Gas and Oil Nationalization: Two Important New Briefing Papers from The Democracy Center

The popular demand for gas and oil nationalization is a long-standing one in Bolivia, and has been at the forefront of national politics for three years. On May 1, 2006 Bolivian President Evo Morales issued an historic executive decree declaring the "nationalization" of Bolivia's oil and gas reserves.

The Democracy Center is dedicated to providing its readers with up to date and accurate analysis of this issue as it unfolds. For the past few weeks we have been working on two important briefing papers on the decree that are now posted on our Web site.

The first is a briefing paper on the decree and what it actually means in terms of concrete policy. That brief was written by Gretchen Gordon, a gas and oil researcher with The Democracy Center. Here is the link to the paper.

The second briefing paper is a review of some of the foreign media coverage of the gas decree, written by the other half of The Democracy Center's gas and oil research team, Aaron Luoma. Here is the link to that paper.

In general, we think our readers will find that there has been a good deal of misinterpretation of the decree, with it being looked at as being far more radical that it actually is upon examination. For those interested in this issue, we encourage you to look at these papers and share the links with others following it. We hope that you find both papers valuable and look forward to your feedback and opinions.

Evo Says the US is Sneaking in Soldiers Disguised as Students and Tourists

Several of my readers have asked me what I might have to say about this odd bit of news from Bolivia, courtesy of an AP dispatch. President Evo Morales evidently announced before an Aymara audience this week that the “US soldiers disguised as students and tourists are entering the country [Bolivia]."

I have to say; I think the claim is just a little strange.

First of all, what exactly would the US government do in Bolivia with secret stashes of disguised soldiers? Armed overthrow of the Morales government seems like a bit of a stretch. That would take one really large influx of fake students and tourists to pull off and I think that people might notice a hundred thousand or so extra Americans walking around. Heck, Burger King would be packed!!

Second, if the aim isn’t armed overthrow, what is it? Contact and influence with the Bolivian military? The US already has military advisors, a DEA fortress, and a scholarship program to bring Bolivian troops up for torture training to the School of the Americas in Georgia. What more influence and contact does the US want?

I also have to say; it is pretty darn hard to hide US soldiers here in Bolivia, especially as tourists and students. The haircut gives them away, first off. I get sought out by a lot of the US tourists, students, Peace Corps volunteers and others that pass through Bolivia and I can testify that what’s in fashion is scruffy not buzz cut. Just to grow hair that long the Pentagon would have started to do planning on this months before Morales’ election last December – and as we know from Iraq, planning is not the Pentagon’s strong suit.

Now Morales, assuming the press reports are accurate, might have all kind of reasons for making the claim (his press spokesman says that evidence is forthcoming). My guess is he is just flinging wild accusations back in the face of charges from his critics that he is allowing a flood of Venezuelan soldiers into the country. I am not sure how they are disguised. The Bolivian Ministry of Defense, by the way, took out a large newspaper ad this week categorically denying all of the Venezuelan soldiers are flooding the border claims aired on TV by PODEMOS.

I tired to look on the Internet for photos of US tourists and students in Bolivia, to see if I could find any suspicious evidence for myself. I do think I may have found something. Here is a link to a photograph purportedly taken of some US Peace Corps volunteers in some, to be frank, highly suspicious disguises. I am sure, dressed as this, they have been able to pass into highly secret areas throughout the country, without notice. Those Pentagon types under Rumsfeld are wily indeed.

If our readers catch any sightings of these hidden soldiers, secretly reading military instruction manuals stuffed surreptitiously into the pages of Lonely Planet Bolivia, please let us know.

The Sun Rises on the Andean New Year

5am in Cochabamba: garbage trucks and shamans.

That pretty much sums up what was going on in the streets of Cochabamba in the most wee hours this morning. There I was, up well before dawn, to climb one of the city’s darkened hills and join in marking the opening moments of the Andean New Year.

The trek to the mountain top began oddly. Thirty of us crammed onto a hired micro bus to make the journey up the hill, a bus adorned with bunting around the windshield made from an American flag, matched by two stars-and-stripes decorated air fresheners dangling from the rear view mirror (shaped like two Christmas trees).

Our destination was a hill near the world’s largest Jesus (well-illuminated at night, by the way) which involved negotiating our way through a locked gate controlled, evidently, by the Bolivian Catholic Church. I doubt it was spiritual rivalry that kept out our busload of indigenous musicians, dancers, and native healers. More likely it was just some confusion, which the gatekeeper in the church’s employ seem to resolve easily with the passing of a few coins.

In Aymara culture the new year begins with the emergence of the sun’s first rays at the end of the longest night of the year which, here in the southern hemisphere, was last night. The leaders of this morning’s annual ritual picked this high hill because it would be one of the first places in the long Cochabamba valley that would feel those rays.

There were about 150 of us up there as the night sky started to show its first stripes of “celeste” (light blue), including just a tiny handful of foreigners. Several huge wiphala flags waved in the light pre-dawn breeze. Ten musicians, all men, filled the air with the deep and forlorn sounds of long flutes and the steady beat of an enormous drum. Six women – dressed in woven blouses, rich green skirts, and gray hats with blue ribbons at the brim – twirled and danced to the beat, making their skirts swish in a blur. They danced to steps they had surely known and danced to since they were children. Three modest fires burned in preparation for the ritual to follow.

Did I mention that it was cold? Butt-freezing cold? Okay, this is “cold” by Cochabamba standards. That means that it maybe dipped to 30 degrees Fahrenheit. In places like Minnesota and upstate New York they call that summer. But still, the cold gave everyone there ample reason to join in the dancing and a real and practical desire for the sun to finally make that awaited appearance from behind the mountains.

The pale blue sky brightened. The sun’s rays could be seen splashing the tip of the valley’s tallest peak, Mt. Tunari. A bright patch just at the horizon’s edge pointed to just where that far away ball of gas would make its first peak over the side. Flutes still playing, amidst loud group chants of “jallalla” (hiyiya, long live…), we faced the spot where the sun would rise and held our open hands up to catch the warmth of the first rays. It is mostly ritual, but after an hour standing around a cold and dark hillside, most of really were getting pretty excited about the sun coming up.

Cheers greeted the first bright beams and soon the whole lot of us were dancing and weaving together in a large circle of held hands, moving around the fires which burned a careful mixture of coca leaves, spiritual symbols made from hardened sugar, and a llama fetus or two. By 8am people started to make their way back down the hill toward the city. With an early appointment to keep I headed down myself, slowly and alone, pondering a new year that begins in late June.

When I was much younger, growing up in southern California, a New Year’s rite of passage was sleeping the night on a Pasadena sidewalk with a million or so other people, waiting to watch the Rose Parade the next morning. Imagine, if you will, about a million US teenagers all simultaneously going nuts at midnight. I may have kissed a cop in 1974, but my memory is a little fuzzy.

Dawn on a hillside in Bolivia with flutes and fires. What a long way from that. What a different tradition. Jallalla los dos!

Happy New Year to all our readers.

The Hugo Factor

Yesterday afternoon, while watching Brazil douse Australia 2-0 on a wide screen TV on the Prado, I got my first TV look at the red vs. blue teams going after one another in that other big competition of the moment, Bolivia’s July 2 national elections for a Constituent Assembly. That vote will determine who will sit at the table to re-write the nation’s constitution and it is turning into a “how do we feel” six month referendum on the Morales presidency as well.

“Hugo Chavez is gonna get your Momma!”

The “red team” in this case is PODEMOS, the political party set up by former President “Tuto” Quiroga, who finished a distant second to Morales in December. PODEMOS’ ads, both on TV and in the newspapers, can be described in an easy phrase, “Hugo Chavez is gonna get your Momma!”

“Chavez’ Troops Sweep Bolivia,” reads the headline over a full-page ad in Sunday’s Los Tiempos. The same menacing photo of Chavez in a red beret holding an assault rifle runs in the PODEMOS TV ads as well. The ads warn that Venezuelan troops have arrived on Bolivian soil. Chavez came to Bolivia to help MAS launch its campaign, PODEMOS declares. “In the Constituent Assembly we will defend the red, yellow and green [the colors of the Bolivian flag] and we will not allow the insertion of Chavez or his military.”

Since World Cup soccer does not allow the same every-ten-minutes opportunity for TV ads as US football (imagine watching a championship match for the game and not the ads!) PODEMOS paid to have the Bolivian game announcer add an occasional voiceover as the yellow shirts of Brazil menaced the black shirts of the Aussies: “For a sovereign country, PODEMOS.”

As someone who has worked on a lot of political campaigns over the years, I am willing to bet that Quiroga and PODEMOS did a little polling and focus group work in preparation for their ad campaign and I suspect they found out the following:

1. Their best shot at improving their disappointing 29% showing in November (MAS won 54%) is to go after some of the middle class voters who supported Morales last time around.

2. The best shot they have to woo those middle class voters back from MAS is to make great hay out of Morales links to Chavez.

3. Showing Quiroga’s face around is what Playboy Magazine used to call “a turnoff”.

I am guessing the latter because, two weeks before the election, trying to find any sighting of Quiroga, either in ads or in the news is a lot like trying to find bagels and cream cheese in “la cancha” (the marketplace), mana canchu, no hay, there isn’t any.

In contrast Morales is all over the MAS ads. Even Samuel Doria Medina, the Burger King and cement magnate who came in an even more disappointing third place (8%) finish in December, shines his bearded face on most all of his party’s (UN) billboards and ads.

The Invader in the Red Beret vs. the One Dressed in Red, White and Blue

I have no doubt that shouting “Hugo” is a good political strategy for POEMOS and the invisible Quiroga. It is roughly the equivalent of George W. Bush trying to see how many times he could insert the numbers "9/11" into his 2004 campaign speeches.

The Chavez card worked nicely for Alan Garcia in the Peruvian elections earlier this month and it has succeeded in helping whittle down the once formidable lead of the left candidate for President in Mexico as well. To be clear, Morales has certainly wrapped himself tight in Chavez’s arms – by being joined at the hip in one press event after another, and by ratcheting up Venezuelan/Bolivian economic ties.

I also can’t comment with any authority about the Venezuelan troops charge. But what I understand is that Chavez brought in a legion of troops to protect and accompany him on his recent visit with Morales to the Chapare. He left behind the same frustrated complaints of, “How many body guards does that guy need?” after his presence at Morales’ January inaugural.

All that said, let’s just have a little look at this question of “sovereignty” and where Quiroga and PODEMOS stand.

While PODEMOS now cries “sovereignty” in the face of ramped up Venezuelan economic aid and cooperation, Quiroga was Vice-President and Vice-President in one of a string of Bolivian governments that essentially turned over the nation’s economic policies to planers and economists at the World Bank and IMF. Those policies produced such stellar results for the Bolivian people that last December voters virtually obliterated those traditional parties from the political map. Quiroga himself was part of the government that handed over Cochabamba’s water to the Bechtel Corporation and he later defended the move, even after a citywide rebellion ousted the company.

While PODEMOS and Quiroga now issue warnings about Venezuelan troops on Bolivian soil, they don’t seem to be upset with the scores of US troops that have been a presence here for decades. I haven’t heard them complain about that armed US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) fortress on Calle Americas, a place encased with enough black iron fencing that it looks like Darth Vader’s vacation home. My favorite “war on drugs” irony is that one of the Bolivian guards who protects the DEA building on the midnight shift chews a wad of coca to stay awake.

I never heard PODEMOS or Quiroga complain once about Bolivian drug prosecutors who received, for years, a salary bonus directly from the US government (greater than their civil servant pay) and who put thousands of innocents in jail to keep the US Embassy cheerful. Morales’ government, wisely, has ended those bonuses.

There is plenty of room to be nervous about what Chavez wants from his new coziness with Bolivia. And there is plenty of wisdom involved in asking questions about what kind of political and economic links benefit Bolivia. Too bad that isn’t what PODEMOS is doing.

Okay, But What About the New Constitution?

Meanwhile the blue team, MAS, has a clear strategy as well, Evo, Evo and more Evo. His picture adorns all the ads and brochures. To MAS’ credit, those ads also trumpet MAS’ “Ten Proposals to Re-found Bolivia.” While pretty general, MAS’ ten points at least speak to some of the issues on the table: a multi-cultural and democratic society; political decentralization; the armed forced should respect human rights; the state should guarantee health care and education for everyone; Bolivia will recovery its economic sovereignty, etc.

Judging from the PODEMOS ads we might expect the party to limit its constitutional agenda to a new provision stating: “Bolivia is not a part of Venezuela and they guy in the red beret should stay home (and his soldiers, teachers and doctors too). Oh yeah, and maybe his money, we’ll see.”

Certainly buried in there are some worthwhile debatable points, but it would be nice if the election were also about, say, the nation’s economic future as well.

All this just shows, more than anything else, that Bolivian election politics is really a lot like politics everywhere. When your leader is popular, wrap yourself in his image. When he’s not, pretend you forgot his name (as in the current US Republican refrain, George W. Who?) and talk about something else. Hugo Chavez in Bolivia. Immigrants in the US.

By the way, none of this made any difference to the Brazilians and Australians on the street yesterday. The yellow and green drank beer and drove around waving flags and honking their horn. The Aussies retreated to a bar and did some drinking of their own, just more quietly. And despite its loss to Switzerland yesterday, my money is still on the mighty players from Togo to pull it out.

Cuba and Human Rights: A Tale of Two Sides of One Island

Each year the US State Department issues a report on the state of human rights around the world – a nation-by-nation review from the perspective of the current administration of how our global neighbors measure up. As the preface to the report issued last March notes:

All men and women desire and deserve to live in dignity and liberty. As President Bush said: "The advance of freedom is the great story of our time." Promoting human rights and democracy is a worldwide phenomenon and there is a growing global discussion of democracy and the universal values protected by democratic governance.

More than a hundred nations are included in the State Department report, from Antigua to Zimbabwe. Not among them is the US itself.

Each year one of the countries topping the US government’s bad boy list is that troublesome island 90 miles off the Florida coast – Cuba. Here is what the report issued last March had to say about conditions there:

The government's human rights record remained poor, and the government continued to commit numerous, serious abuses. At least 333 Cuban political prisoners and detainees were held at year's end.

The report went on to specifically cite:

beatings and abuse of detainees and prisoners, including human rights activists, carried out with impunity, denial of fair trial, particularly to political prisoners.

Speaking of “Prison and Detention Center Conditions” in Cuba, the Bush Administration had this to say:

Prison conditions continued to be harsh and life threatening. Conditions in detention facilities also were harsh. Prison authorities frequently beat, neglected, isolated…detainees and prisoners. Authorities often subjected detainees and prisoners to repeated, vigorous interrogations designed to coerce them into signing incriminating statements or to force their collaboration with authorities. Some endured physical and sexual abuse, typically by other inmates with the acquiescence of guards, or long periods in isolation or punishment cells.

Of course, nothing in the Bush Administration’s assessment of human rights in Cuba includes the goings on at that other, increasingly infamous, prison facility on the island. That would be the one run by the US government, Guantanamo.

If the State Department report is accurate, then the Bush administration currently holds more political prisoners on the Cuban island that Fidel Castro, currently reported at 460 (almost 130 more than Castro). And what the US has to say about Castro’s jails and justice system could not only be applied to the US’s practices at Guantanamo, but would have to be made more extreme to create an accurate picture.

Prisoners held there by the US have been held for more than four years, most without charges, and face indefinite detention with none of the rights afforded prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions or to criminal suspects in the U.S. justice system. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has accused the US military of using tactics "tantamount to torture" on prisoners at Guantanamo, leading to worldwide calls for the prison’s closure.

Even a senior official in the government that has backed Bush the hardest in his “war on terror” – Great Britain – recently observed: "If it is perfectly legal and there is nothing going wrong there, why don't they have it in America?"

It is true that once upon a time the US really was a credible voice for human rights in the world. The emphasis put on rights by President Carter in particular were a noble undertaking.

However, no example highlights the hypocrisy at hand in the Bush Administration than the tale of two sides of the Cuban island. Fidel Castro should be held to global account for human rights abuses (as should all governments). But who in the world is supposed to take the US credibly when it warns of torture and abuse on one side of the island while practicing the same and worse just a stone’s throw away?

“Do as I say and not as I do,” is not a great basis for any nation’s foreign policy, especially a nation that boasts as much about its commitment to human rights as the US does.

The Constituent Assembly – Lite

It was supposed to be an instrument of popular democracy; the way that Bolivia’s marginalized communities would design a new political system for their nation. It was a demand from the people second only to the call for the nation to take back control of the nation’s gas and oil. “A Constituent Assembly that is sovereign and of the people!” That was the refrain during last December’s heated election campaign.

Three weeks from today Bolivia will shut down for a historic national vote to name representatives to a national constituent assembly to rewrite the nation’s constitution. From the way it feels on the street here in Cochabamba, at least, most people couldn’t seem to care less.

A Lifeless Election

In the run-up to the December elections you could feel the process of political transformation; it was palpable. Walls were painted in party colors. Campaign headquarters were being opened in every neighborhood. Flags flew. The newspapers wrote of it endlessly. Candidates were everywhere (it was hard to go to the store to buy milk without running into one). Most importantly, people were talking and debating about the election.

With three weeks to go to the Constituent Assembly vote, it is hard to even know it is coming up. Yesterday in Plaza Colon I spotted my first actual campaigning. PODEMOS, the party of Jorge Quiroga – the once-President and distant second place finisher in December – was running a lackluster motorcade in endless circles around the Plaza, its only sign of life being a blaring instrumental version of the Kjarkas classic, “Viva Cochabamba.”

In the city at least, MAS is even less visible, though I did run into Evo a couple of weeks ago with a head full of mixtura (confetti) standing in the Central Plaza doling out a fresh supply of computers to the regional police. A handful of billboards dot the city featuring the faces of unknown people who occupy the main slates for election. To be honest, it feels something like having the Bush/Kerry slugfest in 2004 turned into a race for leadership of a local mosquito abatement district. It is not just that it lacks the same intensity. It lacks any intensity at all.

How did This Happen?

The first thing is that a Constituent Assembly process that was supposed to be wide open – in which the country’s vibrant social movements would step squarely into the arena of elections and political reform – is instead just one more party for the political parties. It came out that way because the political parties designed it that way.

Parties like MAS, PODEMOS and UN qualified for the ballot automatically. Unions, indigenous groups, and other social movements had to hit the streets and gather 15,000 signatures each – complete with fingerprints and identification card numbers – in a few weeks. You couldn’t qualify a ballot initiative in California under such rules. No surprise; some of the most potent potential competitors to the parties didn’t make it to the ballot at all.

Some in MAS will claim that party dominance of the Assembly vote was the compromise price it had to pay to get the legislation it needed out of Congress to set that popular vote. But MAS was clearly playing the game to filter out or co-opt potential competitors for its base. It found a winning formula in December that it would like to repeat on July 2 – let the traditional parties split their vote and let MAS have the left to itself.

A MAS Backfire Waiting to Happen?

I think it is a strategic decision that could backfire big time on MAS.

In December MAS and Morales benefited from waves of enthusiasm and interest in the election. People who might not have otherwise voted went to the polls in droves and they voted for Evo. Candidacies from the social movements would have helped generate some of the enthusiasm missing around the July 2 vote. What happens with a vote in which a lot of people just stay home?

Here’s a scenario MAS won’t like.

In a low-turnout vote, the traditional political players, folks like Quiroga; they know how to get people to the polls. I think there is a very, very good chance that MAS, even if it wins more votes than any others July 2, will finish in a first place that pales in comparison to the 54%, historic, outright majority Evo took in December. This is not a national race with Evo on the ballot. This is a series of local races in which MAS faces are a cast of unknowns. It is more akin to municipal elections and the last time Bolivia had those, the traditional powers beat MAS easily most everywhere. The same was true in the December elections for governors around the country.

Symbolically, the vote will be hailed by Morale’s substantial opponents as sign that his popularity is waning. The press, both in Bolivia and abroad, will repeat that refrain. MAS may easily find itself with a Constituent Assembly in which its rivals have a much more clout than in their limited numbers in the MAS-dominated Congress.

MAS gambled on having an Assembly vote it thought it could dominate, a means of further solidifying its political power. Instead, by helping design a vote that is closed and pretty boring, it may end up handing away a substantial part of the victory it fought to hard to win just seven months earlier.

AIDS at 25: The People I Lost

It was twenty-five years ago this week, the first week of June 1981, that a mysterious pneumonia among gay men in the US gained its first notice in a US medical journal. It was gay men of my same generation that were its first victims. Three of them were close friends, one of them my very closest. Here is something of their stories, vibrant and loving men worth remembering on the anniversary of the birth of a plague.

Martin O’Malley and Daniel Brewer

Martin and Daniel were already a couple when I met them, a long-standing one. Daniel was a nurse in San Francisco, where I lived. He worked with prematurely born infants and we met as I was enlisting nurses to help campaign for a piece of California legislation to put birth defect warnings on wine, beer and spirits bottles. He was tall, muscular and graceful – the kind of San Francisco man that prompted women I knew to note their misfortune that he was gay.

Martin was a wild man. He was born and raised in Philadelphia, in a family environment that seem to destine him to live in a world of wild imagination and a touch of craziness. He once told me that, to teach him the alphabet as a young boy, his father took him on the train from Philadelphia to Washington, looking for things that began with each letter in sequence. The trip ended with a run through the Washington zoo to see the zebra.

For a time Martin served as the executive director of a shelter for homeless families I helped start in San Francisco in the mid-1980s (homelessness, that other plague that took root at the same time as AIDS). He served with a mix of creativity and utter incompetence as a manager. Painfully, we had to fire him. But we remained friends anyway.

Daniel was diagnosed first. As AIDS began to take control of his body his muscular frame shrank to a spindle. Soon after he was no longer able to work and soon after that, unable to leave the small apartment that he and Martin shared on Potrero Hill, just behind San Francisco General Hospital – global AIDS central at the time. His nursing friends, including a blonde Florence Nightingale named Amy Casey, managed to sneak in to the apartment everything that Daniel needed to die peacefully at home, from a hospital bed to a generous morphine drip during his final days. I am sure most of what they supplied him with was utterly illegal, but none of us cared.

Martin tended his dying partner with such grace, attention and love that it shown as an example to straight and gay couples alike. I think of Martin and Daniel and that dedication in days like these when people like the President of the United States and others declare that allowing couples like them to marry would “undermine the structure of the family.” I don’t see how it would undermine the structure of mine.

I was with Martin on the day – with Daniel still alive but dying – that he found out he was HIV positive. The two of us were the same age by a few months. I remember him telling me with tears in his eyes, “We didn’t do anything that you guys (the straight ones) didn’t do in college. No one told us it would kill us.” Sex as a death sentence. We were all just getting used to that. For Martin, his tending to Daniel was not only an act of love but also a horrible preview of coming attractions for himself, one he would have to endure without his lover and partner by his side. Daniel died in San Francisco in 1988. Martin died in Philadelphia a few years later and we held a memorial service for him in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco.

Christopher George McKenzie

The dedication to my last book, The Democracy Owners’ Manual, reads as follows:

In Memory of Christopher G. McKenzie
Teacher, Patriot and my Best Friend

Chris was a teacher at my high school in Whittier, the kind that students hang out with in his classroom after class. He taught English but his love was photography and a good number of his English assignments involved students doing slide shows. I never had him for a class. We bonded over our both being Nixon-bashers in Nixon’s hometown during Nixon’s presidency. Our friendship may have been the best thing to have come out of that twisted administration, that and détente.

Our friendship lasted for years beyond our shared time at Pioneer High School. It lasted through his wild run for Whittier City Council, in which he fell short by just a few points of becoming the first gay member of one of the most conservative little bastions in conservative Southern California. It lasted through him standing up at my wedding, invited to do a reading before all my friends and family, and taking the opportunity to ask them to help him pressure me to run for President of the United States. It lasted through that evening that I sat on the floor of my kitchen in San Francisco, with tears in my eyes, as Chris told me through a telephone receiver that he had tested HIV positive.

Those were the days in which to test positive meant you would get AIDS and to get AIDS meant that you would die. Death waits for us all, but for Chris and others, it waited without patience. He lived his life knowing that he has a very limited time left to do so. Our conversations were dotted with reports on cell counts and the language of measuring one’s closeness to a fatal illness. Toward the end he started plotting his death the way one might plan how to decorate a home. He wrote his obituary. He planned his memorial. A one-time candidate for the Catholic priesthood, Chris drove around Los Angeles with the personalized license plate, X JESUIT.

On December 5, 1994 Chris died, at home, his partner Samuel, an immigrant from Guadalajara at his side. Another one of those couples whose love and commitment threaten to undermine the American family. The obituary he wrote for himself for the Los Angeles Times – which he had shown me with great pride a few months before –
included this self-confession:

Fascinated by earthquakes and politics, he was an avid gardener
who loved Yosemite and good books. He never reached his goals
of being President, writing a book and earning a million dollars.

Martin, Daniel, and Christopher – three names and three friends lost to AIDS, among 25 million others this past quarter century.

A US Official’s Advice to Bolivian Graduates

On Saturday I had the odd privilege of attending the graduation ceremonies at the “American” school here, where my son Miguel was among the graduating seniors. I say odd because, from a comic perspective, I think the highlight was the commencement address offered up by the enthusiastic gentleman sent by the US Embassy to offer up some words of wisdom to the grads and their parents, Mr. Tim Sears.

Mr. Sears’s introduction itself was a bit comic. The head of the school board, a Bolivian who has been a major recipient of USAID funding in the past, forgot to introduce Mr. Sears altogether – leaving the Embassy official in the awkward position of sashaying to the podium without introduction and the USAID recipient having to apologize later for the oversight.

I desperately wanted to shout out, “Hey Rudy, you can kiss any more USAID money goodbye now buddy!” But I restrained myself in the name of my son’s dignity – something always in jeopardy for my kids when Dad is in the house.

Mr. Sears, who confessed to scribbling out his speaking notes while approaching the runway at Miami International Airport, cheerily offered what he told the graduates were three challenges they faced in the future and three pieces of advice. I can’t say I recall all of those, but here are a few I remember.

“Global warming,” that was one of the challenges faced by the graduating class of 2006. I am not sure if this was the first time that a Bush administration official has formally acknowledged the melting of the ice caps, but we all certainly appreciated his candor. Given that the US currently burns 25% of the world’s fuel and refuses to comply with international anti-global warming agreements, and Bolivia is left to basically being a glacier-melting spectator, I found the advice odd.

His advice to the graduates included, “fasten your seatbelts,” which I presumed to be a figurative remark that would lead to some observation about the fast and unpredictable pace of the future. Actually, he meant it literally as in – wear your seatbelts when riding in cars. I waited in vain for some spunky member of the senior class to yell out, “Hey mister, if the glacier melts are going to kill us are seat belts really that important?” But no such outburst of youthful cool was forthcoming. I was left longing for the class of 1975.

Mr. Sears also encouraged students to keep reading and advised that anything would do. His reading suggestions ranged from Web sites to comic books for adults. I could hear the Australian school librarian muttering incredulities under her breath. It was only for the sake of my son’s fragile dignity that I stopped myself from yelling out, “Hey mister, what about porn sites?” But I suppose one written word is as good as another, no?

I felt personally proud when the representative of the US government quoted, before the vastly Bolivian audience, that most esteemed of US philosophers, Woody Allen (something from Annie Hall about dead sharks and romantic relationships). I knew I was the only one there who probably got the reference.

I can’t testify as to what impact the advice from the Embassy had on the graduates. Glancing into the 4x4s in which the Bolivian elite and their kids went off to celebratory lunches, I still saw an awful lot of seatbelts dangling user-less from the doors. And as our family left in a battered Toyota Corolla cab, no click of seatbelts was to be heard there either.

After a morning of platitudes, a steady stream of “today we end an era of our lives” and “now we go out into our futures” and “buckle up young ones” I pondered what I would have said if given the podium for a few minutes. It has been a long time (31 years) since I stood at a podium in a high school stadium in Whittier and delivered my own commencement speech (with my mind half on the all night party at Disneyland that would come afterwards).

I guess I would say to the class of 2006 the following:

Forget everything else people tell you and just find one thing in the world that you love to do, that you are good at, and that leaves the world somewhat better for your having been here. Avoid materialism. Embrace creativity and craziness. Be careful of ruts and conformity. As for seatbelts – yeah, buckle-up. But more importantly, make sure the road you are driving on is yours and not one someone else picked out for you.

Of course, no one asked me.