Mr. Veep Goes to Washington

After a number of false starts, Bolivia is finally sending a high-level delegation to Washington this week, led by Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera. It will be the US Capital’s first look at the top end of the new Bolivian government and what happens during the visit will have a major impact on the next evolution in the often stormy relations between the Bush and Morales administrations.

On the surface, the visit is about trade issues, and specifically the desire by the Bolivian government to get the US to extend the life of a fifteen-year-old US policy giving trade preferences to Bolivia-produced textiles. The number of jobs dependent on that extension numbers in the thousands, backers of it claim, and the Morales government is not anxious to have it end on its watch – for reasons both of economics and politics. Trade issue observes in DC have told me for months that winning the extension from the GOP-controlled Congress is going to be a hard sell.

Beneath the surface the issue in DC is really a question on the part of doubtful but persuadable politicians and opinion makers: Is the new Bolivian government a group of people we can work with, or a group of Hugo Chavez groupies who just want to pick a fight with George Bush?

Personally, for a lot of reasons, I think Alvaro is going to win a lot of admirers in Washington, and help open up better relations between Bolivia and the US.

First, the VP is smart, wicked smart. His capacity for analysis of Bolivian history and politics is as impressive as anyone I have ever met here. He will have done his homework on the issues people in Washington want to talk about and he knows how to make an argument.

Second, he will signal to people in Washington that there is a lot more to the new Bolivian government than the silly off-the-cuff charges about the US (such as the soldiers in disguise accusation) that Evo makes in places like Punata and get picked up by AP and transmitted straight north. Alvaro will make no such mistakes.

[A note: thank you to all the “soldiers-disguised-as-students” who wrote to me after our Blog posting. I enjoyed your tales of being falsely accused as spies.]

Third, the Vice-President will have a willing audience. Many of those set to meet with Alvaro are those I met with in January, days after his and Evo’s inauguration – Congressional staff, think tank people, DC movers and shakers. There are a lot of them, Republicans included, who would like to see Bolivia’s new government succeed. While neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Cheney has any plans to receive the mop-haired VP from the Andes, plenty of others, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Richard Lugar, will.

What should the V.P. say in Washington? Here is my advice.

Bolivia is the poorest nation in South America. In December, in a genuinely democratic step forward, the Bolivian people elected a president, by a historic majority, who grew up in poverty and has as his core mandate the lifting up of his people out of poverty. If US policy makers want to know why the government is setting out to “nationalize” its gas and oil; it is about generating resources to relieve poverty. If it wants to know why Bolivia wants to shed the IMF/World Bank economic policies coerced onto it for two decades; it is because it believes those policies have made poverty worse. If it wants to know why it wants to take a new approach on the coca issue; it is because the US “war on drugs” has helped spin Bolivia into a chronic economic crisis.

I believe that is a message that is genuinely what Bolivia is about right now. I think it is one that Washington can hear. And I think it is one that Bolivia’s Vice-President can sincerely and effectively deliver. Vamos a ver.