Four Hours and 20 Minutes of Evo

Evo Morales’ anniversary address before the Bolivian Congress yesterday clocked out at 4 hours and twenty minutes. That is 27 minutes longer than Gone with the Wind (which was also, I imagine, easier to watch). According to the coverage in today’s La Razon, as several members of Congress began to fall asleep Evo suggested from the podium that they be offered coffee.

Morales used his anniversary speech to run through the litany of his accomplishments (from gas nationalization to declaring a National Day of the House Worker); to call for prosecution of a variety of former government officials; and to reiterate his call for visas for visitors from the US. With four hours and twenty minutes, he probably had a chance to cover just about everything.

Reading today about the marathon speech [he is still easily outdone by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who, in the year of my birth, spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes during a filibuster against a civil rights bill] I thought back to Evo’s inaugural speech in the Congress a year ago. Then a more humble Evo interrupted himself after a half hour of talking to apologize to listeners for talking so long. “I really didn’t mean to speak for this long, I guess I must have caught something from Hugo and Fidel,” he said to warm laughter.

My favorite moment of that speech was when Evo was speaking about the fight against corruption then looked into the former presidents booth to the notoriously corrupt Jaime Paz Zamora and said, with the nation watching, “Don Jaime, Que ha pasado?”

Evo’s presidency has already delivered positive results that are historic. Four years ago Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada set off the February Negro killings (34 people dead and a one day shooting war between the national police and the army) because he took new taxes on foreign oil companies off the table and instead tried to satisfy the IMF’s deficit reduction demands with a tax hike on the working poor. Evo abandoned “Washington Consensus” dogma, raised foreign oil taxes by $1 billion, and is now running a budget surplus instead of a deficit. None of the companies fled the country as predicted. That is a huge achievement.

But Evo’s second year needs to be a year of humility and healing, not hubris and confrontation. His speech yesterday was a missed opportunity to begin that. Tonight George Bush delivers his State of the Union address in Washington. He knows that if he goes longer that an hour, most people will switch to American Idol. I bet that members of the Bolivian Congress (those that stayed) had wished they had a remote control as well.