Deciphering the Bush Administration's Mixed Signals on Bolivia

Few foreign relationships will be as crucial to the new Bolivian government as that with the US. The US is a major source of Bolivian foreign aid and has a dominant role with two international lenders on whom Bolivia is also greatly dependent, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

All this makes the Bush administration's opening moves toward Bolivia all the more important to watch and to understand. For whatever reason, the Bush administration isn't making that code breaking an easy task.

In the run up to Bolivia's vote, US officials openly vilified Evo Morales and MAS as Marxist puppets of Venezuela and Cuba (here's an article). In August a senior Pentagon official blamed Bolivia's recent uprisings on “reactivated underground networks" of Cuban agents.

As the Bolivian election neared, the US cooled its rhetoric deliberately, not wanting to repeat the episode of three years earlier when the then-US Ambassador virulently and publicly attacked Morales, nearly doubling his support in election polls.

At last month's inauguration, the Bush administration was represented by the assistant secretary of state for Latin America, Tom Shannon, who Morales cordially acknowledged during his speech before heads of state and the Bolivian Congress. By all reports, the new US/Bolivia relationship got off to a genuinely cordial beginning. That led, last week, to President George Bush calling President Morales to congratulate him on his victory.

So what did it mean a day later when Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld appeared before the National Press Club in Washington to, once again, sound administration alarm bells about Morales and Bolivia. In his speech Rumsfeld likened Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to Adolph Hitler:

"I mean, we've got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money," Rumsfeld added. "He's a person who was elected legally - just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally - and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others."

Of Morales directly, Rumsfeld said:

"We've seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome."

This is not the language of a diplomatic thaw.

After a week in Washington, and conversations with people in the administration, the Congress, the Bolivian government and other close observers, the situation appears to be this. The Bush administration is split, with moderates on one hand interested in developing decent relations with the new Bolivian government (in part to keep Morales from developing even tighter relations with Venezuela). On the other side are hardliners who see Morales and MAS as enemies of the US that the Bush administration should oppose and undermine at every turn. This split within the administration is verified by a memo leaked to The Democracy Center from within the Southern Command of the US army.

It could be that Rumsfeld's comments were part of an internal game to counteract the call from Bush to Morales or it could be a deliberate administration strategy to play both sides.

One thing that is clear is that the first issue that will shift the emerging US/Bolivia relationship from diplomatic talk to hard negotiations is coca. The "war on drugs" is the US government's key diplomatic interest in Bolivia and it wants Morales to maintain a hard line against expansion if the nation's coca crop. Morales, the long-time leader of the nation's coca growers, is under pressure from his political base to allow an expansion of that crop. In his inaugural address Morales called for a dedicated fight against "narcotrafficking" but not oppression of poor coca farmers. The weeks ahead will tell us how he intends to do both and how the US will react to it.