Bolivia in the Crosscurrents

Thousands of people from the altiplano have descended on La Paz. Miners have refused to give up the use of the occasional stick of dynamite in their protests. American Airlines has announced that it won’t be flying into La Paz. Congress has been given a four-day ultimatum by the people in the street to either set events in motion to rewrite the constitution or be shut down. The military swears it won’t be a part of any coup.

That’s how it looks in Bolivia tonight.

Bolivia is caught in the midst of a series of volatile crosscurrents and the outcome is anyone’s guess. This isn’t October 2003 when the lines were clean – huge public objection to a government gas export plan, followed by massive public rage against a President who thought the best way to deal with protesters was to shoot them, followed by a Nixonian departure into exile.

Today the factions and demands are many and hopes for reconciliation are evaporating quickly. A summary:

The Aymara Nation: I have been telling foreign reporters for a week that the main question was how intense a reaction we would see from the Aymara Nation, the population of that vast, flat, and impossibly high expanse of altiplano that stretches from El Alto to Lake Titicaca. The answer came in today in the form of thousands of angry protesters in the capital demanding two things in particular – nationalization of Bolivia’s gas and oil and an immediate move toward a national Constituent Assembly (more on that below). One question lingering over events here has been whether the demand for nationalization would be able to maintain intensity and that depended on the altiplano. Intensity is no longer a question.

The National Labor Union (the COB): Jaime Solares, the head of the COB, seems dedicated to saying the most inflammatory thing that comes to mind. That wouldn’t matter so much if the press wasn’t looking to him as a major spokesperson at the moment and if what he was saying wasn’t so dangerous. The latest is his call for a new military-led government to takeover Bolivia (akin he says to the Chavez coup years back in Venezuela that failed). In a country where military dictatorships ruled for decades leaving behind a trail of dead, disappeared, and tortured, his suggestion is not especially welcome by anyone else, left or right.

MAS and Evo Morales: How ironic that the man who the US has been trying to paint as one of the most dangerous radicals in Latin America has emerged as the “moderate” in all this, so much so that he and MAS find themselves bitterly attacked from the left. Evo and MAS weren’t talking nationalization until a week ago, focused instead on lawmaking in the Congress toward a 50% tax deal. By many reports, Evo and the coca farmers marching at his side were not well received by the people of the altiplano when they arrived in El Alto yesterday.

Santa Cruz: A country length and a climate away the movers and shakers in Santa Cruz are saying that they are fed up with the protest politics in the highlands and are pushing for a quick vote on regional autonomy. As I have written before, this too is about oil and gas, and a regional desire to keep as much control (and profit) as possible from gas development in that side of the country.

The Oil Companies: They have a mantra. We will leave. We will sue. We will leave. We will sue. We will leave. We will sue. They are shouting that mantra loudly into the ears of the government and to any reporter, domestic or international, willing to listen. I am sure that the IMF, Bolivia’s co-governing body, is privately issuing similar economic warnings as well.

The Government of Carlos Mesa: It is actually easy to forget that Bolivia has a government right now. Frankly, the President seems almost irrelevant. Every few hours he pops up on television to make another articulate plea that no one listens to – don’t talk about gas anymore, I have an economic plan I’d like to talk about. The disadvantage of speaking into the red light of a TV camera is that you can’t tell that no one is listening.

The Constituent Assembly vs. Autonomy: Here the race is on between two visions of how to remake the Bolivian state. On the one hand the social movements on the left and in the altiplano are focused on quickening up national plans for an Asamblea Constituyente, essentially a national constitutional convention that would rewrite the rules of democracy from scratch. For its backers that includes talking about issues like gas. Last time I talked to those in charge of this in the government their vision was a process in which all content issues (like gas) were off the table and delegates would only talk about how to change the process of elections, etc. Santa Cruz’s call for a regional referendum on autonomy is essentially a preemptive strike against the Asamblea. In other words, put of a political fence around their part of the country so that the new national rules won’t really apply as much.

Complicated enough?