Back from One Balkans, Home to Another

bal·kan·ized: to break up (as a region or group) into smaller and often hostile units.
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

I have found myself to have a new secret power. I can now recite the major headlines in any given Bolivian daily newspaper without even reading it.

Governors and Morales in New Battle

More Protests as Inflation Soars.

Morales Criticizes U.S.

U.S. Criticizes Morales

None of this is because I am clairvoyant. 'Polarization' and 'Bolivian politics' have become so synonymous now that if you look in a dictionary for one of those terms it tells you to see the other. Having just spent two weeks working in the Balkans (Kosovo and Montenegro) I can't help but be struck by the comparison. There the era is 'post-conflict' and new governments are trying to put things back together. Here the era is 'a-new-conflict-a-day' and those leading seem pretty intent on pulling things apart.

So, in the interest of provoking more spirited debate on the topic, here are some reflections and analysis about the Balkanization of Bolivia.

Means and Ends

Every now and then, though less of late, you hear political or social leaders clamor about the importance of the 'rule of law.' It is a principle that has become almost quaint in Bolivia. Politicians and movements both left and right have made it clear that 'the law' in Bolivia is something roughly akin to stopping on a red light in Cochabamba – a thing that is advisory only.

Let's begin, in fairness, with the left. In the days when Evo and many of his current allies were on the outside, the law was always something that needed to flex in response to bigger social demands. Road blockades, destruction of public buildings, the shutdown of cities and other tactics were always considered acceptable acts when needed to get the attention of governments. The strategic principles were clear – find the spaces of power and occupy them and make the nation ungovernable until demands were met or the government fell.

And today, the right and regional autonomy movements inspired and led by the right cheerily imitate those same strategies and tactics. Find the spaces of power and occupy them. Make the nation ungovernable until demands are met or the government falls.

Using ends to justify means is nothing new in politics, but it has basically become the rule in Bolivia, including by the political right.

Take the autonomy votes in Santa Cruz and elsewhere. Is it legitimate to hold a vote to take a formal public pulse on the topic? Yes indeed, legitimate and legal and a great tactic if you plan on winning big. But can a region unilaterally renegotiate fundamental issues in the regional/national distribution of authority? Well, now that wouldn’t be legal. Last night a taxi driver and I came up with this metaphor. What if, after we agreed that I'd pay 15 Bolivianos to go from Cochabamba to Tiquipaya, I announced on arrival that 5 Bs. seemed a fairer price and paid that? Neither does the Bolivian Constitution allow for such sudden one-sided changes.

Or take the Governors of Santa Cruz, Tarija, Pando, Ben and Cochabamba, who suddenly announced a week ago that they weren't going to participate in the August 10 'revocatoria' vote approved by the Congress and President – a law actually initiated by the opposition to Morales. It is a bit hard to take pious declarations about respect for law from a group of politicians who then say, 'Okay, but that law we don't like, so screw it.' The political aerobatics by Cochabamba's Governor, Manfred Reyes Villa are especially breathtaking. Less than two months ago he was bragging about his original call for such a vote and declaring on CNN, "How many lives and confrontations would have been avoided if in that moment we had approved the law?" Now he just wants to ignore it. Slick.

The sad thing is that in a political environment in which ends mean so much and means mean so little, there isn't even a very focused debate on what those ends ought to be.

What's at Stake?

It is not however, particularly difficult to spot what are the genuine public policy issues that reside beneath the political power plays at hand right now in Bolivia. The fundamental questions that divide the nation remain:

Land Reform: What land would the government give to the landless? How would the land in private hands be compensated for? Who would be eligible to receive the land and in exchange for what commitments? What support would the government provide them to help them make that land productive?

Gas and Oil: How will the soaring profits from Bolivia's gas and oil – courtesy of both soaring global prices and increased taxes on foreign companies – be divided between the regions where it sits and the regions where it does not sit? What role should the Bolivian state have in exploration, production and sale and how can it do that effectively?

Autonomy: What political authority – in the fields of justice, education, resource management, and others – will be reserved for indigenous communities, regional governments, and local governments?

The Presidency: Can Bolivians, if they choose to do so, re-elect their President and Vice-President and if so, how many times?

These are some of the concrete issues at the heart of the divide and none have been raised into full public debate. All have been obscured by a dangerous stew of political power plays, over-heated rhetoric and overt racism. As recipes for Balkanization go, it’s a pretty good one.

To be clear, the divide in Bolivian politics existed long before the current actors took the stage. Bolivia is a nation deeply divided by race and class. But both Morales and his opponents have done a masterful job of making the divide new and different.

Opponents of Morales, for reasons racial, economic, political, regional, and strategic, made a clear choice early on to treat his election as a heavy train headed down the tracks straight at them and tried to throw everything in front of that train they could to stop it. Their July 2006 election campaign (for the Constituent Assembly) tried the "Hugo Chavez! Hugo Chavez!" approach and failed miserably. They then scored a good political victory with the demand for a 2/3 vote on everything before that Assembly.

But the regional autonomy campaigns and demand to move the national capital to Sucre, that was pure political genius.

Where once Evo faced an opposition that one could genuinely classify as the old elite, he now faced one that was regional, taking with it even many of the lower income parts of the rebel departments. If I am a woman selling gum on a street corner in Santa Cruz, who do I like better – the President who wants to take a full cut of gas and oil revenue for El Alto or the regional leaders who say keep it here. Regional identity beat class identity. And Evo helped his opponents mightily, with confrontational appeals to his base that pushed a lot of people in the middle into the greetings arms of the opposition.

Y Ahora, Que?

What does this mean? Okay, here's a guess. Political stalemate for two and a half years. Regions will seize autonomy where they can (by blocking land reform, for example), knowing that Morales will not send in the Army to stop them. They won't be able to extend autonomy where it would take national cooperation, for example getting a bigger share of gas revenue.

And then the opposition will run out a long political clock.

Absent a new Constitution – which seems a more and more distant possibility with each passing month – Bolivia will head into new national elections in December of 2010 in which Evo can not be a candidate and in which he has groomed no successor with a chance. And then once again out of power, it will be the left's turn to show once again that it still knows how to make Bolivia ungovernable from the other side.

Now, I want to admit a couple of caveats to this analysis:

First, my more revolutionary friends will quickly dismiss this as a 'reformist' analysis, which it is. Many prefer to see what Evo represents as a revolution, a movement to pull the existing political and social order up by its roots and start anew, with equality replacing privilege as the national organizing principle. In many parts of the nation, the altiplano in particular, that may well be true. But most of Evo's actions are hardly revolutionary and amidst the Bolivians I interact with, be it my neighbors in the cow fields or the vendors in the street, what I hear about isn't revolution but dreams of lower-priced food, a little political stability for a while, and a shot at a living income.

Second, at the risk of channeling former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, in Bolivia it isn't the 'known unknowns' that will trip you up. It's the 'unknown unknowns.' Just when you think that the course of events in Bolivia seems to have a discernable pattern to it, some event turns that pattern on its head – the people kick out Bechtel, or Evo wins, or people start killing each other on the streets of Cochabamba.

Let's hope the surprises ahead here are good ones.