A Strikingly Bad Way to Make (and Not Make) Laws

There is of course, the old saying – Laws are like sausages; you never want to see either of them being made. With that in mind the ongoing Bolivian political drama of drafting a new national constitution is starting to make sausage-making look attractive.

Last year it was the opposition’s turn to set democracy aside. Adversaries of President Morales used street violence and physical and verbal assaults on MAS delegates to bring a two-month halt to the Constituent Assembly process in Sucre. In the end delegates there (absent the opposition) took up work, controversially, in an army base. It was an interesting strategy by the opposition -- first make it impossible for the Assembly to do its job and then declare that the Assemblky is useless because it isn;t doing its job.

Thursday in La Paz MAS took a turn at legislating-while-intimidating. It surrounded the Congress with large crowds from social movements sympathetic to the government, preventing, often violently, many opposition members from being in their seats when lawmakers voted on and approved holding a nationwide vote on the MAS-backed constitution. That May 4th vote would decide the political fate of both the new constitution and a separate provision capping the maximum size of landholdings in Bolivia.

Predictably, Morales and MAS proclaimed the vote a victory for “democracy and unity”, while opponents lambasted it as “illegitimate” and an abuse of power.

Anyone who has followed Bolivian politics longer than six months will also note that the shut-the-process-down strategy did not start with the opposition/move-the-capital crowd last year. Protests by dynamite-wielding Potosi miners outside an emergency session of Congress in Sucre in 2005 was a key reason that Senate President Vaca Diez did not take over from President Carlos Mesa when he stepped down. Then of course one could go back further and trace the lineage in even more extreme forms to Generals with tanks engaging in various rounds of unpleasant “regime change” in the 1960s and 1970s.

Today, the rival arguments, in a nutshell, are these:

MAS

From the start, the opposition has never been interested in negotiating a new constitution. It has been interested in blocking a new constitution – by demanding a minority veto on every provision and procedural vote, by exploding Sucre to the point where the Assembly couldn’t meet, and now by holding up the convening of an election to give the people a chance to vote and express their will. So, we either had to let them stop the process or rally our support and move without them. And in the end the people will decide on the constitution for themselves.

The Opposition

MAS isn’t nearly so interested in equality and democracy as it is in re-writing all of the rules of governance to strengthen their hold on power and to perpetuate that hold. Fist it rammed through a constitution without the opposition in the room and now they have rammed through legislation to bring that MAS-only constitution to a vote. While the new Constitution doesn’t give MAS everything it wanted, like unlimited chances at reelection for Morales, it lays the groundwork for giving them everything they want later by allowing future changes to be approved by just a simple majority of the Congress. MAS is pushing Bolivian democracy to the edge of a dangerous precipice.

And both the arguments above are a lot more true than not true. Hence Bolivia is headed toward very dangerous waters ahead. Again.

What next? A big question is this – will the opposition set aside its declarations of illegitimacy and illegality and fight for a NO vote in May, or will it boycott that vote? Both strategies are risky for the opposition, and you can bet there will be meetings all over Bolivia this weekend trying to decide what to do.

“Polarized” is now a word that fits Bolivia as a description the way “Butt-freezing cold” might apply to Minnesota in January.

Why is that? One reason is that, in a country where very old economic and political power arrangements are in historic play, the stakes are high and conflict is inevitable. Yet another is that both the opposition and the government seem hell bent to do everything they can to make the gap between them wider by the day.

Photo: A PODEMOS Congress member tries to make her way into the Congress building, Los Tiempos.