Constitutional Reform in Bolivia: And Now the Ugly Endgame

Readers:

Those who follow Bolivian events closely know that the political battle over drafting a new national constitution took a violent turn over the weekend, when conflicts in Sucre left three men dead and hundreds of others wounded. As always, it takes time to gather reliable information about events here and provide readers with something serious and solid. We have also had a few other things on our minds the past few days. Here is an extended Blog post on the battles over the weekend, developed with the close assistance of two Bolivian members of The Democracy Center team, Aldo Orellana and Leny Olivera. For those who want more background on the struggle over Constitutional reform, I encourage you to have a look at our recent briefing paper on the issue, here.

Jim Shultz

Constitutional Reform in Bolivia…and Now the Ugly Endgame

If you were going to lay out the various phases of Bolivia's struggle to write a new Bolivian Constitution, it would go something like this.

First there was the long period when a Constituent Assembly and new Constitution was a demand promoted by many of the nation's indigenous communities. A new national Constitution would be written "by the people". Then there was the phase when the Assembly leapt to become a central national issue, and then a pledge by the nation's first indigenous President. Then there was the part where the political parties in the Congress cut a deal to put the political parties in charge of the process.

Then there was the July 2006 national election to pick the delegates that would go to Sucre, a virtual repeat of the Presidential vote six months earlier. Then there was the battle over procedure that spilled into the streets and delayed all work for six months. Then there was the phase where the Assembly commissions actually went to work and drafted articles for a new constitution. Then there was the phase where the opposition succeeded in blowing the whole process up by igniting a fierce debate over moving the nation's capital. Then there was the part where the whole pretense of the Assembly-as-decsionmaker was set aside and MAS made one last effort to seek compromise with its opponents in a commission of political party leaders.

Then there was last weekend – when all intentions of compromise, by anyone, seemed to be permanently set aside and the battle over a new Constitution entered the ugly politics of endgame.

The Week that Led to Bloodshed

Here are the events of the bloody last week in a nutshell.

Early last week, the MAS-led committee that runs the Assembly made one last attempt to reconvene the body in its official headquarters, a theater in central Sucre. Protests demanding that Sucre be named the nation's new capital has blocked the Assembly from meeting since August, despite recent assurances from civic leaders there that the delegates could continue to work. On Wednesday, amidst reports that Sucre protesters spat on and verbally attacked delegates arriving at the meeting hall, the "directorio" led by MAS formally suspended the Assembly once again.

Then, last Thursday, MAS leadership voted to formally move the Assembly's meetings from the protest-plagued city center to a small military installation on the outskirts of town. The installation was guarded by as many as 1,000 national police officers. Hundreds of social movement MAS sympathizers also gathered outside the site, pledging to "protect" the Assembly. Opposition leaders announced that they would not participate in the relocated sessions, citing intimidation by the presence of the campesinos supporting MAS and MAS' refusal to place the Sucre capital issue on the agenda.

Behind police lines and in sessions boycotted entirely by MAS' key opponents, 154 of the 255 delegates met Friday and Saturday, approving en grande the basic framework of a new constitution, one that reflected all of MAS' positions and none of the opposition minority positions.

Some MAS officials and Assembly technical staff argued later that the draft approved was only a preliminary one, and that before it could go before voters, it still required 2/3 approval of the specific articles. But the specter of MAS locked behind guarded doors, approving a lopsided constitution of its own design, set off a firestorm of street protest in Sucre and public denouncements from the opposition.

On Friday night civic leaders in Sucre called for civil disobedience to block the Assembly's work, but did not call specifically for a march on the military facility where the meeting was being held. No matter, by Saturday morning Sucre university students and others, numbering in the thousands, climbed to the small hills outside the Glorieta military facility and began attacking the police and the Assembly, according the news reports, with a mix of dynamite, Molotov cocktails, burning tires, and small arms.

As MAS delegates approved a draft constitution inside, the protesters and the police battled on the outside. Scores of people were injured and, at nightfall, one man was dead, Gonzalo Durán Carazani, a 29 year old lawyer. News reports say he was shot in the chest with a small caliber weapon, not the type carried officially by any police. The police tear-gassing of the students and the attacks by the students on the police lasted until nearly midnight. Two of those wounded in the Saturday confrontations died later from their wounds, Juan Carlos Serrudo, 25, killed by a police tear gas canister shot into his chest and José Luis Cardozo, 19, of a gunshot wound.

On Sunday morning, mobs of students and others began setting fire to public buildings, specifically the office of the transit police, police command center, police academy, fire department, and tax department. Then the national police announced that a Sucre mob had lynched and killed one of their officers, Jimmy Quispe Colque. [According to news reports Wednesady, the officer, while beaten, escaped and went into hiding, and was not killed as first reported.] On Sunday, citing concerns for their own security, the national police abandoned Sucre, with most traveling to Potosi. More than 100 inmates at a local jail escaped when the police guarding the jail left their posts.

In Santa Cruz early Sunday morning anti-Morales protesters there swept past police guards to takeover local offices of the national tax authority, declaring that the money should stay in Santa Cruz and not be sent to the national government in La Paz.

Political Reaction, from Right to Left

Political reaction to the chaos in Sucre, and surrounding the approval of the draft MAS constitution, was fierce. Jorge Quiroga of PODEMOS, Morales' chief 2005 opponent, and ostensibly the leader of the opposition, denounced the MAS draft as, "a proposal drafted in a military base, and the point of guns and bayonets and stained with the blood of repression."

Manfred Ryes Villa, the governor of Cochabamba and also a past and future Presidential candidate called on the Bolivian military to stand against the Morales government in defense of the Bolivian people. That drew a quick response from the head of the Bolivian armed forces, warning that the former Army captain turned Cochabamba politician had no mandate over the nation's armed forces and should not pretend to have one.

On Sunday afternoon, from La Paz, President Morales spoke officially to the country in televised remarks. In a break with usual protocol, most of the country's major private television networks refused to carry the broadcast. On the one hand Morales called for “serenity and tranquility" and called on Bolivians to work "democratically" for social justice. On the other he laid the blame squarely on his opponents for the chaos in Sucre and the failure of the Constituent Assembly to reach a consensus. "Some groups of oligarchs, conservatives and neoliberals don't want to change the Constitution…and for this reason since the beginning they have intended to close or bring failure to the Assembly." He also expressed his total confidence that if the MAS draft were brought to a national vote it would be approved by the required simple majority.

On Monday, speaking to a march of 2,500 rural supporters in La Paz, Morales acknowledged that the MAS draft still required final revision and approval by the Assembly in order to advance to a national vote. He also declared that the Assembly should continue its work, whether the opposition chooses to participate or not.

Meanwhile, civic leaders in six of the nine Bolivia regional departments have called for a daylong general strike Wednesday to protest the MAS draft of the Constitution. This guarantees that the political conflicts of the last week will at least have one sure winner – thousands of Bolivian school children treated to a mid-week day off.

And the Chess Game Behind the Scenes

As is almost always the case in interpreting the frequent chaos of Bolivian politics, it is essential not only to look at the hot rhetoric and street action that is public, but the political chess moves that lie underneath.

First, there really should be little question that MAS very much wanted to go to voters with a Constitution that had support from at least some of its opposition. If that was not their aim, then Morales and his party went to great lengths to hide their intentions, with more than a year of work by the Assembly and endless efforts to negotiate with the opposition. If the party's true aim, as some opponents will claim, was to push a MAS-only version straight ahead, they could have done that a year ago and from a much stronger position than Morales has now. Polarization was never MAS' or Morales' best move – though the President's frequent rhetoric of fire against his opponents over the past year hasn't helped win MAS any allies.

That said, polarization and blocking Assembly progress does seem to have been the favored move by MAS' political opponents. From a purely Machiavellian view that's completely understandable.

Was there ever anything on the table that opposition leaders liked better than the status quo? On issue after issue – indigenous rights, land reform, resource management, presidential re-election, the structure of government, and more – the conservative parties that lead the opposition are clearly a lot happier with the Constitution they have than with any reforms being pushed by MAS.

The one possible exception has been the demand by the gas-rich eastern departments for autonomy over resources and revenues – something they were never going to win in the form they wanted from MAS and Morales. Looking at that scenario, it is hard to imagine why the opposition would have chosen to do anything other than block the process. And if your intention is to stop a new constitution from happening, and to force MAS into its most extreme action mode – it would be hard to develop a better recipe than that employed by the opposition since it lost a lopsided defeat to MAS in the July 2006 Assembly delegate vote.

That is, provided of course, that you are interested in seeing the nation slide to the brink of chaos in which it now finds itself. But the image of a Bolivia in chaos may also work to the opposition's advantage as well. It is not by chance that Reyes Villa is waving the military action card around for anyone willing to have a look.

And Next?

So what happens now? Absent some sort if unanticipated change, we can expect the following:

1. MAS and Morales will try to entice at least some of the opposition back into the Assembly process to participate in the "revision and approval" stage for each proposed article in the new Constitution. This is the approval that is supposed to require a 2/3 vote of the whole. But it is hard to imagine why the opposition would that process now, though MAS could try to get support for moving forward on a smaller number of articles that already have some opposition backing. More likely, MAS may continue to go it alone and try to bring their plan to a national vote.

2. Under a unified rallying cry of "See, Morales is Chavez after all and is trying to impose his own Constitution on the people!" all the disparate pockets of opposition to MAS will come together. PODEMOS and Tuto Quiroga, the six opposition governors, civic leaders in Santa Cruz and Sucre, and a host of others will, for the first time, form a united front, with the aim of blocking the MAS constitution and delivering a heavy political blow to Morales.

3. The Constitution battle, from both sides, will be carried into the streets, and the results of that are never fully predictable in Bolivia – witness last January in Cochabamba. This will include attacks on media facilities, as it has already, by MAS supporters who have raised the issue of media bias against Morales. This will also include confrontations driven not only by politics but the unpredictable ingredient of mostly male violence released to the streets, from both sides.

If the MAS Constitution does come to a vote, the opposition will have a choice to make. It can encourage its backers to vote but vote 'blanco', the equivalent of abstention, in an effort to deny the election legitimacy. Alternatively, the opposition can unify behind a call to voters to vote NO. Frankly, they may be better off with the latter.

Do the political math. In both the Presidential vote and the Constituent Assembly vote, Morales and MAS got about 53%. That was a solid majority, and nearly twice that of their nearest opponent, PODEMOS. But two things next time around will be very different. First, Morales' and MAS' popularity at the polls is likely to be significantly less than it once was, especially among anxious middle class voters, a sizable number of whom backed MAS before. Second, in both those previous votes, MAS had the great political advantage of facing a fragmented opposition and a relatively unified base. On a Yes/No vote on a MAS-backed Constitution, that opposition will be unified as never before. Nor is it clear how unified the political left will be in favor.

Whatever one thinks about who is to blame for the fiasco over the weekend in Sucre, or for bringing Bolivia to a dicey political precipice, the fact is that it is a whole new scenario now. What really happens next, both in the street and behind the scenes is really anybody's guess.

Note: I am taking the liberty of moving to the comments section of this post a handful of comments on the Assembly issue posted to our Memoriam for BBC Reporter Lola Almudevar. That will leave the comments section there to be what it should have remained, a place for those who knew and admired her to offer their condolences and memories.