The Battle for Plaza 4 de Noviembre

This morning I went strolling through the north of the city, following my three-year-old daughter’s end-of-school-year performance at her day care. It was a great exhibition of two, three, and four year olds performing Little Red Riding Hood and also Bolivian traditional dances, for their parents, siblings, uncles, aunts, and grandparents. Mariana, in the great tradition of her older sister before her, is really good at shyly mouthing the words while her body remains frozen during the supposed dancing. The hamburgers afterwards interested her more.

Not far away is the Plaza 4 de Noviembre, a traffic roundabout with a fountain in the middle that, for some reason I don’t quite understand, takes on the character of a political battlefield during election time. With three weeks to go before Bolivia heads into an epic election for President and Congress, the circle was in full battle mode, red vs. blue.

Red vs. Blue

Red is the party of Podemos and the leading right wing candidate, former President Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga. His partisans lined up along one side of the curve, wearing red t-shirts, waving large red flags, and attempting to lure passers by in cars to take small red leaflets promoting his candidacy.

Blue is the party of MAS and the leading left wing candidate, socialist Evo Morales. His partisans also lined a portion of the circle – blue t-shirts, blue leaflets, and alongside his blue flag the multicolored, checkered “Wipala”, the flag of Bolivia’s indigenous communities.

Both sides also had loudspeakers set up blaring campaign music. Quiroga’s is, to be honest, a really annoying jingle that one might confuse with a song for toothpaste if one were not paying close attention. MAS loudspeakers were blaring the traditional pan flute music of the Andes.

In the dueling symbolism you can actually see something of the campaign itself if you look close, two visions of Bolivia. One modern, market-driven and a little too keen to sound like the USA. The other is calling Bolivia to its indigenous roots. One claims it knows far better than the other how to actually govern a country. The other claims that, what it lacks in experience governing it makes up for in a commitment to govern for the poor and indigenous majority.

Preparado, but to do What?

It is an interesting point, this, “we know how to govern and you don’t” argument. Quiroga is pressing the point hard in his last efforts to close the deal with voters. Yesterday, during a drive-through visit to Cochabamba, he declared that Morales, “is not prepared to govern.” Preparado, it is a word here in Bolivia that generally means you have a formal education, in a country where most people don’t. You here the term, with the word “not” planted before it, a lot about MAS from its critics.

MAS shot back that the “preparation” that Quiroga has “from Harvard University” has mainly served to assassinate Bolivians, hand away the nation’s natural gas to foreigners and to have Bolivia bow down to the US Embassy.

[Note: I am not sure but I don’t think that Quiroga went to Harvard. I did though, and in fact, it doesn’t automatically prepare you to govern, certainly not as much as those with Harvard diplomas think it does.]

This debate, while exaggerated from both sides, is an interesting one. Which is more important, to know how to assemble a team of capable technicians that can make a government function, or having a government that is resolutely committed to the interests of Bolivians rather than foreign investors. Quiroga was, for example, Vice-President in the government that handed Cochabamba’s water system over to Bechtel in a one-bidder process that essentially amounted to robbery (a guaranteed 16% profit every year for forty years). In an interview with Bill Finnegan of the New Yorker Quiroga defended that give away:

I mean Bolivia is not, it's not the Brazil of the world where they're lining up to invest in different things.

It is not hard to envision the same kinds of excuses being cooked up by a new Quiroga government to justify bargain giveaways of Bolivia’s gas.

As for MAS, it has a better backbench of people ready to govern that many analysts give it credit for. One of the people I saw out there this morning, wearing his blue Evo shirt, was a man who had previously served as Bolivia’s Ambassador to two different countries. MAS may lag behind in degrees from Harvard, but it isn’t without some governing weight of its own.

A Preview

All this leads me to a preview of my next article on the elections. I don’t think that MAS will try to govern at all, even if Morales does win (as seems more and more likely) first place on December 18th. My sources close to Morales tell me they have another plan in mind of what to do with a first place finish.

Stay tuned.