Sucre Poker and Bolivian Chess

Here's the hand you've been dealt.

You are the Bolivian department of Chuquisaca, the home of Sucre, the judicial capital of the country and also one of its least developed regions. You bear the grudge of a historical wrong – the loss of the full capital to La Paz – committed before your great-grandparents were born. Suddenly, you find yourself for the first time with some serious political leverage on your hands. You are the host of a Constituent Assembly to re-write the nation's Constitution. You make a move.

You try to plant before the Assembly a proposal to move the nation's capital back to Sucre from La Paz. You aren’t taken very seriously. Basically, you are blown off. You can’t even get the issue put to a vote before the full Assembly. So you play the same card that the President and his allies once played so often when their demands were ignored – disruption. You physically harass the delegates, block building entrances, and generally make it impossible for the Assembly to meet. And so it doesn’t meet. It is dead in its tracks for two months.

The government is desperate to get the Assembly process on track and because of that it's ready to deal. You have leveraged 'capatalia' into a real issue and into real negotiating power. From the perspective of political poker, you've played things shrewdly. The government offers up construction of a new regional airport and a new highway. It pledges to move significant government functions to Sucre, including the national election authorities and even some sessions of Congress. If your goal was to boost public investment in the region and obtain a more visible presence in the nation's politics, it is a solid win.

The First Rule of Poker

But there is a rule in poker, one that I explained once upon a time to my tearful daughter when teaching her the game. It isn't actually your money until you take it and walk away. The danger in poker is that players with good hands convince themselves that they have great hands. Then they end up having losing hands. [Note: Being the good father that I am, I let my daughter win back all of my pocket change.]

Some realisms:

Upstate New York is not going to be handed back over to the Iroquois.

The Spanish are not going to refill Potosi with silver.

Paraguay is not going to hand back El Chaco.

Bolivia is not going to declare war on Chile and recover the sea.

The capital of Bolivia is not going to be moved to Sucre.

Injustices one and all, but the more that time that passes after the injustice is done, the more subtle the reparations that are possible. No person, or region, in any country, is terribly game to give up a major chunk of its economy freely to another. This is especially true when the sacrifice is aimed at making amends for a wrong that no one still alive actually committed.

What does that mean for Chuquisaca now? Well the Constituent Assembly is sitting in Sucre waiting to reconvene, but those leading the "return the capital" rebellion seem pretty intent on not letting it. Some of them apparently still suffer the illusion that a ticked off population five times its size in La Paz and El Also is going to wave a cheerful goodbye to being the national capital. One wonders whether these leaders also put their wobbly adult teeth under their pillows at night waiting for Ratoncito Pérez (the Latin American equivalent of the tooth fairy).

There are splits over the matter in Sucre, just as a poker player wrestles with choices over how to play her hand. Some of those pushing to take the deal on the table and let the Assembly get back to work are backers of the government, but others not. Some may just be realists. In any event, MAS seems about ready to call the bluff and move the Assembly to friendlier MAS territory in Oruro, a city which does not have its sights on the capital, but which does produce the best Carnival in the nation.

If the Assembly leaves that will leave Sucre free to fill its streets in protest, but with no leverage left to wrestle even the promise of a few street pavings. This is bad poker.

If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it…

If Sucre fills its streets in protests demanding the capital be moved and the Assembly has gone elsewhere…

Bolivian Chess

All of which leads us to the real question: If demanding the move of the capital is being pushed far beyond the point of a winning hand for Sucre, why is that hand being played? It is hard to believe that the intelligent people of Chuquisaca are that blinded. The answer lies not in poker, but in chess.

Since it lost so lopsidedly in elections for delegates to the Assembly 16 months ago, the political opposition here – most specifically PODEMOS and leaders in Santa Cruz – has made a strategic choice to block the Assembly's progress rather than shape its product. That is understandable. From the perspective of the opposition there is nothing that the Assembly could possibly produce that it would prefer to the status quo. The exception to that might be greater regional autonomy, but the MAS majority isn't going to cede to the regions control over either land reform or gas, the opposition's lead desires.

Simple chess: If you can't checkmate your opponent then just make damn sure your opponent can't checkmate you – stalemate. At this point stalemate is the best move the opposition has got and after the 2/3 vote issue ran its course and the Assembly began working again, blowing up the Assembly with the 'capatalia' issue was an ingenious play toward stalemate.

Here is the formula. First make every move that you can to block the Assembly from functioning, then declare that the Assembly is dysfunctional. Not bad.

You can tell in the newly hot rhetoric coming from MAS leadership that they are getting tired of the game and are pondering a new move themselves. Vice President Linera, always the cool rhetoric member of the President/Vice President team, declared this week that the Asamblea had been kidnapped by "racist and fascist" Sucre leaders.

Watch for MAS' 'Plan B', and it won't be just moving the Assembly to Oruro. Don't be surprised if, whether it is by an act of Congress or by Presidential decree, the MAS version of a new constitution is placed on the ballot where it can be made the national 'magna carta' by a simple majority vote. And MAS may be able to win such a majority at the ballot box. The opposition will cry bloody murder amidst chants, fair ones, that a new constitution should seek to represent something closer to a national consensus.

But seeking a national consensus is a very different strategy than blocking the majority at every turn. If the Assembly fails Bolivia is headed for a political showdown. It might be in the streets or it might be at the ballot box, but either way, the nation would be a lot better off if its leaders played less poker and less chess, and more statesmanship on all sides.

For a deeper look at the Constituent Assembly process see The Democracy Center's new briefing paper, Re-Founding Bolivia: A Nation's Struggle Over Constitutional Reform.