Okay – Now He’s Staying

Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go there will be trouble
An' if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know.

-- The Clash

Granted it is an odd image. Bolivia's President sitting alone in the Presidential palace, his grey bearded chin resting warily in his hands, listening over and over to the lyrics of a bootlegged Clash CD that he surreptitiously picked up on a lunch time walk down La Paz's main street. Maybe it isn't happening this way, but it seems pretty darn close.

On March 6th President Mesa went on national TV to announce his resignation, which clearly was a move to provoke expressions of political support more than it was an actual threat. It also wasn't a bad move for him, politically speaking. Then he received support, both in the streets and from the Congress in a unanamous resolution caling on him to stay. Then he tells the same Congress -- Okay, I'll stay if you all agree to run for reelection two years early. How do you think the US Senate would react to a propoal to run their races over again two years early?

With that propoal rejected Mesa announced once again he would leave.

Then at 11 o'clock last night, after which all sensible Bolivians had gone to bed, Mesa told the few reporters still gathered near his office, that he was staying. "I am not going to hand over the Presidency to someone who doesn't have the legitimacy of the vote. For this country...I want to guarantee that I will not leave you abandoned."

Again I repeat, it is all about oil. Mesa, under heavy pressure from foreign oil companies to pass a new gas law to their liking, is frustrated that the Congress won't give it to him. In his various threats to resign Mesa has said, "We can't continue governing with a Congress that refuses to accept a minimum of rationality in its negotiations with the President."

Mesa, once the nation's leading newscaster, may have spent too many years communicating into the red light of a television camera that never spoke back to him. In politics it doesn't work that way. Presidents, as a rule, do not resign when their Congresses refuse to follow orders, they play politics to their best advantage and they negotiate.

So just how irrational are the demands coming from Mesa's Congressional opponents on the left? The demand is simple -- as foreign companies develop Bolivia's gas and oil they want the country to get a 50-50 split, a real one, not a fake one in the form of complicated tax schemes designed by the companies.

Suppose you found oil under your house. To be clear, you'd need to develop it in partnership with an oil company who knows how to pump, process and sell it. Would it be unreasonable for you to tell Shell, Enron, British Petroleum or another corporate suitor that you want a 50-50 split, straight out of the ground?

That is what Bolivia had before its failed privatization moves in the 1990s and that is what most Bolivians want back. I say again as well, Mesa knows better. He knows the calls from companies that they'll walk if they don't get what they want are cries of wolf. I quoted him in my last Blog in which he called it, "the great alibi." His own special minister for gas handed me a report when I met with him showing that, under the current scheme, Bolivia's share of oil profits is among the lowest in the world among oil producing countries.

Fifty-fifty at the mouth of the well. It is a reasonable demand and the sooner Bolivia gets there the sooner the country will escape a political meltdown. Foreign companies like to talk about the importance of stable investment environments and rightly so. Who wants to invest big dollars in a country where the government changes hands along with the seasons? What they need to see now is how they are the chief reason Bolivia is headed in that direction.