Bolivia Writes a New Constitution

Readers:

Last week a Democracy Center team left Cochabamba for Sucre, to provide ongoing coverage of the Constituent Assembly convened there. The Assembly is charged with the task of rewriting the nation's constitution. Below is a dispatch that the team wrote on the eve of their departure, setting the context of the process underway.

Monday August 6th marks Bolivia's national Independence Day, and also the one-year anniversary of the Assembly's start. This August 6 was supposed to be the deadline for completing the new constitution. While some progress has been made, the constitution writing is still far behind. Much criticism has been heaped on the delegates for this tardiness. Some of this criticism is surely valid, but writing from California I can't help but make a comparison.

In Sacramento Monday the California Legislature will once again take up approval of a state budget that is now more than a month late and has left low-income health patients losing some of their medical care. A group of less than 20 State Senators is responsible for that delay, thanks to a rule that requires the budget to be approved by a 2/3 vote. Sound familiar? The debate over requiring a 2/3 vote for every small step in approving a new Bolivian constitution dominated the start of that process.

The lesson here is that political delay and debates over giving a minority veto powers is not a Bolivia issue; it is a democracy issue. Resolving heated political disputes through negotiation, instead of action on the street, takes time.

Here's the opening piece from our team. We'll have more later this week.

Jim Shultz


The Birth of a Dream

The story of the Constituent Assembly is one of an idea being born, entering the public debate, and becoming reality. Like many big ideas, it began with a dream – a dream for justice and the recognition of all Bolivians that the small group of elite who ‘founded’ the country never thought about including in the original Constitution.

Some might say there are two Bolivias. One Bolivia settles conflicts in courts with lawyers and judges. The other depends on community mediation with traditional authorities. One Bolivia buys and sells land as individuals and calls for the respect of private property. The other Bolivia holds land as a community and continues to be suspicious of land titles. One Bolivia has made the rules and the other has chafed under them.

One Bolivia declared independence from Spain and wrote a Constitution for the new country in 1825. The other was excluded from the process – forced to work as slaves and sharecroppers in those original founders’ mines and haciendas.

One Bolivia had divided the land as they saw fit, often with very little regard or knowledge about the communities already living on it. The other saw their people’s lands handed over to someone else, divided by political lines drawn on maps, given to Bolivia’s elite as political favors, or eaten away in concessions to giant mining, agricultural, or more recently, lumber, cattle, and petroleum companies.

The Constituent Assembly began as a call for justice, a concrete demand for land rights, access to resources, and equal cultural representation in government affairs. Its proponents envisioned an inclusive system and a series of rules that would encompass the diversity that Bolivia represents, recognized and codified in the highest law of the land.

The Idea Comes to the Public Debate

Indigenous resistance to the cultural, political, and economic oppression of the Spanish and their descendants has taken place for over five centuries. But it was in the 1960s that Bolivia’s indigenous peoples first started demanding their right to “autodetermination,” or the right to live with dignity and justice.

Pro-indigenous movements, taking up the banner of “autodetermination,” spread through Aymara and Quechua highland peoples and through the 34 indigenous groups of the lowlands. The growing consciousness among indigenous peoples led to the formation of groups like the Farmers’ and Agricultural Workers’ Union (CSUTCB) which organized mainly in the highlands and the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia (CIDOB) organized in Bolivia’s lowland tropical regions). Through these formal structures, the call for autodetermination and justice began to be heard at the political level. Those demands would be transformed into a concrete proposal calling for a Constituent Assembly to rewrite Bolivia’s Constitution.

At first, the proposal for a Constituent Assembly was given very little attention. Victor Cortez of CONAMAQ (one of the largest highland indigenous organizations) explains how his organization’s first call for a new Constitution was received. ”No one gave us much importance. Many called us crazy. We were oppressed, we were ostracized.”

Yet the diverse groups across Bolivia found ways to combat their communities’ continued marginalization. In 1990, indigenous groups from the Amazonian lowlands organized the first March for Territory and Dignity. Hundreds of people marched from the tropical department of Beni to La Paz, generating a new national awareness of lowland cultures’ existence and struggles.

A turning point in the strength of the movement occurred two years later in 1992. Indigenous groups from the highlands and lowlands of Bolivia and from all over Latin America joined together in a celebration of 500 years of cultural resistance to Spanish colonization. The atmosphere had begun to shift. In 1994, under the leadership of the first indigenous vice-president, the first words of Bolivia’s Constitution were changed to describe the country as “multiethnic and pluricultural.” Although this was an important step, words alone were not enough.

A Demand Becomes Reality

When the people of Cochabamba filled the city’s streets in 2000 to protest Bechtel’s takeover of their water system, the idea of rewriting the Constitution to be more inclusive of Bolivia’s indigenous peoples had already been introduced to the public debate.

But when the people won in Cochabamba and Bechtel was forced out, a new sense – that things really can change – was infused into the country and into the debate over the Constituent Assembly. The demands gained new traction and greater intensity with urban and rural social movements taking up the cause.

During political turmoil in 2003, the Constituent Assembly became an official, concrete, and central demand. Tens of thousands marched on La Paz to protest then-President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada’s wildly unpopular plan to export national gas through Chile to the United States. Among the demands throughout the Gas War was to call a Constituent Assembly It soon became a twin rallying cry along with the call for a referendum on the gas issue. A technical change in the Constitution in 2004 allowed for Bolivia’s constitution to be completely rewritten through a Constituent Assembly – and for a new Constitution to be approved by the people through a national referendum.

During the 2005 presidential campaign, the Constituent Assembly took center stage as one of the main pillars of Evo Morales and MAS’ campaign platform. After celebrating their victory, the new Congress and President set to work drafting the rules for rewriting the Constitution. In March 2006, they passed a law calling for elections of the Constituent Assembly representatives for July 2006. In total disregard for the inclusive process that drove the first demands for a Constituent Assembly, the Bolivian Congress required all candidates be affiliated with a political party. Indigenous or community groups were not welcome if they did not sign up under the banner of one of the registered parties—which were dominated by MAS and PODEMOS. This set the stage for growing polarization along party lines.

The Constituent Assembly was officially convened on August 6, 2006, Bolivia’s Independence Day. The representatives were given one year to complete their task. Their first mandate was to decide on the procedural rules, which took five months thanks to a political holdout between the two dominant parties over the process for approving the new Constitution’s articles. It wasn’t until January 2007 that the representatives finally came to an agreement on the procedural rules, freeing them to move onto the real debates.

Twenty-one commissions were created as the incubators of ideas and debate. They were also charged with writing articles that they recommended for the new Constitution. Currently, the 21 commissions have each filed their reports and Settlement Committees are attempting to iron out differences between majority and minority reports this week. On August 6, the representatives will begin a plenary session to approve the parts of the new Constitution which has been agreed on by consensus. While they were originally supposed to finish all debate by August 6, 2007—by next week-- the deadline has been extended to December 6 of this year.

The process of taking the Constituent Assembly from dream to demand to reality has been a complex and complicated one. To get a deeper look at what is happening, a team of researchers from The Democracy Center will be in Sucre this week, sending dispatches on what the process of rewriting Bolivia’s Constitution looks like from the inside. Check back over the next week for in-depth reporting from our Dispatches from Sucre!

Written by Leny Olivera, Aldo Orellana, and Lily Whitesell