Catholic Holidays and Coup Alerts

Here’s what it looks like Thursday morning.

It is a Catholic holiday today (Corpus Christy) so religion has once again succeeded in achieving what social movements have tried to do over the past week – shutting the country down.

Meanwhile, the more paranoid among us here are on coup alert as rumors of some form of Presidential ousting – be it from the left or right, if that means anything right now – is in the works. A couple of Army Lt. Colonels appeared on TV yesterday calling on President Carlos Mesa to step aside to “make room for a government of the people”. The soldiers also repeated the call by social movements to nationalize Bolivia’s oil and gas and to immediately convene a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution.

In the time it takes for to devour a fine cob of Bolivian corn, the head of Bolivia’s armed forces went on TV himself, labeled the Lt. Colonels renegades and declared that the military stood solidly behind the President and democracy.

I don’t put much credence in the threat posed by yesterday’s announcement. To steal a phrase – I doubt that a coup will be announced on television. Nevertheless it all put people on edge for much of last night, amidst other reports that Senate leader Vaca Diez (a critic from the right of President Mesa) was oddly headed for Santa Cruz.

The real guessing game right now – as it always is at this point in a Bolivian political crisis – is trying to predict how the scenario plays out to some end. Here’s my guess.

The upheaval in La Paz will continue and Bolivia will appear to be just at the point of a total meltdown. Behind the scenes groups and institutions such as the Permanent Assembly and Human Rights, the Defensor del Pueblo, and the Catholic Church will be talking to everyone and out of the blue a truce will be announced and talks held, most likely to finalize the date and terms of the Constitutional Assembly. Bolivia’s inevitable confrontation over not just gas but political power and who has it will be delayed off into the future for a few months.

The dilemma is that there is no middle ground and no matter who tries to establish some they get run over, like “Armadillos in the middle of the road” as Jim Hightower would say. President Mesa tired to play the middle ground and has become almost irrelevant. Evo Morales, ironically, tired to position himself in the middle (by calling for a 50% tax on gas companies but not all-out nationalization) and finds himself under harsh attack from his left.

The middle ground may no longer be Bolivia’s solution. The Aymara nation has pretty much served notice that its tolerance for Bolivian apartheid is at an end. Bolivia’s economy can’t sustain many more years of the Washington Consensus economic model that put its gas and oil into foreign hands and has left the poor only poorer still.

Sooner or later Bolivia is going to have to change direction in some dramatic way. When? 2005 is starting to look like a pretty good bet.