Three Messages that Morales and MAS Need to Hear

I have spent a lot of the past few weeks having conversations with Bolivians I know, listening to their concerns about events here and especially to their views about the one-year-old government of MAS and Evo Morales.

Too often, the government and MAS have met all criticisms by dismissing them as the rhetoric of "the oligarchy" or of right-wing elites. To be clear, a good deal of the opposition to MAS and Morales really does come from elites who see their privileges under attack and who have wanted the new government to fail from the start. But a lot of that criticism also comes from people who used to support Evo and MAS and who, importantly, could have been and should have been a reliable part of MAS' base of political support.

Here are three messages that I hear these people saying to Morales and MAS that neither the party, the government, nor the President seems to be hearing. They need to, not just for the sake of their own political fortunes, but for the sake of Bolivia as whole:

1. The Middle Class Matters

Evo Morales got elected president with a historic majority a year ago because he did two things. First, he built a solid base among Bolivia's poor and in rural areas. He wrapped himself in his indigenous identity and, with no real competition for that same base, made himself the embodiment of political hope for the nation's most marginalized people. Second, and equally important, he convinced thousands and thousands of middle class voters to back him as well. They did so with a mix of aspirations. Some hoped that putting social movements in charge would keep them off the streets. Some joined in his desire for a change of economic course. Others voted against old parties that they viewed as tired instruments of corruption (including PODEMOS which many viewed, correctly, as Banzer's ADN party with a new name).

In the year since, Morales has alienated that middle class base over and over again – with his government's efforts to undo Catholic religious education in the schools, with his resistance to compromise on the 2/3 vote issue in the Constituent Assembly, but also with his rhetoric and failure to recognize that the middle class here struggles also.

A neighbor of mine, who owns a small corner store, captured this sentiment, explaining to me that she voted enthusiastically for Evo but would never do so again. "He talks always about the indigenous, but what about the rest of us?" she told me. A President needs to be President for all the people.

Evo would help himself and the country enormously if he dedicated himself in this second year to also reaching out to the nation's struggling middle class. They worry about their children's schooling. They worry about limited economic opportunity. The young are leaving Bolivia by the thousands each month to become nannies in Barcelona or homebuilders in Madrid, leaving behind confused children and tearful parents, all for the lack of opportunity at home. A simple message of, "Yes, I am your president as well," matched with policy initiatives to address their concerns, is essential.

Lest this be dismissed by MAS politicians as unneeded, they might take account of the fact that the best political defense MAS has against the right wing is not the ability to assemble masses in plazas but to rebuild its rapidly evaporating middle class base.

2. Humility and Competence Matters

When he was inaugurated a year ago, a more humble Evo Morales told the country that he would certainly make mistakes as President and the he would be to admit them and learn from them. Today a less humble Morales and MAS administration seems virtually incapable of admitting errors when it commits them, relying too easily on excuses and charges against the opposition.

I had a long visit with another Bolivian friend of mine the other day, a smart human rights lawyer who I have known for years and who I respect greatly. She is exactly the kind of progressive person many outsiders would expect to be a big Morales backer, but she's not. When she speaks of Morales she uses words like "authoritarian" and "arrogant". Those are not only characteristics that make citizens apprehensive about their government. It makes them afraid of their government. MAS and Morales need to hear that.

Citizens also expect their government to be competent, and the results from MAS so far are decidedly mixed. The government now has its third state energy company (YPFB) head in a year. The Water Ministry, a new agency created with great hope a year ago, keeps spitting out all the competent people I know who went to work there. To be clear, MAS and Morales have made some important progress, most notably in renegotiating the giveaway oil contracts that Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada handed to foreign petroleum companies a decade ago. But, especially in the new round of Cabinet appointments, political allegiance seems to be more important than competence and that is a bad sign.

3. Reconciliation Matters

Yesterday I sat with a cluster of Cochabamba social movement leaders who professed openly about their depression at the direction of things here, and specifically the disaster of the deadly confrontations in the streets on January 11. The odor of mistrust, racism and hate lingers for many here in Cochabamba. People with dark skin tell me they worry about going into the neighborhoods of the north and wonder aloud whether light-skinned people from the north feel the same about the southern neighborhoods.

There are thousands of people who did not spend January 11 running through the streets with sticks and don't back the partisan brinksmanship (with other people's lives) played by either Evo or Manfred. They are searching for a path toward reconciliation.

A President needs to be a force for bringing people together, and not simply join with his adversaries to divide them. Watch for more groups on the left to challenge Morales this year, not just for his policies but also for a style of governing that worries them for many of the same reasons it worries his adversaries on the right.

A week ago, in its version of the "Evo at One Year" story, the Miami Herald quoted me with the tag, "sympathetic to Morales' aims." I think that is a fair characterization. I am sympathetic to the aims that Bolivians had when they voted for Morales a year ago – economic policies aimed to benefit Bolivians instead of foreign corporations, real political power for the marginalized majority, a battle against corruption, and a government that would incorporate the full diversity of the population it was hired to serve.

I still believe in those objectives and I think there are many good people in this new government that do as well and who are working hard toward that end. But faith in the process and in Morales' leadership is eroding among many people who once believed in it.

Evo and MAS need to hear that and need to deal with it, now. If they do, the government that began with such high hope still has a good chance of succeeding. If they don't, the future of the President, the party, and the country, looks full of trouble.

Manfred Reyes Villa's Washington Tour

In the aftermath of the conflict and violence that struck Cochabamba two weeks ago –sparked by his demand for a regional re-vote on the autonomy issue – Cochabamba governor Manfred Reyes Villa decided to extend his absence from the region, and the nation, and headed for Washington.

Starting late last week Reyes Villa has been meeting with a series of US-based human rights groups to seek backing for his clams that the Morales government instigated an attempted "coup" against his governorship. According to a release that Reyes Villa sent to journalists, his meetings included Human Right Watch, The Center for Justice and International Law, and Inter-American Dialogue.

Reyes Villa placed the blame for the Cochabamba violence squarely on President Morales, declaring in his release that the goal of his visit was to: "denounce the process of overthrow of elected departmental governments undertaken by the government of Evo Morales."

Reyes Villa claims to have secured a commitment from Human Rights Watch to form a commission to come to Cochabamba and investigate the events earlier this month.

I hope that HRW does come and does do the kind of thorough investigation that the group has done before here on issues like the US War on Coca. Those questions should not only look at MAS role in the January violence, but the role of the Governor and his backers as well.

The Democracy Center Turns 15 -- and the On-Line Version of our New Magazine from Bolivia!

Dear Readers:

The Democracy Center is now fifteen years old!

This new year, 2007, marks our anniversary and in honor of that occasion we just published a newsletter to our subscribers that takes a look back at how we began, where we've been, and acknowledges some of the many great organizations that have worked by our side – from California to Bolivia and beyond. Below is the lead and a link to the full issue.

To celebrate we also unveil the on-line version of our new Democracy Center magazine -- "Jallalla!" You can read it in full (for free) here.

Many, many thanks to all of you who have been with us these fifteen years. I think we're ready for at least fifteen more!

Jim Shultz

THE DEMOCRACY CENTER TURNS 15!

It began with an unexpected letter from Washington. My wife and I were living in Bolivia, taking a year off from political work in California to be volunteers in an orphanage in Cochabamba. Friends at the Advocacy Institute wrote and asked if I would put together an advocacy training program for health activists in South Africa, then still governed under white apartheid rule. That February (1992) I arrived in Johannesburg and, without my really knowing it, The Democracy Center was born.

Read the full newsletter here.

What I'd Be Doing if I Were in the US This Weekend

Four years ago President Bush listened carefully to fabricated intelligence reports, heard what he wanted to hear, and launched the US into one of the most disastrous and deadly follies in the nation's history. Last November President Bush listened again, this time to the voice of voters across the US, and apparently has once again heard what he wanted to. In the face of huge and clear popular opposition to his war policies in Iraq, Bush has opted for a policy of escalation.

Many others, more expert and more eloquent than I, have filled pages on the Internet analyzing and criticizing Bush's planned 20,000 solider escalation of the war. This weekend thousands of people in hundreds of cities across the US will take to the streets to voice their opposition to the war and to help encourage the newly installed Democratic Congress to develop the political backbone to act.

Here is a list, published by the group United for Peace, of the major events taking place this weekend, state-by-state and city-by-city.

Is it worth your time to turnout? More than 3,000 US troops have been killed since Bush launched the war, and 34,000 Iraqis just in the last year (according to the UN). If it were your sister or brother, your son or daughter, your husband or wife, on the list to go – would you turn out then?

I know what I would be doing if I were in the US this weekend. Because I can't, I hope some of you will go in my place (and share news with your comments here on the Blog).

January 11: An Eyewitness Account

Readers:

It has been two weeks since January 11, the day when the streets of Cochabamba turned deadly violent, leaving two people dead and more than 160 others wounded. Reasonable people can debate the true roots of those events. Was it Manfred Reyes Villa throwing down the gauntlet to MAS backers by saying he would call for a re-vote on autonomy six months after Cochabamba voters soundly rejected it? Was it the labor unions and campesino groups that filled the Plaza in protest, and who blocked roads coming in and out of the city?

There is, however, little room for debate about when and where a tense political situation exploded into widespread violence that overtook the center of Cochabamba. That was just after 4pm two weeks ago at the end of Cochabamba’s tree-lined Prado. I walked through that area just a few minutes beforehand, interviewing people from all sides of the battle that was about to explode.

Since then I have also spoken to a half dozen people who were eyewitnesses to those events. One of those accounts, from a non-participant, Jonas Brown, a US citizen who lives in the exact spot where the fighting began, stands out. I asked him to write it up for our readers and he agreed to do so. I post it here, unedited. I think it is an important contribution to the record of what happened here two weeks ago today.

[Note: The photo here, of supporters of Manfred Reyes Villa, was taken from the balcony of our office.]

Jim Shultz

January 11: An Eyewitness Account

When I returned to Cochabamba from summer vacation on January 9, a group of about fifty police officers were all but living on the street just outside my apartment. They were guarding the intersection of Avenida Ramon Rivero and Calle Antezana, just before it crosses Antezana Bridge to the northern part of the city. Since Cala Cala Bridge and most main roads through the city were blockaded by the protesting campesinos, this was a critical intersection to control if there was to be any flow of traffic back and forth across the river in the downtown area.

My apartment window looks out over this intersection. Over the next two days, when cooking or eating, I glanced down at the police from time to time. It was a picture, mostly, of boredom. If there was anyone benefiting from the blockades financially, it had to be the ice cream man, hawking from the shade of his pushcart’s overhanging umbrella. When the sun came out, he had faithful patrons in the idle, over-heated police. Only a few officers at any time were needed to direct traffic. The others sat on the curbs, their body armor half-off or lying on the grass behind them. Their superior roused them at intervals to stand in formation on the street. They would refasten their armor, assume their positions, then, quickly dismissed, retreat into the shade and peel off the layers again.

I did see them called into action once. On the 10th, a crowd of campesinos with sticks began moving tentatively from La Plaza de las Banderas down Ramon Rivero, possibly with the intent of taking and blockading the Calle Antezana intersection. The police formed a wall and marched to meet the campesinos halfway, at the intersection of Avenida Ramon Rivero and Calle Lanza. As I stood watching, a man in business clothes with a black eye and a cut on his face approached me and warned me to be careful. He had been beaten up by campesinos the day before when he was caught taking photographs of a blockade. According to him, he had absorbed some 30-40 kicks and punches.

This standoff ended without violence. After a brief, tense interval, the campesinos retreated back to the plaza. The police went back to sitting on the curbs. They nodded or said hello when people walked past. They congregated in the limited shade of a small tree, chatting away the empty hours, hitting each other’s body armor playfully with their clubs. Then, abruptly, in the middle of the afternoon on the next day, January 11th, their struggle with boredom ended.

On one side, the campesinos had approached again from La Plaza de las Banderas, a few young men trying to arm themselves en route by ripping branches off the trees. The energy level in the crowd was higher than it had been the last time. They yelled in unison and some leaped up and down. Firecrackers were set off. From the other side, the Los Jovenes por la Democracia demonstration in favor of Manfred Villa Reyes was about to cross Antezana Bridge onto Avenida Ramon Rivero. This small group of police officers stood between two opposing, electric, stick-waving protests.

They lined up in the street, listening to their superior’s orders, their faces now icy and nervous. For the first time, it occurred to me that they didn’t have shields or helmets. In fact, some didn’t even have billy clubs, only sticks and heavy wires like the protesters. Not all had body armor. Most importantly, of course, they were severely outnumbered. Reinforcements had arrived, but not enough to make much difference.

The force split into two. One formed a wall, as they done before, and marched down to the meet the campesinos where Calle Lanza intersects Avenida Ramon Rivero. Even to one who knows nothing about crowd control, it seemed a precarious situation. The police line was thin, only one officer “thick” at most points. The other half of the force formed a line at the south foot of the bridge, their arms interlocked to prohibit the pro-Manfred demonstration from exiting the bridge onto Avenida Ramon Rivero. This equally thin second line, charged with repelling a much larger, more concentrated crowd—and one which was already moving—looked even less tenable than the first.

My apartment is on the empty block that was being used as a buffer between the two police lines. A few of my neighbors and I stood outside our gate watching as the pro-Manfred crowd flowed across the bridge chanting slogans, thrusting their sticks into the air. Some paused to throw stones down toward the river, presumably at campesinos, who may have been throwing stones back. I don’t know who provoked whom, but this was the first hint of violence that I saw.

At the front of the march, the crowd was mostly young men armed with clubs of some type or other: wooden staffs, branches, baseball bats, metal rods, etc. The police line flexed as the foremost marchers pressed into it. It wasn´t clear if the leaders were pushing themselves into the police or if they themselves were being pushed by the momentum of the crowd. Either way, the police quickly realized they couldn’t hold the crowd on the bridge and adjusted their line to funnel the crowd onto Avenida Ramon Rivero to the east, away from the campesinos.

The crowd now had a road down which to continue marching, but they didn’t move. For a few moments, nothing happened. Then, in a sudden surge, the source of which was indiscernible, the front of the crowd burst through the police line and, waving their sticks wildly, broke into a full run down Avenida Ramon Rivero in the direction of the campesinos. My neighbors and I were in their path. We ran and ducked behind our apartment gate.

The pro-Manfred march had been billed as peaceful, and there were reasonable, non-violent people who participated in it. But the contingent at the front of the crowd evidently had something else in mind. They didn’t march toward the campesinos in the style, even, of an aggressive protest. Once through the police line, either acting on plans made beforehand or giving in to the angry chaos of the moment, they launched an assault that bore no resemblance to civil protest.

From behind the gate of my apartment, I couldn’t see what happened when the pro-Manfred group clashed with the campesinos, a relative smattering of police officers wedged between them. Apparently, tear gas was released. A few minutes later, I walked back outside. The campesinos, outnumbered in that particular area, had retreated and most of the fighting was now taking place in La Plaza de las Banderas or on El Prado. Only a few scattered melees continued nearby on Avenida Ramon Rivero.

The police’s mission had changed from violence prevention to violence management. Some campesinos had become separated from their comrades and were caught among the pro-Manfred marchers. Some had been too slow or just unlucky. Others had been injured. The police, using their own bodies as shields, ferried them one by one or in small groups through the pro-Manfred marchers to empty streets or to ambulances. These panicked campesinos hurried through corridors of screaming, stick-waving marchers to safety, a few sustaining blows from sticks even as they ran.

I saw men using their sticks to threaten young and middle-aged campesinas—even one with a child on her back—yelling at them. Expressions of terror flashed on the faces of the women. One campesina, pursued by marchers, fled into the gated front yard of a nearby establishment. The person guarding the gate shut it behind her. A crowd gathered around yelling at her. They dispersed when someone behind the gate escorted her safely out of sight.

As the fighting moved down the street, the middle and back ranks of the pro-Manfred protest continued to arrive. They appeared to be trying to size up the situation. Some gathered in small groups. They had a decision to make. Should they keep marching? Was this even a march anymore? What exactly was happening? Did they support it?

Some turned back immediately when they saw the violence. Others milled on the street or sat on the curbs holding their signs, bewildered expressions on their faces. Still others went ahead to witness or perhaps even join the fighting. A few armed men were on motorbikes zooming back and forth, brandishing their sticks. An organizer appeared trying to rally the uncertain marchers at the back, yelling something like, “Let’s go. We’ve cleared out the plaza. It’s all safe up ahead.”

Though Avenida Ramon Rivero was still hostile territory for the campesinos, its access to unblocked streets must have made it the best way to get casualties to the hospital. From the direction of the fighting, police officers led exhausted, terrified, limping, half-conscious and/or bleeding campesinos one by one down the sidewalk past our apartment.

The police continued shielding the injured with their own bodies until each person was safely inside an ambulance or a truck. At one point, they had to hold a small crowd of yelling pro-Manfred supporters back from a campesino man on a stretcher. My Spanish is not good enough to know exactly what was being yelled at the campesinos out in the crowd, but I made out one statement hollered by my very own neighbor at an injured man: “Go home, Indian!”

Even a man whose face was a river of blood—whose T-shirt was soaked-through so that the entire front of it was crimson, whose eyes were foggy with shock—was yelled at as he staggered by dripping a trail of blood.

An adolescent campesina had become separated from her family. She came and sat down by our apartment building, weeping quietly. She was trying to gather herself, but each time an injured campesino was led past, she broke into tears again. I went over and awkwardly asked her how she was doing. She looked at me in terror and turned away. Finally, a policeman led her away and put her into a truck for her own safety.

I’m an American. It’s not my place to take a side in the political disagreements that caused this fighting, or to try to judge, following the events on January 11, which side holds the moral high-ground. I have only written what I saw. This is an account by one shocked witness of one interval in which a large number of “normal” citizens somehow lost track of their humanity. The same phenomenon was echoed tragically throughout the remainder of the afternoon by people on both sides.

Before I went to sleep that night, I looked out the window. The police had returned and were sprawled on the patches of grass along the street, which was littered with garbage, abandoned sticks, and used-up fireworks. The next day they would receive military reinforcements.

Written by Jonas Brown

Evo Shuffles His Cabinet

Last night, as part of marking the completion of his first year in office, President Morales announced the replacement of seven out of sixteen members of his presidential cabinet. The reshuffle had been a subject of much speculation for the past few weeks, following an “evaluation” of the ministers at a MAS-led social movement’s conclave (MAS-affiliated movements) here in Cochabamba.

Gone are the ministers of education, interior, justice, economy, labor, rural development and public works. The ousted Education Minister, Felix Patzi, has been a particular flashpoint for the new government, starting with his demand to end Catholic religious education in the schools, putting the government into conflict with the powerful Catholic Church. Patizi also failed to endear himself to private schools and much of the Bolivian middle class when he issued a government order that schools needed to teach classes in indigenous languages (a move with some merit but not as a blanket matter for all schools in the nation). In fact, it was the former Education Minister’s proclamations that sent the first major anti-Evo protests into the streets here in Cochabamba, long before the 2/3 vote issue and autonomy became the major flash points.

Gone also is Justice Minister Casimira Rodriguez, the former leader of Bolivia’s domestic workers’ union and someone we at The Democracy Center know well and have a good deal of respect for. Rodriguez, a Cochabambina who wears a traditional pollera, was often referred to in foreign media profiles as a “former-maid” not recognizing her record as a labor organizer nationally and internationally. Her work as Justice Minister focused on anti-corruption efforts.

Another Minister, Salvador Ric, a Cruceño whose participation in the cabinet was supposed to help Morales build a bridge to Santa Cruz and the business community, resigned last week, claiming that the government failed to heed his views.

Four Hours and 20 Minutes of Evo

Evo Morales’ anniversary address before the Bolivian Congress yesterday clocked out at 4 hours and twenty minutes. That is 27 minutes longer than Gone with the Wind (which was also, I imagine, easier to watch). According to the coverage in today’s La Razon, as several members of Congress began to fall asleep Evo suggested from the podium that they be offered coffee.

Morales used his anniversary speech to run through the litany of his accomplishments (from gas nationalization to declaring a National Day of the House Worker); to call for prosecution of a variety of former government officials; and to reiterate his call for visas for visitors from the US. With four hours and twenty minutes, he probably had a chance to cover just about everything.

Reading today about the marathon speech [he is still easily outdone by Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina who, in the year of my birth, spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes during a filibuster against a civil rights bill] I thought back to Evo’s inaugural speech in the Congress a year ago. Then a more humble Evo interrupted himself after a half hour of talking to apologize to listeners for talking so long. “I really didn’t mean to speak for this long, I guess I must have caught something from Hugo and Fidel,” he said to warm laughter.

My favorite moment of that speech was when Evo was speaking about the fight against corruption then looked into the former presidents booth to the notoriously corrupt Jaime Paz Zamora and said, with the nation watching, “Don Jaime, Que ha pasado?”

Evo’s presidency has already delivered positive results that are historic. Four years ago Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada set off the February Negro killings (34 people dead and a one day shooting war between the national police and the army) because he took new taxes on foreign oil companies off the table and instead tried to satisfy the IMF’s deficit reduction demands with a tax hike on the working poor. Evo abandoned “Washington Consensus” dogma, raised foreign oil taxes by $1 billion, and is now running a budget surplus instead of a deficit. None of the companies fled the country as predicted. That is a huge achievement.

But Evo’s second year needs to be a year of humility and healing, not hubris and confrontation. His speech yesterday was a missed opportunity to begin that. Tonight George Bush delivers his State of the Union address in Washington. He knows that if he goes longer that an hour, most people will switch to American Idol. I bet that members of the Bolivian Congress (those that stayed) had wished they had a remote control as well.

A Year of Evo: The Challenges of Governing a Revolution

Readers:

Today marks one year since Evo Morales became Bolivia’s new President. Journalists from across the world have been running around the country for the past few weeks preparing stories on “Evo at One Year”. Below is the article on Evo that I wrote for our new Democracy Center magazine, Jallalla, which many of you ordered. The on-line version of the magazine should be up on our Web site in the next two weeks.

Jim Shultz

A Year of Evo: The Challenges of Governing a Revolution

It really was a dramatic and hopeful beginning that cold January weekend a year ago when Bolivia got a new President.

Atop thousand-year-old, pre-Inca ruins at Tiahuanaco, Evo Morales stood dressed in colorful indigenous vestiges that took museum curators to assemble. In a ceremony that hadn't been held in 500 years, he received a blessing of his powers from leaders of the indigenous communities of Bolivia's highlands. His formal inauguration before the Bolivian Congress the next day drew nearly a dozen heads of state, from Chile to Slovenia. Knock-off copies of the new president's red and blue horizontal striped sweater sold briskly on the Internet. His picture graced page one of the Washington Post. "Evo Mania" took Bolivia and the world by storm.

In the year since, Bolivia has become a global travel destination for journalists, filmmakers, and political seekers who think they might find some kind of new democracy in the making here. If they look with open eyes they can see close-up some hard lessons about the challenge of converting people's hopes into political reality.

Gas Wars and Rewriting The National Magna Carta

When Morales was elected in December 2006, with a historic majority that was twice that of any president in decades, he had a clear mandate from the Bolivian people to do two things. The first was to reverse, full-speed, twenty years of market-driven economic reforms that had privatized much of the nation's resources – from water to gas – into foreign corporate hands. The second was to initiate a Constituent Assembly to rewrite the nation's constitution and its most fundamental political rules.

Last May 1, on International Workers' Day, Morales stepped out onto the balcony of the Presidential Palace in La Paz – just across from where a predecessor had been hung to death from a lamppost sixty years before – to deliver on promise number one. Before a massive crowd cheering from below, Morales announced a presidential decree "nationalizing" the vast oil and gas reserves that had been privatized into the hands of corporations like Enron a decade before. "For more than 500 years, our resources have been pillaged," Morales declared. "This has to end now." Then, in a grand gesture that was pure domestic political photo-op, Morales sent Bolivian troops to the nation's gas fields to "protect" them.

Foreign media declared that Bolivia had "seized" the assets of foreign companies. Others declared that Morales had "been conned by Castro and Chavez". From afar it all looked pretty radical. But closer up the plan was mostly moderate stuff – buying back a majority stake in the pieces of the energy industry that Bolivia sold off far too cheap in the 1990s; upping taxes on foreign oil companies; and renegotiating contracts to get a fair prices for the nation's wealth under the ground. Confiscation and seizure it wasn't.

Nor has it proven easy. Morales has struggled, and stumbled, in his effort to put together the cash needed to get the government back into the energy business and to get a solid team of competent and honest people in place to manage it all. Negotiations with foreign firms have been difficult. He also faces fiery opposition from the country's eastern states where the gas and oil resides and where residents want to keep a big share of the wealth that comes from it. Nevertheless, gas revenue to the public treasury is up and, albeit slowly, things are changing.

Morales' efforts to deliver on promise number two, the Constituent Assembly, have been no less turbulent. Last July's election to pick delegates to that Assembly was swept by Evo and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party with 55% of the vote, twice that of his nearest rival. But 55% is not two thirds, and two thirds is the number of votes that MAS agreed would be required for the Assembly to act, when it negotiated the deal last year with opponents to start the process.

When MAS and its opposition – the latter, none too keen on rewriting the constitution to begin with – started stalling out even on procedural issues, MAS declared that only the final proposal needed two thirds and set about to run things with its simple majority. MAS opponents, especially those same civic groups from the oil-rich east, cried power grab and began organizing the kinds of mass protests and general strikes that Morales used to help organize against his predecessors.

Gas and the Constituent Assembly dominated Bolivian politics during Evo's first year in power and they are likely to dominate his second year as well.

Land, Mines, Coca and Rhetoric on Fire

But those issues were clearly not the only points of national combustion last year. A Morales land reform decree – aimed at giving titles and a bit of aid to some of the country's millions of landless peasants – sparked fear among both big landowners, who could be affected, and small ones who will never be. In September, Bolivian police killed two coca growers during an eradication operation, even as Morales seeks to open up foreign markets for products made with the green leaf he held aloft during his speech before the UN General Assembly. In October, rival groups of miners at the country's largest tin deposit went to war against each other with thrown sticks of dynamite, leaving 16 dead.

Watching all this and interpreting it is tricky work. Ex-military leaders talk of possible "civil war." Morales allies warn of a potential "coup." Journalists call to ask me if Bolivia will suffer a political meltdown.

Anyone who thought that the transformation of political power underway here would be quiet or easy was not paying attention. High expectations among people used to having low ones, combined with the determination by others to protect long-standing privilege, are an explosive mix.

And to be honest, sometimes Morales makes things harder than he needs to. When he sent his Vice President, Alvaro Garcia Linera, to Washington to lobby for a renewed trade pact on textiles, Evo undermined the trip with announcements at home that the US was launching a conspiracy against him. His passionate declarations about indigenous power "that will last 500 years" leaves those who don't claim Aymara, Quechua, Uru and Guarani roots wondering what place they have in the new Bolivia. Morales strikes a good many of his fellow Bolivians as arrogant and arrogance married with political power makes people understandably nervous.

Bolivia spent 2006 at a crossroads and it heads into 2007 still there.

The Bolivian elite, which has held power for decades, sees the Morales presidency, not as a turn of history, but as someone else getting their turn, just as the old parties have swapped power for decades, always following the same basic economic and political course. Morales and his backers see things a lot differently. They see this moment in Bolivia as the equivalent of Nelson Mandela and the ANC taking over the reins in South Africa in 1994 – a new constitution, a new weave of power, a new nation.

After Evo's first year in office his critics on the left, who want deeper change and want it faster, are more pessimistic than they were that January morning when Morales stood at Tiahuanaco. His conservative opposition is more openly hostile than it was a year ago and it is digging in for battle. The majority of Bolivians in the middle are getting more impatient for change and it shows in Morales' declining poll numbers.

Yes, governing is harder than some of those doing it here thought it would be, and governing Bolivia is especially hard. But, this nation is clearly on a very different course than it was before Morales took power, enough to give real hope still to many who have waited for hope, stuck on the nation's margins for a very long time.

Who Will Cross the Line?

For months those with a more hyperbolic analysis of events here have warned of “civil war”. It was supposed to start, they warned, in Santa Cruz, where opposition to President Evo Morales is most fierce. But that was never the unfolding of events that was in the cards. It is the very ferocity of Santa Cruz opposition to Morales, the lopsidedness of it, that made mass civil conflict there unlikely.

The ugly preview of what civil conflict can look like happened, instead, here in Cochabamba. Why? Because this is the meeting point between the western highlands where Evo’s support runs highest, and the eastern lowlands where he is so despised. It happened where both sides could muster large numbers and it happened here because the local Governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, made a dangerous play to position himself as the key national opponent of the President.

So now the lines are drawn. As I have written before, this is not the Water Revolt of seven years ago. This is not a unified city – south and north, poor and middle class, rural and urban – against a repressive government. This is a city deeply divided.

Who will cross the line?

I have made it a point since these conflicts began to spend a lot of time crossing the line, talking to partisans on both sides and the many more who feel caught in the middle. Each side is utterly convinced that there is no legitimacy to the other. If you want a taste of the vitriol and closed-mindedness at hand, you can get a taste from the more bitter comments on this Blog.

Here is what I wish. I wish that some neutral party (if there is one left) would convene a public forum, televised for the whole city to watch, in which three people from each side would share their views of what has happened here and why. Neither side is capable now of listening to the other. Each side has sought some peaceful action toward reflection this past week. One held a street corner memorial for a 17 year old killed brutally. The other held a cultural event opposing racism in the Central Plaza. But they did this apart.

“Is there room for reconciliation?” I asked a young woman yesterday who was in Plaza de la Banderas when the Manfredistas began the assault on the campesinos on the 11th, and who had the blood of a beaten elderly man splatter across her. “Not now, not after hearing the racist attacks as they hit us.”

Here is what I would say to each side:

To The Campesinos and Others Who Gathered in Cochabamba
to Demand Manfred’s Resignation:

Yes, I fully realize that you see Manfred’s demand for a re-vote on autonomy and his alliance with those in Santa Cruz as a broader political move to stop political transformation in its tracks. Certainly, it is that, among other things. I realize that you think that those who back Manfred are “fascists” (whatever that overused term means these days). Certainly the stick and gun wielding young men who broke through the police lines on the 11th to beat women first, while screaming the most racist things they knew, certainly they gave you ample reason to believe this.

But there are a lot of people in Cochabamba who aren’t them and who don’t see it that way. They believe in democracy and they don’t see how a gathering of 5,000 or even 10,000 people have a right to undo an election in which ten times that many participated and chose a governor. They do not believe that burning the state office building is a solution. After weeks of asking I still have yet to get a satisfactory response to the question: “What gives you the right, more than anyone else, to undo an election?” There are many complaints to be raised against Manfred, but this is not Goni in 2003. Then a President ordered out troops to kill civilians, in repression so blatant and brutal that his own Vice President broke with him [While Manfred, by the way, stood by Goni’s side].

My friends, there is another side to the story.

To Those Who Took Peacefully to the Streets to Oppose the Demand for Resignation

Yes, I realize you see the arrival of the campesinos and others as an anti-democratic act by outsiders. I understand that you believe you are defending democracy. But recognize that for years, the better off of Bolivia have been telling the poor and the marginalized to leave behind the politics of the street and enter the arena of elections. Seek political transformation there, you told them. And many of you allied yourselves with that transformation by voting, with hesitation, for Evo a year ago.

But what faith in the integrity of elections are the marginalized supposed to have when a governor elected with a 47% majority, in a blatant move to serve his own national ambitions, seeks to undo a clear vote (63%) against autonomy just six months ago. Are elections a carnival game where if you miss the balloon with your dart the first time you just put down another quarter and demand to play again? Did you really expect those who see so much at stake for them in this transformation to just issue a news release or call into a radio show to articulate their anger?

Yes, someone burned the doors of the Prefectura (though who did and under what circumstances is still not clear). But make no mistake, on the 11th it was not the campesinos who broke through the police lines set up to keep the peace. It was a mob of Manfred backers armed with unhindered racism, sticks, guns and a strategy of “beat indigenous women first”. You should be concerned, deeply concerned, about who organized and ordered that attack. They are not people you want as allies.

The lines are drawn and each side is utterly dedicated to their convictions that they are 100% in the right and those who think differently are misguided at best, and patently evil at worst.

There is something tragically poetic that each side lost a life on January 11th. That can either be a wake up call to find another way to resolve the dispute at hand, or January 11th will serve just as an ugly preview of where Bolivians are headed. Your choice my adopted countrymen and countrywomen.

NPR Report on Bolivia

Reporter Julie McCarthy just completed a solid report on Bolivia for US National Public Radio (NPR), aired this morning. She spoke to both sides (and yes she interviewed me as well) and offers an analysis worth listening to and sharing with others trying to following events here. You can hear the 5-minute piece here.

The Failure of Leaders

Manfred Reyes Villa and Evo Morales were both in Cochabamba yesterday, but didn't manage to find time to meet with one another. Too bad.

Reyes Villa snuck back into town to meet with his aides at the five star Hotel La Colonia and announced to the press that even though he was in town, he still isn't governor. He said he would leave those duties in the hands of the interim governor for at least a couple of more weeks while he focuses instead on holding Evo Morales responsible for the violent events of last week. "I can't just come back like nothing happened," he told Los Tiempos.

Meanwhile, Evo was across town for an "evaluation" of last week's events, at the regional headquarters of the cocaleros union. While here he also announced a modification of his call for a new national process to allow voters to recall elected officials – presidents, governors and mayors. Without entering into specifics Evo declared that there should be some form of "special treatment' for those elected with a majority of more than 50%. Coincidently, Evo won a year ago with 53% of the vote and Manfred with 47%.

There are many people who love to claim that everyone on the other side – the campesinos who came to the city to oppose Manfred and the city residents who took to the streets to defend him – was paid to be there. I walked the lines personally last week and talked to many people on both sides. They were there, on both sides of the line, because they believed in what being there meant.

That said, it is also reasonable to say, that those on the streets (and the families affected who weren't in the streets) were caught in a political power play that none of them asked for and which Manfred and Evo created. Manfred decided to shift his ambitions from governing Cochabamba to trying to get into the national game by saying he had the authority to convene a re-vote on autonomy. He had to know that would provoke a militant response in a region that had already voted soundly the other way, but he did so anyway. Evo, I think, could have pulled the plug on the occupation of the city center and blockades of the roads, if he had chosen to. That is not the same thing as calling for it (which it seems he did not) but it is still a hand in events.

The issues of political power at hand in Bolivia at this moment are important. I am not disputing that. But both Manfred and Evo bear responsibility for letting the conflicts involved become bloody battles in the streets that took a huge human toll. Neither seems to be taking the role of peacemaker right now either.

That seems funny to me. Because right now I think being a peacemaker is not only what Cochabambinos need their leaders to be, I bet it also makes for smart politics.

Meanwhile, Back to Goni…

Yesterday the Bolivian Supreme Court formally declared former president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and two top aides, Carlos Sánchez Berzaín and Jorge Berinduague to be “en rebelde” in the government’s (pre-Evo) case against them for the deaths at the government’s hands in 2003. The ruling essentially means that the Court declares that the three know about the legal order for them to return to Bolivia and have ignored it.

On June 22nd, 2005, the Bolivian Foreign Ministry formally requested that the U.S. State Department serve notice to Sánchez de Lozada and the others that they needed to return to Bolivia to give testimony in the case (as have other former officials). For a year and a half the Bush Administration – despite its rhetoric about respect for international law – has failed to comply with that request. However, Goni and the others do clearly know about the case. Goni hired one of Bill Clinton’s former impeachment defense lawyers to represent him and his counsel has been making the rounds talking to a wide variety of actors n Washington.

In essence the Supreme Court decision here says: Okay, we know you know about the legal order to return to Bolivia so getting you legal notice is no longer an issue. The next move is a request t the US government for formal extradition (which I would imagine has about the same chance of acceptance as Jerry Falwell conducting gay marriage ceremonies anytime soon) and notice to Interpol.

The case against Sánchez de Lozada, Sánchez Berzaín and Berinduague is not going to go away anytime soon and Goni especially can expect it to follow him to most every public event he attends.

Morales Rejects Ousting of Manfred

For those following events here in Cochabamba who think the politics of it all are getting complicated, it is because it is getting more complicated by the day.

Yesterday the mass rally in the city’s Plaza Principal voted (in the not really an actual vote way that 5,000 people in a plaza decide anything) that Manfred Reyes Villa is no longer the governor of Cochabamba. Soon afterwards the Morales government, via the Vice Minister for Coordination with Social Movements (we don’t have one of those in the US) announced that the national government did not recognize that ousting and that Reyes Villa is still the legal governor of the department. The government affirmed that governors (and now presidents, presumably) can only be ousted by elections.

The rally also named a “popular government” to now lead Cochabamba, an act that, from what I can tell, isn’t even taken seriously by many social movement groups here.

For his part, there are rumors that Manfred Reyes Villa is back in Cochabamba, but nothing I have been able to confirm. Manfred has said again that he won’t push for the re-vote on autonomy that was the catalyst for all this. Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera reiterated yesterday that the national government is ready to give Reyes Villa all the protection he needs to return to Cochabamba, including 24-hour police and military guards.

Many of the people who have come to Cochabamba have gone home, at least for now, including a good number of the cocaleros, according to my sources.

In other words, no resolution as of yet, but a return to normalcy for the most part.

A Reflection

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

-- Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. 1964

Well, I Guess You Can Count Out Compromise…

I just returned from the Plaza Principal, an ocean of people from one corner to the other, a good 5,000 at least, just guessing. Lots of huge bags of coca; lots of exploding fireworks; and all the same speeches we have heard from the same leaders for a few weeks. Manfred is alternatively the representative of the neoliberal model in Cochabamba and the king of corruption.

One other thing he is, is a Governor who is going to have a very, very hard time actually ever being governor again.

On the one hand it is almost impossible for me to imagine Manfred resigning. He is not just Manfred Reyes Villa, he is a political project years and years in the making, steadily seeking his way up the political ladder, presumably toward the Presidency he sought and almost won in 2002 (but for the skillful aid of former Clinton consultants hired by Goni). A lot of people have invested a lot of money and resources into the Manfred Project and such a project does not push the self-destruct button lightly.

On the other hand, it is becoming almost as impossible to imagine how he calmly returns to Cochabamba and goes back to paving roads, cutting ribbons and appearing in big publicly financed self-promotion ads about all that each Sunday in the local newspaper. Whatever you want to say about how this happened, Manfred Reyes Villa now has the most emphatic and largest mass of people who hate him of any Bolivian politician since Goni (and if you focus just on Santa Cruz, Evo).

What happens now is anybody's guess, but Manfred's stay in Santa Cruz is starting to look more and more like a very long-term visit.

I do have to say, that you have to love a city that, while a mass angry rally is happening in the Central Plaza, around the corner the cake shop is still open where you can buy a chocolate cream torta that is so sweet your teeth fall out on contact. Where the ladies with carts selling nuts and selling orange juice are doing brisk business with the protesters. Where people (except for those with stores and businesses on the Plaza) are going about their daily lives.

That's La Llajta!

A Lot of People and a Lot of Tear Gas Canisters

I just got back from the Plaza Principal where it looks like a crowd larger than any so far in this protest is gathering for a 3pm Cabildo. An hour before the scheduled start there were already 2,000-3,000 people gathered and thousands more marching in, a procession at least another six blocks long. Some noticeable differences from last week – almost no one was carrying sticks (which everyone seemed to have last week); there were many more women; and there were a good number of babies and children.

In the blocks surrounding the Plaza there are also many more police than I have seen since all this started, many more than there were this morning. And those police are very, very well armed with tear gas. Each one typically had three large canisters strapped to his/her belt and most carried gas-firing rifles.

What all this means we will see, but we'll have a report from the Plaza when things start later on.

Soldiers with Lanyards, and a Tense Wait

This morning on my walk into work through Plaza Colon I passed by a few of the couple of dozen young soldiers stationed there for the past few days. Young conscripts wearing green ponchos against the morning drizzle sat sending text messages on their cell phones and weaving green lanyards out of what looked to be old shoelaces. I am sure that they hope boredom is the worst they will have to deal with today.

To the untrained eye, Cochabamba looks pretty normal today, even the Plaza Principal which is now empty of the large crowds of cocaleros and others that have been occupying it, though the charged façade of the empty state building is a clear reminder that things are not normal in Cochabamba.

Negotiations seem to be continuing in various places, with little fruit. The national government has beckoned Manfred Reyes Villa home to Cochabamba to address the crisis. Manfred continues to declare that he will stay in Santa Cruz, for safety and other reasons. The social movements that are demanding his resignation still insist that nothing short will end their protests and they are scheduled to hold a "cabildo" (an assembly at which actions are voted on, like the ones held by autonomy groups in Santa Cruz earlier) in the Plaza at 3pm.

It is in the conversations on the street and with neighbors that gives one the clearest sense of how Cochabamba is not operating normally. In the north part of the city where I live there is ample concern and sadness over the brutal way (reportedly sliced by machete and hung from a tree) in which a boy about to mark his 18th birthday was killed last Thursday. I am sure in other parts of the city people grieve with equal force over the death of a 42-year old campesino who left behind children of his own, shot by a hidden gun.

Cochabamba needs to choose between more warfare or compromise. For my two cents, here is what I would suggest as a compromise:

1. Manfred pledges to honor the public vote on autonomy last July and not seek a re-vote.

2. The anti-Manfred protesters withdraw their demand for his resignation.

3. The Prefect agrees to totally open the official books and allow a committee of respected people (from all sides) to investigate the claim that money has been inappropriately spent (perhaps with a pledge that, if it has, Manfred resigns).

More updates later.

Cochabamba: Somewhat Back to Normal but Waiting

Monday, midday

Cochabamba is relatively back to normal today, with the obvious exception of the Central Plaza which is still occupied by groups demanding that Manfred Reyes Villa resign. How long this version of “normal” will last is anybody’s guess. What will happen next will be determined by a whole set of behind-closed-doors conversations happening in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, and La Paz.

Here in Cochabamba there are even more people coming to the city from rural areas of the department (it is important to keep in mind that the area Manfred serves includes all of the rural areas far beyond the city as well), preparing to put large numbers in the Plaza for a rally and show of force Tuesday.

Over the weekend Evo Morales came to Cochabamba and met with leaders of the protest, calling their demand for resignation “legitimate” and he did not call on them to end the protests. Instead he pushed for his proposed law allowing the recall of officials, encouraged Reyes Villa to return from Santa Cruz, and offered to help mediate between the protesters and the embattled governor. Reyes Villa, for his part, had pledged to stay in Santa Cruz, not for his personal safety, he says, but to prevent additional confrontations aimed at forcing his resignation.

How can one read all this?

As for Evo, he has clearly either chosen not to use his influence to call off the protests or his base in Cochabamba is now acting with such a level of independence that he can’t. He has essentially taken the position: Hey Manfred, this is your problem, not mine and good luck fixing it. I doubt that is a position that will sit very well with the majority of Cochabambinos, who aren’t especially loyal to either side of the “Manfred should resign” debate and just want their city back to normal. I think they want their President to do all he can to find a peaceful resolution.

As for Manfred, he probably could have picked a better symbolic place for his short-term exile than Santa Cruz. He risks looking more like a Camba wannabe each day, but I can understand why he wouldn’t especially want to just fly back to Cochabamba. If I had six thousand people really, really pissed off at me I’d be cautious as well.

I had a thought Sunday, an image than won’t come true. Looking at the sad coverage of two families burying their loved ones over the weekend I wondered if the Catholic Bishop here, Tito Solari, couldn’t pay each of them a visit and say, “Only your two families, together, have the moral weight that might make all sides commit themselves to a peaceful solution. Will you join me in a news conference together?”

I realize the stakes in this conflict are high and the issues are important, for everyone involved. But leaders on both sides can and ought to commit themselves (and mean it) to no additional violence.

A Note to Worried Parents

I know that there are a lot of readers of this Blog who are from the US and have kids living or visiting Bolivia – Peace Corps volunteers, semester abroad students, and the like – and get nervous when they read about the incidents of violence that we have reported on here. I am a father too.

It is important to understand that when outbreaks of violence occur like those last week, they are confined to a very small portion of Cochabamba in the city center. Unless you live in the Center (as many Bolivians do) you really have to go out of your way to get in trouble. If people, like your kids, want to stay out of trouble it is easy to do so: just stay clear of the center of town. Not all of us follow that advice, but you are welcome to suggest it to your kids (as I have to mine).

And Now, an Exit Strategy

Yesterday I wrote that events in Cochabamba had placed Bolivia in uncharted waters in terms of how these kinds of political crises get resolved. Today we are back in charted waters of partial retreats, negotiation, mediation, and compromise, as the outlines of an exit strategy begin to emerge from various sides.

Manfred: “Well, if a new referendum is unconstitutional…”

Yesterday Manfred Reyes Villa and the other governors supporting him took their road show from La Paz to Santa Cruz where the Cochabamba governor made his first significant public comments since the explosion of violence here Thursday. He blamed events on Morales and the cocaleros and said it was the President’s responsibility, not his, to restore order. But then he also announced that he was retreating on his call for a new regional vote on the autonomy question, saying that if it wasn’t constitutional to convene a re-vote he certainly didn’t want to violate the constitution.

Evo: Scrambling to look like a President

For his part, Evo was back from Nicaragua Friday and scrambling to look presidential. A government vice-minister had already proclaimed earlier in the day that the “democratic” solution to the Cochabamba crisis was for protesters to respect the legitimacy of Manfred’s election as governor and for Manfred to respect the anti-autonomy position of the people expressed at the polls last July. In a televised address Evo called for calm on all sides and put his weight behind a constitutional amendment he will send to the Congress allowing for voter recall of all major public officials. "Be it a mayor, be it a governor, be it the president of the republic, if he violates human rights or is corrupt or he does not honor campaign promises ... it should be possible to revoke any authority's mandate by a referendum."

The Church: Back in the game as mediator.

I have been telling reporters all week, “Keep your eye on the church.” When the conflict hits the fan in Bolivia, at the end of the day, the only institution that can get everyone to the table – from left to right – is the Catholic Church. At the news conference of the governors yesterday Manfred announced that Bolivian Cardinal Julio Terrazas has agreed to mediate a dialogue between the governors and Morales (or whomever he sends).

The Anti-Manfred Protesters: The roads are open

Yesterday afternoon the anti-Manfred forces that continue to have control of the city’s main plaza announced the end of their blockade of roads leading in and out of Cochabamba, which has left thousands of travelers stranded for days. One of the leaders of the protest said on television that it was never their intent to cause harm to businesses and citizens, just to apply pressure on Manfred. I doubt that makes much real difference to the businesses and citizens who have been so drastically affected. I have it on a good source that the sudden move to drop the blockades resulted from a not especially happy phone call to protest leaders from Morales on his return. They have not withdrawn their demand that Manfred resign.

Manfredistas with sticks and pistols: No where to be seen

There were a few stick-wielding Manfred supporters on the streets yesterday, but very few. The army of Manfred backers, which set upon the cocaleros Thursday with suspiciously military precision, was nowhere to be seen.

Tuto Quiroga: It is Manfred’s fault…

Former President and PODEMOS opposition leader, Tuto Quiroga, was on television yesterday blaming Manfred for the Thursday violence, saying that the Cochabamba governor should have been at home managing the crisis instead of roaming about the rest of the country in political meetings. Quiroga has found himself utterly replaced, in just a matter of a month, as the lead opponent to Morales. Welcome to the new reality of Bolivian politics: the opposition that counts from now on is not in the Congress but among the now-elected governors.

Enough Blame for Everyone to Get a Share

So, Cochabamba returns to relative calm and normalcy for the weekend, with some hope that an end is in sight to the crisis that has struck the city for a week, but knowing that nothing is certain. Two men are now dead, one from each side of the battle, and hundreds are injured. Thousands have lost a precious week’s wages and a cloud of Cochabambino vs. Cochabambino mistrust hangs in the air. Who is to blame?

Manfred deserves a lot of credit. It was, in the beginning, he who started it with his demand that the election he lost on autonomy in July be rerun to see if he could get a result more to his liking. Manfred is many things but he is not stupid. He had to know that his demand would provoke a crisis and there is ample reason to believe that he did it purposefully to position himself (as he has) as the new leading opponent to Morales, knowing as well the potential for violent repercussions. Manfred’s call for a re-vote on autonomy is the Cochabamba equivalent of President Bush responding to the anti-Iraq War vote in November by sending in 20,000 more troops. If these had been US protests we might have seen a banner reading, “Hey Manfred, What part of 63% NO don’t you understand?”

Evo is not much cleaner. All week I have tried to get an honest answer from people in a position to know: Did Evo engineer or authorize the MAS/cocalero-led protests as a way to pressure Manfred in his own backyard. There is no straight answer, which leads me to believe that Evo did not engineer this but also did not prevent it from happening when he could have. I believe that Morales will pay a huge political cost for all this. He began 2006 with a vast reservoir of political capital and a strong base of middle class support to add to his natural base among the poor and rural. After this week, in Cochabamba at least, what was left of that middle class base is gone and it isn’t coming back.

The Anti-Manfred Protesters miscalculated. Yes, it is true that there is nothing else they could have done to stop Manfred and his re-vote other than civil disobedience. There is nothing short of that he would listen to. But the protesters underestimate the animosity they create among city residents when life is disrupted and property is destroyed. Yesterday in the Plaza Principal, Omar Fernandez, the MAS Senator and irrigators' union leader, spoke from the same balcony where he spoke so many times during the water revolt seven years ago. And Fernandez tried to invoke this week’s protest as the extension of that water revolt victory. In fact, sadly, it is the reverse. The water revolt historically unified Cochabamba’s urban and rural communities. This week left those communities bitterly divided.

The Pro-Manfred Thugs: There is a groups of people out there who are not the college students and business women I met and talked to in the streets and who pledged that the sticks in their hands were for self-defense. They are others who flew in as a swarm Thursday afternoon to take first aim at women in wide pollera skirts, letting their racism fully loose as they swung their bats. What role did Captain Manfred Reyes Villa (the title he has conspicuously resurrected for himself as late) have in their arrival on the scene?

Last night I was walking home late from the city center, on streets that were eerily quiet and dark. I ran into two very small boys, Henry and Carlos, who had sticks in their hands. They were smiling and we spoke:

“So why do you have those sticks?” I asked them.

“There are some boys down the street who bother us sometimes.”

“And now you are fully armed?”

“Yes, now we are fully armed.”

“Did you get the idea for the sticks from what happened yesterday?”

They both nodded back to me.

When political conflict dissolves into brother upon brother, sister upon sister, violence we never know how that changes things. Everyone who had a hand in the events this week needs to ask some deep questions about what they could have done different.

My Cochabamba Article on Pacific News Service

Yesterday the Pacific News Service posted an article I wrote on events in Cochabamba, which tries to place the confrontations here this week in the larger context of current Bolivian politics. Unfortunately, the editors published it under the hyped headline, “Is Bolivia on the Brink of a Civil War?” [which it isn’t]. For those interested, here is my lead and a link to the full article.

COCHABAMBA, Bolivia--When Bolivians elected their first indigenous president, socialist Evo Morales, a year ago, the country's poor and marginalized could now claim a president as their own. It was also clear, however, that Bolivia's transformation would not end with an election, and that it would continue to provoke serious political conflict.

On Thursday, that conflict turned into open battle on the streets of the nation's third-largest city, Cochabamba, leaving two men dead and more than 150 people wounded. Read the full article here.

A Brief Note About Comments

As long time readers of this Blog know, I do not respond to comments. I really don’t have the time to do so. I glance through as many as I can to see if I spot anything thoughtful, which often I do. And I appreciate those who offer thoughtful commentary here, whether it agrees with what I have written or doesn’t.

There are also, obviously, a lot of comments posted here that are just people looking for somewhere to rant. Events in Bolivia provoke a passionate response in people these days, as they should.

However, some people are just out there looking for a target and because I write publicly without any effort to hide my identity some people like to project their anger on to me. I have been accused here of everything from personally inciting the violence at the Huanuni mines (Yes, miners read the Blog and said, “Hey, let’s go get some dynamite!”) to convincing cocaleros to support Evo Morales (yeah, I’m the one who did that.).

To those readers I say, if you get something out of making me your target of animosity, you are welcome to it. I think a lot of people get entertainment value out of those rants. But you might personally get more out of therapy.

Also, I work in a world of writing where people actually identify themselves and have enough courage of conviction to attach their names to what they write. This world of “anonymous” or silly fake names is not one I have much respect for. In anonymity people can actually be anyone and they have no personal accountability whatsoever for what they say. Sure, you might be a real Bolivian who was an eyewitness to events. Or you might be some guy sitting in his underwear at a computer screen in Miami with nothing better to do. Do you really expect people to take you seriously?

I have been an activist for 35 years and I still believe that if you believe in something you ought to have the courage to actually attach your name to it. And to those who would invoke the excuse – “Evo has bands of clandestine agents who troll the Internet looking for people posting Blog comments that disagree with him and they are going to get my Momma” – really, try to get just a little better grip on reality.

The Numbers Grow

Tear gas now wafts its way through the windows of my office. Twenty-four hours after central Cochabamba erupted in violence that claimed two lives and wounded well more than a hundred, the numbers of people in the streets only grows.

I just returned a while ago from the Central Plaza, where a crowd of about 5,000 people demanding Manfred's resignation gathered to hear speeches from the balcony of the central labor union. I was one of only a few gringo heads that stuck up from the Bolivian crowd. Sticking up higher still were thousands of rough wooden sticks held upright in people's hands. It's safe to say that my mother would not have approved of how I spent my lunch break.

Cocaleros and others from the countryside region of Cochabamba are coming in by truckloads. Omar Fernandez, the Irrigators Union leader and MAS Senator who is a leader in the protest, asked those blockading the roads in and out of the city to let the newcomers in. Opponents of Reyes Villa are increasing their numbers and they are coming here to stay.

I don't know, at this writing, exactly what is happening with concentrations of Manfred supporters, but there are reports that two separate groups, possibly armed with guns, are marching toward the Central Plaza to take control of it. Rumors are many in these situations and hard facts tougher to come by, but we'll keep you posted. Clearly, new outbreaks of violent conflict are possible.

Speaking from the balcony, a visibly exhausted Fernandez made it clear that the leadership of the protests want further violence to be avoided. He cast yesterday's events as a deliberate provocation by Manfred supporters and urged those in the plaza not to allow their adversaries to drag them into violence once again.

The Morales government has made several statements in the last 24 hours. Evo Morales, en route home from the presidential inaugural in Nicaragua, called for peace and dialogue. Last night, Vice President Garcia Linera blamed Manfred for provoking the violence and also called for peace. More interesting was a long declaration on the radio this morning by the Vice Minister of Government who said the solution to the crisis needed to be a compromise that "respected democracy." That compromise, he said, meant that the cocaleros and others in the plaza needed to respect the democratic legitimacy of Reyes-Villa as governor and Reyes-Villa needed to respect, in turn, the democratic will of the people of Cochabamba who voted strongly against the regional autonomy Reyes-Villa is now backing. The prospects of either side backing down seem pretty slim at this point.

What does all this mean? Here are three things that I think have to be noted about the current situation:

1. The violence yesterday was clearly started by Manfred's backers.

The facts seem indisputable. At 4:15 the cocaleros, about 600 of them, were dispersed on the lawns at the end of the Prado on the southern side of the bridge. Some 1,000 stick-wielding Manfred backers deliberately crossed to that side of the bridge and began beating people. TV film footage, including scenes of young male Manfred supporters beating indigenous women, not only corroborate this version of events, but also sent a racially charged image across Bolivia that will not soon be forgotten. Yes, the cocaleros helped provoke the current crisis, but Manfred's backers win sole credit for turning that tension into the violent melee that took place here Thursday.

2. The Battle of Cochabamba is a stand-in for something much larger.

Each side has sought to wrap itself in the mantle of "democracy", and each side has some legitimacy in doing so. Manfred and his backers say he was elected by the people and that no crowd in the Plaza has the right to reverse an election. Those calling for his resignation say he is violating democracy by directly going against a popular vote against autonomy. But really, the stakes are bigger here. Cochabamba has become the meeting ground of two broad forces trying to steer the nation in their preferred historic direction. "Autonomy" is not about what language children will speak in school; it is about oil revenue and who controls it. The highlands and the marginalized of Cochabamba want that resource to belong to all of Bolivia. The eastern provinces, where the luck of geology placed that oil and gas, want to maximize their share. Unwrap all the proclamations about democracy (though clearly sincere by many) and it is about oil and gas, political control of the nation's future, and what Manfred opponents call, "the process of change."

3. We are in uncharted waters here.

This is not the water war. Then you had a unified Cochabamba – urban and rural together – joined in a social movement with clear leadership, facing a government. Even in the most conflictive moments there was a logic to how the various actors made their choices and there was always dialogue between the two, along with skilled mediation. This is about a Cochabamba deeply divided. Some of the same neighborhood people blockading streets in the more affluent northern parts of town yesterday, in support of Manfred, were blockading with the Coordinadora seven years ago. There is no dialogue taking place and no viable mediation. There is also much less control from above about what happens on the street. The end game in the water revolt was clear toward the end – eventually Bechtel would leave. How this crisis ends is completely unclear, and uncertainty combined with angry crowds in the streets is a dangerous chemistry.

Walking the Battle Zone

Readers:

News reports here say that there are at least two people dead and as many as 70 others injured as a result of the violent confrontations on the streets of Cochabamba this afternoon. For an hour the downtown street below our offices was a back and forth tide of young men with sticks, rocks, and deafening fireworks. We'll keep you as up to date as we can in the coming hours and days.

Meanwhile, here is what I saw and heard spending the day walking what would turn out to be Cochabamba's deadly battle zone.

Jim

Manfred Territory

On weekends Plaza Cala Cala is a small traffic circle with a fountain in the middle where families stroll from the surrounding neighborhoods to sit on the grass and eat ice cream. This afternoon, with roads in and out of it blockaded by supporters of embattled state Governor, Manfred Reyes Villa, it was the resting ground for about 250 Manfred supporters equipped with a variety of makeshift arms. These included heavy sticks, baseball bats, metal pipes, a handful of tennis rackets, and one croquet mallet.

This is where I began my walk this afternoon through the streets of Cochabamba, a battle zone waiting to happen and which became one just hours later.

A 21-year-old student at Universidad Privado Boliviano was designated by his friends to speak with me, which involved waking him from a nap on the lawn. "We're here to march for peace. These sticks we have are just for defense." He told me that the demand for Governor Reyes Villa's resignation was, "completely politicized. The cocaleros have come here from the Chapare because they are part of the union that backs Evo Morales and he is against Manfred just because he has different ideas about running the country, like autonomy."

The Plaza was relatively quiet at 2pm when I walked through it, with the only noise coming from the loud male whistles provoked by the appearance of a young woman in a mini-skirt.

Walking down Calle Libertador toward the city center things remained quiet. The chicken broaster restaurant at Calle Americas was full of people who had laid down their sticks and bats to have a meal. Sixty Manfred backers milled about the empty intersection. One smiling young couple was using their sticks to imitate a battle between Jedi knights. A poster proclaimed, "Evo, Respect Democracy!" A man's t-shirt offered the suggestion, "Cochabamba United", on a day when it had never been more divided.

"Eliana Irarte, a 43 year-old business woman in pink sneakers and a turquoise blouse was among those gathered, flat stick in her hand. "We have nothing against the campesinos," she told me, offering to be interviewed in Spanish or English. "But we can't permit their destruction of our city. We [the middle class] supported the Morales government. I believed in the change. I just want respect for democracy and to live in peace."

Continuing south toward the center the streets were mostly empty. A tiny boy rode a bright red bike. A toddler guided by her mother rode a plastic yellow tricycle. Soriada, a young woman in a red blouse was doing a brisk business at her daily street set-up of candy and soda. “The President should tell his people [the coca growers] to leave," she told me.

A few blocks later I arrived at another group of Manfred supporters just as a heavy man riding a "quad” four-wheeled motorcycle (one of the only vehicles I saw all afternoon) arrived and handed another man with a megaphone an official communication from the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz. The declaration pronounced the committee’s support for Manfred Reyes Villa and those who had taken to the street to defend him.

I took notes on a blue notepad. Suddenly a couple of the men in the crowd circled me, ordered me to leave, and ripped the notebook from my hand. I explained that I was a writer walking the route and listening to the views of their backers, which provoked the men to crush my notes into balls, which they tossed on the ground. Encircled, I asked the crowd if this was what they meant by “democracy,” picked up my papers and left.

Two hours later it was from that same spot that he afternoon’s violence would be launched.

The next two blocks were a sort of Demilitarized Zone. No one had sticks. Five police sat on one corner accompanied by five tired police dogs. The Cochabamba DMZ ended at the far end of the bridge that serves as the entrance to downtown, featuring a huge new billboard put up for the recent summit of South American presidents. “Cochabamba Unica” the sign proclaims, “Land of Encounters”. I don’t think the designers meant the kind of bloody encounters that would soon erupt directly underneath it.

Anti-Manfred Territory

Immediately on the other side of the bridge was a line of 25 erect police officers, a good portion of them young women, with shields and full riot gear facing the crowd before them, a clear barrier against their crossing to the other side. The police looked, understandably, nervous and were reluctant to speak with me.

Beyond them there was no mistaking the differences between the two crowds on either side of the river. On the other side of the bridge at the foot of the city’s Prado (the tree-lined restaurant district) some 600-1000 campesinos were sitting in patches of grass, dressed in the dark woven shirts and brown and black felt hats that are almost a uniform for these women and men. Almost all were chewing coca. I sat down to make notes on my trampled notepad and a group of about 20 surrounded me, watching me write, with great suspicion. I again tried out my, “I am a writer…” explanation, and this time with better results. They were anxious to share their perspective.

“Manfred provoked this,” Teodoro Sanchez told me, a 36-year-old man from the Chapare region of Cochabamba. “The majority of people are tired of being cheated. We are asking for his resignation and we will continue marching until he leaves.”

A clean-cut 15-year-old high school student from Cochabamba, Noel, told me, “If the people put him in, the people can put him out.” The people (el pueblo) was the power always invoked when I asked by what right those assembled felt they could oust an elected official. For the campesinos and workers I spoke with “the people” meant the people who had marched on the city. On the other side of the river “the people” meant the larger electorate.

Both sides were also utterly convinced that the people on the other were paid to be there. But here, as on the other side of the bridge, the motivation was politics not currency. “We want Manfred to leave, autonomy will divide the people.” Sabina Claros said as she squatted next to me. The 45-year-old housewife who came from the rural town of Misque added, “We have no fear, we don’t even fear death.”

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