Cocalero Expansions Draw Conflict

Bolivia's cocaleros have long been at the center of some of the country's most serious conflicts, but usually those conflicts have been with coca eradication efforts backed by the U.S. and the DEA. Now with the DEA gone and the U.S. largely out of the picture, those growing Bolivia's expanding coca crop are at the center of a new set of conflicts, very different ones.

Earlier this month it was the cocaleros vs. the monkeys, or more specifically the world famous Chapare animal reserve, Parque Machia. The park just outside of Villa Tunari is known for its overly-friendly monkeys (they'll happily pick your pocket while pretending to cozy up) and collection of young foreign volunteers who tend to the large variety of protected wildlife that live there. Two weeks ago some of those volunteers were using a well-known Bolivian protest tactic, the road blockade, to try to stop construction of a new highway through the park. Critics claim that the new road between Villa Tunari and Central Copacabana is about more than local transportation convenience, but to make it easier to move around the region's growing coca crop.

President Morales, who counts the cocaleros as his most loyal political base, has agreed to a temporary halt to the road to study environmentalists' concerns. But angry cocaleros in Central Copacabana are now threatening to reopen the road by force. Here is a report by some of the Parque Machia volunteers.

On Saturday in Isiboro National Park in Beni the conflict over expanded coca growing turned deadly. The park, home to the Yuracare Indians, had been encroached on by a growing group of cocalero "colonies" which, according to the Yuracare, have been clear-cutting forests to make room for the growing of the green leaf that is also the root ingredient of cocaine.

According to news reports, over the weekend the Yuracare took matters into their own hands and tried to move the cocaleros out by force, sparking a conflict that left at least one person dead and others severely injured. The details of the fighting are still sketchy but it appears that police sent in from Cochabamba and elsewhere to stop the conflict were ill-prepared and many were left injured as well.

The coca issue is a complicated one and we have written about it many times here on the Blog. On the one hand not all coca grown in Bolivia is used to produce cocaine and there are many non-narcotic uses (I am drinking coca tea as I write this) that could be expanded if exportation of non-narcotic coca products were made legal. And it is true that in the name of the War on Drugs that thousands of innocents have been jailed to boost arrest statistics aimed at keeping Washington happy.

That said, it is also true that stories are widespread here about cocaine labs taking over the hills above Cochabamba and about foreigners moving in to take advantage of a coca-growing environment that has become much looser.

Now it has come to a violent conflict – not the first – between indigenous people defending their land and coca growers looking for new land to cultivate. That should give all those looking at this issue pause to look beyond the rhetoric from all sides and closer at the reality of what is happening on the ground and what it means.

[Note: The Blog will be on a break until Friday.]

Early Morning, Beyond the City Limits

Readers:

There is plenty of time between now and December to obsess about Bolivian electoral politics, to let people trade barbs over Evo and his coterie of adversaries, to examine the ramifications of the US’ latest criticism of Bolivian anti-drug efforts, etc. We also have a new video coming up from Cochabamba, a major offering that is in the final editing stages (the theme remains secret).

But in this post I prefer to offer something different.

Jim Shultz

Early Morning, Beyond the City Limits

My alarm goes off reliably at 6am every morning. My alarm is not a clock. It is cat. Her name is Emma. She is brown and white and just as the first light of dawn peaks in through the tall eucalyptus trees she decides that her night of tormenting small mice and baby possums is over and she comes to the door that is two feet from my sleeping head and meows in high volume. If that fails to roust me she has some manner of banging her body against the thin wooden door. That works.

The cat’s entrance into the bedroom sets of a chain reaction involving the dogs. They awake and with tails that wag so frenetically they can knock over a small child (and have) they wait for possible signals that I might take them for an early morning walk through the countryside. When I pull on an old pair of boots that is usually the sign they are looking for.

As I shut the wooden gate that separates our yard from the rough street of rocks and dirt where we live I can see my nearest neighbors, two fields up, tending to their cows. Don Fructoso (yes, that really is his name) and his family are up well before their strange gringo neighbor up the road. They have almost twenty cows, not including five little ones born just these past few months. Each of these cows, he explained to me, produces 20 liters of milk per day, ten in the morning and ten in the evening. By 6:30, with the sun barely up, his family is headed off in an old beat-up blue station wagon with a collection of steel milk canisters in the back. They take these canisters to the meeting point in our neighborhood where the giant truck for the PIL dairy company will buy their milk to process into small plastic bags. No milk carton has ever been seen here in Bolivia, to my limited knowledge.

My family has recently given Don Fructoso and his family a small puppy that was part of a litter that ended up living with us for a time. These puppies produced great glee in my six-year-old daughter and great quantities of tiny black piles of puppy poop in our yard. Now when I pass by his house the puppy wants to follow me. So this morning the two excited black dogs and I headed uphill in the opposite direction.

Just past the corner I run into another neighbor of ours, an elderly woman who grows corn and walks with a waddle. She is carrying a broken plastic trashcan in which there appears to be an assortment of plastic and paper refuge. I wince because I know where she is going. More than likely it is to the dry riverbed to add her garbage to the pile that has been growing there since the rains stopped falling last April.

Tiquipaya is beautiful as long as you keep your sights six inches above the ground. Because the ground is often covered with garbage. Empty lots become carpeted with discarded plastic bags. Dry rivers become dumps. It is hard to find a stretch of 100 meters anywhere that hasn’t already been strewn with bits or piles of plastic and paper that someone tossed out of a car window, or onto the ground as they walked, or dumped just before dawn while the cows were still being milked. This is what happens when there is no garbage collection and nowhere else to put it.

Last April President Morales sponsored a resolution at the UN declaring it Dia de la Pachamama, Mother Earth Day. It was nice gesture. But I think La Pachamama would appreciate it even more if the government would buy some public trash containers, set them up around these rural neighborhoods, and arrange for the garbage to be collected. People would use them. La Pachamama might like it even better still if the government had a plan to actually reduce the amount of garbage produced. We can dream.

The dogs and I walk past the fields where my neighbors have only recently planted corn and potatoes. The earth is clean now, plowed up into long straight lines of trench and mound. One thing that people who live in these parts know how to do well is squeeze food out of soil. Some friends here have tried to teach me the basics in the small garden plot we have just planted in our yard, a miniature imitation of the real fields that surround us. Corn and potatoes, as it turns out, prefer to sprout in dry soil. Who knew? They are only to be watered after the first green leaf pops its small head out into the Bolivian sun. I would have probably drowned them.

When summertime comes some months from now these fields will be harvested. Tall corn plants will produce a few cobs each of the giant white corn known here as “choclo” and we will eat it with chunks of the soft white quesillo cheese that people like Don Fructoso produce fresh. We will be reminded in that wonderful combination of tastes and textures why we live here.

Farther up the road a small creek runs along the property of another neighbor. The children in this house here often bathe in the creek in the morning. But most of the creek is filled with a long parade of the deep green leaves that belong to the calolillies growing in its waters. They have long white pedals shaped like upside down bells and thin yellow fingers reaching out from the center.

It is just after here that we hit the crossroads of two main paths. My dogs look up at me for direction. In another hour or so there will be cars making their way along these roads. Old white Toyota Corolla wagons, manufactured in the era of disco, will encounter one another and take turns pulling over to the few wide spots to the side so that the other can pass. Speeds here rarely reach what a bicycle can’t pass.

But for now, with the morning sky still only a faded blue, the only movement on the streets is of people and cows. Most of my neighbors have gotten acquainted with the two walking beasts at my side. We joke that I am out walking with my “guardas espaldas”, my bodyguards. Simone, eleven-years-old and social insists on sniffing the feet of those we meet.

Just before we turn right back to the house there is a creek to cross, this one full of water. It irrigates fields for miles onward. I leap across it at its narrow point. The dogs wade in, not missing a chance to muddy their feet before they make a run for my poor wife and daughter whom they will pounce on as soon as they find an open door.

I lag behind to take one last look at the sky. Dawn has had its moment here in the countryside. The sun’s fires already shine on the top of the mountains to the west. In an hour I will have completed the rituals of taking a child to school and will be smooshed once more into the back seat of a tiny car converted into public transit, the city inhaling people from all directions to begin their workday.

And I will look forward to the next dawn and the next walk and the next alarm that comes with small white whiskers.

The Campaign…in Spain

Here in Cochabamba, campaigning for the December 6 Presidential vote is beginning to become more visible every day.

Large, yellow and very hi-tech billboards for Evo Morales are popping up at various locations over town, including a giant one in “ground zero” of Cochabamba’s middle class, La Recoleta, just steps from the even more massive Cine Center multiplex. Morales’ chief rival here, former Governor Manfred Reyes Villa, working with fewer funds, has opened his campaign office just across the street from where the Union of Household Workers has its local office.

So odd placements abound.

But the stop on the Bolivian campaign trail that really mattered this week wasn’t in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, La Paz, Oruro or even Tiquipaya. It was in Madrid, where an appearance by Morales brought thousands to a stadium normally used for bullfights. The official speech by Morales was about the rights of immigrants. Spain is home to a wave of some quarter million Bolivians who have migrated there over recent years, to become construction workers, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, and maids.

But the subtext of the speech, and one likely reason for Morales’ first visit to Spain since his inauguration nearly four years ago, was something else. In December, for the first time, the huge population of Bolivians living abroad will be eligible to vote. An estimated 2.5 million Bolivians live abroad. To be certain, the number that will actually vote in December will be much smaller than that. But the new extension of the vote to Bolivians abroad means that the political battleground between Morales and Reyes Villa (the only two serious contenders) will extend far beyond the streets of Cochabamba – to the huge Bolivian enclaves of Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Arlington, Virginia.

Until April of 2007 Spain was a particular magnet for immigrants from Bolivia. Before then Bolivians could enter the country without a visa. Thousands of ‘one-way tourists’ filled Aerosur’s new Madrid-bound flights each week, having memorized a few lines for immigration authorities about the Spanish tourist attractions they hoped to see, but really intending to make contact with the cousin or sister who proceeded them and then find a job.

In fact, most of the Bolivians living in Spain today don’t do much sightseeing at all. Instead they live in fear of being caught by police. A summer ago I spent the day in Madrid with two Cochabamba sisters that I have known since the early 1990s, both of who migrated to Spain in the pre-2007 rush. One of them, who works as a live-in caregiver for two elderly Spanish sisters, hasn’t seen her children in three years. I asked them what they had seen of Madrid – La Plaza Mayor, the grand parks, the Puerta del Sol.

“We never go anywhere,” one of them told me. “We go from work to home, that is it. The police even wait outside the Internet call centers that we use to call our families. We wake up with this fear, we carry it with us all day, and we go to sleep with this fear.”

It is women like these that could cause a serious stir in the December vote, if they decide to participate.

In Madrid on Monday, Morales made his pitch as a clarion call for immigrant rights. "We all have the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the laws of each country." It is rhetoric that should be attractive to the Bolivians living in the once-upon-a-time Empire.

But calls by Morales or anyone else are unlikely to change the increasingly rigid rules against immigration being imposed by the European Union. It is those rules, pushed hardest by France and Italy, which have contributed to the end of Spain’s previous hospitality.

The Bolivian President’s speech is also at odds with the way that the Bolivian government deals with “undocumented” immigrants here. I am friends with a young couple from Buenos Aires, parents to three young children, all here without papers. They live in Bolivia with the same fear of discrimination and deportation that my Bolivians friends in Madrid face.

As President on a state visit, it is much easier for Morales to wage a subtle campaign among the Bolivian diaspora than it will be for Reyes or any of his opponents. He also has a more natural base in the biggest communities of Bolivians abroad. The people who have left to be fruit sellers in Buenos Aires and nannies in Barcelona come mostly from Bolivia’s struggling working poor – a political base that generally backs the President.

The enfranchisement of these new voters is one wild card amidst the general predictions of an easy first round victory for Morales in December, but it is a card that seems to play well in the President’s political hand. Will we see a Manfred rally anytime soon in Mar de Plata? Will we see Morales pitching for votes at Sunday mass in Falls Church? These scenes are unlikely, but this time around, Bolivians abroad will have the option to no longer be spectators of the electoral Olympics back home, but participants.

What it Was Like to be Far Away

It was a Tuesday morning and I had to go to the orphanage early. I was meeting with the Moms, the women who live in the small houses that are home to ten children each. One of those houses and one of those Moms had actually been my own children’s years before.

I remember that first moment, the one in which I went from being unknowing to hearing the first faint note of tragedy. We were talking about socks. As we planned, with the Moms, the orphanages annual budget, we were pondering the number of socks we would need to buy for eighty children and how much that would cost. That’s when the cheerful woman who worked in the orphanage as a secretary came in looking not cheerful at all and whispered something very strange in my ear.

“Jaime, on the radio they are saying that a plane crashed into the Twin Towers in New York.”

It sounded goofy to me. The media in Bolivia is notorious for reporting all kinds of stories that turn out not to be true. I thought back to that morning in 1991 when I was stopped in my tracks by the front-page headline in the Cochabamba daily, proclaiming that President George Bush had had a heart attack and that Dan Quayle had been sworn in as President. Believe me, that put the U.S. ex-pats here ill at ease for a good twelve hours, until we were finally able to sort out that in fact, Bush had just gone into the hospital for a heart examination.

But on that Tuesday morning my friend sounded upset enough that I decided to walk to her office and see what I could find on the Internet. That’s when I saw the CNN page with a photo of one of the tours ablaze and a report that the other had just collapsed into a massive pile of rubble and bodies.

I called another member of the U.S. ex-pat community here, a woman who had a television with cable (I have neither). It was a very short conversation.

“Can we come over?”

“Yes.”

And then, along with millions of other Americans who were so very much closer, we sat memorized in front of a television all day, watching CNN and trying to absorb the enormous way in which our world had changed in one hour and twenty-five minutes.

Back then my two older children were still middle schoolers at one of the American Schools here. At the request of the U.S. Embassy the school closed and sent the children home. It is hard to remember now eight years on, but for those first few hours no one had any idea what was going on and what might come under attack next.

It reminded me so much of the day when I was in the first grade and my teacher came back from the lunch recess, tears having swollen her eyes, telling us that the President had been killed and that we were to go home.

It is a very odd feeling to be so far away from your country when your country has been attacked. It was, in a milder way, like the feeling I had walking on the streets of San Francisco the day my father died many years before. The world around you continues as if nothing is different. But your world is different. We became part of a small pocket of people for whom the world had become, suddenly, another kind of place, surrounded by people who certainly knew of the events in New York, Washington, and Sharksville, but who were not affected by it in the same way.

Bolivians seemed to react to the attack on the two Towers in two different ways.

That evening and for a few days after we received telephone calls from friends telling us how sorry they were for what had happened, offering us condolences the way they might have if they had heard through the grapevine that a relative had died. We appreciated these calls.

Other people here, however, could not get past affixing their political ideologies to the attacks that left 2,993 people dead and 2,993 families in unspeakable grief. In Cochabamba’s main plaza one group posted a copy of the front page of the local paper, which featured a graphic photo of a human being ending his or her life with a leap from a flaming skyscraper. Written along side the photo in red ink were proclamations of how the Empire had finally harvested its just rewards. No mention was made of how the men and women killed, including immigrant Latinos working as janitors and dishwashers, were responsible for U.S. foreign policy.

September 11, 2001 reminded us in ways enormous and not so enormous how some people are willing to suspend entirely their ability to see human beings as human beings, in the name of political fundamentalism. This is true on the left and the right and in other corners less easy to name.

I did not stay far away for long, as it turned out.

A few weeks after the attacks I was in both Washington and New York for work. My first understanding of how things had changed was the sight of dozens of uniformed young soldiers in the Miami airport, armed with automatic rifles.

In New York I took the long walk to the lower end of Manhattan, as did so many, to pay my respects to the massive demolition project that Ground Zero had become, in a decimated neighborhood where chain link fences were papered over with letters of sympathy from all over the world and desperate flyers of families still searching for the ones they had loved and lost.

Looking back on that day eight years ago, I recall the afternoon that my older brother and I stood on my father’s fresh grave and, wiser than me then and now, he told me, “Remember how it feels today. The feeling will fade. It will not feel this intense again.”

Our memories do, over time, strip away the intensity that the present brings to events, both joyous and horrible. And so we designate dates on a calendar as assignments to summon as we can some of the intensity of what we once felt, because remembering has a purpose. And it is a purpose that is not political, ideological or commercial. It is human.

September 11, 2009

The Second (or Third) Coming of Manfred Reyes Villa

In Bolivia, national elections have become something like Easter. There seems to be one a year but never on the same day. Next December 6th Bolivians will go once again to the polls, for the fourth time in as many years. They will decide whether to give President Evo Morales an unprecedented second term under a new constitution that now allows the nation’s President to seek re-election.

For months a collection of would-be candidates have jockeyed for position, seeking to forge alliances among the wickedly fragmented opposition and forge a candidacy that might actually challenge Morales. It is a field that has included, among others, a former President, a former Vice-President, a former-Governor, a prominent mayor and others.

But now, after four years of fumbling and failing to generate a genuine national opposition to Morales, it looks like one might finally be emerging. The leader of that coalescing opposition is not a new face in Bolivian politics, but one of its most well-known – former Cochabamba Governor Manfred Reyes Villa.

This week candidate Reyes Villa made headlines with his selection of a running mate who will have to wage his campaign from a jail cell in La Paz. He will be joined on his ticket by the imprisoned ex-Governor of Pando, Leopoldo Fernandez. His pick for Vice-President awaits trial over charges that he played a leading role in the massacre of a dozen supporters of Morales in his state last September.

Who is Manfred Reyes Villa? What are his chances of unseating Morales? What does all this say for the current state of play of Bolivian politics?

First, some background.

Evo vs. the Fragmented Pack

For most of the three decades since Bolivia returned to democracy, until 2005, Bolivian national politics was a simple and straightforward game of musical chairs. Three political parties essentially rotated the Presidency among themselves every five years, each taking a turn to benefit from the spoils of political power.

In 1993 and in 2002 it was the conservative ghost of Bolivia's old revolutionary party, MNR, which bartered itself into the Presidency, led by Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (Goni). When Sánchez de Lozada and the MNR were retired from the Presidency by the one-term rule, an odd-couple "mega-coalition" took over, farming out the Presidency alternatively to two once-adversaries, Jaime Paz Zamora of MIR and dictator-turned-democrat Hugo Banzer of the ADN.

None of these parties ever garnered much more than a quarter of the popular vote and the differences between them didn’t go much farther than their party logos and selection of which political family would be rewarded with government jobs. In terms of policy all adhered carefully to the fundamentalist economic policies pushed by the World Bank and IMF and the repressive anti-drug policies insisted on by Washington.

The elections of December 2005, however, changed that formula completely, in two ways.

First, Bolivians elected a new President and a new party to office, with a historic 53% majority that dwarfed that received by any of his rotating predecessors. The political wave that gave Bolivia its first indigenous President also dispensed the MIR and ADN to history and left the once dominant MNR party of Sánchez de Lozada with nothing more than eight seats out of more than 150 in the Bolivian Congress.

Second, Bolivia dramatically changed the way it selected the Governors of its nine departments. These powerful positions – sources of massive job patronage and opportunities for corruption – had always been filled by Presidential appointment. Under reforms adopted in 2005 those Governors were now elected directly by a vote of the people.

When Morales took office in January 2006, Bolivia’s political map left the opposition parties in Congress in tatters and shifted that opposition to the governors, a majority of whom were stuanchly if not radically opposed to the new President and his plans for “the change.” This was opposition of a very different sort.

Here we break for a short political science lesson.

In most democracies the tug of war between government and opposition takes place in the national Congress (or its equivalent). Both sides vie for a national base that can back its proposals and position it to win the Presidency the next time around. Bolivia’s opposition governors, however, were operating in a whole other world.

In the departments of Santa Cruz, Chuquisaca, Tarija, Beni, and Pando the local governors advanced their political positions not by using moderation to build a national base, but by using heated rhetoric and tactics to feed anti-Morales fervor among their local political base. Morales, inclined to confrontation as a habit, gave the same right back at them.

What this meant is that, while Morales has had to contend with a political opposition that could fill the streets and shut down major cities with protest and violence, he has not faced any significant political force that can challenge him nationally at the polls. While anti-Morales forces were turning out people by the tens of thousands in Santa Cruz, Morales has been traveling the country, handing out bonuses for students, tractors to campesino farmers and solidifying a base of political support among rural people, the poor, and working class voters in he cities that has turned him into Evo the Invincible at the ballot box.
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In three national elections in three years Morales and MAS only increased the strong base of support they had in 2005. Over the course of a July 2006 vote for delegates to a national Constituent Assembly, the August 2008 referendum on the continued service of Evo and the Governors, and last January’s vote to approve a new Bolivian constitution, Morales built up his base enough to win a stunning 2/3 of the vote.

Manfred the Political Daredevil

As politicians go, in any country, Manfred Reyes Villa is an interesting study – a man with an uncanny ability to repeatedly snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Reyes Villa is a former Army Captain with close ties to one of his country's most repressive dictatorships. In the early 1980s he served as the personal guard to the brutal Luís García Meza. Later however, he shed his uniform and converted himself into a very successful local Cochabamba politician.

In 1993 Reyes Villa was elected to his first of four terms as Mayor. Despite ever-present vague charges of corruption (his then-political party, NFR earned the street nickname, “Nuevo Forma de Robar" – New Way to Steal), Reyes Villa became a popular figure. He used deep excursions into public debt to help finance big, flashy public works projects, including a shiny new airport and the planet's largest statue of Jesus.

In 2002 as Bolivia headed into a new round of Presidential elections it truly looked like Manfred's year. The handsome Mayor led his nearest rival in the polls, Sánchez de Lozada seeking a return to office, by nearly two to one. The third major candidate, Evo Morales, didn't even seem a factor.

Then a team of U.S. political consultants hired by Sánchez de Lozada went to work on Manfred-the-frontrunner.

In a campaign captured brilliantly in the documentary "Our Brand is Crisis", the Goni camp hammered away relentlessly at Manfred 'the former military man' (using an old photo of the candidate in uniform) and used aerial photos of his family's numerous real estate holdings in Bolivia and Florida to remind voters of the corruption charges that seemed to swirl always around him. Reyes Villa's support started to plunge.

Then just before the vote, the U.S. Ambassador delivered a final blow. Washington’s chief diplomat issued a withering public attack against Morales and threatened a cutoff of U.S. aid if Bolivians elected the cocalero as President. Offended voters flocked to Morales, nearly boosting him into first place. Most of those votes came right out of Reyes Villa’s electoral hide. He finished a disappointing third.

But less than a year later Cochabamba’s erstwhile Mayor seemed to be once again sitting pretty.

After the election Reyes Villa refused overtures by Sánchez de Lozada to join the MNR's governing coalition, forgoing the chance to dole out thousands of government jobs to his supporters. Instead he settled in as an opposition figure and almost immediately Sánchez de Lozada's tepid public support began to diminish even more. In February 2003 Sánchez de Lozada called for a tax increase on the country’s working poor in order to meet the IMF’s belt-tightening demands, setting off political conflicts that left 34 Bolivians dead. Being on the outside of the governing coalition was looking like a better and better place to be.

Then just months afterwards, Reyes Villa did the political equivalent of buying a ticket for passage on the Titanic after it had already hit the iceberg and was headed to the bottom of the Atlantic.

Surprising most everyone, Reyes Villa suddenly reversed course and threw his political support behind the embattled President. As a reward he was given political control of Cochabamba’s state government and with it hundreds of jobs to dole out to supporters. But he also grafted his political fortunes to Sánchez de Lozada's just as his old adversary was headed to his political grave. In October 2003 Sánchez de Lozada sent out troops to shoot down protests against his gas and oil export plans. Reyes-Villa’s new ally resigned in a political storm and headed to exile in Maryland. Only months into his new alliance Reyes-Villa was left with behind with only deep voter memories of he and the deposed President smiling side by side.

Then in 2005 Manfred saw the opportunity for a political comeback and took it.

He opted out of an iffy second run at the Presidency and chose instead to enter a much safer race to become the new elected Governor of the state of Cochabamba. He stitched together his old support base in the city and added on to it new support in the countryside with promises of the same kind of public works that had made him so popular as Mayor. Against a weak MAS candidate hand-picked by Morales, Reyes Villa won the new Governor post handily.

In his first year as Governor, once again, Manfred looked to be in great political shape. While other governors waged bitter battles with Morales over issues like regional autonomy, a sunny Reyes Villa just kept on paving roads, cutting ribbons, and using public funds to put his photo, scissors in hand, in the Sunday papers (just as Evo does with national funds).

Then, as 2006 drew to a close, Reyes Villa demonstrated once again his curious knack for shooting himself in the foot when he stepped out of the familiar world of local politics and tried to go national.

In a move that seemed mostly aimed at baiting Morales supporters in Cochabamba, Reyes Villa called for a re-vote on the regional autonomy issue, just months after Cochabamba voters had soundly defeated it. He also called for Morales to resign. The President's backers took the bait fully, marched onto the Governor's office and burned it, sending Reyes Villa fleeing. When backers of Reyes Villa and Morales confronted one another in the streets of Cochabamba on January 11, 2007, three men were left dead and scores of others badly wounded. Reyes Villa took local political peace and set it ablaze underneath his feet.

Then Reyes Villa through down another gauntlet directly at Morales, calling for a national referendum that would force each of the nine governors and the President and Vice-President to all submit their political futures anew to the voters. Morales eventually called the opposition's bluff and in August 2008 Bolivian voters went back to the polls once more. Morales was continued in office by a vote of nearly 2/3. Reyes Villa was defeated badly and was cast yet again into political exile.

Until now.

In Search of a Unified Opposition

There are many reasons why opponents of Morales would wish to have a unified campaign against him in the December vote. The biggest one is this. Under the new Bolivian constitution a candidate can be elected without a second round runoff under two circumstances. The first is how Morales won in December 2005 – winning the backing of a majority of voters (50% plus 1). However, even if Morales does not win that majority again on December 6th he can still escape a runoff against his nearest challenger if no other candidate comes within 10% of his total. In other words, if Morales finishes with just 40% of the vote, he escapes a runoff as long as no one else cracks past 30%.

It is little wonder then that Morales and his backers have looked gleefully upon the usual battles of personal ego and political rivalry that have divided his opposition into limp little chunks.

Under normal circumstances the national opposition leader would be former President Jorge Quiroga, who heads the main opposition party in Congress (PODEMOS) and who finished second (a poor second) to Morales in 2005. But the bookish Quiroga is a weak political figure at best, so much so that his PODEMOS party has basically ceased to function.

This in turn has left a half dozen other serious candidates trying to vie for the position of lead challenger to Evo. One of them was Sánchez de Lozada’s former Vice-President, Victor Hugo Cardenas. They Aymara scholar seemed to generate some early steam behind his candidacy last March after a mob of Morales backers attacked his altiplano home, but since then his candidacy has fizzled. Today he announced his withdrawl from the race but endorsed no one else (for now). Presidential wannabe Samuel Doria Media, owner of the country’s Burger Kings, can’t seem to get anyone to take his second attempt at the presidency seriously. The rest of the prospective field includes a pair of other indigenous alternatives to Morales, including the Mayor of Potosi. But none of them seem to have any hope of carving into Morales’ solid base.

Then there is Reyes Villa.

In the past few weeks, the once Mayor and Governor of Bolivia’s third largest voter block seems to be stitching together an alliance of those most disgruntled with Morales. This includes a young Santa Cruz woman who was once a Morales protégé and MAS member of the city council, the current Governor of Beni, the past Governor of La Paz, and a growing list of well-known opposition figures.

With his selection of the jailed Fernandez as his running mate Reyes Villa is now positioned to win support from the most hard-line adversaries of Morales, including the conservatives and wealthy elites of vote-rich Santa Cruz.

In short, while it seems unlikely that all of the various corners of the opposition will fold their tents and join forces with Reyes Villa, he has clearly established himself as the only serious candidate the opposition has and in politics that counts for a lot.

What All this Means

If past history and current polls are any measure of voter sentiment, Morales is headed to a second term regardless of how well Reyes Villa does at shedding his old curse when he goes national. Journalists and pundits may focus attention on the heated anti-Evo sentiment to be found in he cities, but once you head beyond the city limits you find community after community where Morales can count on support that measures 80% and higher. This includes the largest population cluster in the country, La Paz, El Alto and the altiplano.

The chances of Reyes Villa unseating Morales or even forcing him into a runoff remain extremely remote. What this does mean, however, is a few other important things:

First, even if he loses in December, Reyes Villa is likely to end up the undisputed leader of the national opposition and that opposition is likely to be much stronger that any Morales has faced in his first term. Even if the new constitution’s formula for electing Congress gives MAS new advantages to securing majorities in both houses, whatever minority Reyes Villa ends up with will be a lot more strategic and forceful than the current one, because it will be part of a national opposition instead of a fragmented regional one.

Second, if he plays his political cards right (which is still a leap) Reyes Villa will also be very well-positioned for a third Presidential run in 2014. If the rules of the new constitution hold (I’ll get to that in a minute) Morales will not be allowed to run for a third term when his second one expires. By design, Morales has made his MAS party a political vehicle for only one national candidate, himself. There is no one else being groomed to succeed him and it is unlikely that MAS can field anyone else who can hold onto his base. One scenario is that in a post-Evo world MAS will start to fray apart along the lines that divide it internally.

Or there is this scenario – the far more likely one.

Morales and MAS will wait for their moment and will propose that the new constitution be amended once more, allowing Evo to run yet again. If and when they do that, watch for all hell to break loose. If there is one thing that scares Morales opponents more than any other – more than land reform, more than national takeovers of private businesses, more than alliances with Hugo Chavez – it is Evo in a perpetual presidency for life.

A perpetual presidency is also, as a matter of practice, a bad idea. Governing regimes that feel unchallenged make bad policy, invite corruption, and dilute democracy to something less than real democracy.

In my view as a democrat with a small “d” Bolivia does need an opposition that functions. MAS and Morales will govern better if they are challenged at the polls, if they are challenged on policy and ideas, and if they know people are looking over their shoulders for mismanagement and corruption. They will govern worse without those things.

To be clear, I am not saying that an opposition led by Cochabamba's former Mayor will deliver those things. There is a good chance it won’t. But what is sure is that for the first time in the Morales presidency a genuine national opposition is forming and it likely to change the political path ahead, in ways we can anticipate and in ways we can’t.

Okay commenters -- have at it!

Back With a Vengeance

Ok readers – I am back.

After five weeks of bouncing across the USA I am back in Cochabamba – back from visits with everyone I am related to by blood or marriage, back to a diet without bagels or the bags of junk food consumed on long road trips, back to the land of road blockades and afternoon coffees that don't cost $4.

And after a long absence I am back to writing here on the Blog. That’s fine, you needed a vacation from me and I needed one from you.

But get ready to go at it again. The months ahead in Bolivia promise an ample supply of drama and comedy as we head into yet another round of national elections. But first a look at my eight-city "Schlep Across the USA".

Jim Shultz


Things I Saw in the USA

Washington, DC

Obama-mania. I used to think there were a lot of pictures of Evo Morales on walls and billboards in Bolivia, until I got a good look at the explosion of Obama paraphernalia on sale in our nation’s capital and across the U.S. Obama comic books (as a super hero), kits letting you paint and decorate your own Obama statuette, bobbing head Obamas for your car dashboard. The key difference of course is that while the Morales imagery is largely financed out of the public treasury, the Obama paraphernalia is free market economics in full throttle. I am looking the possible market for a bobbing head Evo statuette.

Washington is a divided city. On the one hand there are all those people clustered together in a beehive dedicated to power and the pursuit of it – from both left and right. Then there are the people who serve those people bagels. Here is where there is some insight to be gleaned.

Most of the folks slapping cream cheese on round boiled bread with a hole in the middle are immigrants. I make a point always to ask them where they are from and get some morsel of their story. Usually they seem genuinely pleased to have someone ask about them. The morning I was headed to the Obama State Department to debate the merits of international trade tribunals I was served by a young woman from Guatemala, in the U.S. for eighteen months.

“And how do you like it here?”

Pause, “Not so much.”

“Why?”

“All day people just look behind me at the wall. No one looks me in the eye.”

I know there are many good people in Washington (before last January 20 and after) but sometimes all those people so busy "saving the world" forget to pay attention to some of the people living in that world who cross their paths. So a simple Spanish lesson for those buying bagels and other food products from Guatemalans, Salvadorians, Mexicans, Bolivians and others:

“Hola, como esta usted?”

New York, New York

I sat for dinner with one of my true heroes, Cathy Breen. A woman in her late 50s with graying hair and large plastic glasses, Cathy is not the sort of person you would necessarily notice just passing her on the street. But she is a hero. For half the year she lives in a Catholic Worker house in the East Village, making her life with people who live on the margin, including some who carry the burden of mental illness. Her home is a community where most others could not comfortably spend even a few hours.

The other half of the year this former Maryknoll missionary in Bolivia lives among the refugees of the U.S. War in Iraq. She began going to the Middle East in the run-up to that U.S. invasion. Back when the U.S. government was pedaling false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction and raining mass destruction on Baghdad, Cathy was there. She was on the ground during “Shock and Awe”, to bear witness and send reports back home to the rest of us. She was embedded with the people instead of the troops.

Now, more often than not, you can find her in either Damascus or Amman living among some of the 1.5 million Iraqi people who have fled the war and its violent aftermath. She accompanies them through their process of applying for asylum to the U.S. for a new life and comforts them when they are turned down. One family she told me about was denied entry by U.S. officials because the wife had paid ransom to win release of her kidnapped husband. U.S. officials labeled this as “cooperation with terrorists.”

In her stories I hear echoes of another U.S. war two decades ago. Washington spent billions backing a right wing regime in El Salvador and then when Salvadoran refugees fled to the U.S. border to escape the violence we did all we could to send them back home. The U.S. is much better at starting and financing wars than it is dealing with the human damage our wars create.

Upstate New York

To my California friends, call it treason if you like but after many visits here I have to say that one of the most pleasant places that the U.S. has to offer is upstate New York in the summertime. I am not just writing that to kiss-up to my hoard of Buffalo in-laws (with whom I just spent a week in the Adirondacks). Upstate in summer is green, it is relaxed, and it is full of people who really, really appreciate summer since it is a respite from the punishment that is upstate in winter.

When my eldest daughter was trying to figure out where to apply for college my Buffalo-born wife tried hard to convince her to head upstate. I would secretly take her aside and tell her, “You want to know what winter is like in upstate NY?” Then I would thrust her hand into our badly-in-need-of-defrosting freezer. “This is what they call a warm day.” I was very convincing. She now goes to college in Florida.

But summertime – that is a whole other deal.

Maybe it was the farmers market in Keene Valley, where locals and visitors in assorted kaki shorts chomp on samples of organic apples and blueberry bread. Maybe it was the vista of Adirondack peaks and square miles without a trace of Cochabamba litter. But actually I credit my seduction to the taxidermy shop in Keene. I recognize that getting shot and stuffed is not great news for the black bears, spotted deer, assorted birds or the black and white skunk that lined the shelves and floor. But my six-year-old and I sure thought it was cool. So now I am thinking that when my own time comes I could get stuffed and become a sort of lasting ornament here at the Democracy Center, perhaps holding a bagel. I’m looking into shipping and stuffing costs and will keep you posted.

Phoenix, Arizona

My family here explained that we were fortunate to hit cool weather, 106 degrees Fahrenheit, down from 115 the week before. Now good cheap Mexican food is certainly an asset in any city but it doesn't make up for living in a frying pan, from my point of view. My biggest regret was when I suddenly remembered on Highway 10 near the California border that I had forgotten to try actually frying an egg on the sidewalk. So I guess I'll have to go back next summer.

Southern California

Home to the land of my birth. So many tourist attractions, so little time. My family lives very near the Reagan Library. I have been there before and was tempted to return once again (I hear it now has a wicked-cool replica of Air Force One) but I opted instead for visits with my mother. If you ask my six-year-old what the highlights were for her she might put them in this order: seeing my brother's new puppy pee on Daddy's shoe; swimming with her cousins, and riding a bike with all her family to the Santa Monica pier and going on all the rides without throwing up. I don't think she would have liked the Reagan library, unless they have a puppy there that pees on shoes.

San Francisco

I believe that it was Jerry Garcia who once described San Francisco as "49 square miles surrounded on all sides by reality." It was good to be home.

Now to be clear, San Francisco doesn't really have summer. In August San Franciscans just read reports about summer elsewhere, while shrouded in teeth-rattling fog. Okay, it isn't that bad. Even in August the afternoon sun is often strong enough to draw Speedo-clad gay sunbathers and Latino families together into Dolores Park. Here is where the Castro and the Mission come together in one of the oddest cultural soups anywhere. But to get real summer you have to cross a bridge.

I spent a good part of my week there in Marin, where redwoods mingle with granola bins and road bikes that sell for the price that people buy cars for in Cochabamba. It is also very sunny. On one of those August mornings I ventured with my youngest and two of her cousins into Muir Woods, where tall straight redwoods dating back to the time of Christ's birth put to shame every grand church built in his name since.

There is a memorial there in Cathedral Grove to Franklin Roosevelt. In May of 1945 leaders from throughout the world were gathered in San Francisco to make history with the signing of the charter that founded the United Nations. FDR was to have been at that conference but died just a month earlier. One of the wiser leaders among the assembled delegates convinced the entire conference to travel across the Golden Gate to the redwoods and to honor the dead President's memory.

It made me think. How different would it be if our leaders today, in any country, traveled to natural settings like this for their debates over environmental policy? Would we demolish our planet so cavalierly if we debated its future in nature instead of within sterile granite walls?

Back to Bolivia

So that is my report. For those of you who come here only or a quick fix of Bolivian political matters, stay tuned. There is plenty to write about here in the days and weeks ahead – Evo vs. Manfred, machinations over lithium and foreign arms purchases, and verbal jousts between Bolivia and Peru. We'll try to do justice to them all.

But today is quiet in Cochabamba, as transportation unions have shut down the city with a one-day strike. It is tradition here that, when mad, various interest groups give everyone a day off (and make working people lose a day of wages) with a set of road blockades. This is the Bolivian version of am upstate "snow day", but with really good weather.

So here I sit contentedly stranded in the fields of Tiquipya, where my daughter plays happily with the five baby puppies that now occupy our yard and where I have just eaten the last sesame bagel that I stashed in my suitcase on my return.

As the saying goes: When the bagels are gone it is time to get back to work.

Stay tuned.