The Fork in the Road

Protests and blockades paralyzing La Paz. Roads across the country shut down. Campesinos marching on Santa Cruz attacked by stick-wielding youths. Congress struggling to find some compromise that can bring the country back to normal. All sides losing patience and repeated rumors of coups in the air. This is the way Bolivia looks tonight.

It is unclear how long Bolivia can continue along with the current stalemate. The movements calling for nationalization of oil and gas and for a national Asamblea Constituyente not only show no signs of letting up, they show all the signs of growing more intense and bold in their willingness to shut the country down.

Yet, here in Cochabamba, as soon as you step away from those involved in the protests, you run into a wave of frustration by taxi drivers, shop workers, neighbors and others who, while generally in support of the social movements’ demands, are getting increasingly ticked off at having the center of the city shut down and work made impossible for many. I can only imagine that in La Paz these sentiments on both sides are even more intense.

The fork in the road – Bolivia will either find a compromise forward soon or the government will take up arms to squash the protests. Only those who don’t know better predict which way things will turn.

Once again, it is time for a little reminder of the hidden forces at work here from abroad. Bolivians did not get themselves into this conflict by their own doing, not by any stretch.

Here how it works:

Step One: The International Monetary Fund decides that the economic medicine that the country needs is privatization of all its industries – say eating raw eggs ten times a day – you can say no. When the IMF is the doctor and you are dependent on it for economic aid, it is like the doctor being able to withhold your food if you don’t chow down the eggs. You take the eggs.

Step Two: Bolivia takes the IMF’s advice, privatizes its oil and gas, watches state revenues from oil and gas take a nosedive while prices skyrocket. People start to get mad.

Step Three: After the people get mad enough to oust their President (Goni 2003), the next President promises to put the whole thing to a vote and does, with 92% of the people affirming that they want Bolivia to take back control of the nation’s gas and oil.

Step Four: The IMF and the oil companies tell Bolivia (albeit, in economic jargon): “Hey a deal is a deal. You can’t put the toothpaste of privatization back into the tube. If you do this no one will invest in your country. You will be a pariah.” Behind the scenes the IMF makes no tampering with the oil companies’ contracts a condition of renewed aid.

Step Five: Unable to get their government to listen in any other way, people go to the streets, they push their country to the edge of chaos. Some take a historical view and see, in oil and gas, the makings of a 21st century version of the Spanish stealing three centuries of silver out of a mountain in Potosi’ leaving Bolivia the poorest country on the continent. They act “radically”. Others take a daily view, “I just want to work, I just want peace. Who are these people disrupting our lives?”

The pressure from those demanding that Bolivia take back its gas and oil is as visible as a mass of people occupying a city and as loud as dynamite thrown in anger. The pressure from the other side – from the IMF, from the USA, from foreign oil companies – is invisible. It takes place among calm people wearing suits, ties and heels, behind closed doors. So far, that is a pressure far more powerful than thousands in the street and suffers no similar public reaction against it.

So here is a moral question for our readers. If a nation is pushed by foreign players like the IMF into a policy without any public input or support, and if that policy turns out to be such a failure that the people rebel – who bears responsibility?

How would people in the U.S. feel if the IMF came in today and forced the US government to privatize Social Security, took that fundamental democratic choice right out of the public’s hands? Or suppose that the IMF forced the US government to turn over the Alaskan wilderness over to oil companies from China? What then?

What is happening in the streets of El Alto, La Paz and Cochabamba this week is nothing to be shocked about. It is a political boomerang a decade in the making from a simple fact – Bolivia did not hand control of its oil and gas reserves over to foreign companies because the people deliberated on it and decided it was a good deal. Bolivia took that action under the threat of losing foreign aid it was dependent upon.

You don’t take a decision like that away from people and then express shock and dismay when they finally react. If fatal violence again breaks out in Bolivia in the next week, let us not pretend that it was a purely Bolivian act. The actions that set that violence in motion will be traceable, once again, to an unelected institution a hemisphere away in Washington DC.