Federico Fuentes
The results of Bolivia’s December 6 national elections confirmed the support won by President Evo Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party for the profound changes underway.
Morales increased his vote from 53.7% in 2005 (a record at the time), winning 64.2% of the vote in a poll marked by the highest level of participation ever. Some 93.9% of registered voters took part.
A divided opposition with no clear project, whose traditional parties have all but disintegrated, was unable to contain the MAS landslide.
In the MAS strongholds in the Andean west, Morales scored 80.2% in La Paz, 79.4% in Oruro and 78.3% in Potosi.
His vote reached more than 90% in rural areas. Among Bolivians overseas, allowed to vote for the first time, Morales won almost 70%, including more than 90% among Bolivians in Argentina and Brazil.
He also increased his vote in the east, which is controlled by opposition prefects (governors). He won 56% in Chuquisaca and 51% in Tarija, as well as 44% in Pando, 37.6% in Beni and 40.9% in the opposition heartland of Santa Cruz.
The vote showed Morales maintains powerful support among his traditional base of indigenous peoples, campesinos and workers, and has extended his support further into middle-class sectors.
More than an election victory
Ironically, in a country that had been in a permanent state of convulsion with threats of civil war and disintegration, Bolivia appears one of the most stable countries in the region.
The reason lies in the resounding political defeat of a right-wing anti-government offensive in August-September 2008.
Morales was first elected in 2005, on the back of five years of intense social confrontations during which politics was defined more on the streets than in parliament.
Morales was quick to note that his election did not mean the poor majority had “won power”.
Once elected, Morales, together with the social movements (particular the indigenous and campesino organisations that make up the heart of the MAS), sought to implement the key demands that emerged from the peoples’ struggles: winning back control over Bolivia’s natural resources, in particular the nationalisation of gas; and a constituent assembly to draft a new constitution to “decolonise” the state and end the political exclusion of the indigenous majority.
All of this was too much for the rich elite, which felt that it was losing power to the same people it had long exploited.
Almost immediately, the elite launched a fierce onslaught against the government, using its control by its representatives over the prefectures in the east, the right-wing majority in the senate, and its media and economic might.
This battle reached a climax in September 2008, after Morales’s crushing victory in a recall referendum on the presidency the previous month. Unleashing a campaign of terror, opposition leaders, the US embassy and some high ranking military officials attempted to carry out a coup.
This offensive was defeated by the combined action of the social movements and loyal soldiers, who were mobilised directly by Morales to areas where military commanders were refusing to stop the coup plotters.
The defeat of the coup created the political space for the adoption of the new constitution and Morales’s re-election. The MAS now enjoys a two-thirds majority in the senate.
On election night, Morales said the MAS’s parliamentary majority “obliges me to accelerate the process of change”.
“Now we have a free path to apply the constitution to the benefit of all ... now we have an enormous responsibility to deepen and speed-up the process of change and proclaim socialism.”
Breaking the elite’s economic power
Morales has begun increasingly implementing his land reform program. Until now, it had been stalled by the violent opposition of paramilitaries tied to agribusiness and the weakness of his government in the east.
In moving on land reform, it seems the Morales government is seeking to break the economic power of the large landowning oligarchy based in the east.
Only days after his re-election, Morales ordered the seizure of 12,500 hectares of land illegally acquired by the family of Branco Marinkovic, one of the country’s largest soybean magnates and a leader of the violent campaign to overthrow Morales.
With 20 police officers, the vice-minister for land walked onto the property and ordered it be handed over to the local Guarani indigenous people.
The Marinkovic family is also fighting a legal battle to keep control of a slightly bigger ranch.
A week later, the government took control of 2800 hectares of land belonging to Osvaldo Monaterios, the owner of the Red Unitel television network and a fierce Morales critic.
Despite the extreme weakness of the right-wing opposition, the struggle is far from over.
US imperialism remains a big threat, as it showed with the military coup by US-trained officers in Honduras last years and the current occupation of Haiti.
Dangers
There are also dangers within the process of change and the old state the Morales government inherited — of bureaucracy, corruption, inefficiency and disputes over positions of power.
In a visit to Pando last November, Morales raised these problems. “There are some leaders of my party who think they are the owners of the process”, he said, referring to sectors within MAS that protested the fact that some MAS-backed candidates for the election where not MAS members.
“The process of change belongs to all the citizens, be they MAS supporters or not, given that we do not want more corruption or neoliberalism in the country.”
Morales said: “The state bureaucracy, which remains as a vice from the old state, is still an internal enemy within the process of change that halts and delays decisions that require speed and efficiency.”
Vice-president Alvaro Garcia Linera said in his January 21 swearing in speech that it was necessary to build a new state, “which the Bolivian people have proposed be built from below”.
The new state’s three pillars would be: “plurinationality” (recognition of indigenous equality); regional and indigenous autonomy within the framework of “a democratic decentralisation of power”; and a mixed economy in which the state plays the central role in strategic sectors.
Garcia Linera also noted the need to spread the socialist revolution internationally. “No revolution can triumph if it is not support by other revolutions in the world. The empire is a global demon, and the only way to defeat it is with another globalisation, otherwise the empire will impose itself.
“We are globalising the power of the people.”
Republished from Green Left Weekly
Showing posts with label Constituent Assembly. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Constituent Assembly. Show all posts
The Multinational State and the People, an Unprecedented Construction in Bolivia
Ximena Soruco Sologuren
Translated by Marcelo Virkel
Republished from Upside Down World
In January 2009 Bolivians adopted a New State Political Constitution, in which converged many histories and memories that coexisted during different cycles: the crisis of political parties, representative democracy and the neoconservative economic model caused pleas for the nationalization of resources and social control that echoed the 1952 Revolution -when miners, peasants and the middle class mobilized against the anti-nation (the conservative miner State). But also the memory of the anti-colonial struggles that transcended and confronted the Bolivian nation-state emerged with an unprecedented force: Tomás Katari, Tupac Katari (1781), Zárate Willka (1899), Guarayan leader Andrés Guayocho (1887), the battle of Kuruyuki de los guaraníes (1892), the movement of the empowered leaders (1900-1930), the Indigenismo and Katarismo (1970s), the demand for land and territory by lowlands indigenous people (1990s), etcetera.
Evo Morales embodies the intersection of the national-popular scope that emerged from within the nation-state during the Chaco War (1932-1936) and condensed during the 1952 Revolution, and the anti-colonial scope, whose resistance began during the conquest's early years and had its highest point in 1781, with incidents that were profound -because they emerged from outside of the nation-state-, but have not been so geographically widespread during the two hundred years of republican history, until now.
Is this an unprecedented intersection, in the sense that both scopes have been running in a parallel way without touching? If so, what is this intersection in reality and what are the alternatives of political construction open to us nowadays? The uprisings we mention have never been “pure” since they took place within the colonial context to which the national context latter superimposed, a fact that continued and intensified old contradictions in new ways; but certainly there was more symbolic weight in one scope or the other depending on who was leading the uprisings and forming the alliances, and if they were indigenous or mestizo. However, both scopes had to face the “colonial-national situation” that had created the clutter, that is, individuals experiencing different (ethnic, class, gender) dominance conditions within the system, and whose relationship with one another was one of a chained (self)denial (everyone on top of and against each other).
Thus, the expressions of anti-colonial resistance opted for subordinated alliance strategies with mestizo groups, villagers, artisans, miners, workers, and intellectuals. These alliances could dissolve due to their internal contradictions, until reaching a state of total confrontation. Similarly, national movements needed to address and organize the indigenous people as subordinates in order to achieve the proposed changes. Although these mestizo alliances in the national-popular scope had better success because they built new political systems, they ended up reproducing the modern nation-state that continued the colonial and capitalist dominance: the Republic's Independence, the Conservative State of 1899, the Nationalist State of 1952, and the Neoconservative State of 1985.
What are the possibilities of building something unprecedented, that is, to break the routine of the historical determinations and the gradual racial dominance that appears with unequal insertions under capitalism and modernity? What kind of organization among the groups that make up the motley of Bolivia will allow the achievement of hegemony without domination, but with enough strength to build a new political system? The challenge of this historical period seems to be the transformation of the clutter or the national-colonial situation into a complex organization without domination, an intersection between the indigenous and national-popular scopes strong enough to build something unprecedented. Neither decolonization understood only as “restitution” of the indigenous cultural identities nor realization of the modernity's unfulfilled promises. But what then?
The new Bolivian constitution raises this project -that still requires a political theory, an institutional engineering, and most importantly, the formation of new political subjetivities- of a multinational state. The preamble of the constitution recognizes these memories of resistance in order to build a new state: “The Bolivian people, of plural composition since the depth of history, inspired by past struggles; anti-colonial indigenous rebellion; independence; popular liberation struggles; indigenous, social and trade union marches; water and October wars; struggles for land and territory; with the memory of our martyrs, we build a new State.”
The alluded depth of history refers to the sources of resistance we had pointed out, both popular and indigenous; that is, it lies as a vertical rupture that crosses the layers of dominance: those of the colonial times that also burst into national cycles, and those of the national times that responded to the continual metamorphosis of dominance, but at the same time built new and shared senses of resistance.
But if the memory of the popular and indigenous past reactivates in the present as a power capable of paralysing the established order as it was by 2003 and building a new state as proposed in the constitution, an exercise of creation of alternatives appears. We think of this exercise as a relationship between people, state and pluralism that uses the nation-state as the general framework although reconfigured, because it considers the heterogeneity from an indigenous social and symbolic organization, that is, from a scope that is not modern.
The separation of scopes
The separation between what Zavaleta Mercado called “national-popular” and the anti-colonial rebellions occurred between the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but as a posteriori interpretation, that is, an interpretation made by the republican historiography that defined -under the frameworks of meaning at the time- which were and which were not pro-independence movements. The recognition of the struggles for independence in 1809 in what is now Bolivia, but which took place across the continent, separates from the anti-colonial indigenous tradition due to the concept of emancipation that it proposed. While Tupac Amaru and Tupak Katari were thinking about returning to a time prior to the Spanish colony, the pro-independence figures chose the project of the American Independence and the French Revolution: the establishment of a modern nation-state.
However, this separation is to be reviewed in our historiography -even the critical branch- because, for instance, Tupak Katari's rebellion cannot be considered only an attempt to return to a time before the Spaniards; it should be seen as the search to continue the civilizing development stopped by the conquest. But this continuity meant a rupture -even of the prehispanic tradition-, a democratization of the indigenous communities that broke not only the Spanish dominance but also the precolonial system of hereditary chiefs that had been included into the Spanish state machinery. It was not an archaic response, but something novel for the time. During this rebellion cycle in Upper Peru it was proposed that everybody “can rule through the king” and -probably for the first time- a rotation system to democratize the political power within the communities was installed -even before the French Revolution and without having had any contact with the independence ideas in the United States, since Tupak Katari did not speak or read Spanish, and therefore he could not have been familiar with such texts.
The profound questioning of this indigenous rebellion against the colonial and precolonial political systems, and its network of relations with the mestizo population was denied by the Creoles, who assumed (following the death and exclusion of popular pro-independence sectors) the leadership of the republic. Since then, the official perspective considered the cycle of indigenous rebellions as a “war of races” and not as a precedent for independence that aimed to achieve freedom from the colony, although with a scope that was different from the modern nation-state.
Following this early exclusion of the indigenous people, and until the second half of the twentieth century, a political system of citizenship for a Creole, literate, male and proprietor minority was built. This state lived off the tax imposed on indigenous people, enabled the usurpation of communal lands (which had even survived the Spanish colonial state) and, since the heyday of tin mining, joined the international market and system under construction through the exploitation of raw material and the disciplining of the workforce.
The 1952 Revolution, as a second national constituent moment, emerged under this context of dominance. The miners, sons of the tin capitalist enclave, managed to organize the indigenous people that had been mobilized to recover their land, and the middle class and urban workers who had been excluded from citizenship and the wealth they produced. The nationalization of mines, the declaration of universal citizenship, the destruction of ranches and the agrarian reform, and universal education had been achieved by the popular and indigenous movement, although it did not have its own political project. The revolution was offered to the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), a political party that built a state capitalism, an agroindustrial bourgeoisie in the East, and an homogeneous nation through the mixing of races.
The colonial rule (denial of the indigenous people) and the capitalist domination (formal subsuming of labour and disruption of “precapitalist” economies) were reproduced in new ways. The indigenous community ended up being conceived as fragmented peasants with individual land deeds, hereditary fragmentation and consequent migration toward the cities; its new political form, the trade union, was corrupted by the military-peasantry pact. This political form legitimized dictatorial governments, the repression of miners and their insertion in the nation as mestizos, that is, the insertion required the denial of their origins and ways of life. The continuity of the state capitalism was only possible under military dictatorships that victimized the miner movement, privatized the land in the east of the country and, since 1985, dismantled the state enterprises. State capitalism, through dictatorship, ended in neoconservatism.
This history of social mobilizations that end up being functional to the dominance was repeated in this neoconservative cycle. The miner actor from the national-popular line had disappeared after the closure of the mines and the anti-colonial indigenous line was initially co-opted by the multicultural discourse. The privatization of state enterprises and of the Bolivian economy sought legitimization through multicultural social reforms, although these were subordinated to the transnational capital.
The end of the story in this country appeared as the abstract inclusion of the citizenship in diversity, individual and collective rights, standardized education -although bilingual. It was the image of a minimal state and of a nation as an amorphous mass of individuals organized by the markets, with the promised recognition of their economic, social, cultural and ethnic capitals as means of social advancement. In reality, producers and consumers numbered the fewest; the rest -in cities and in the countryside- were the indigenous people, and the poor and informal mestizos who could be disposed by the system.
The political crisis (that began in 2000 with the protest against the privatization of water, continued with the indigenous mobilizations against the excluding multiculturalism and the affirmation of both sides of Bolivia, and brought together all the indigenous and popular sectors behind the demand of gas nationalization), was the result of old and new unresolved contradictions. With different characteristics, the indigenous movement addressed and organized the popular sectors and faced its own political project: the construction of a multinational state.
How could the indigenous movement amalgamate other actors under a common project that was strong enough to topple the former order, overcome the opposition that was determined to end up in civil war and separatism, and adopt a new constitution? The long and painful path to the Constituent Assembly and the approval of the text demonstrate that, for the first time in republican history, the indigenous actor was able to organize the national-popular line with its scope of self-government in the construction of a new state. This unprecedented capacity of indigenous representation of the Bolivian nation (within the framework of a modern nation-state) had two conditions: the depletion of national representation, achieved by the decompopsition of the traditional national actors -mestizos and Creoles- and the rise of a new social relation within the clutter, viewed from the indigenous perspective. Let's see.
The depletion of national representation
The transformations in the political system that took place during the republican life were achieved through either popular or indigenous massive mobilizations; however, they always ended trapped in the reproduction of the colonial and capitalist contradictions. It seemed that while the questionings to the political system were made within the nation-state, the Creole mestizo leadership, that represented this political form since independence, was able to reposition in power. That is, despite the questioning of the elite actors (organized in conservative or protectionist versions, in regions as Chuquisaca and then La Paz, in different political parties), a new Creole-mestizo actor was able to channel the mobilizations and to achieve the representation of a national project.
Zavaleta Mercado uses the term “majestic paradox” to describe this “unprecedented ratification capacity of the ruling class across different state phases, immense social changes and even several modes of production. Thus, the same way a national revolution is similar to a bourgeois revolution made against the bourgeoisie, its own development places the factors at the service of the oligarchical-majestic reposition. The majestic charge is a true constant in the development of the history of Bolivia.”
However, something that could not have been foreseen until 2000, but had been born in the 1952 Revolution was the fact that this oligarchical-majestic reposition stopped being national-wide. When the MNR, and then Banzer's dictatorship gambled on the construction of a national agroindustrial bourgeoisie in the Bolivian East and a unifying miscegenation they did not imagine that this bourgeoisie would end up denationalized, unable to build a national project; in other words, there is a majestic recreation through regional, but not national miscegenation (cruceñidad -from Santa Cruz). That is why, although the political opposition to Evo Morales initially tried to organize several regions by demanding autonomy (the Media Luna -half moon-), it became a separatist project, a project to constitute a new nation-state.
This decomposition of the traditional national actor, and its inability to represent -not even in an apparent manner- a new national project, configures an unprecedented call to the indigenous actor to take charge of the nation. Based on the analysis we conducted, this call is the possibility of organizing actors under the national-popular scope (miners, workers, intellectuals, middle classes, teachers, regional identities) in a common project. This is the context of the rise of the multinational state.
Two important lessons of the history of social movements in the twentieth century are that there are no social laws or inevitable processes, that is, no changing process is guarantied; and secondly, that there is not only one actor -one collective actor is not enough to make transformations, especially in cluttered contexts as the Bolivian one where several ways of world organization, modes of production, constitution of subjetivities, political forms and heterogeneous (or not completely subsumed to capital) social densities coexist in contradiction. Thus, the multinational state is an attempt to build a political system that is able to coordinate these modes of world organization, these indigenous and non-indigenous cultures, beyond the capitalist colonialism. But this attempt, captured in the new state political constitution, is a starting point -not an ending point- that needs enough strength to become hegemonic, in the common sense of the majority, to be able to build a political institutionalization and to preserve in time (education). This strength is only possible if the indigenous actor does not think of itself as the only actor; in other words, if instead of becoming self-referential it is able to congregate other actors, worldviews, exclusions and needs, and so on, around the multinational state project.
Now the problem is that the organization of several actors in Bolivian history has taken place in moments of resistance -when the established order loses its legitimacy and becomes violent in its response to criticism- but gets weak and fragments once it has managed to construct a new political system. This happens also due to the fact that the moments of massive mobilization cannot be permanent because actors organized and mobilized around unifying questionings (nationalization of resources, land recovery) return to their private spheres, to their daily survival and specific demands. This demobilization allowed the majestic recreation in previous political cycles. So, what kind of aggregation would allow a more stable organization among several actors that could be maintained? We think that one possibility would be the coordination that has been done between the new multinational state and the autonomies as local communal and civic governments (in the regions). This constant organization, which does not consider the state as the synthesis of society, could be the contribution from the self-government indigenous scope.
However, before considering how we understand this scope, it is necessary to take up the lesson about the non-inevitability of history once more; not only because of the capability of reproduction that the dominance has, but also because it is possible to construct alternatives. I appeal to this lesson to avoid any static or dogmatic interpretation of the nation-state as a modern political form, dominant on its own right.
The modern nation-state -that had been born also from social revolutions against the Western feudal dominance, and from anti-colonial revolutions in the “Third World”- became the central political device to constitute the industrial capitalism world system, but today the nation-state (that sometimes even blocks globalization) is no longer needed by globalized financial capital. The global and local orders show this metamorphosis of capital, which tends to constitute strong political blocs and small political units that are defenceless against capital circulation.
This means that it is necessary to rethink the nation-state against capitalism and colonialism in the global context. Not doing so could result in a dangerous extrapolation (the mechanic application of the functionality of the nation-state for industrial capitalism to financial capitalism) that can be used by the right in Bolivia and Latin America. But we also believe that a way to rethink the nation-state is by overcoming the ethnocentrism that built it from a single and universal (bourgeois, proletarian, western) actor, and that projected the total homogenization of society by capital, and a single cultural and civilizing pattern.Translated by Marcelo Virkel
Republished from Upside Down World
The Final Battle in Bolivia
Roger Burbach
Evo Morales, the first Indian president of Bolivia, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, "Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14," the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present the constitution.
Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linares states, "Either we now consolidate the new state…with the new dominant forces behind us, or we will move backwards and the old forces will again predominate." A leading trade union leader, Edgar Patana, put it bluntly: "The final battle has begun, and the people are prepared for it."
For over a year the oligarchy centered in the eastern city of Santa Cruz has conspired to frustrate the efforts of the Constituent Assembly in which the governing party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), and its allies hold 60 percent of the seats. First the right wing parties in the Assembly, led by Podemos, insisted that a two-thirds vote was needed even for committees to approve the different sections of the new constitution.
When the opposition was overruled on this point, the oligarchy then won allies in the city of Sucre, where the Constituent Assembly is being held, by asserting that the executive and congressional branches of government should be moved from La Paz to Sucre, which used to be the center of government until the late nineteenth century. This was also a racial strategy as La Paz and its sister city El Alto are at the heart of the country's majority Indian population that support Morales and mobilized in 2003 to topple an oligarchic president in La Paz who murdered Indian demonstrators in the streets.
In Sucre in recent months right wing militants have menaced and assaulted delegates of MAS, including Silvia Lazarte, the Assembly's indigenous women president. The Assembly has been effectively prevented from functioning since August 15.
Then in a move to more equitably redistribute the country growing oil and gas revenues, Morales in mid-October declared that a retirement pension equal to the minimum wage would be extended to all Bolivians that would come directly out of a special hydrocarbon fund. Morales simultaneously cut the payments from the fund that go to municipal governments like Santa Cruz with no congressional oversight. This caused an uproar in the Media Luna (Half Moon) region, comprised of the department of Santa Cruz and allied departments, with many of the business interests of the country threatening to create shortages and sew economic chaos by withholding their produce from the market.
Three hundred peasants, who came to Sucre last week to protect the Assembly members in its efforts to reconvene, were violently expelled from their sleeping quarters at the Pedagogical Institute by right wing students and Lazarte was prevented from convening the Assembly. Then Morales moved the Assembly meeting site to an old castle on the outskirts of Sucre that also serves as a military school and barracks. The head of the armed forces, General Wilfredo Vargas, backed the meeting of the Assembly at the castle, saying "it has to meet to continue …to modernize the state in all its features."
Then Vargas in a swipe at one of the regional political leaders allied with the Media Luna who claimed that Cuban and Venezuelan military units where in the country, declared: "No information exists of such units. And if it were the case, they are military units of the State and as part of the State they represent the Bolivian people."
The Bush administration is also jumping into the fray. Earlier this year Morales denounced that US backed agencies and non- governmental organizations that are providing direct support to right-wing political parties and allied institutions, ordering that all such funding would now be channeled directly through the government. Then at the recent Ibero-American Summit in Santiago Chile, Morales declared that "while we are trying to change Bolivia…small groups of the oligarchy are conspiring in alliance with the representative of the government of the United States," referring to the US ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg. To support his claims a photo was shown of Goldberg in Santa Cruz with a leading right wing business magnet and a well known Colombian narco-trafficker, who had been detained by the local police.
On November 15, the US State Department spokesperson, Sean McCormick, responded by demanding that Morales stop launching "false" and "unfounded" allegations of conspiracy by the ambassador. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the Bolivian ambassador in Washington to deliver the same tough message.
The delegates of the right wing parties led by Podemos boycotted the meetings at the castle, declaring that the Assembly is "illegal." On Friday 139 of the 255 Assembly members met and approved the broad outlines of a new constitution to carry out the reforms championed by Morales and the country's social movements. The next step is for the Assembly to adopt the specific clauses and content of the constitution.
But before that process could begin, the opposition in Sucre, led mainly by students and young people, violently took over all the major public buildings using dynamite and Molotov coctails, demanding the resignation of "the shitty Indian Morales." Parts of the city were in flames as the members of the Assembly abandoned the castle on Saturday, and by Sunday rioting mobs controlled Sucre, forcing the police to retreat to the mining town of Potosi, two hours away. Three people, including one policemen, are dead, with hundreds injured. The right wing and the business organizations in Santa Cruz and allied departments are threatening to declare autonomy and even talking of cession.
"We are at a national impasse" says Manuel Urisote, a political analyst and director of the Land Foundation, an independent research center in La Paz. "The right wing led by the Santa Cruz oligarchy is in open rebellion, but Morales, the Movement Towards Socialism and the popular movements will not back down. The military is supporting the president. As a national institution it intends to maintain the territorial integrity of Bolivia and it will not accept decrees of cession by Santa Cruz."
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA). (http://globalalternatives.org) His most recent article is, "Ecuador's Popular Revolt: Forging a New Nation," NACLA's Report on the Americas, Sept.-Oct., 2007. He is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Evo Morales, the first Indian president of Bolivia, is forcing a showdown with the oligarchy and the right wing political parties that have stymied efforts to draft a new constitution to transform the nation. He declares, "Dead or alive I will have a new constitution for the country by December 14," the mandated date for the specially elected Constituent Assembly to present the constitution.
Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linares states, "Either we now consolidate the new state…with the new dominant forces behind us, or we will move backwards and the old forces will again predominate." A leading trade union leader, Edgar Patana, put it bluntly: "The final battle has begun, and the people are prepared for it."
For over a year the oligarchy centered in the eastern city of Santa Cruz has conspired to frustrate the efforts of the Constituent Assembly in which the governing party, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), and its allies hold 60 percent of the seats. First the right wing parties in the Assembly, led by Podemos, insisted that a two-thirds vote was needed even for committees to approve the different sections of the new constitution.
When the opposition was overruled on this point, the oligarchy then won allies in the city of Sucre, where the Constituent Assembly is being held, by asserting that the executive and congressional branches of government should be moved from La Paz to Sucre, which used to be the center of government until the late nineteenth century. This was also a racial strategy as La Paz and its sister city El Alto are at the heart of the country's majority Indian population that support Morales and mobilized in 2003 to topple an oligarchic president in La Paz who murdered Indian demonstrators in the streets.
In Sucre in recent months right wing militants have menaced and assaulted delegates of MAS, including Silvia Lazarte, the Assembly's indigenous women president. The Assembly has been effectively prevented from functioning since August 15.
Then in a move to more equitably redistribute the country growing oil and gas revenues, Morales in mid-October declared that a retirement pension equal to the minimum wage would be extended to all Bolivians that would come directly out of a special hydrocarbon fund. Morales simultaneously cut the payments from the fund that go to municipal governments like Santa Cruz with no congressional oversight. This caused an uproar in the Media Luna (Half Moon) region, comprised of the department of Santa Cruz and allied departments, with many of the business interests of the country threatening to create shortages and sew economic chaos by withholding their produce from the market.
Three hundred peasants, who came to Sucre last week to protect the Assembly members in its efforts to reconvene, were violently expelled from their sleeping quarters at the Pedagogical Institute by right wing students and Lazarte was prevented from convening the Assembly. Then Morales moved the Assembly meeting site to an old castle on the outskirts of Sucre that also serves as a military school and barracks. The head of the armed forces, General Wilfredo Vargas, backed the meeting of the Assembly at the castle, saying "it has to meet to continue …to modernize the state in all its features."
Then Vargas in a swipe at one of the regional political leaders allied with the Media Luna who claimed that Cuban and Venezuelan military units where in the country, declared: "No information exists of such units. And if it were the case, they are military units of the State and as part of the State they represent the Bolivian people."
The Bush administration is also jumping into the fray. Earlier this year Morales denounced that US backed agencies and non- governmental organizations that are providing direct support to right-wing political parties and allied institutions, ordering that all such funding would now be channeled directly through the government. Then at the recent Ibero-American Summit in Santiago Chile, Morales declared that "while we are trying to change Bolivia…small groups of the oligarchy are conspiring in alliance with the representative of the government of the United States," referring to the US ambassador to Bolivia, Philip Goldberg. To support his claims a photo was shown of Goldberg in Santa Cruz with a leading right wing business magnet and a well known Colombian narco-trafficker, who had been detained by the local police.
On November 15, the US State Department spokesperson, Sean McCormick, responded by demanding that Morales stop launching "false" and "unfounded" allegations of conspiracy by the ambassador. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called the Bolivian ambassador in Washington to deliver the same tough message.
The delegates of the right wing parties led by Podemos boycotted the meetings at the castle, declaring that the Assembly is "illegal." On Friday 139 of the 255 Assembly members met and approved the broad outlines of a new constitution to carry out the reforms championed by Morales and the country's social movements. The next step is for the Assembly to adopt the specific clauses and content of the constitution.
But before that process could begin, the opposition in Sucre, led mainly by students and young people, violently took over all the major public buildings using dynamite and Molotov coctails, demanding the resignation of "the shitty Indian Morales." Parts of the city were in flames as the members of the Assembly abandoned the castle on Saturday, and by Sunday rioting mobs controlled Sucre, forcing the police to retreat to the mining town of Potosi, two hours away. Three people, including one policemen, are dead, with hundreds injured. The right wing and the business organizations in Santa Cruz and allied departments are threatening to declare autonomy and even talking of cession.
"We are at a national impasse" says Manuel Urisote, a political analyst and director of the Land Foundation, an independent research center in La Paz. "The right wing led by the Santa Cruz oligarchy is in open rebellion, but Morales, the Movement Towards Socialism and the popular movements will not back down. The military is supporting the president. As a national institution it intends to maintain the territorial integrity of Bolivia and it will not accept decrees of cession by Santa Cruz."
Roger Burbach is director of the Center for the Study of the Americas (CENSA). (http://globalalternatives.org) His most recent article is, "Ecuador's Popular Revolt: Forging a New Nation," NACLA's Report on the Americas, Sept.-Oct., 2007. He is a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.
Declaration from the Jach’a Omasuyos, historic place of the Red Ponchos, of resistance and of change
Faced with the social and historic events occurring in the country, the Omasuyos Province, (Jach’a Omasuyos) land of the Red Ponchos, defenders and catalysts of change, represented by the Federation of Campesinos, FEJUVE (Federation of Neighbourhood Committees of El Alto), Civic Committee, unions, truck drivers, Federation of Rural and Urban Teachers, university students, secondary students and other organisations, manifest out emphatic protest against the brutality exercised by the oligarchic caste from the half moon [Bolivia’s four eastern states – Tarija, Beni, Pando and Santa Cruz] against the constituent assembly delegates which represents both their hatred towards the indigenous originario peoples, today oppressed in all the impoverished sectors of the republic, as well as their clear intention of going against the changes that our country is living through, which is why we declare:
1. STATE OF EMERGENCY and the continuation of the struggle for the Constituent Assembly to be able to conclude its sessions, and for the defence of the unity of our peoples, in the face of the divisionist intentions of the oligarchy from the half moon, who through the demand to make Sucre the full capital aims to once again benefit from political and economic power
2. Permanent Mobilisation and Organisation for resistance and self-defence, declaring a MOBILISED CIVIC STOPPAGE and grand concentration for the OPEN TOWN MEETING in the General Staff of Q’ala Chaka on Thursday 22 of the present month, extending the invitation of all regional and national organisations.
3. We warn the government, the union and indigenous organisation and social classes of an immediate declaration of a STATE OF
4. Organise the occupation of lands of the oligarchic large landowners and of the misnamed half moon to benefit the originario indigenous peoples.
5. Total repudiation of the prefects (who are illegal due to the fact that they were created via a decree), mayors and the civic committees of the half moon because of their clear intromission against the process of the Constituent Assembly, warning them to abide by the decision of the grand social and indigenous majorities.
6. We warn the senate chamber to not block laws that benefit the people, otherwise the social organisations we see ourselves obliged to take drastic decisions such as the definitively closure of the senate.
7. Sign an inter-institutional pact between the Armed Forces and Police and social and indigenous sectors.
8. Organisation and preparation for the march onto the cities of
9. Ask the truck drivers to maintain unity and not generate conflicts over sectoral demands
10. In the event that the aggression against the assembly delegates occurs again there will be an immediate mobilisation of the people onto
Passed in the City of
Signed: all the representatives of the Red Ponchos
Giving the Bolivian People What They Want
Lianet Arias Sosa interviews Bolivian Senator Santos Javier Tito Veliz
In March 2006, a few months after Evo Morales took office, the convening of a constituent assembly took place. The goal was clear: draft a new constitution that would transform the historically marginalized population into true actors in the economic and social life of
On
However, time has gone by without the desired results.
“The oligarchy is definitely there, and in one way or another so is the influence of the
“They want each article of the final text to be approved by a two-thirds vote,” said Tito Veliz. “In the beginning, the government said yes it would be approved by a two thirds vote, that there wasn’t any problem; but also that on some articles it wasn’t necessary, only a simple majority. The opposition insisted on two thirds for everything. This greatly slowed down the work of the constituent assembly because there isn’t a two thirds consensus on each and every article.
“Regrettably we currently have the thorny subject of defining the capital, which is making it difficult to finish as hoped by the December 14 deadline. All efforts have been made to reach a consensus among the most affected, which are the cities of
However, it’s not only the issue of a two thirds approval or
In August 2007, the contradictions appeared to reach their limit. Attacked by civic movements determined to have the capital moved to
Facing such a delay, other measures to benefit the population become unfeasible. On Monday, President Evo Morales criticized the Senate, where the opposition has a majority, for blocking approval of 97 legislative bills that would favor the entire country.
“We want to move forward with what the Bolivian people want —said the MAS senator—, the Bolivian people want structural changes, profound changes. To do so, it is important to have a constitution by the December 14 deadline. There is even the possibility that if the assembly fails to resume in
“These are going to be crucial days. We hope that the situation is resolved for the good of the country’s democracy and to have a dignified country, a sovereign country.”
Republished from Periodico 26
The Spirit of Revolt: Bolivia's Ongoing Revolutions
Adolfo Gilly
Prologue to Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso 2007)
In
Alteños collected their dead, held wakes in their churches and homes, and said, "Enough!" With the strength of men and women, young and old, they pulled train cars along the tracks from the station and pushed them off a bridge, so that many meters below, the cars blocked the highway leading from
The following day, they started to descend, by the dozens, or perhaps even hundreds of thousands, to occupy the city of La Paz, while from the other side of the valley, more unending columns of Indians ascended, with the same goal: to take the capital and overthrow the murderous creole regime of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. By then, the middle class in
The history of this fraction of time that explodes out of quotidian time as a sort of shift in destiny; the history of this instantaneous time called revolution, its past, its ancestors, its protagonists, their reasoning and motives, is the subject of this book by Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson. They were there, and have spent years studying
A classic revolution, at the very beginning of the twenty-first century, has taken place in
This book boldly and rightly affirms that what happened was a revolution, and demonstrates it through history, analysis, and chronicle. A revolution, that which no longer existed, a violent and liberating revolution like all others in history: here it was again, bringing back the spirit of revolt out of grievance and out of the past.
* * *
After chronicling the cycle of popular mobilization since 2000 that led to such an outcome, Hylton and Thomson seek out its roots, premonitions, and precursors in the long time-spans of history.
The first great indigenous insurrection against this domination-which preceded the Wars of
Defeat did not erase the memory for indigenous people, who have known ever since that they once laid siege to the city of the "señores," nor for the white and mestizo minority, as successive generations have transmitted until today the fear-negated, but always living on at the threshold of consciousness-of a new siege on the city by a limitless dark-skinned population.
In April 1952, a popular insurrection exploded in defense of a presidential election stolen by the dominant oligarchy. Known as the "April Revolution," rebels took the city of La Paz, dispersed the army, overthrew the president, established a mestizo government that nationalized the mines-the principal Bolivian industry-decreed an agrarian reform, and had to live for years with the parallel power of miners', workers', and peasants' unions, their armed militias, and community radio stations. Of course, miners, workers, and peasants were Indians, and their indigenous languages were used to debate in their assemblies and to talk during their celebrations and in their homes.
After a long period of vicissitudes and tenacious resistance, beginning in the 1980s the new power of the neoliberal world reorganized
But like all domination with racial roots, nationalist ideology and the shared symbolism between dominant and subaltern groups was merely a thin, formal layer, and hegemony a fractured and fragile covering. Underneath lived the persistent and vast human community of the indigenous, those life-worlds that filmmaker Jorge Sanjinés called "The Clandestine Nation." Since Tupaj Katari, and even before, those worlds never ceased to emerge, here and there, to break up the surface of domination with violent local revolts which were rapidly put down and punished, but not forgotten.
This nation, negated by the liberal republic, was also nearly invisible for the republican left, which confused it with Indian positions in economy and society: peasants, factory workers, miners, petty merchants, artisans. The republican left did not, therefore, see the ancient place that this nation occupied in the colonial world and that persisted in the republic: Indians, people the color of the earth; Aymaras, Quechuas, Guaraníes, Urus, those who, on the shores of Lake Titicaca, claim to be the most ancient of human beings.
Each time the country today called Bolivia begins to move, the clandestine nation reappears, or better, makes itself violently visible and audible, as Edward P. Thompson put it, taking leading places on the stage previously occupied by noisy politicians, bureaucrats, military men, investors, and their scribes.
That is how it made itself present in October 2003 when people descended on La Paz and took it over, unfurling their flags and symbols and putting forth their bodies, and their dead, as Thomson and Hylton note: "Beginning with Warisata in September, and spreading to El Alto in October, the mourning of martyrs provided a time to express grief and fury, to bolster the spirit through ritual and reflection, and to dedicate ongoing struggle to those who had lost their lives. The martyrs also provided a new example of indigenous patriotism in
Revolutionary Horizons speaks to us of continuities and ruptures in time, of the cruelty and fragility of internal colonial domination, of centuries-old dispossession and impious exploitation; of the immaterial inheritance of memories and experiences; of how the spirit of revolt has been transmitted across generations through protest, mass clandestinity, and everyday life amidst discrimination and difference. The inheritors and bearers of Andean civilization might well say, "Generations come and generations go, but the earth lasts forever."
The authors put it as follows: "In this book, we approach revolutionary 'horizons' not only as those perspectives of men and women in the past who looked upon the possibilities of future social transformation. For there is another sense of the word. At an archeological site, the phased strata of the earth and the remains of human settlement that are exposed by careful digging are called 'horizons'. We offer this then as an excavation of Andean revolution, whose successive layers of historical sedimentation make up the subsoil, loam, landscape, and vistas for current political struggle in
Thus the revolution of October 2003 and its aftermath in June 2005 are presented as the condensation, in two decisive moments, of the previous experiences of rage, humiliation, and desire: a resounding explosion, an illumination that lights up an instant, a break in the time of everyday life in which linear time, circular time, and messianic time whirl and mix together. This temporal break passes, and does not last, but its resonances and dissonances never die down. They come to be known as years and lives unfold, Thomson and Hylton tell us at the end of their book.
* * *
A victorious revolution, like the Bolivian one in October, implies a deep change in institutions and political leadership, which happened in the presidential elections of December 2005 and the inaugural ceremony of Indian President Evo Morales in January 2006. Although connected, the new political leadership and the revolution that brought it about are two phenomena that differ in substance.
The new power is a result of the revolution, not its embodiment. In their final reflections, Hylton and Thomson tackle this crucial question. People do not go into a revolution on behalf of an image of the society of the future, Leon Trotsky noted, but because present society has become intolerable. Their revolt nurtures itself on the image of enslaved ancestors, not the ideal of liberated descendants, wrote Walter Benjamin.
A revolution means that nothing goes back to being what it was before in the spirits of the living and their relations with each other. It also pays homage to the dead, rescues the memory and the trials and tribulations of humiliated ancestors, and renovates the symbolic universe. That is why a revolution has repercussions in place and in times yet to come. But its duration is short. And if, when it manages to triumph, a revolution engenders a new political leadership, the insurrection is neither embodied by nor prolonged in it, and the break in time closes: "mais il est bien court le temps des cerises." What then follows concerns a subsequent time, even as the new leadership continues to affirm, "I am the revolution."
It is important to debate and assess the composition and subsequent changes in political leadership that arise out of a revolution. But to subsume its analysis and its meaning in this fashion is to lose one's way and to enter into a shadow play. This is frequently done by those who, without suspecting it, have themselves become shadows of real life, which goes on elsewhere, far from them.
The history of revolutions is usually treated in terms of the consolidation of a new order. In other words, revolution is a necessary prelude to the new order. This is not the way this book considers the third Bolivian revolution, which inaugurated the twenty-first century on the altiplano.
Thomson and Hylton concede the importance of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), headed by Evo Morales, as a channel and political instrument for the popular insurrection, in which social movements played the leading role. They note, "Morales and MAS tail-ended, rather than led, the insurrection of 2003 and 2005. [But] in the electoral arena, Morales and MAS have served as the only effective vehicle for national articulation of the heterogeneous movements."
Nevertheless, they continue, this does not authorize the leadership to uphold that in the future indigenous sectors do not need representation as Indians (in the Constitutional Assembly, for example), on the grounds that "they have already received representation - through MAS." Instead of continuing to resist, the official argument runs, these sectors "need to locate themselves in this new time of occupying structures of power."
Both historians go against such an argument: "Whatever their intent, such statements de-authorized, marginalized, and silenced indigenous demands. It was a new example of the condescension that has plagued Indian-Left relations historically and that has pushed indigenous activists into more radically autonomous positions." An indigenous president is not enough to turn the clandestine nation into the Republic.
It is necessary, of course, to understand the inelastic limits that those who govern run into, whether it be the ferocious resistance of the classes that have been displaced from power, and their political and economic representatives, foreign as well as domestic; or the steel cage in which the new global neoliberal order encloses possibilities of action, along with the imminent presence of its powerful material base-the Pentagon, the military force of the United States; or the material limits of scarcity, national isolation, and poverty.
In the words of the authors, "There are consequences of the present whose force will be difficult to obstruct or reverse in the near future. And yet, if history has shown that revolutionary moments leave an indelible mark on the future, it has shown that internal colonialism and class hierarchies are durable structures as well."
But for this very reason, the popular movements that gave rise to the new configuration of state power cannot lose themselves in it. They must maintain not indifference or neutrality, but rather their autonomy and independence.
* * *
We need to treat the history of revolutions as the history of those unique moments in which the forgotten, the oppressed, the humiliated-those who make the world with their hands, bodies, and minds-rise up and suspend the time of contempt to inaugurate a new time; moments, unforgettable whether long or short, of revelation of their own being, their own intelligence, and their own inheritance, which is that of all human beings.
"Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden," wrote Walter Benjamin in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History." There, the spirit of revolt survives and burns in secret, in diverse times and places.
Those moments in which that spirit comes to light and stirs like gale winds, those breaks in time whose duration should be multiplied by their intensity, can later be suspended and converted into memory and the past. But they also become lived experience and, as a result, ongoing reverberations into all the possible futures of those who lived through those moments as a people.
These are the themes of this exceptional book, which is the work of two historians who have followed and lived Bolivian life. Revolutionary Horizons is a chronicle, a history, and an archaeology of indigenous insurgency on the Andean high plains, and, at the same time, a mature fruit of study, experience, and reflection.
A longtime participant-observer of Latin American revolution, Adolfo Gilly is a professor of history at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and the author of numerous books on history and politics, including the classic The Mexican Revolution: A People's History (New Press, 2006 [1971]).
Bolivia: Coming to Terms with Diversity
Laura Carlsen interviews Alvaro Garcia Linera
As head of Congress and the major political operator for President Evo Morales,
Garcia Linera says the conflicts are to be expected, as Bolivian society takes on "the two conquests of equality"—political rights for indigenous peoples and economic equality through a redistribution of national wealth. He calls the Morales administration a "government of social movements" and describes the goals to build "institutions that allow us to recognize our pluralism" and "generate minimal levels of access to opportunities and resources."
LC: The government of Evo Morales came to power with the symbolic force of being the first indigenous president in the country, and has promised to address an historic backlog of demands for indigenous rights. But the government also faces the challenge of achieving some degree of unity to carry out deep transformations in society. In practice, how do you reconcile these two responsibilities?
AGL: The presence of the first indigenous president is without a doubt the most important symbolic break in the last centuries in
But soon we saw that while political equality was advancing, the challenge remained to expand advances in political equality into other realms, in this case, the economic realm in the form of a new redistribution of wealth. The society required that both these tasks be taken on together—political equality and the recognition of the equality of indigenous peoples, their culture, and their language; but also a redistribution of wealth to improve peoples' access to resources.
And that's where the job of President Morales' government has gotten complicated.
LC: Why is that?
AGL: In other societies, political equality is not necessarily accompanied by an immediate effort to redistribute wealth.
The more privileged sectors felt obliged by modernity and general advances to accept political equality, but to accept redistribution of wealth is another matter. It generates more resistance from groups that are accustomed not only to holding positions of power but also to a form of allotment that traditionally set aside public resources with their families' names on them.
This is the most difficult part of what we've taken on—the two conquests of equality. But the fact that there was already a democratic and redistributive agenda proposed by society since the year 2000 meant we had to assume both tasks simultaneously, with the all the difficulties that you're seeing in these days and weeks—all predictable, of course.
LC: How do you convince or obligate sectors with historic privileges to cede privileges in order to establish this new state and society?
AGL: It requires on the part of the most privileged sectors—not "generosity"—because in politics and economics that term doesn't exist—but a strategic viewpoint. This isn't a movement that at any time seeks to annul privileges. This is a movement that seeks to generate minimal levels of access to opportunities and resources.
From a strategic point of view, the most privileged sectors would understand that the best way to preserve part of their privileges is to cede part of their privileges. But when they are not willing to cede a part of these privileges, what that does is generate pressure that's more and more adverse to them, with the risk that all their privileges could be affected.
The program of the underclasses of
And in fact, the measures we've taken—nationalization of hydrocarbons that didn't expropriate fixed assets but recuperated the property and decision-making capacity over gas and petroleum—demonstrate the society's and the government's strategy.
The key for privileged sectors resides not in looking to the future in one year, but to see the future in 10, 20, or 30, or 50 years. This strategic point of view is what could help this process of redistribution of wealth and lead to a coming together, but in a more balanced way and not with the scandalous distances in terms of property and money that we still see in Bolivia.
LC: There has been talk of a growing political and social polarization in the country. Do you agree with this assessment of the present moment?
AGL: Ethnic, class, and regional differences in
The novelty today is that for the first time the society is forced to look at itself in the mirror, and it has to see its limitations, its cracks, its weaknesses. Exclusion and confrontation have been recurrent throughout our history—there have been uprisings, massacres in the Bolivian society every 10, 15 years. The ethnic, cultural, and regional differences in our Bolivian society, today visible all at once, are not recent products. They are old wounds that have been present in our history and were never healed, fissures whose resolution was always avoided and that now have appeared simultaneously. Now it's up to this generation—I'm not saying "this government"—to this generation, to this society—to resolve issues that couldn't be resolved in 182 years of political life as an independent republic.
There's no reason to be afraid of these tensions because they're tensions that we've experienced before. The real problem would be if we didn't resolve them, if we just did what past governments have done and swept them under the rug.
Because this is the historic opportunity for society to be sincere with itself; it's the opportunity for a rebirth of its collective spirit based on who we really are, and not the illusion of who we want to be, as the elites have always imposed before in this country.
LC: Given the divisions, do you still think it's feasible to agree on a new constitution with major changes, or will it be necessary to accept more minor reforms?
AGL: The Constituent Assembly is conceived of to create an institutional order that corresponds to the reality of who we are. Up to now, every one of the 17-18 previous constitutions has tried to copy the latest institutional fashion—French,
This is the great challenge of the Constituent Assembly. And that's why we are confident that it will meet its goals, in spite of the difficulties, with this idea of expressing the real society and projecting that in institutional and normative terms for the coming decades.
LC: You have spoken of diversity not only in terms of the need to recognize it in a new form of institutionality but also as the guiding principle of a new social pact. Reading the newspapers these days, diversity seems to be more a factor of division. How do you move toward this vision of strength through diversity?
AGL: Sometimes the press focuses the cameras only on the differences. Then you see a country that appears to be on the verge of a breakdown because all actors want to assert their own identities and differences at the same time.
We've always been divided. It's just that now we're seeing ourselves with all our divisions and tendencies. The illusion of a monolithic, cohesive unity has broken like a glass thrown to the ground. And it can never be put back together. We can't go back to living with illusions.
The key for all the groups is to affirm their difference, but at the same time produce a will to unity—to an agreed-on unity, not an imposed or merely superficial unity. Sure, at first it's scary, as everyone begins to wake up to the fact that they are different from the other, and to assume that difference and not to hide it. But that's the first step in building real unity.
The second step is, based on the affirmation of differences, to affirm what we have in common. Without a doubt, the indigenous and peasant movements have been the most lucid in taking these steps. To give you an example: it would be very easy for the indigenous and peasant movement to demand the right of each community, each culture, each nationality to the control and ownership of natural resources. Even the UN declaration recognizes that right—to land, forests, gas, and oil.
But what you see is that at the same time as they affirm their diversity, they are also asserting unity when they say "we have to nationalize hydrocarbons" in the sense of a collective "I" that is above the particular language, culture, or region. The proposal to nationalize gas and oil didn't come from intellectuals or from the middle classes. It came out of the popular movements, mostly indigenous and peasant movements. So the sector that most affirms its difference is the one that also affirms the principle of unity around a material collective "I." Not a fictitious one, not just symbols and rites, but in real actions: the assembly, nationalization of hydrocarbons, and redistribution of wealth.
LC: You mention the responsibility of social movements. Other progressive governments, brought to power by grassroots movements, have been criticized for subsequently sidelining those movements. How do you conceive the role of social movements in the Morales government?
AGL: We consider this to be a government of social movements. Even though that means there are tensions, because government and state are by definition a process of centralization of decisions and, by definition, a social movement is a process of socialization and collective diffusion of decision-making. What's interesting is to ride on that tension. That's the novelty of the process.
You'll ask: But how do you back up this claim to be a government of social movements? On four levels, from the most general to the most specific.
The most general: the program of changes and transformations in the government is the program proposed by grassroots mobilizations over the last 15 years. What the government of President Morales has done is to practically transcribe into decree or law what was collectively developed by society itself through social movements. Land, hydrocarbons, Constituent Assembly, the issue of autonomies, redistribution of wealth, process of industrialization, and so many things still pending—all the big decisions of this government have been historically proposed over the past 10 years by the social movements.
The second level is that for the government's major decisions—all of them, without exception—we've consulted with the leadership of the different social movements. There isn't one important measure that isn't marked by a process of feedback and consultation with these sectors, because every one of these actions can only be sustained through mobilization of society, not through a bureaucratic action.
Third, in the government's structure, you'll find the presence of a good part of the leadership of the social movements. Whether as mayors, prefects (the provincial leadership), parliamentary representatives, constituent assemblypersons, ministers, there's a practical, physical presence of grassroots leadership in government. To what degree they maintain their connection to their constituents is a different problem. To what degree they could become bureaucratized, is definitely a risk. But if you watch the parliament on television or the assembly, you see an enormous presence of these sectors. This is something that was unthinkable five or 10 years ago, because these were positions reserved for certain families, for elites cultivated in foreign universities, with famous last names, and a tradition of being in politics.
Fourth, although the social movement itself can't move into government administration, the selection of government officials must meet not only criteria of merit but also approval from social movements and organizations. Here it's equally valid to have a masters or doctorate from Harvard as to have links with the peasant federation. Yes, this can slow up certain areas of government efficiency but it's a sign of the times.
LC: The last question: You and the president come from a background of participation in movements. What are the big surprises or unexpected challenges of coming to government?
AGL: There's clearly a leap between the logic of mobilization and protest, to the logic of administration. However, the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) as a coalition of social organizations has experienced a learning curve and transition from strictly making demands and being a union movement, to increasingly becoming a revolutionary political entity. This started 10 years ago when the unions began to control local governments. The agrarian unions entered the mayorships and had to put to test their demands with transparency. Its not a lot of time, many parties have to spend 30 years preparing for governing. In our case, there were 10 years of training—too fast.
But for better or worse, you have there a first period of gestation of political leaders who had to combine the discourse of mobilization with the ability to govern. These leaders who were trained since the 90s in local government, several of them are now in parliament and even Vice Ministers.
Also, this social movement matures very quickly starting in about 2000, moving from confrontational strategies to proposing designs for the nation. It isn't usual, even in the history of
Although there have been difficulties, which we've admitted publicly, it still is remarkable what we've achieved with these decisions: economic growth, modification of the economic structure of society, and implementation—albeit gradual—of some things at the social level.
I believe it's a healthy process and full of vitality, and has good possibilities of success.
Laura Carlsen (lcarlsen(a)ciponline.org) is director of the
Bolivia: 'A project for the liberation of the poor’
“Here in
MAS is the party of Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous president in Bolivia’s history, elected in 2005 on a platform of reversing 500 years of colonialism and genocide against the indigenous majority, and reversing the impact of 20 years of neoliberalism that has left Bolivia South America’s poorest nation.
It is his confidence in the people that gives Loayza hope for the constituent assembly, which has not met since August and is rapidly approaching its second deadline of December 14. Its original one-year time frame was extended without a single article of the new constitution having been voted on.
GLW asked Loayza why the assembly has faced so many problems. He explained that “the traditional right-wing parties do not agree with the constituent assembly, they want to keep fooling the people, turning them against MAS. They don’t want to accept that they were defeated. They want to wear the people down, in order to finish off MAS, starting by finishing off the president.
“However, this will be difficult. Even if they do not allow us to approve the new constitution, we have the constitutional text, which is being finished off now and will be presented to the people, and the people will decide.”
‘A political project of the poor’
When Loayza, together with Morales, was first elected to parliament in 1997 it marked the entrance of the indigenous and campesino (peasant) movements onto the political stage nationally. Two years previously, three of Bolivia’s key indigenous and campesino organisations, including the United Union Confederation of Campesino Workers of Bolivia (CSUTCB) headed by Loayza, came together to construct a “political instrument” that aimed to be “a political project of the poor, for the liberation of the poor”.
Following the 1997 elections, the Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples (which took the electorally registered name of MAS) was formed. In 2002, MAS came second in national elections, with Morales just falling short of winning the highest vote for president.
Refusing to make alliances with the traditional parties, MAS won government outright with 53.7% of the vote in the December 2005 elections, on the back of rising indigenous, campesino and other social movements. Re-elected as deputy in 2002, Loayza is generally viewed as representing the more radical wing of the MAS, largely due to his role as a leader of the CSUTCB during the 2003 and 2005 uprisings.
A plurinational
The election of what Loayza describes as
“[An] indigenous, originario government signifies a change because until now governments have always stolen our resources, becoming wealthy at the expense of the poor. We want to finish off the neoliberal economic model.”
Loayza explained that
He said that MAS is “neither from the traditional left nor the traditional right — we come out of our own cultural identity” adding, “we want to change the country because each of the 36 [indigenous] nations has its own culture, language and beliefs. They live in harmony with Mother Earth.” However, accepting these differences doesn’t mean division: “to change the country we want unity”.
Behind the emphasis on indigenous rights and culture is not the goal of returning to a romanticised past, but rather an expression of
Political commission
Attempting to implement these changes has placed the indigenous peoples on a collision course with the old ruling elite. This clash has at times been physical, something Loayza can personally testify to. Loayza nearly lost his life, spending two months in a coma, after a scuffle in the assembly resulted in a fall from a three metre high stage, fracturing his skull.
The right-wing opposition has fanned the flames of discontent among the people of Sucre (known as the “white city” for its social composition), where the assembly is meeting, with the demand that the legislative and executive powers — which shifted to La Paz in 1899 following a civil war — return to the city. Violent protests forced the temporary suspension of the assembly and some MAS delegates were forced into hiding.
To overcome the stalemate, the government took the initiative of forming a “political commission” to bring together representatives from all groups in the assembly to negotiate contentious points and attempt to reach consensus. Having squandered eight months debating rules of procedure, and then unnecessarily aggravating tensions by declaring that the issue of the capital could not be discussed in the assembly, many are wondering how useful the assembly will ultimately prove to be, and whether it isn’t just the same old parties once again negotiating the future of the country among themselves.
A recent poll showed that nearly two thirds of Bolivians don’t think the assembly will complete its job by December 14, with support for the assembly dropping to 39% in October. From the original goal of “re-founding
The current stalemate in the assembly now as many in MAS focusing on ensuring the constitutional changes include the ability to re-elect presidents to allow for continuity in the process of change. Despite discontent with the assembly, and in the face of sustained opposition attacks on Morales, the same poll puts his support at 62%, an increase of 5% from two months previous.
Loayza told GLW: “The political commission was formed firstly to seek unity, and afterwards to discuss the principal issues that have caused the problems, such as [competing] visions for the country.
“Until now we have reached consensus on the economic issue: the new constitution will recognise the state economy, the private economy and the communitarian economy to benefit the communities … we have also reached agreement on autonomy” at the departmental (state), municipal and regional level as well as for indigenous communities, “two important issues”.
While the main opposition party, Podemos, participated in discussions over autonomy, they did not sign onto the agreement, nor did they sign onto the subsequent agreement reached on October 18 over the type of state that Bolivia would become, which in an attempt to include all views was defined as unitary, social, plurinational, communitarian, autonomous and decentralised, democratic, free, independent, sovereign and inter-cultural.
The assembly is yet to reconvene, with a negotiation team from the political commission travelling to
Loayza told GLW that while MAS was working hard to get agreement from the two thirds of assembly delegates needed to approve the final text, “I think we will not get that unity”. In such a scenario “once we have a constitutional text we will approve it by majority [in the assembly], and once approved we will hand it over to the people. If the opposition does not let us approve it, the people are the sovereigns: they will approve what we have done.”
First published in Green Left Weekly
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
