Update/Bolivia A New Day for Bolivia
Schultz, Jim
On the night of Friday, October 17, television screens across Bolivia were split into two mesmerizing images of history unfolding. At the bottom of the screen was a Boeing 767, an overnight...
...Morales and the coca grower unions are demanding that the government drop its "zero coca" pact with the U.S...
...from the opposition, the Congress voted overwhelmingly to accept the resignation...
...Look at all the public companies that have been privatized...
...For three centuries that single hill virtually bankrolled the Spanish Empire, leaving Bolivia with only the corpses of enslaved miners and the bitter memory of a stolen inheritance-an experience Bolivians see repeating itself with the nation's gas reserves, In modern times Bolivia has seen the arrival of a different type of conquistador, the well-dressed officials 8NACL4 REPORT ON THE AMERICAS NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 8UPDATE/BOLIVIA A demonstration in the La Paz neighborhood of Alto Calacoto where six people died in clashes with police...
...Like the loss of its seacoast to Chile, globalization is an issue that strikes a sensitive nerve in Bolivia's deep historical memory...
...If he keeps his promises he will be our friend...
...Late in the struggle a group of protesters moved an abandoned rail car and dropped it off a bridge to block one road...
...Jim Schultz is the executive director of The Democracy Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia...
...Transparency International rates it among the most dishonest in Latin America...
...Bolivia's political system is notoriously corrupt...
...What had begun a month earlier as a series of protests by Aymara Indians in the flat highlands outside of La Paz, had spread into a nationwide popular rebellion that left more than 70 dead and hundreds of others wounded...
...government and allow coca growing families in the conflicted Chapare region to grow small family plots...
...The government will also need substantial breathing room from the Bank and the IMF if it wants to make any major changes in economic policy without getting blacklisted by the multilaterals in the process...
...citizens in Bolivia to leave the country immediately...
...Vice President Mesa publicly broke with the President, telling one local radio station: "I cannot accept the number of deaths this conflict is causing and I cannot accept the fact the government...
...In the name of opening the country to foreign investment, a succession of Bolivian governments have obediently adopted the World Bank/IMF formula for prosperity-privatizing public enterprises, relaxing labor protections and holding down government spending...
...At the top of the screen was a live broadcast from the national Congress, where Sinchez de Lozada's Vice President, Carlos Mesa Gisbert, was being sworn in to replace him...
...dead left in his wake...
...Bechtel is now suing Bolivia for $25 million in a secretive trade tribunal operated by the World Bank...
...Bolivians also understood that the latest battle over the exportation of gas was only their most recent fight in the country's ongoing struggle against exploitative globalization imposed from abroad...
...Sdnchez de Lozada disappeared into his fortressed presidential residence as the U.S...
...At 10 PM, with the President already on the tarmac waiting for takeoff, his angry letter of resignation was read before a televised session of Congress...
...Mesa told the Congress and the Bolivian people that he would govern as an independent, excluding the nation's highly suspect political parties from the executive branch entirely...
...For 15 years Bolivia served as the Bank's and the IMF's unwilling South American lab rat--known in the trade as "an early adjuster...
...He committed to a binding popular vote on gas exportation, a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution and an aggressive anticorruption campaign...
...While there is still much to be seen about whether the departure of one President and the arrival of a new one will actually make a difference here, a month of protest and bloodshed did end with something many did not expect-hope...
...At the bottom of the screen was a Boeing 767, an overnight flight to Miami, slowly taxiing out to the runway...
...IMF officials told me that the belt-tightening program was "mutually agreed upon between the government and Fund staff as a way to restore sustainability...
...And coca is practically the only issue on which the new President has not made a clear statement of his intentions...
...This is a victory in a battle, like other battles we have won, but we haven't won the war," says water revolt leader Oscar Olivera...
...One Bolivia lives in adobe houses without running water...
...But the IMF disregarded government warnings that the package would provoke serious social unrest...
...The nation's extreme inequalities and miserable poverty are in and of themselves sufficient factors to fuel broad resentment towards what is seen as an uninterested and incompetent government...
...Minutes later the nationally televised chaos in the Congressional chamber was broken by the solemn swearing-in of Carlos Mesa as the Republic's new President...
...Bolivians live in a sort of apartheid, not the kind overtly sanctioned by law, but the more sinister variety, stemming from a tangled web of economic, political and cultural conditions...
...This is the hour for Bolivians to offer proposals about what kind of country we want to have...
...The International Monetary Fund (IMF) claims that the sale would be a badly needed cash boon for the ailing country, but average Bolivians don't buy the argument that the benefits of the sale will ever trickle down to them...
...wwwdemocracyctrorg> He is also author of The Democracy Owners' Manual (Rutgers University Press...
...from those loyal to the deposed President and "assassins...
...The new President waded into a massive crowd of thousands in the heart of El Alto and visited with the families of those killed...
...But even if the gas were piped to the Pacific through a different route, polls say a majority of Bolivians would still oppose the gas deal with California...
...Bolivia had entered a new day...
...The proposed tax hikes of the IMF plan sparked nationwide demonstrations ("el impuestazo" or "tax revolt...
...The next day the clearing of the roadblocks began, life began to return to normal and Mesa began a series of symbolic acts to persuade people that something different had begun...
...As the tanks and soldiers rolled back to their barracks and the road blockades were slowly lifted, the Bolivian people tried to understand what kind of day that would be...
...Instead he was apparently packing his suitcases for his flight to Miami...
...Prosperity, however, is not one of them...
...He also expressed his willingness to leave office before the end of his constitutional term if that is what the congress decided...
...Under coercion from the Bank, the government privatized the city's water system and gave a 40-year sweetheart lease to Bechtel, the California engineering giant...
...government repeatedly proclaimed its backing for him...
...We are trying to recover democracy through peaceful means...
...Last February Bolivia's globalization war erupted again...
...Then we can sell the gas...
...The gas issue may have been the spark, but there was enough tinder of discontent at hand to ignite the gas revolt into a full-scale inferno of public rebellion...
...The direct spark for the September-October civil uprising in Bolivia was a government plan to export a portion of the nation's mammoth natural gas reserves...
...The plan did not prove to be especially popular with the Bolivian people...
...The tall, gray bearded and bespectacled Mesa began his speech to the nation by asking for a moment of silence for "the men and women of Bolivia who gave their lives fighting for democracy and justice...
...Embassy told all U.S...
...Please give me time, give me space," Mesa told the indigenous crowd, as he stood at Quispe's side...
...As he tries to carve a way forward, Mesa will find himself stuck between a rock and a hard place on many fronts at once...
...Quispe told the crowd: "This is a mestizo who can help us...
...Across Bolivia people seemed eager to believe that this man, a journalist who had written some of the most respected books on the nation's history, was genuinely committed to helping the people write a dynamic new chapter of their own...
...That afternoon rumors of the resignation circulated through the airwaves and the streets...
...The other vacations at Disney World...
...Each of Bolivia's three recent battles over globalization has ended in both a victory and a death toll substantially larger than the one before it...
...Within weeks of taking over the water, Bechtel imposed huge increases on water rates...
...The roads leading in and out of the capital city were blocked with a ragtag assembly of rocks, logs and whatever else people could find...
...Indians from the altiplano--the highland plains--were joined by coca growers from the lowlands of the Chapare on the other side of the country...
...As the sun rose on October 17 many expected Sdnchez De Lozada to declare a formal "state of emergency"-martial law...
...The U.S...
...The prescription has had a host of effects...
...To begin with, it ran smack into a deep national resentment over Chile's seizure of Bolivia's last remaining outlet to the sea in 1879...
...Yet the warning issued by the U.S...
...When the death toll climbed, marchers from cities hundred of miles away began marching on La Paz...
...He blamed everyone but himself, made no apologies and made absolutely no mention of the Vol )(XXVII, No 3 NOVEMBERIDECEMBER 2003 9 Vol XXXVII, No 3 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2003 9UPDATE/BOLIVIA 0 0 a 0 0 o A grinning miner victoriously holds up the Bolivian daily La Raz6n, which proclaims the swearing-in of the new President, Carlos Mesa...
...School children here are still taught that the nation must reclaim its coastline...
...In early October, with the death toll surpassing 30, the government began to crack...
...When local corruption meets big international conglomerates looking for a way to pipe away natural resources at rock-bottom prices, the result is usually a sweetheart deal that leaves the dealmakers happy and the public in the dust...
...While the vast majority in Bolivia struggles for basic survival, a tiny, wealthy elite intent on protecting its privileges runs the country...
...Under the plan the gas was to be sold to a British-led consortium called Pacific LNG, which would ship the gas out of Bolivia through a new pipeline to the Pacific coast via neighboring Chile, then on to Mexico for processing and finally off to the lucrative California market...
...As in the February anti-IMF uprisings, Sanchez de Lozada feigned dialogue as he sent in the troops...
...The "gas revolt" began against this backdrop of a people already fed up with their government and a President already stripped of public credibility...
...All the money will just end up in the pockets of the President, the ministers and other politicians," says Lourdes Netz, a former Roman Catholic nun...
...Over the weekend of October 1112 the government stepped up its repression, and the death toll nearly doubled...
...In 1545 at the dawn of colonization in the Americas, the Spanish discovered one of the largest single sources of mineral wealth in the history of the planet, Bolivia's Cerro Rico (Rich Hill), the silver-filled hill of Potosi...
...If not, that means he is a friend of the gringos and he will be our enemy...
...Protest leaders demanded the President's resignation...
...Embassy, already bruised from its failed effort to prop up Sinchez de Lozada, insists that those crops will end up feeding the cocaine trade and is unlikely to give Mesa any wiggle room at all on the issue...
...The protests were led by striking national police officers in La Paz...
...Thirty-two people were killed in the protests, including a young nurse shot by government sharpshooters as she attempted to aid the wounded...
...Bolivia's key movement leaders, including Quispe and Evo Morales, the leader of the nation's coca growers who was runner up in last year's presidential elections, have granted Mesa and his government a truce until late January to see what progress can be made...
...The last casualty was the President...
...Let's show the world that we know how to construct peace...
...On the gas issue, protests in the west against the sale are being matched by an increasingly militant pro-sale movement in the east, where the gas is located and where people expect to benefit more directly...
...First let's get a political system that we believe will actually sell the gas in the people's interests, say many Bolivians...
...In mid-September tens of thousands of men and women marched on La Paz via El Alto, a poverty-stricken suburb at 14,000 feet above sea level...
...On February 12-13, army units dispatched by Sanchez de Lozada opened fire on the protesting police in the capital's central plaza directly in front of the Congress and the Presidential Palace...
...of the World Bank and IMF...
...The next day he arrived unannounced and uninvited at a huge victory rally in the capital presided over by the government's fiercest adversary, Aymara leader Felipe Quispe ("El Mallku"), the chief architect of the blockage of La Paz...
...Among its passengers was Gonzalo SAnchez de Lozada, who had just resigned the nation's presidency...
...The State Department declared that "the American people and their government support Bolivia's democratically elected president...
...This triggered a regional uprising that kicked Bechtel out of the country...
...Bolivia's fight against these policies first caught world attention three years ago during the city of Cochabamba's now famous revolt against water privatization-considered by some analysts as this century's first war over water...
...Have the people benefited...
...In a heated vote marked by angry exchanges: "terrorists...
...is not heeding the loss of life...
...The stark social divisions in the country, as in much of the world, are marked with racial and ethnic overtones...
...The contrast with his predecessor could not have been more pronounced...
...This time in response to the IMF's attempt to impose a national austerity package on the country...
...Finally there is Bolivia's perennial issue-coca...
Vol. 37 • November 2003 • No. 3
