National Meltdown or Just the Loud Noise of Political Change?

Is Bolivia in the midst of a national meltdown or just emitting the loud noise of political change? That is the big question on the minds of Bolivians and Bolivia watchers this week.

So many tables have turned here that it is hard to keep track.

Key elements of the nation's traditional ruling elite, led by former-President Tuto Quiroga and "civic leaders" from Santa Cruz are organizing a paro civico (general strike) for Friday in four departments of the country. It is the kind of action that Quiroga and his political mentor, President Hugo Banzer, used to send out troops to squash. Meanwhile, the government of President Evo Morales, who used to help organize such strikes, pledged yesterday that, while it opposes the objectives of Quiroga and his allies, the government has no intention whatsoever of using soldiers or any other means to intervene. "It is part of their democratic right," announced Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera.

Quiroga, who talked a tough law and order line during the campaign he lost badly in December (his billboards featured the word "Authority" in huge letters), is now part of an effort threatening to organize its own Constituent Assembly to rewrite the constitution -- no Congressional authorization or government sponsored elections required, evidently.

Quiroga and the other MAS opponents argue that Morales and his backers are breaking the law by pushing to give the Assembly convened in Sucre more power than it was authorized in the Congressional act convening it. They can certainly make a reasonable case for that and have every right to do so. On the other hand, despite the fact that President George Bush breaks the law wildly in the US (for example, illegally spying on US citizens), I have yet to hear a call by Congressional Democrats to set up a new Congress all on their own.

Is all this a sign of a meltdown in the works? On the one hand, it could be.

Will MAS's insistence on the rules it wants governing voting procedures in the Assembly push its opponents into full political battle against the government? Will those opponents feel so threatened that they start risking the thing that they supposedly have craved so much – national stability? Where would instability take Bolivia?

If the elite in Santa Cruz, for example, thinks it has a unified base behind it in the four departments joining in Friday's strike (Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija, Pando), it might want to check its back. As a Bolivian friend of mine pointed out to me yesterday, Santa Cruz is just like Cochabamba. It is full of people from Oruro, Potosi and other parts of the highlands, who migrated to Santa Cruz in the last decade looking for work. When their families and old neighbors, people like the miners from Potosi, start to march on Santa Cruz as they have threatened, will the region's elite wake up one morning to find their empleadas and workers marching with the miners?

On the other hand, this could all be just a national version of the scenes I used to witness of an old Santa Cruz friend of mine, Sister Lourdes, negotiating tomato prices in the cancha (the market place).

"How much per kilo…ayyyy, that is much too high!!" she would proclaim to the woman selling, as if she really was offended. "I'll pay four."

"Ayyyy, I can't sell it to you for that," the seller would respond, apparently equally offended.

So the haggling went back and forth until some number in between was settled on. Then they'd exchange warm niceties with one another, the seller would toss in a "yappa" of an extra tomato or two and the show was over.

A lot is at stake in the rewriting of the nation's constitution. Whether committees can pass proposals by a majority vote or a 2/3 vote is very small tomatoes in comparison to the mammoth debates ahead over gas, land, and the distribution of political power.

Maybe the ever-more-heated rhetoric on all sides this week is the opening act of a political conflict that is simply unstoppable in a country undertaking such a huge transformation of who has power. Or maybe both sides are testing, to see how far they can push, to see how hard the other side pushes back – but with each side knowing that a meltdown serves no one's interest in Bolivia.

They may just be negotiating the price of tomatoes, but on a scale so far-reaching and historic that the haggling is very, very loud.