¡Bolivia de Pie!

...In debt negotiations with the government in the 1990s, for example, the World Bank made $600 million in debt relief contingent on the privatization of Cochabamba’s waterworks.5 Eventually the cash-strapped government complied, awarding a 40-year contract to the sole bidder—the consortium Aguas del Tunari, whose majority owner was the U.S.-based Bechtel corporation...

...Under the tutelage of Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, it took Goni and his team just 17 days to cobble together what they called the “New Economic Policy...

...Hence when Bolivians began the latest cycle of resistance and insurgency in 2000,” write historians Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, “their radical traditions of organizing provided unexpected reserves of strength...

...This restraint is all the more noteworthy because the U.S...

...At a press conference the military high command warned Congress “to listen to the voice of the people” and “popular demands...

...The International Monetary Fund (IMF), often working in concert with the Bank, has also played an insidious role in determining economic policy...

...Embassy and transnational capital...

...They have gone from the defensive and the local, to a position that is national and on the offensive...

...we want our autonomy...

...The battle broke out as announced and, while under martial law, the people of Cochabamba fought armed troops throughout the tear gas-choked city...

...Juan Coro, a miner en route to Sucre, was killed, but reports indicate it was police that shot him, not the Armed Forces...

...Among their many accomplishments, Bolivians have blocked a sweetheart deal with private energy companies, reestablished public companies, raised the debate of nationalization, thwarted rightwing efforts to takeover the state and gained support for a new Constitution...

...The country was open for business...

...While we’re fighting in the streets, they are there, happy, on the balconies watching us, and then at the last minute when we’re about to overthrow the government they join us...

...Moreover, the all-ornothing ties between political parties and the social movements are currently much more fluid and flexible in Bolivia than in other Latin American countries...

...Official pronouncements of organizations in the social movements allude to the strategic assumption that the power of local elites and the more nebulous global networks of power are not merely symbiotic, but one and the same...

...Despite the military’s bloody history and Vaca’s overtures for repression, even the Armed Forces sought to prevent “a confrontation at all costs between brothers,” as one commander stated...

...Two days later, the government was forced to scrap the contract...

...It seems like the beginning of a now-familiar Latin American story...

...They argue that the future of the gas reserves should not be held hostage by what they see as extremist indigenous movements...

...In early 2003, the IMF recommended budget targets for Bolivia and suggested taxation as the best way to reach those goals...

...This January, five years after residents of Cochabamba won back their water and reestablished a public utility company with mechanisms for citizen participation, the Neighborhood Associations (FEJUVE) of El Alto won a similar battle...

...What’s more, the social movements have done so by attacking, weakening and in some cases circumventing the power structure within its borders and beyond that determines what’s “permissible” under conditions of Empire...

...7 The only way the government could meet the IMF’s requirements was by raising income taxes...

...some residents even seized Illimani offices and facilities...

...Management of city’s waterworks had been privatized in September the year before, and within weeks household water bills had skyrocketed by 200%.2 A coalition opposing the water contract and rate hikes nicknamed La Coordinadora led intermittent protests and strikes in the first months, but then declared an all-out “final battle” for April...

...11 Morales has subsequently begun constructing an “anti-neoliberal coalition” for the December elections...

...But for now, the country’s fate is sealed in the outcome of the constituent assembly that will convene in 2006 to rewrite the Constitution...

...In a dramatic reversal from his more radical past, after the 1985 election, Paz enlisted the help of his U.S.-educated Finance Minister Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada to map out an economic strategy...

...The day after Vaca was forced to step aside, La Coordinadora, which remains one of the country’s most vibrant and active social movement organizations, released a revealing communiqué stating: Through the enormous mobilization of Bolivians and the indigenous people throughout the country we have temporarily averted a grand maneuver by the transnational corporations, the U.S...

...Illimani pegged El Alto’s rates to the U.S...

...Under this violent repression, however, cocalero unions and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party led by congressman Evo Morales have scored important, yet partial, victories against the bellicose imposition of the Drug War...

...In the contorted logic of global capitalism, this means that the World Bank Group, which demanded and funded the privatization in the first place, and was then a partial owner, will also decide whether the government complied with the “deal...

...According to the latest census, 53% of El Alto residents still lack these basic services.6 After negotiations over the water crisis stalled, FEJUVE called a general strike on January 10...

...The moment that you change your tax rules, you are changing the rules of the game that establish the possibility that those companies will come and invest in Bolivia...

...The ongoing battle over the fate of the nation’s gas reserves had the adverse effect of destabilizing longstanding fault lines in Bolivian society: between the indigenous peoples of the impoverished highlands and elite groups from the resource-rich eastern and southern lowlands of the country...

...lvaro García Linera, a La Paz–based analyst, notes that the water revolts in Cochabamba and El Alto along with other localized mobilizations—against coca eradication, for example—have been mostly reactive and defensive.8 Although the tax revolt fits this characterization, it differed in that it was national in scope...

...Revolutionary forces and aspirations, only recently thought to have been buried, suddenly resurfaced with surprising energy and creativity, albeit in new forms and under new circumstances...

...Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles cemented by reactionary forces within Bolivia and abroad, the social movements have succeeded at the very least in moving the goalpost: whether the issue is overturning facets of the neoliberal model, resisting the cycle of violence of the Drug War (increasingly subsumed by the War on Terror) or disregarding the strictures of Wall Street...

...4 Stateoriented economic policies were reversed, industries and services were privatized, government spending was cut, hyperinflation was stopped, the unions and labor laws were weakened and the financial sector was deregulated...

...The water belongs to the people, damn it...

...a veto that was once the exclusive preserve of the U.S...

...Perhaps more significantly, in 2002 the U.S.- trained and -financed Expeditionary Task Force (ETF), a paramilitary counterdrug unit, was disbanded due to widely publicized abuses...

...Instead of a responsive rearguard action, the movements—led by the insurgent communities of the altiplano (highland plateau) and the FEJUVE of El Alto—preempted the sale of the country’s vast natural gas reserves by foreign corporations...

...Since then, through similar mobilizations, Bolivia stands as the only country in Latin America—and perhaps the world—that has successfully rolled back some of the key impositions of dominant military, economic and political paradigms underlying current patterns of globalization...

...Moreover, the social movements—in an unprecedented alliance—united around a common set of demands that eventually included the unequivocal nationalization of the country’s hydrocarbons industry...

...Bolivia’s rich histories of tightly knit campesino communities (called ayllus), workers’ unions, campesino unions, neighborhood associations and many other forms of collective organization have long made it one of Latin America’s most organized societies...

...These elites and their wellheeled civic and business groups are intimately tied to private energy companies...

...This, compañeros, is no small thing: all the power of global capital was brought down against us yesterday, and we managed to stop it.9 Under conditions of Empire, which makes the alreadylimited spaces of political maneuverability even more contested, the current state of affairs in Bolivia brings to sharp focus some core, familiar questions for the Latin American left: what is the most effective path for national self-determination and social justice...

...During this same privatization push by the Bank, the government also privatized the joint water system of El Alto and neighboring La Paz, awarding it to the private consortium Aguas del Illimani, mostly owned by France-based Suez...

...Quispe leads the much smaller Indigenous Pachakutik Movement (MIP) party and is closely linked to the militant Aymara communities of the altiplano...

...In about a week, the government succumbed and announced it had canceled the contract...

...21060,” initiating the radical neoliberal transformation of Bolivia and the systematic dismantlement of the state built by the Revolution...

...Regardless of the electoral outcome, the social movements will continue to be a dominant, oppositional force no matter the government in power...

...The country erupted in protest, especially La Paz, where already-striking policemen joined the demonstrations and eventually had a daylong shootout with military forces in front of the Presidential Palace...

...3 These conditions make Bolivia uniquely poised to resist and overturn reigning global economic, political and military arrangements, and it has begun to do so with stunning success...

...Paz had been a leader of Bolivia’s Revolution of 1952, which in its early years had instituted broad reforms: nationalization of key industries, land reform, universal suffrage, education programs, subsidies and other social protections...

...The Embassy forged this dependency of the military through the U.S.-sponsored Drug War...

...USING THE CONTEMPORARY TOOLS OF ECONOMIC POWER— holding up loans, aid, and debt relief—the [World] Bank and IMF influenced and outright coerced the Bolivian government into selling or leasing its public enterprises into corporate hands,” says Jim Shultz of the Cochabambabased Democracy Center...

...Since the 2002 elections in which Morales lost by less than 2%, he and his cocalero-based party, the MAS, have focused on local elections as a springboard for winning the presidency...

...The so-called “gas war” in September-October 2003 that toppled the Goni Administration and its continuation in May this year was profoundly different from these previous uprisings...

...Most recently, cocaleros reached an agreement with the government in October 2004 that allowed the marginal expansion of government-sanctioned coca in the Chapare, where most of the country’s “illicit” crop is grown...

...Only then will it be seen if the new country that emerges from that process will be capable of translating the demands from the street into the actions of the government...

...The next part of his analysis, an ominous warning, would later prove tragic: “The first political task consists of restoring the state’s authority over society at large...

...Aguas del Illimani will likely bring charges against the government for canceling the contract at the International Center for Investment Settlement Disputes (ICISD), an arm of the World Bank...

...Then-Vice President Carlos Mesa told Jim Shultz of the Democracy Center that the first option, which was raising the taxes levied on private oil and gas companies, was immediately ruled-out...

...The protracted low-intensity conflict in Bolivia over U.S.-mandated coca eradication has led to widespread human rights abuses and the death of at least 33 cocaleros (coca growers) between 1998 and 2003...

...Embassy had shown support for Vaca, and the military has a long-established history of bending to the will of the Embassy, which provides it with generous funding, weapons and training...

...Most of these rightwing groups also advocate for greater regional autonomy and some even call for the resource-rich regions to secede from the western highlands...

...Using their primary pressure tactic of road blockades—which effectively shut down the entire country with military precision—the cocaleros have won government reprieves on coca eradication and the construction of more military bases...

...Days later, the government was again forced to comply with the public’s demands and repealed the tax...

...When President Carlos Mesa was forced to resign last June, the movements scrambled to prevent a surrogate of these elites, Senate President Hormando Vaca Díez—the next in succession for the presidency—from taking office...

...Rather than a strictly economic program,” explained Goni, “the New Economic Policy is a political plan...

...government, the Santa Cruz oligarchy and the traditional Bolivian political parties...

...Would a broader alliance including less politically progressive forces widen the appeal and viability of a transformative project, or would such an approach be doomed by compromise and stagnation...

...This constitutes a qualitative leap in the social movements’ construction of an alternative political project,” writes García...

...But in an effort to gain middle class support, Morales’ first move was to ally with the Movement Without Fear (MSM) party, which opposes the nationalization of the hydrocarbons industry...

...The great alibi, the great argument of the multinational corporations, is legal security,” said Mesa...

...THE EARLY 1980s WERE DESPERATE TIMES FOR BOLIVIANS...

...BY MOST ACCOUNTS, THE OPENING SALVO IN Bolivia’s ongoing revolutionary cycle occurred in 2000.1 Mothers, unionists, campesinos, students, in fact, citizens of all kinds seized the streets and plazas of Cochabamba to take back their water...

...10 At the June 17 meeting of the MAS, its bases called for an allegiance, “principally, with other sectors of the social movements...

...The city’s walls were still scrawled with the then-victorious rallying call, “¡El agua es del pueblo, carajo...

...Broadly stated, the two competing left currents in Bolivia are generally associated with Evo Morales, on the one hand, and radical Aymara leader Felipe Quispe and his allies on the other...

...The widespread food shortages, astronomical hyperinflation and general instability led the government to call early elections in 1985...

...Protests paralyzed the city and shut down the international airport...

...An ICISD case brought by Illimani, however, would have the added irony that the International Finance Corporation, which is also an arm of the World Bank, happens to be a shareholder in Illimani...

...Finally, in early February 2003, Goni, who had recently been elected to a second presidential term, decided on a tax structure that included Bolivians earning only twice the minimum wage...

...At first, the government considered only raising the income tax of the richest Bolivians, but budget projections showed the country would still fall short of the IMF’s target...

...When asked about his relationship with Morales and the MAS, Quispe charged, “Evo Morales wants the presidency...

...Its aim is to recover the basic principles of republican life without which we run a serious risk of national disintegration...

...dollar and water bills shot up by 35%, while water and sewer hookup fees reached $445...

...Protestors traveled across the country from La Paz to Sucre—where Congress had met to escape the La Paz demonstrations—encircled the colonial city and managed to block Vaca’s appointment...

...It’s fitting that the current cycle of struggle began by reclaiming such a basic and symbolic element of life...

...Víctor Paz Estenssoro of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) party won a fourth term as president...

...In a dramatic development, the movements even counted on the tacit support of the military...

...THE SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, PARTICULARLY WHEN ACTING IN concert, now wield a veritable extra-governmental veto over government policy...

...Bolivia already faces a pending $25 million suit at the ICISD for canceling Tunari’s contract in Cochabamba...

...Three weeks after his inauguration, Paz signed “Supreme Decree No...