism’s teaching that we should “earn more money in the least possible time.” As a woman in those battles recently stated, “I am not going to eat gold.”

“The pachamámico discourse, on this and other points, simply takes the debates onto the terrain of philosophy, a discipline worthy of the greatest respect, except when used as an excuse not to address the burning issues that we must confront.”[13]

We agree that it should not be used as an excuse, but we are entitled to use it to defend Mother Earth, which is not what Stefanoni does when he demands that we abandon our Indigenous way of viewing the world — which, of course, is not his. We are entitled to maintain and develop our identity just as he has the right to maintain his vision of the world.

“The debate over decolonization cannot overlook the tension between the survival of the ghetto (in the form of preservation of ‘ancestral’ identity and culture or theories of the ‘good farmer’ Indian….”

First, let’s talk about the ghetto. The great majority of Indigenous are not and do not want to be a ghetto. (Of course there are exceptions who do have that reverse racist spirit, such as Felipe Quispe, who is respectfully mentioned by Stefanoni.) The Pachacuti party in Ecuador accepts gringos as members, provided they agree with its program. In Peru, we consider ourselves part of the broader mass movement. Morales invited everyone to come to the Cochabamba meeting (unfortunately, many of the Europeans who were in Copenhagen could not attend because their flights were cancelled due to ashes from the volcano in Iceland).

The best example are the Mayas of Chiapas [in Mexico], who have said “We are Indigenous, we are proud of it, we want to be respected as Indigenous. We consider ourselves brothers of all the poor people in Mexico and the world.” Bear in mind that the first international meeting to debate the theme “Against neoliberalism, for humanity,” much before the World Social Forums, was held in the mud of Chiapas in response to the call of the Zapatista Indigenous, and it was attended by representatives from 70 countries.

As to “the good farmer Indian,” of course this is true, we have an age-old heritage of farming that safeguards the soil. Indigenous agriculture does not engage in monoculture, which destroys the soil, nor does it use agrochemicals that likewise destroy the soil as does modern agro-industry which also uses genetically modified organisms and has discovered the wonders of the terminator seed, which cannot be used for reproduction. Indigenous agriculture, among other things, mixes crops and practices crop rotation, which conserves the soil.

“The process of change is too important to be left in the hands of the pachamámicos.”

Who wants to do that? The Indigenous movement, which is fighting for change, appeals to all the people to join in that struggle.

“The affectation of ancestral authenticity may be useful for seducing revolutionary tourists in search of Latin America’s ‘familiar exoticism’ … but it does not seem capable of contributing anything significant in terms of building a new State, instituting a new model of development, discussing a viable productive model or new forms of democracy and mass participation…. its ‘philosophical’ generality provides no clue to overcoming dependent capitalism, extractivism and rentismo, nor to the construction of a new State….”

The Indigenous community exists in any country in America with an Indigenous population: Bolivia, Chile, Honduras, Mexico, the United States, Canada. This community holds that it is the collectivity that is in charge (which does not mean there are no communities deformed by the capitalist environment surrounding them). It is, on a small scale, an organism of political power, struggling and coexisting alongside the power of the system.

Struggles against the system strengthen the community as an organism of power. I experienced this personally in the valley of La Convención, in Cusco, Peru, during the struggle for the land. We experienced it last year after the massacre in Bagua, when the police were afraid to enter many forest communities being ruled by the communal government.

We are seeing this strengthening now in Ecuador, as a result of the tension that exists between the Indigenous and “socialism of the 21st century.” In Cauca, Colombia, notwithstanding attacks by the government, the paramilitaries and the FARC,[14] the Indigenous organization is taken to higher levels of the community, and the communities are organized and are joining together.

The best example are the Indigenous of Chiapas, where the Indigenous have been governing themselves for more than 16 years in a collective, truly democratic form through “Juntas de Buen Gobierno” [Councils of Good Government], the members of which serve in rotation and are unpaid. The Zapatista National Liberation Army, which is also Indigenous in composition, does not participate in the government; its members are prohibited from being members of the councils. Its role is to protect the Indigenous communities from the attacks of the “bad government”.

The Indigenous do not “take” power, they build it from below in an authentically democratic form. They do not call it “socialism” because the “socialist” government in Chile has been jailing the Mapuche using Pinochet’s laws, and in Ecuador, as we said, they are struggling against “Socialism of the 21st century.”

Sooner or later, in Bolivia they will be confronting the government of the “Movement toward Socialism”, which is still not the Indigenous democratic government but an anti-imperialist government midway between the oligarchy and the Indigenous and Bolivian population in general, similar to the governments of Ecuador and Venezuela.

We hope that the non-Indigenous population will also participate in building the new society. We are excited by the existence of the “fábricas recuperadas” [occupied and worker-run factories] in Argentina. Probably there are other examples.

The use of the pachamámico language by government agencies and NGOs, which use it to hold back the movement and for other purposes, does not invalidate the Indigenous spirit, the Indigenous cosmovision, the Indigenous language, the Indigenous struggle. “Marxism-Leninism” was also used in the Soviet Union to massacre the workers’ vanguard, which does not invalidate Marxism or Leninism. The so-called democratic neoliberal governments do not invalidate democracy.

———

Republished from Socialist Voice

Translator’s notes

[1] The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth was held April 20-22 in Tiquipaya, a town in Cochabamba Department, Bolivia.

[2] A comment by Evo Morales when addressing the summit was widely misinterpreted internationally. See http://www.misna.org/news.asp?a=1&IDLingua=1&id=270943¹⁰.

[3] See http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism/2009-February/044800.htm¹¹l.

[4] Catherine E. Walsh is director of the Doctoral Program in Latin American Cultural Studies, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito, Ecuador. See http://tinyurl.com/2dpgby4¹². FLACSO Ecuador is the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences, Ecuador section.

[5] Reprimarización, a Spanish neoligism sometimes translated as “re-primarization,” means forcing the economy to produce those low value-added items where it has an absolute competitive advantage — in Bolivia, for example, hydrocarbons extraction for export with little development of refining capacity or endogenous manufacturing.

[6] Respectively, Quechua for Mother Earth and Earth Father. Felipe Quispe heads the Pachakuti Indigenous Movement (MIP) and has also been general secretary of the United Union Confederation of Working Peasants of Bolivia (CSUTCB). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felipe_Quispe¹³. The Chapare district of Bolivia is the heartland of the Indigenous coca growers, whose union is headed even now by Evo Morales.

[7] See Forrest Hylton, “The Bolivian Blockades in Historical Context”, http://www.counterpunch.org/hylton02012003.html¹⁴.

[8] Chacha Warmi: the Quechua principle of two sexes, working together to attain equilibrium in the cosmos. Evo Morales describes his cabinet, which is composed equally of men and women, as an example. Three of the 10 female members are Indigenous social activists.

[9] The Viceroyalty of Peru was one of the two Spanish Viceroyalties in America from the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo laid the basis for Spanish rule in Peru from 1569 to 1582. He executed Túpac Amaru, the last Indigenous leader of the Inca state in Peru.

[10] Rentismo refers to economic dependency on royalties and taxes from natural resource extraction.

[11] See “Bolivia Avatar,” http://www.surysur.net/?q=node/13391¹⁵.

[12] Mesa 18 was an informal working group at the Cochabamba summit, in addition to the 17 official working groups, comprised of people from social movements opposed to mining and hydrocarbon policies of the Morales government.

[13] “Bolivia Avatar”, op. cit.

[14] Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia – Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the oldest and largest insurgent grouping in that country. FARC guerrillas have been known to attack Indigenous communities.

Bolivia: When fantasy trumps reality

Federico Fuentes

Ironically, while the left is one of the fiercest critics of biased media coverage, it can also fall in the trap of corporate media distortions, particularly if its coverage dovetails with its own fantasies.

A May 14 article by Daniel Lopez published on the website of Australian group Socialist Alternative is proof of this.

The article echoes the view of a May 10 article on the BBC website, which has a clear dislike of Bolivian President Evo Morales.

The BBC article argued a “general strike” by Bolivian unions marked “the end of the honeymoon period between the left-wing Mr Morales and his power base among the country's poor”.

This position fits nicely with the outlook of Socialist Alternative, which also condemns Bolivia’s first indigenous president.

Lopez wrote that Morales’ moves “against the working class” have led to “the first large scale action of workers in opposition to the Morales government”.

According to Lopez, “demonstrations were held around the country [on May 4], accompanied by a 24-hour general strike which was then extended indefinitely”.

Despite the “sell-out” of the Bolivian Workers’ Centre (COB) leadership, Lopez assured us “the strike is well into its second week”.

A deal struck between Morales and the COB has been “resolutely rejected”, Lopez said, and “the strike continues”.

The ‘indefinite general strike’ that wasn’t

On May 1, as well as nationalising four electricity companies, Morales restated his government would not increase workers’ salaries by more than 5%.

This was met with protests in various cities, the largest of which was the COB-organised rally in La Paz.

One indication of its size is La Prensa’s report that a 300 strong contingent of factory workers (whose union was a key organiser of the protest) tried to jump in front of the miners at the front of the rally, leading to clashes.

COB general secretary Pedro Montes announced a follow-up 24-hour strike for May 4.

Reporting on the May 4 “general strike”, Bolpress said, “hundreds of teachers, factory workers and health workers .... alternated down the Prado in La Paz” in divided marches.

La Prensa said “at least 500” factory workers descended on the labour ministry, where they attempted to burn down the front door, leading to 15 arrests.

Pedro Alberto Calderon, a leader of the La Paz factory workers, continuing the dispute with the miners by calling Montes’s his expulsion from the COB “because he has betrayed the whole working class” by not marching in La Paz, La Prensa said.

Montes instead chose to join a miners’ march in Oruro.

News sources also reported 500 health workers marched in Santa Cruz. In Cochabamba, factory workers blocked the local bus terminal.

About 500 to 1000 marched in Sucre and smaller protests were held in the other capital cities.

“In the combative city of El Alto”, Bolpress said, “productive activity was normal”, as in most of Bolivia.

On May 7, a COB assembly called for an “indefinite general strike” to begin May 10, La Razon said.

Bolpress said that day, Bolivia’s largest peasant organisation, the United Confederation of Bolivian Peasant Workers (CSUTCB), the national women’s peasant federation, the coca growers’ union from the Chapare, and the Departmental Workers Centre of Santa Cruz defended the government and against COB’s actions measures, because “they only hurt the brothers and sisters of the countryside and the country”.

The CSUTCB is the largest COB affiliate, representing 1.5 million peasants. It is a key part of Morales’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party.

By May 11, everyone agreed the “indefinite general strike” was a flop. La Razon’s website that day read: “Scarce support for general strike”.

Union leaders representing teachers, health workers and factory workers did not strike, but were negotiating with the government, La Razon said.

In an article headlined “The government’s offers weaken COB protests”, Bolpress said union divisions “weakened to the point of converting to almost null the general strike”.

Instead, La Prensa said, 300 workers, mainly miners, gathered in Caracollo to begin a 200km walk to La Paz.

The night before, the COB and the government reached a tentative agreement to lower the retirement age from 65 to 58 (51 for miners). Bosses would also be forced to contribute to workers’ pension funds.

The COB, affiliated unions and government officials began to discuss the new proposals. Bolpress said that, although the COB agreed to the new proposals, some teachers, health workers and factory workers rejected it.

La Razon said after futher discussions, the health workers’ union also agreed to the government proposals and called off future actions.

ABI reported on May 13 that Guido Midma, the executive secretary of the miners’ federation who was approvingly quoted in Lopez’s article, said: “The miners’ federation will not allow others to attack [the COB]. On the contrary, we call on these sectors to reflect because they are automatically marginalising themselves.”

A small contingent of mainly teachers continued the march to La Paz. Factory workers and teachers pledged to once again “radicalise” their protests on May 18.

They also continued to call for Montes’ removal and the sacking of several government ministers.

By May 17, La Prensa said the La Paz factory workers’ union had decided to postpone their actions. Union leader Wilson Mamani said the decision was taken at the request of other factory workers around the country.

On May 18, media reports said between 3000 and 15,000 teachers arrived in La Paz, culminating the march from Caracollo.

The National Confederation of Urban Teachers, however, was no longer supporting the march, although it continued to oppose the government’s position.

Teachers’ union leader Federico Pinaya told La Razon some sectors of the union were trying to use the protests in the lead up to internal union elections.

Rural teachers unions pulled out of the protests and returned to the negotiating table.

By May 21, the only sector still protesting was a militantly anti-Morales section of the urban teachers union, who were demanding their wages be brought to the level of rural teachers. But even the leaders of the teachers’ union have since come to an agreement with the government, subject to approval from the membership.

Bolivian reality

The small scale of the strikes and protests does not mean the government’s proposed pay rise should not be debated or challenged.

There are tensions between the Morales government and its base. In the April 4 national elections, MAS faced more competition from dissident MAS sectors than right-wing forces. The Morales government has also had to confront a range of small, but significant, conflicts with sectors traditionally aligned with MAS.

It is clear the movement for change in Bolivia needs to reflect on some of these warning signs.

However, confusing an “indefinite general strike” with a lot of huffing and puffing by a few union leaders, and symbolic protests, mixed with a good dose of internal union politicking, only leads us away from the real issues.

Today, the Bolivian workers’ movement is far from the powerful force some Bolivian union leaders and foreign leftist like to fantasy it still is.

Bolivia’s organised workers’ movement is still suffering from the defeats inflicted by the implementation of neolibeal policies.

About 62% of the working class is in the informal sector, 83% in small companies with less than 10 workers, and the unionisation rate is only 23%. This rate has steady increased under the Morales government.

Nor is this the same Bolivia as in the past.

The 1970 COB thesis Lopez quoted approvingly does not mention the word “indigenous” once, despite the long-oppressed indigenous peoples making up about two thirds of the population.

If this policy of refusing to acknowledge indigenous peoples’ existence was mistaken then, it is criminal today.

Today, a revolutionary movement has developed, whose future is still to be determined — even if it didn’t occur according to COB theses or manuals from afar.

With the COB in steady decline, it was indigenous and peasant sectors that led the resistance to the military dictatorship in 1978, and constructed the CSUTCB as its own independent organisation in 1979.

These sectors led the process of recapturing the historically marginalised indigenous peoples’ self-identity and pride.

The resistance to neoliberalism over 1990-2005 did not emerge from the factories. It began in the countryside and spread to indigenous workers and the urban poor.

The main indigenous and peasant organisations decided it was necessary to move from resistance to taking power. In the 1990s, they decided at a congress of Bolivia’s most powerful unions to build their own political instrument to this end — creating what is now the MAS.

Indigenous struggles

As a result of this historic decision and the mass struggles that followed, they put one of their own in the presidency in 2005, electing Morales with a record high of 54% of the vote.

A new constitution incorporating the rights of indigenous peoples, the start of land reform, the nationalisation of important natural resources and increased state social spending to the poor are some of the gains won since.

Lopez’s article mentions none of this.

Morales also plays a leading role internationally in attacking the capitalist system for its responsibility for the climate crisis. Morales hosted a “people’s summit” in Cochabamba in April that brought together 35,000 people from around the world to organize to fight back.

This does not mean the government cannot be criticised or that workers should not fight for their demands.

But to paint the Morales government as the main enemy because of a dispute over wages, while failing to mention even once the suffering and resistance of the most marginalised who have benefited most from the Morales government, is blind sectarianism.

To raise the wage demands of sector of workers as the central issue in Bolivian politics, while ignoring the changes under way and the challenge any revolutionary government would face in lifting South America’s poorest nation out of poverty and dependency, is pure and simple economism — that is, counter-posing demands about wages to the broader struggles of the oppressed.

Such positions are rejected by Bolivia’s indigenous majority because they understand that, for the first time, they are charting their own path towards liberation.

Bolivia’s revolutionary process needs a strong independent working class to help push it forward. But those who denounce anyone who tries to relate to this reality as “sell-outs” don’t help such a cause.

Republished from Green Left Weekly

BOLIVIA: Peoples Conference model of inclusion offers only path forward on climate change

Nick Buxton

The Peoples' conference on climate change showed that a global movement, much larger than anyone imagined and with firm proposals, has coalesced and gathered strength

In the aftermath of the dismal outcomes of the Copenhagen climate summit, US chief climate envoy Jonathan Pershing was quick to blame the failure on the UN's inclusive approach and proposed that some future meetings should be restricted to major countries. “[It is] impossible to imagine a negotiation of enormous complexity where you have a table of 192 countries involved in all the detail,” Pershing argued, adding that “We are not really worried about what Haiti says it is going to do about greenhouse gas emissions.” For the US, apparently, too much democracy and inclusion is a bad thing.

Bolivia, which along with 160 countries, had been excluded from last-minute talks on the Copenhagen Accord took the opposite approach at the recent World Peoples' Conference on Climate Change and Rights of Mother Earth held in Cochabamba, 19-22 April 2010.

Rather than looking to limit participation , Bolivia decided to be more inclusive, inviting not just every government but also representatives of every civil society and popular organisation more than willing to get into “all the detail” of climate negotiations because of its implications for humanity. President Morales in his invitation to the conference said that “As there are no agreements and profound ideological differences on the best way to confront the threats that threaten the world, it is vital that peoples mobilise and decide the policies that need to be developed.”

The resonance of Morales' call was demonstrated just four months later, when instead of the expected 10,000 people, over 35,000 people from 140 countries including representatives of 48 governments arrived in the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia for an historic debate on how to confront one of the greatest crises the world has faced.

The main work of the conference was carried out in 17 working groups covering issues within official UN negotiations such as Kyoto Protocol, Adaptation, Forests as well as critical issues that are not currently part of negotiations such as agriculture and food sovereignty.

These working groups developed concrete proposals including demands for developed countries to reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2017, a draft declaration for Rights of Mother Earth (or nature rights), the establishment of a Climate Justice Tribunal to provide some legal sanction against governments, individuals and companies that contribute to climate change, a call for the recognition of climate refugees within all international refugee conventions, the rejection of transnational extractive industries on indigenous lands, and provision of financial resources of up to 6% of GNP of developed countries for adaptation, technology transfer, capacity building and mitigation.

At a more fundamental level and in a critical debate that has no presence at all at the official UNFCCC level, the working group on harmony with nature examined the critical issue of how to change humans relationship with the planet we live on in order to recognise our interdependence and to end a relationship of exploitation. South African lawyer, Cormac Cullinan, explained the importance of this new paradigm: “Everyone agrees that climate change is threatening humanity and many species, etc but in official negotiations no-one is prepared to look at the causes of climate change. Climate change is merely a symptom of a profound imbalance between humans and nature. We must find mechanisms and laws that help us heal our relationship with Mother Earth.”

At the forefront of the working groups were an impressive number of grassroots activists from every corner of the globe involved directly in the struggle against climate change. These community leaders were clearly empowered by taking part in a constructive and participative process of developing proposals for tackling climate change.

Faith Gemmill, part of the Alaska Tribal Council fighting fossil fuel development in her region, said that in Copenhagen indigenous people had been outside the summit but that in Cochabamba they were at the heart of negotiations. “In Alaska, we find ourselves both fighting fossil fuel extraction and the impact of climate change. Indigenous people have a lot to contribute through the negotiations and to change the nature of the climate change debate.”

Soumya Dutta who works with forest peoples in India explained how powerful it was that “the very people at the bottom of the pyramid (on whose exploitation - along with the exploitation of nature - the capitalist industrial system thrives) who have taken control and dictated the whole process. The process certainly was not smooth .. but the amount of emotive energy, the richness of living-experiences coupled with informed decision making logic and the amazingly democratic process that somehow emerged... [was] a whole new experience.”

Taking an inclusive consultative approach on a crisis that has as many perspectives as there are Parts Per Million of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere certainly had its challenges. The experience of the Internet working groups in the run up to the conference quickly revealed the problems of giving as much space to one eccentric individual as a well founded network with a developed position. Working groups such as the one on Forests had serious political divergences, for example over the controversial market-based UN programme Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries. There were also tensions between diverse cultures of civil society based on different languages, different forms of political accountability and different strategic approaches.

Moreover, despite the language of inclusion, the Bolivian government was not immune from its own politics of exclusion, demonstrated when they prohibited a number of meetings within the summit which critically examined Bolivia's own record on environmental issues. The government argued that the national focus was not pertinent to a conference focused on international climate issues where the chief responsibility for the crisis lies with the industrialised North.

Ironically however their attempts to exclude what became known as Group 18 actually gave the group added visibility. It also highlighted the very important discussion on how to resolve contradictions between the Bolivian government's rhetoric on “living in harmony with Mother Earth” with the environmental damage caused by Bolivia's continued dependence on fossil fuels and mineral extraction. While these issues pose serious dilemmas for an impoverished country which in recent years has made significant progress in redistributing wealth from the nationalisation of gas resources, they highlight at a micro level some of the key debates that will need to take place worldwide as we seek to remove our dependence on fossil fuels.

However, these controversies ultimately highlighted the power of Bolivia's inclusive call, rather than detracted from it. The thing about an inclusive approach, and the reason why countries like the US are so opposed to it, is that you don't control the conversation. As a result, both inside and outside the conference, there was a vigorous debate on every aspect of climate change policy. This debate is bound to continue. Yet despite vigorous debates and differences, it was impressive to see how international movements in Cochabamba succeeded in constructing consensus around radical proposals emerging from every one of the 17 (or 18) working groups.

Critics of the conference have said that the conference proposals will have no bearing on official negotiations and have tried to relegate it as a left-wing talking shop. Much of the mainstream media chose to ignore the conference almost entirely, given that no major economic powers were present. The perceived wisdom, reinforced by individuals such as US climate envoy Pershing as well as many liberal commentators, is that the only solution for climate change will come from a stitch-up between the US and a few major powers, and that the views of the world's majority are irrelevant.

However political and media elites' attempts to dismiss the power of Cochabamba more likely shows their naivete or political blindness rather than that of the social movements. The Peoples' conference on climate change showed that a global movement, much larger than anyone imagined and with firm proposals, has coalesced and gathered strength. Led by people on the front lines of climate change, from India to Alaska to Africa in alliance with scientists, researchers, artists as well as developing country states like Bolivia, Cochabamba unveiled a significant international movement determined to develop proposals that tackle the root causes of climate change. The proposals may seem radical to some but are ultimately effective proposals to preventing runaway climate change. Many social movements are already working to enact these proposals at local, regional and state level in a myriad of ways from blocking coal plants to developing organic agriculture and will continue to work on real solutions regardless of whether they are taken up by the UN.

As one of the banners at the conference summed up: Nature doesn't do compromises. We either live within the limits of the world's bio-capacity or we don't. While the world's most powerful political leaders ignore this message in favour of policies of weak compromise, empty commitments and exclusion of the majority of the world's people, the movement present at the historic Cochabamba conference offers one of the main hopes that humanity can effectively address the climate crisis.

Republished from TNI

Nick Buxton is TNI Online Communications and Media Officer. He has been based in California since September 2008 and prior to that lived in Bolivia for four years, working as writer/web editor at Fundación Solón, a Bolivian organisation working on issues of trade, water, culture and historical memory.

He is a long-term activist on global justice and peace issues. In the late 1990s he was communications manager at Jubilee 2000, part of the global movement that put unjust international debt on the global political agenda.

His publications include: “Networking for debt cancellation” in Advocacy, activism and the Internet (Lyceum books, 2001); “Civil society and debt cancellation” in Civil society and human rights (Routledge, 2004) and “Politics of debt” in Dignity and Defiance: Bolivia’s challenge to globalisation (University of California Press/Merlin Press UK, January 2009).

Nigerian activist: People’s climate summit ‘a turning point’

Federico Fuentes, Cochabamba

“There are two ways forward: Either save capitalism, or save Mother Earth”, Bolivian President Evo Morales said, stressing that this was the choice facing governments at a May 7 press conference in New York. There, he discussed the outcomes of the 35,000-strong World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth with United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

On April 26, a delegation made up of Bolivian government representatives and environmental activists from four continents officially handed over the summit’s proposals in the discussion leading up to the next round of UN-backed climate talks, which are to be held in November in Cancun, Mexico.

The proposals from the people’s summit — held in Cochabamba, Bolivia over April 19-22 — included a 50% reduction of emissions by developed countries, the payment of climate debt to developing countries, a proposed Universal Declaration on Mother Earth Rights, and a call to replace the destructive and consumerist capitalist system at the root of the climate crisis.

Morales said: “If Cancun is the same as Copenhagen”, and the voice of the people that emerged out of the people’s summit is ignored, “then unfortunately the United Nations will lose its authority among people in the world”.

Nigerian environmental activist and chair of Friends of the Earth International (FOEI) Nnimmo Bassey was a member of the delegation. He said the people’s summit had been “a turning point”.

In a UN press statement Bassey said the outcomes of this summit had become organising tools to build a grassroots movement aimed at forcing governments to listen to the people that elected them.

Speaking in Cochabamba, Bassey noted that his organisation, the largest international federation of autonomous environmental collectives with a presence in 77 countries, actively supported Morales’ call for a people’s summit on climate change “because we believe in the climate vision of the government and peoples of Bolivia”.

“We believe that it is time for peoples and governments to sit together, draw up programs of action and act together” said Bassey, whose organisation’s work is summed up in three key words: “mobilise, resist, transform”.

Bassey condemned the fact that the voice of the people had been excluded in many of the official governmental meetings. As an example, he said FOEI and many other organisations were locked out of the official negotiations in Copenhagen on some of the days.

He said: “We believe that this is clearly not the way to go, because if the peoples’ voices are not heard, then how can we come up with the right responses [to the climate crisis]?”

Here in Cochabamba, we have “a people-driven process: there is no corporate lobby present like in Copenhagen.

“That is why we are here as part of the people’s movements for climate justice … [This summit is] critical to the future of the planet because we are having discussions among people who are in the front line of being victims of climate change.”

Bassey said his organisation rejected the supposed “agreement” that came out of Copenhagen, “because if it is allowed to stand, poor and vulnerable nations will be exposed to grave danger”.

“For example, the political commitment expressed by countries that accept the accord that came out of Copenhagen means that we can expect a temperature rise of more than 4°C. What this will mean for Africa, for other continents, is a temperature rise of more than 6°C. This would lead to the collapse of agriculture, water supplies and a massive increase in climate migration.”

For this reason, the climate justice movement needs a program for action that includes food sovereignty, energy sovereignty and a rejection of agro-fuels, which are “causing mass starvation by taking farmland that used to be used for food for people and using them for crops for machines.”

Bassey also said FOEI opposed market-based solutions, saying these were just a scheme for countries and companies to “claim credits and get paid to release more carbon emissions into the atmosphere”.

“This is a false solution; the real solution is to stop emissions.”

While these and many more demands for climate justice were enshrined in the peoples’ agreement that came out of Cochabamba. But one issue that did not was the thorny issue of fossil fuel extraction. This is in a in a context where the economies of many underdeveloped countries, such as Bolivia, rely on such extraction to survive.

“Oil should be left in the soil, coal should be left in the hole, and tar sands should be kept underground” declared Bassey during his speech as part of the opening ceremony of the summit.

Bassey said those who say “if we don’t extract oil, someone else will”, are ignoring the fact that the benefits of such extraction never go to local communities.

Transnationals always ensure “investment is always directed to benefit the global North, and not for needs of the people”.

“In our fight against global warming and destructive extraction, we don’t accept that anyone at all is better than somebody else.”

He referred to the example of the struggle of his people in Ogoniland, where leading environmental activist Ken Saro Wiwa was killed in 1995 for protesting against Shell.

“In Ogoniland, they declared that Shell could not operate there anymore, and until now they don’t accept any alternative oil corporation to come and operate. So it is possible to refuse one corporation and refuse others because the difference between Shell or Chevron or Mobil or whoever, is no more different that the difference between Coca Cola and Pepsi.”

Understanding it was impossible to immediately halt such activities and a transition was necessary, he said it was also necessary to understand that “the extraction of fossil fuels is extremely degrading to the environment and is a large contributor to global warming: the more you extract oil, the more you increase the carbon stored in the atmosphere.”

“People think that fossil fuels are a cheap form of energy, but this is only because no one is paying the true cost of oil: no one is paying for the pollution, no one is paying for the people who have been displaced, who are dying as a result of its extraction. If the true cost of oil was to be calculated nobody would touch oil.”

He said in Nigeria, they were campaigning to keep fossil fuels in the ground and “this is a campaign that comes from one corner of the world and is going to spread around because it is the real solution to climate change.”

Bolivia’s mining dilemmas

Federico Fuentes, Cochabamba

Perhaps no other sector better exemplifies the challenge the Bolivian government faces in lifting the country out of the poverty and dependency afflicting South America’s poorest nation than its all-important mining industry.

Mining minister and former miners’ union leader Jose Pimentel told Green Left Weekly: “Bolivia has been a mining country for more than 500 years, ever since the Spanish came and discovered the legendary wealth [of the silver mines] of Potosi.”

“And when we look at the situation today, we can say that a large part of the country continues to depend on mining.”

For example, Pimentel said an estimated 90,000 workers affiliated to hundreds of cooperatives are attempting to subsist from mining “in a rudimentary manner”.

“This sector impacts on important cities such as Potosi and Oruro, where practically the only productive activity is mining.

“So to get rid of mining in one blow would not only bring with it social problems, but could even create situations of rebellions because large groups of people would be directly affected.”

Moreover, revenue from mining has also become increasing important for the government’s social spending aimed at lifting up the poor majority.

Rising global prices meant that mineral export revenue jumped in the first quarter of this year to US$464 million. This represented 32% of Bolivia’s total export revenue — a 77.7% jump in revenue compared to the same quarter last year.

With companies now forced to pay higher royalties and the state playing a more active role in the sector, the government has been able to redistribute a greater share of this wealth via its pro-poor social programs.

But the government is facing pressure from local indigenous communities demanding that it comply with its environmental discourse.

It also faces troubles in its relations with mining multitnationals and the challenge of using a weakened state that was privatised and dismantled by previous neoliberal governments to state to promote its industrialisation drive.

One example is the project to extract and process iron ore from Mutun, the 8th largest iron ore mine in the world.

In 2007, the government signed a contract with Indian company Jindal to exploit 50% of the Mutun mine. The agreement included the construction of an iron smelter and steel factory to ensure that value-added products would be exported (not just raw materials, as is often the case with poor nations).

The project, involving a projected investment of $2.1 billon by Jindal, was presented as evidence that a stronger state working with private capital could develop the country’s economy.

Yet, three years later, this dream is no closer to being realised. Relations between the government and the company have taken a turn for the worst.

Due to Jindal’s lack of compliance with its contractual obligations, the government announced in April its decision to collect $18 million in warranty bonds. It accused Jindal of having invested only $12 million of the US$600 million required by now under the terms of the contract.

Jindal has challenged the move, blaming government inefficiency in dealing with the relocation of local communities.

Having neglected to nationalise the land with the iron ore deposits, the government has had to go through tedious and drawn-out negotiations to verify and buy-out individual landholders.

This process has been further hampered by the fact that most landowners had no land titles to legally sell, forcing the government to delineate each landholding. Some peasants unhappy with the amount of land designated to them have refused to sell.

In April, tensions also boiled over between local indigenous communities and owners of the massive San Cristobal mine, Sumitomo Corporation, in Potosi.

San Cristobal accounted for 55% of Bolivia’s mineral exports last year, with Sumitomo netting around $1 billon in profit.

Locals are angry that in an area suffering from desertification, and where access to fresh water is increasingly scarce, Sumitomo extracts 50,000 litres of underground water a day, free of charge, while paying a tiny $38 million in royalties last year.

When this was publicly exposed, locals began to set up roadblocks, burnt down a local company office and overturned several train carriages carrying mineral exports from the mine to Chile.

The problem for the government is that under the current mining code, Sumitomo is able to make use of “legal vacuums” that place no obligation on the company to pay for its water usage.

Pimentel said this will have to change in the new code set be presented to the Plurinational Assembly later this year.

“It is impossible to continue these kinds of mining practices.” He said the new law must “enforce a more rational and efficient use of these resources”.

Sumitomo claims such measures, and the protests, are putting in danger its investments and financial viability.

Perhaps the government’s biggest dilemma is the proposed, extremely lucrative, large-scale exploitation of the world’s largest lithium mine.

An estimated 19 million tonnes of lithium, roughly half of the world’s supply, is said to be located in Bolivia’s Uyuni salt flats. At stake is about $1 billon a year.

“In the case of lithium”, Pimentel said, “we are now constructing a pilot plant to extract lithium as well as boron, potassium and magnesium”.

“Next year we hope to enter into the final stage of our project, with the creation of an industrial plant, the first job of which will be to produce lithium carbonate.

“Afterwards, we will move towards industrialisation of lithium carbonate, producing things such as batteries, where naturally we will have to look for strategy partners that can guarantee us technology and markets.”

There is no shortage of multinationals seeking to become “strategic partners”.

No official tendering process has opened, but rumors are French company Bollore-Eramet is front runner for the partnership, with its proposed “Franco-Bolivian project for Bolivians to live well and in harmony with Pachamama [Mother Earth]”.

Other contenders include Sumitomo and the South Korean Cores Corporation.

Cores is currently involved in the Coro Coro hydrometallurgical project to extract and process about 10 million tonnes of copper.

The project is criticised by indigenous communities protesting the lack of prior consultation, and plans to divert local river ways to supply the mine with water. This will directly affect about 300 peasant families.

The lithium deposits being located within one of Bolivia’s most famous tourist attractions. Concerns about the environmental impact of mining have been raised.

Concerns have also been raised over the lack of transparency and public discussion regarding such a critical project for Bolivia’s future.

Given the problems with the practices of the multinationals, which rather than helping Bolivia’s industrialisation have kept Bolivia dependent on the extraction-based development model, serious questions are being raised about the sector’s future.

Bolivia: ‘No excuses for killing Mother Earth’

Federico Fuentes, Cochabamba

Under the new constitution approved in January 2009, the state now controls all minerals, metals, precious and semi-precious stones in the country.

While respecting previously granted concessions to private companies, it has restricted new concessions to joint ventures with the state

In 2007, the Bolivian government returned 100% control of the Huanuni tin mine to the state-owned Comibol.

On May 3, the government nationalised the Glencore-owned antimony smelter, which has been out of operation for more than two years.

The decision was taken due to Glencore’s 10-year non-compliance with its investment commitments, instead choosing to begin dismantling the privatised smelter.

It follows on from the government’s 2007 decision to nationalise the Glencore-owned Vinto tin smelter.

However, Comibol is far from having recovered from two decades of disinvestment and privatisation by successive neoliberal governments.

Explaining the need for “strategic partners”, Bolivia’s mining minister Jose Pimentel told Green Left Weekly of the difficulty of accessing credit for industrialisation projects.

“Multilateral or commercial banks generally give loans for infrastructure, electricity, highways but not for industrialisation.

“This has been one of the factors why we have had to seek out strategic partners that can give us the necessary technology and invest capital, and guarantee markets for us.”

But, facing trouble with its “strategic partners”, the government has recently indicated that it may be willing to move ahead independently where possible.

One example is the announcement it will begin mining 50% of the Mutun iron ore deposits. To finance this, the government said it would use revenue from the sale of US$11 million worth of iron ore reserves that Comibol has in storage.

Pimentel also said that after five years of steady economic growth, Bolivia’s currency reserves “have reached $9 billion and I think that some of the projects we have in the pipeline could be directly financed from there”.

Bolivia is also discussing with Venezuela setting up a “grand-national” joint state mining company, within the framework of Bolivarian Alliance of the Americas (ALBA), an anti-imperialist trading bloc launched by Cuba and Venezuela in 2004.

“This is a space that we see as much more important, given that sovereign peoples are beginning to negotiate among themselves in order to replace the transnationals.”

Regarding environmental concerns, Pimentel said, “while we can demand the companies improve their environmental practices by carrying out a more rational and efficient exploitation, we can not ask the same of the workers in cooperatives who live directly from mining”.

“We believe we have to carry out a policy of supporting small producers to solve environmental problems by creating the mechanisms whereby they can carry out their activities without large economic costs.”

A new stricter mining code, combined with “stringently assuring that mining companies respect all environmental problems”, means there should “be no excuse for the mining industry damaging the environment and killing Mother Earth”, Pimentel said.

Bolivia: Between Mother Earth and an ‘extraction economy’

Federico Fuentes, Cochabamba

The tremendous success of the April 19-22 World Peoples Summit on Climate Change and Mother Earth Rights held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, has confirmed the well-deserved role of its initiator — Bolivian President Evo Morales — as one of the world’s leading environmental advocates.

Since being elected the country’s first indigenous president in 2005, Morales has continuously denounced the threat posed by the climate crisis and environmental destruction.

Morales has pointed the figure at the real cause of the problem: the consumerist and profit-driven capitalist system.

Morales is leading a powerful indigenous movement pushing change in Bolivia and the region, which raises restoring harmony with nature as one of its key banners.

This revolutionary movement, with indigenous and peasant organisations in the forefront, has pushed the traditional Bolivian elite from power through a combination of electoral battles and mass insurrections.

It has begun the struggle to create a new “plurinational” Bolivia — based on inclusion and equality for Bolivia’s 36 indigenous nations.

There is an immense sense of indigenous pride and empowerment in Bolivia, a country whose original inhabitants were traditionally excluded.

This revitalised indigenous pride was a key feature of the Cochabamba conference, reflecting the important role of the region’s indigenous and peasant movements in environmental struggles.

The conference’s final declaration contained a strong emphasis on “the recovery and strengthening of the knowledge, wisdom, and ancestral practices of Indigenous Peoples” as an alternative to the destructive capitalist model.

Bolivian vice-minister Raul Prada said the conference represented the start of a “world revolution of Vivir Bien”.

Vivir Bien is an Aymara indigenous concept that means “living well and not at the cost of others”.

Imperialism

Together with these elements of indigenous “cosmovision”, the declaration included a strong anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist sentiment, again reflecting the mood of the summit.

It argued that, “for there to be balance with nature, there must first be equity among human beings”. It squarely denounced “developed countries, as the main cause of climate change”, calling on them to assume “their historical responsibility”.

Imperialist capitalism, benefiting First World multinational corporations, has not only intensified divisions between rich and poor within countries and environmental destruction. It has also entrenched divisions between developed and underdeveloped countries.

Having carved up the world among them, imperialist countries such as the United States and Australia have used their domination over Third World countries to keep them underdeveloped.
The economies of underdeveloped countries have been geared towards extracting raw materials for the benefit of the economies of the imperialist nations.

This gearing of Third World nations’ economies to providing cheap raw materials for export, at the mercy of market prices often manipulated by speculators, rather than seeking a rounded internal development, helps keep these countries in a state of permanent dependency and poverty.

Perhaps no country demonstrates this system better than Bolivia.

Four hundred years ago, the Bolivian mining town of Potosi was the third largest city in the world. Millions of tonnes of silver were extracted — helping finance a large part of Europe’s industrial development.

Today, thousands of cooperative miners work Potosi’s hollowed out silver mines in sub-human conditions to eke out a basic living.

Bolivia, whose resources made Europe rich, is South America’s poorest nation — its economy dependent raw minerals and gas exports.

Bolivia’s challenge

Breaking this dependency is a key challenge for the Bolivian government — and brings with it many difficulties.

In the 2005 election campaign, now-Bolivian Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Lineras summed up this dilemma when he said Bolivia’s choice was “industrialisation or death”.

The Morales government has reclaimed state control over gas and mineral reserves and nationalised 13 companies involved in gas, mining, telecommunications, railways and electricity.

This increased state intervention means the public sector has increased from 12% of gross domestic product in 2005 to 32% today.

With the 2006 nationalisation of gas reserves and signing of contracts with private companies in the sector more favorable to the state, the hydrocarbon sector alone has dramatically increased its contribution to the state budget from US$678 million in royalties in 2005 to $2 billion last year.

This extra revenue has allowed the government to increase social spending, particularly through new benefit payments to pensioners, families with children in school and pregnant women.

An estimated 2.8 million people out of Bolivia’s population of 9 million receive one of these new payments.

All of the macroeconomic indicators show important improvements in Bolivia’s economy. Last year, Bolivia had the highest rate of economic growth in the region.

Having maintained a budget surplus for the past five years, the government has ensured its international reserves have reached a record US$9 billion.

Despite this, the government has largely proven unable to make serious headway with its industrialisation program.

Several of its key mining projects face serious strife (see the article next page) and the country is yet to open a single gas processing plant.

A combination of troublesome relations with multinationals and a lack of technical cadre, among other factors, help explain why.

As a result, Bolivia’s economy — and therefore the social programs — is arguably more dependent on extraction-based activity than five years ago.

Debates and dilemmas

This problem gets to the heart of debates that arose at the climate conference over difficult questions. These include the involvement of progressive governments, such as in Bolivia, Venezuela and Ecuador, in oil mining in the Amazon, as well as the deepening of the extraction-based economic model in Latin America.

Alberto Acosta, the former president of Ecuador’s constituent assembly that produced the world’s first constitution that explicitly defends the rights of Mother Earth, said: “It is necessary to question the capitalist logic and construct a post-capitalist society.”

However, he added: “We have to clearly point out those that are responsible [for the climate crisis] and look at our responsibilities.

“While it is true that the rich are the principal culprits, our countries that are tied to the world economy with an extractivist logic guarantee that these processes of accumulation continue reproducing themselves.”

It would be suicidal to argue that Bolivia should simply shut down its gas and mining industry, with the deadly social impacts that would entail.

The dilemma, however, was summarised by former Bolivian hydrocarbon minister Andres Soliz Rada. He described the “trap” Morales finds himself in, between “his industrialist offers with which he achieved his re-election and the indigenist demands to comply with his proclaimed defence of the environment”.

Morales expressed this dilemma when he responded to environmentalist and indigenous groups who oppose oil exploration in the Amazon by saying: “What will Bolivia live off?”

Without oil revenue, there would be no money for government benefits payments, he added.

Morales’s comments might surprise some only familiar with his powerful denunciations of inaction on climate change on the international stage. But the reality is his government’s proposed industrialisation program and redistributive social spending is a big part of why it maintains high popular support.

This contradiction is enforced on Bolivia by the imperialist system. Overcoming it ultimately requires rich nations to pay their climate debt — and help provide the means for poor countries such as Bolivia to develop sustainably.

In the meantime, Third World governments that seek to break the deadly cycle of poverty and underdevelopment will face difficult choices.

In 2007, Garcia Linera explained: “The outlook according to which the indigenous world has its own cosmovision, radically opposed to that of the West, is typical of latecomer indigenists or those closely linked to certain NGOs ...

“Basically, everyone wants to be modern. The Felipe Quispe [indigenous] insurgents, in 2000, were demanding tractors and internet.”

One example of this was the recent tensions between indigenous peasants groups over changes to the government’s land reform law.

Indigenous organisations from the Amazonian region in the east strongly criticised former vice-minister of land, Victor Camacho, and the Unique Confederation of Rural Labourers of Bolivia (CSUTCB) peasant confederation, for trying to “peasantise” indigenous communities via changes that would prioritise individual, and not collective, land titles.

This apparent contradiction between an “Andean cosmovision” (a concept that seemingly leaves out the other 34 indigenous groups based in Bolivia’s non-Andean regions) and indigenous peasants demanding individual rather that collective land titles can be understood if we grasp the dynamic underlining the Morales government.

Indigenous nationalism

Rather than representing a desire to return to ancient indigenous times, this government is the product of a new anti-imperialism whose roots lie in previous nationalist movements.

It surpasses previous nationalist experiments because, for the first time, it is not military officers or the urban middle classes leading the project, but indigenous and peasant sectors.

Its solid core is represented not by indigenous organisations of indigenous peoples (who are also peasants) that have most questioned the apparent divorce between the governments Panchamama (“Mother Earth”) discourse and its action. It is represented by organisations of those peasants (who are also indigenous) that benefited from previous land reforms by nationalist governments — and today own individual plots.

This is not to deny the important role the specific organisational, economic and political models of the country’s indigenous people play in the process. This is what most clearly differentiates it from previous nationalist governments and is a crucial aspect of its revolutionary dynamic.

Nor can it be denied that the Bolivian government is the leading global advocate in defence of the environment and promoter of a global alliance to wage such a struggle, incorporating strong elements of indigenous cosmovision in its discourse.

However, there is the need for a serious debate in Bolivia, which appears to be beginning post-summit, over how to begin a transition from its extraction-based and dependent economy towards a post-capitalist, sustainable society.

This will require going beyond romantic declarations of the birth of a new “civilisatory and cultural perspective”, or a “world revolution of Vivir Bien”, and understanding the complex reality of Bolivian society and the difficult process of change underway.