Three Bolivias

The Internet, newspapers, and radio airwaves are full of analyses about what the last three weeks of events have meant here in Bolivia. Some of these are more astute than others. Taking both a breath and a step back from the turmoil of the past week I have been trying to sort out myself what all this means. Here’s a reflection on the tense dance between three Bolivias.

The Powerful

Bolivia is a nation run by a tiny elite that doesn’t look, think or share many of the interests of the nation’s poor and Indian majority. What it takes for them to become economic winners is not the same as what it takes for the rest of Bolivia to move ahead economically.

When you spot economic growth indicators for Bolivia the first thing you should ask is who is benefiting. Assuming that the poor move up when growth hits 4% is like saying that if Bill Gates goes to a Thanksgiving dinner in a homeless shelter, on average, everyone eating is a millionaire.

When a small elite holds on to privilege amidst a sea of people who have none, a psychology develops. They assume that their privilege is wholly earned, and all that inheritance, corruption, foreign aid, and an economic system rigged to their advantage have nothing to do with it. People who ask questions are labeled as radicals and conspirators. I have lived here eight years now and have seen this mentality of the powerful in operation in everything from the running of an orphanage and an international school to battles over privatization.

The Poor

I have always found that Bolivia’s poor have a very sophisticated analysis of their country’s economic problems. Sometimes there almost seems to be an inverse relationship between how much formal education people have and how clear their vision is. I have written before about Victor the plumber, who, while simultaneously fixing our broken water pump, explained eloquently the problem of Bolivia always selling off its natural resources in raw form at bargain prices instead of reaping the real benefits that come from industrializing and selling it as, for example, plastic and electricity.

All that and he can fix a pump.

It is the poor than are demanding now, both the return of oil and gas to public control and a rewriting of the national Constitution. As the past few weeks have reminded us, these groups – the indigenous of El Alto and the altiplano, minders, laborers and others – do not lightly take NO for an answer

The “I Just Want to Work”

Stuck in the middle between the two is a large portion of the population, probably a majority who, as I have written, generally support the demands of the social movements but live on the margin themselves and are tired and angrily of weeks of national disruption. They are the taxi driver who says to me, “I just want to work.” As much as they blame the protesters for the disruption they also blame the country’s political leaders for failing to solve the nation’s problems.

How the Powers Clashed This Week

This week in particular showed all those groups in action. Carlos Mesa, who is certainly of the elite, strove mightily in his 19 months in office, to build a bridge to the poor and social movements. I will not forget the cajones he demonstrated two days after he took over from Goni, when Mesa crashed Felipe Quispe’s indigenous victory rally in La Paz and asked to speak directly to the crowd. But in the end he had his hands tied by the IMF, the oil companies and others (including, perhaps his own point of view) and the country fell back into conflict.

Hormando Vaca Diez represented the old elite in pure form, a gruff, wealthy Santa Cruz businessman who thought that the way you deal with protests is to send out the army – the way he might fire on the spot a maid who scrambled his eggs not to his liking. I have no doubt that the US was bought as well into a Vaca Diez strategy and it sure looked until late Thursday that the elite was about to rise back into power.

The best way to interpret things here this past week, I believe, is less by the policy outcomes (nationalization is still on the table, etc.) but as a measure of respective power. In fact, that is what has been going on here for five years. The stability that ruled the country for a decade was based on an adherence to IMF/World Bank doctrine, following US orders in the war on drugs, and a set of social movements still too weak to make a challenge.

The Cochabamba water revolt exploded that stability with Bechtel’s ouster in April 2000 and for five year’s since the bases of power, elite and movement-based, have been circling each other like two cats poised for fur-ripping battle. When the Aymara of El Alto chase the Congress out of the capital and then miners from Potosi cut off their air escape from Sucre, to the point where the elite’s Vaca Diez strategy goes belly-up, I think you have to say that the exercise of power is titling in the direction of the movements. Quarrel if you like about the validity of their demands, but as a simple measurement of power, the Bolivia elite just got its butt kicked for the fifth time in five years over an issue directly related to economic globalization.

And on the merits – do not dismiss the call for nationalization as either a radical dream of a nostalgic trip back to Latin America in the 1960s. To be sure, some of the slogans in the streets might lend themselves to believing that. When I was a student in the 1970s in Berkeley some of my classmates used to paint a misspelled “Devest” on a banner and walk down to the Bank of America and break windows. However, the fact that their spelling was bad and their tactics dubious didn’t mean that they were wrong that South African apartheid had to go.

The case for Bolivia taking back control of its oil and gas is stronger and stronger the more you analyze the bad deal under which it privatized those resources a decade ago. And, even if you look at the case and still think it is a big mistake, it is one that Bolivians have every right to make.

What happens after a few days or a few weeks of talking? I tell you, I don’t see the social movements backing down on this one, not in the face of requests, or international pressure, or arrests, or tear gas and guns. The movements have picked their battle and have decided, as John Kennedy once said of the US’s commitment to fight communism, to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe.” That doesn’t mean the full forces of the Bolivian political elite and the US government won’t try to stop them, as Malcolm X said, “by any means necessary.”

But having watched this country closely as a resident for eight years now, I don’t think the people in the streets have any intention whatsoever to back down. The last person I would ever want to pick a fight with is a Bolivian miner with a stick of dynamite in his hand.