The Chess Moves of Manfred Reyes Villa

I have never played chess with Manfred Reyes Villa, the embattled Cochabamba governor currently on world tour. However, judging from how he plays political chess, I would expect to encounter something like this:

He would begin by playing cautiously, building a secure base – the kind of guy who might build a small wall around his king. That’s the way it would go for a good long while until, finally, out of nowhere and with a flashy grin, he would suddenly sweep his bishop across the full length of the board and take my queen. He would do this completely oblivious to the fact that he has just put himself two moves out of inevitable checkmate.

Mr. Cochabamba

Manfred Reyes Villa is a retired Bolivian Army Captain (and graduate of the controversial US Army School of the Americas) who, as a politician, had built himself until recently a very solid political base in Cochabamba. He served multiple terms as popular Mayor here. The fellow nicknamed “Bon Bom” by locals built a reputation as a can-do guy through a series of high profile public works projects – from new parks to a $3 million sky tram that takes visitors to the feet of the world’s largest Jesus.

And despite being mayor of the city that became synonymous with social movement uprisings during much of his time in office, Manfred managed adeptly to stay out of the fray. During the city’s now famous “water revolt” in early 2000, Reyes Villa – who as mayor signed the agreement authorizing handover of the city’s public water system to Bechtel – became almost the invisible man. Even though he was on the opposite side of the issues from all these movements, he never became the target of their actions or animosity.

He built a huge network of support among the city’s neighborhood associations, one that kept him in office and politically strong. Locally in Cochabamba, Manfred Reyes Villa was good at political chess, very good.

Reyes Villa Goes National

In 2002 Reyes Villa made the obvious move and ran for President of Bolivia. According to most polls he was an early and clear frontrunner, and stayed that way almost all the way to election day. But the campaign that seemed sure to send him to La Paz ran into the wily chess play of a team of US political consultants hired to deliver a second Presidential term to former President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, a.k.a. “Goni”.

In her excellent documentary film on the campaign, Our Brand is Crisis, US filmmaker Rachel Boynton gives us a close-up behind-the-scenes look at the work of a team led by James Carville and others of Bill Clinton fame. Following extensive opinion survey work in Bolivia, Carville and Company spelled it out this way to the man known here as “El Gringo” for both his heavy US accent and close US ties:

1. The maximum vote Goni could ever dream of winning was roughly 24%. The rest of the voters would never forgive him for the privatizations and other economic reforms he implemented during his previous term in the 1990s.

2. Winning would be about keeping any other candidate in the crowded field from getting more than 24%.

3. That “other candidate” was Manfred Reyes Villa.

As the film shows, Goni’s campaign relied on two relentless attacks against Reyes Villa (on the issues their research revealed as his biggest weaknesses). The first was that he was a former military man, a history that made voters nervous. Goni’s ads repeatedly showed old photos of Manfred in military uniform. The second was the vague cloud of corruption charges that have long seemed to hover around Manfred (his political party, NFR, got nicknamed in Cochabamba, “Nueva Forma de Robar”, new way to steal). Goni’s ads hammered away with photos of Reyes Villa’s various homes in Bolivia and Miami and asked how a former Army Captain could afford such things.

The man from Cochabamba never knew what hit him. On election day he came in a disappointing third, behind both Goni (who got his planned 24%) and Evo Morales (who was helped enormously at the end when the US Ambassador called on Bolivians to vote against him).

Manfred, clearly bitter by the campaign that Goni waged against him, refused to join the multi-party coalition that gave Goni the 51% of Congress he needed to take office. The former mayor announced he would stay in the opposition and seemed well positioned to run again five years on.

But being on the outside was not good politics for those who supported Reyes Villa. A lot of people who back presidential candidates in Bolivia do it for the spoils of public jobs and Manfred had none to dole out. Less than a year later, with Goni’s popularity slipping badly, Reyes Villa suddenly shoved his political bishop across the chessboard. In a huge (and ultimately stupid) political gamble, Manfred jumped into Goni’s governing coalition. He was awarded, among other political prizes, control of the job-rich state government of Cochabamba (the governors were still Presidential appointees at that time).

Politically speaking, Manfred’s move to team up with Goni was like buying a ticket on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. Within months, Goni’s public support in Bolivia fell from bad to virtually non-existent, following his announcement of an unpopular foreign gas export deal. Faced with wide protest against that deal, Goni sent out the army, leaving dozens dead.

Then Reyes Villa demonstrated that his national political instincts were not only bad, they were miserably bad. Even after Goni’s own Vice President, Carlos Mesa, broke with Goni over the repression (saying that shooting its own people is not a way for government to deal with the problem) Manfred flew to La Paz to stand at Goni’s side as Bolivians bled in the streets. A week later Goni left for political exile in the US.

Manfred, instead of being able to stand tall as a Goni critic, was fixed in Bolivians’ minds as the man at Goni’s side. The self-inflicted political damage was so great that in 2005 Reyes Villa skipped the presidential race altogether and ran for Cochabamba governor. He won with an anemic 47% of the vote, against very weak MAS opponent.

Autonomy: Reyes Villa goes After the Queen Once More

Fast forward to November 2006. Reyes Villa is once again set up in offices just off Cochabamba’s Central Plaza and sitting pretty. All of the other major political figures in the country are embroiled in a battle over procedural issues in the Constituent Assembly tasked with writing a new national constitution.

As the conflict accelerates, Reyes Villa remains fortunately above it all. He is like Dorrie the Fish in “Finding Nemo”, who in the face of everything just keeps chanting “keep on swimming, keep on swimming.” While other politicians toss insults at each other and stage strikes, Reyes Villa just keeps on paving roads and cutting ribbons, and wallpapers the Sunday papers with state-funded ads showing him do it. On national politics he is virtually silent.

Then suddenly, once again, Reyes Villa grabbed hard onto his bishop and moved boldly across the political chessboard. In November he joined with the governors of the east in their demands at the Constituent Assembly. He also called for political autonomy for Bolivia’s states and declared that he would use his powers as governor to force a Cochabamba re-vote on that autonomy issue, despite the fact that the region's voters defeated it by a wide margin just six months earlier.

The political chess queen that Manfred was after seems obvious. Within weeks he went from being a non-player in national politics to being the leading opposition figure to Evo. And here again, in capturing that queen, Reyes Villa seemed completely oblivious to the political price it would cost him (and the people of the department of Cochabamba).

His image of “the man above the fray who just keeps governing” was gone. Instead he was just another polarizing politician, alongside Evo and the chorus of his domestic challengers. By positioning himself hard against Morales, Reyes Villa surely expected some kind of backlash, in a state that Evo carried by a far wider margin than he had. He probably did not expect 5,000 people taking over the Plaza, burning the doors of his office and demanding his resignation. I certainly hope he did not expect the violence that broke out here January 11 leaving two men dead and more than 160 others injured.

In the space of six weeks Manfred converted himself from being “the man who can govern” to being the absentee leader of a region wounded by violence.

The Manfred World Tour

When the backlash came and when violence overtook the streets, what was Reyes Villa’s chess move then?

First he went to a series of political meetings in La Paz. Then he spent a good week in another series of political meetings in Santa Cruz. Then he went to the US for a week to try to convince organizations in Washington that all the blame for the debacle in Cochabamba belonged to Evo Morales, and he solicited foreign investigation. For the past few days the Manfred world tour has been in Europe, where he is seeking support as well from EU officials (with markedly mixed reactions).

I am sure there is some reason why Manfred thinks all this is both right for Cochabamba and good political strategy for Manfred Reyes Villa. But I don’t see either. Sooner or later the people of Cochabamba will ask who paid for these trips and if it was them, they might not be too happy about it. Sooner or later they will expect their governor to govern. Sooner or later, if Reyes Villa is successful in getting a human rights group or two to investigate the events of January, they are going to ask some hard questions about what role Reyes Villa’s staff and his supporters played in the violence here last month.

As I have written before, I think the blame for January is evenly shared by both Reyes Villa and Morales and MAS.

A survey by the firm Opinion Data, published in Sunday's Los Tiempos, shows that both Morales and Manfred suffered declines in their Cochabamba popularity following last month's conflicts. Evo fell from 65% support in November to 54% today, reports the poll. Manfred, on the other hand, took the kind of biblical-scale tumble that ought to scare the pants off any politician, from 71% support in November to 43% support today.

The ex-Captain has once again demonstrated his gift for shooting himself squarely in the foot. It would seem that, while Cochabamba’s wandering governor has no shortage of bold political moves, he does seem to suffer from a shortage of wise ones.