Bolivia’s Elections Part III: The Issues

Readers:

As promised, we have just posted a new video featuring interviews with the National Senate candidates from Cochabamba from the two leading political parties in Sunday's vote, Evo Morales' MAS party and Manfred Reyes Villa's Plan Progreso para Bolivia-Concertación Nacional.

Subtitled in English, this offers you the chance to hear directly from those on Sunday's ballot. The video, which took great effort to arrange and produce, was put together by Aldo Orellana, Leny Olivera, Jessica Aguirre, and Anders Vang Nielsen of the Democracy Center team.

For those of you interested in seeing more images from the campaign here is an excellent collection of photographs offered to us generously from photographer Eric Mehl.

Our original post continues below. And a reminder, we'll be blogging live from around the country all day Sunday so tune in.

Jim Shultz

Bolivia’s Elections: The Issues

Prepared with enormous research support from Aldo Orellana.

A few days ago I was meeting with a pair of European Union election observers who asked for my perspective on the December 6th elections. In trying to explain a political culture that is a lot more complicated than meets the eye, I figured out an important difference between how elections work in a place like the U.S. and in Bolivia.

Voting in the U.S. is like going to a restaurant. People see what’s on the menu, decide what they want, and order. Last year Democrats were serving ample helping of troops withdrawals from Iraq (their Afghanistan entree is about to change) and expansion of government involvement in health care. Republicans had a special on “staying the course” and cutting taxes.

Bolivia is different. “Issues” are secondary in Bolivian politics. What drives things are identity and alliances aimed at securing power. In the old days a tripod of political parties with indistinguishable differences on the issues rotated the presidency amongst one another. Today an old elite that has been pushed out of power (the wealthy and upper middle class) smashes elbows against a new set of political allies, MAS. A big part of what drives these different alliances is class, ethnicity and culture. But some of it is just old-fashioned political opportunism. The ranks of MAS today include ample activists from Bolivia’s old establishment and right wing. With victory comes access to political spoils, most notably public employment, and so political opportunists flock to whomever seems bound for victory, which these days is MAS.

That said, there actually are issues being debated in this 2009 campaign if you dig past the name-calling. So here is installment three of our series on Bolivia’s elections, The Issues. This follows our two prior election posts: The Bolivian Elections I: Five Things to Understand About the Process and Bolivia’s Election Part II: The Candidates for President.

While the candidates for the Bolivian presidency have had no formal debates (Evo Morales refused to participate in them), on the stump, on campaign Web sites, and in advertisements there are four main issues that all three leading candidates – Evo Morales, Manfred Reyes Villa, and Samuel Doria Medina – seem to focus on most:

1. The New Constitution, Autonomy and the Structure of Government

A key push in President Morales’ first term was to change the rules of the political game in Bolivia, so it is no surprise that these issues have been the most combative over the past four years and are at the center of the current campaign.

President Evo Morales champions the new national constitution that was written by his MAS party and approved by Bolivian voters last January. Now Morales and MAS are pledging, in a second term, to pass more than 100 new laws to implement that new constitution. On regional and indigenous community autonomy, a key issue in the constitutional reform battle, Morales and MAS loosely describe their agenda this way. Regional departments should have autonomy to elect their leaders including those lower down the political ladder than just the governors. But resources, in particular land, gas and oil, should remain under national control.

Manfred Reyes Villa, who was an opponent of the new constitution, declares that it must be reformed. Among his targets for change is the requirement that the nation's judges be elected directly by the voters (he thinks they should be selected by their legal peers) and an end to talking about 36 separate Bolivian nationalities. Reyes Villa has also championed the cause of greater regional autonomy, though without much in the way of specifics of what that means.

Samuel Doria Medina has focused his campaign on the generation of employment for Bolivians and has had less to say about what plans he would have for the new constitution and autonomy, though he says he supports the latter.

2. The Nation’s Natural Resources and Spending the Windfall

What is most interesting is the virtually universal political turnaround on what was once one of the most controversial demands by Bolivia’s social movements (and a foundation of the Morales presidency) – a much bigger role for the government in the development of the nation’s gas and oil.

Nationalization vs. privatization has been a political pendulum in Bolivia since the 1930s and it was not so long ago that a greater state role was considered a radical relic of the past. For years, the International Monetary Fund pressured Bolivian governments to keep the oil and gas in the hands of multinational corporations and to keep the taxes on these corporations low. It was President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada’s decision to follow just that recipe that sparked a 2003 shooting war between the army and the national police on the steps of the Presidential Palace.

Today, as a result of the new contracts and higher taxes implemented before Morales and after, combined with a spike in global petroleum prices, Bolivia has gone from having chronic deficits in its national budget to three years of surplus in a row. It also boasts $8 billion in cash reserves (much of it invested, ironically, in U.S. Treasury Bonds). Even the IMF seems to have gotten religion on the value of higher taxes on the multinationals. “Bolivia was prudent in saving part of the windfall during the expansion period,” said the IMF in a recent news release. “That has allowed the country to apply a counter-cyclical fiscal policy in 2009, including more public investment to support internal demand and the social protection network.”

So now the candidates really only argue about how to spend the money.

The Morales plan is straightforward – cash payments to the people and public works. Morales has established three new "bonus" programs. One gives cash payments to children in the country's public schools, an incentive for poor families to keep them there instead of pulling them out to work. Another is a revamped version of a bonus program for the nation's elderly. A third gives money to pregnant women. The government also claims to have distributed more than a thousand tractors to farmers, paved 840 miles of roads, constructed 545 clinics and health facilities, and financed water connections for 821,000 people.

What’s next? Morales now pledges that he will give a house to every new married couple in the country. The plan even comes with a catchy slogan, “El que se casa, casa quiere.” What will actually become of the sexy campaign promise remains to be seen. Morales has also committed himself to greater industrialization of the country’s gas and oil, and its newer buried treasure, lithium, with the aim of turning the resources into jobs not just royalties. But the road to forming an efficient state industry has been corruption-plagued and bumpy.

Manfred Reyes Villa’s stump speech (I just heard him at a rally in Tiquipaya last week) is a familiar song to those who have followed his career since his days dating back more than a decade ago as Cochabamba’s popular Mayor. The essence: He is a man who knows how to build stuff and he wants to do that all over the country – schools, clinics, paved roads, parks, sport facilities and more. And taking a strange page from George McGovern in 1972 he has also pledged to dig into some of those foreign reserves and give $1,000 to every family in the nation (he calculates this to be one million payments), to boost consumption and investment (and probably votes for him). On housing Reyes Villa pledges to expand government credit to homebuyers and on health to establish a national health insurance system.

Samuel Doria Medina, the only real businessman among the top three, has a mantra – jobs, jobs, jobs. He also boasts a serious program to try to generate new employment. He wants to create a $500 million fund to support the development, industrialization and exportation of organic food products from Bolivia, such as quinoa, coffee, rice, nuts, fruits and vegetables and llama meat. The fund would also provide Bolivians cultivating these products with technical support, new infrastructure, and help with finding export markets. In terms of social spending, his plans for a stronger safety net are much the same as his two competitors, but based on access to affordable credit rather than giveaways or cash payments. He would expand access to credit (which is wildly expensive in Bolivia) by offering $1,000 loans to one million families. Recently the owners of Bolivia’s Burger King franchise has bemoaned that Reyes Villa stole his idea and turned it into a handout instead of lending program.

3. Coca

The little green leaf that can alternatively be used to make herbal tea or cocaine has received some but not much attention in the campaign.

Morales, the former leader of the nation’s coca growers has a three part platform toward the leaf, captured by the slogan, “coca si, cocaina no.” First, he has allowed coca farmers to cultivate a limited acreage per family. Second he has pledged himself to the development of non-narcotic industrialized uses of the leaf (such as tea for export). Third, he declares he is dedicated, despite his ouster of the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), to stopping cocaine production in Bolivia. And while the news is occasionally spotted with announcements of some new shutdown of a cocaine lab and confiscation of drugs, the government also seems deliberately oblivious to the expansion of small cocaine labs turning up in the remote hillsides above Cochabamba.

Reyes Villa has pledged his commitment to fighting illegal drug production in Bolivia, but seems to have been improvising a little on the stump a week ago with a new proposal dealing with traditional coca use. He announced that he would establish a 50% government subsidy for the purchase of coca for traditional use (chewing). No one here seems to be sure what his point is or how his plan would be implemented. I was tempted, however, to take my 10 Boliviano green bag of leaves with me to his Tiquipaya rally and see if I could get him to give me 5 Bolivianos back, but decided against it.

Doria Medina has simply pledged his support to government efforts against “narcotrafficking” with little specifics.

4. Bolivia’s Foreign Relations

President Morales has emphasized Bolivia’s sovereignty in foreign relations, meaning that the nation has the right to have relations with any country it likes in the form it likes. This has led to ongoing battles with the U.S., under both Presidents Bush and Obama, and close ties to Venezuela, Cuba, and more recently Iran. Bolivia has also worked actively on new cooperation arrangements with its Latin American neighbors under two different regional umbrellas, the left-oriented ALBA and the more inclusive UNASUR. The government’s work with UNASUR includes developing alternative trade arrangements to those pushed by the U.S., including an alternative system for resolving trade disputes with foreign investors.

Reyes Villa has pledged much closer relations with the U.S. and had criticized Morales for ousting the U.S. Ambassador last year and blames Morales for the Bush and Obama administration decisions to end Bolivia’s participation in the APDEA trade preference program.

Doria Medina argues for a foreign policy based on pursuing the country’s national economic interests, regardless of who that means doing business with. “We have to make commercial agreements with every country in the world, with the U.S., with China, with Venezuela, with Cuba, with everyone.” He says the Bolivian government needs to have commercial and diplomatic relations with countries it likes and countries it does not.

The Wall Street Journal Takes its Ideology Out for a Bolivian Spin

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published another opinion piece on Bolivia from its columnist Mary O’Grady. I really wasn’t going to write anything about the column because, frankly, I (and most of the journalists I know) don’t take Ms. O’Grady’s writing all that seriously. But since a number of readers have specifically written to me and asked me to write something about the article, here goes.

One does not have to get very far into the article to get its basic gist:

A dictatorship that fosters the production and distribution of cocaine is not apt to enjoy a positive international image. But when that same government cloaks itself in the language of social justice, with a special emphasis on the enfranchisement of indigenous people, it wins world-wide acclaim.

This is Bolivia, which in two weeks will hold elections for president and both houses of congress. The government of President Evo Morales will spin the event as a great moment in South American democracy. In fact, it will mark the official end of what's left of Bolivian liberty after four years of Morales rule.

There are many different kinds of writers in the world. Some work hard to stay strictly neutral. Some have leanings they don’t hide but also take their analysis seriously. And there are others – on both the left and right – who for some odd reason really do believe that exaggeration and wild charges are the basis of good writing. A journalism teacher could make valuable use of Ms. O’Grady as a case study of the third.

To be clear, there are plenty of legitimate complaints that one can make about the Morales/MAS government. A possible list could include: It’s proclivity to put people in positions of power based on political loyalty rather than competence; it’s amplification of polarization in situations where it could instead help make the country more united; its tendency to toss out charges against people and governments without actually having the facts to back up the claim; and its antagonism toward its critics on the right and left. I have written about each of these issues at different times.

But a dictatorship? Please, give us a break. It dilutes a word that we ought to save for the real dictators that have plagued the world, like Pinochet in Chile in the 1970s or Ceausescu in Romania in the 1980s. It's about the same as those who tried to label George W. Bush a "fascist," another word we should reserve for the real ones.

I am pretty sure that regardless of the vote December 6th, Bolivians will wake up December 7th with their basic liberties still in tact, Ms. O'Grady's deep concerns for them aside.

In a country that has been led for decades by unpopular leaders that won the presidency with barely a quarter of the vote, Evo Morales keeps winning political majorities double that and more. If recent polls are correct Morales is likely to be elected once again on December 6th with a majority even larger than the 53% that put him into office four years ago. Is he powerful? Yes. He is powerful because he is popular and he is popular for good reason. His government is genuinely making an effort to lift up the lives of people who have been neglected and exploited by a string of previous governments.

Is Bolivia an authoritarian society? Have a look at the opinion pages of any of the Bolivian dailies if you have any doubt about whether there is room for dissent. A good many of the articles there make even the O’Grady piece look mild.

As she often does in her writings about Bolivia, O’Grady doesn’t do very well with basic facts:

Upon taking office in 2006, Mr. Morales began using his office to persecute officials of previous governments.

If O’Grady is talking about a WSJ favorite, former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada and his aides, she might want to check the calendar. The prosecution of the former President was initiated before Morales became President, by a Congress still-controlled by Sánchez de Lozada’s own political party.

Like I said, I really don’t take O’Grady’s writing seriously enough to go through it line by line and point where her love of exaggeration gets in the way of real analysis. Others here can engage in that if they wish to. But this one line did catch my eye:

Mr. Morales is expected to win re-election easily, in part because in many areas that he controls voters will be escorted into polling booths to make sure they choose correctly.

It made me think of my Tiquipaya neighbor, Efrain, a young man who comes from a small pueblo in the hills above the Cochabamba valley – a place of llamas, and poverty and decades of social neglect by a string of Morales predecessors (and O’Grady darlings). This morning he told me he was voting for Evo on December 6th. I asked him why. He explained that since Evo took office his village has electricity and water service and a new high school, things it never had before.

Sitting in her New York office (has she actually ever been to Bolivia?) Ms. O’Grady wouldn’t have any conversations like these. For her and her editors, ideology is enough. More serious analysis is actually not of much necessity or interest.

It’s a pity really. There was a time when the Wall Street Journal did serious reporting in Latin America. I think back to the long piece its then-South American correspondent Marc Lifsher did in 2003 on the failures of the U.S. alternative development program in its War on Drugs. That was based on real reporting, the kind that makes a reporter brave bad roads to tough places to get hard facts.

And it is that sort of journalism that seems of little interest to O’Grady and the WSJ today.

Afghanistan: Which Way Mr. President?

Dear Readers:

I am a citizen of the United States. For that reason I am, like many millions of others, paying close attention to the deliberations of the Obama administration over how the U.S. will proceed in its nine-year-long war in Afghanistan.

I do not pretend to be an expert on this issue. While I have had a chance in recent years to speak with a number of journalists and others who have worked in Afghanistan, I have not been there myself. And I have traveled to enough countries in the world to know that you do not know a place, not really, until you have spent time there.

So, while my natural skepticism about U.S. military interventions abroad makes me an easy skeptic about any plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, I am also aware that things are complicated. For this reason I have been an eager reader of thoughtful, intelligent analysis on the enormous choice about to be made by the U.S. President.

In that spirit I recommend an important article published this week by the U.S. analyst Jonathan Schell in The Nation – The Fifty Year War. Schell's article is a detailed, well-researched comparison between the disasterous circumstances of U.S. escalation in Vietnam nearly half a century ago with the current circumstances in Afghanistan today.

Most chilling are the echoes of that time of choices on Vietnam:

A decision with such heavy domestic political implications that a President might well deploy more U.S. troops based on those considerations instead of the facts of the war itself.

The U.S. linking it fortunes in war with a government that is quite clearly corrupt and which is dependent on the U.S for its political survival.

The potential for a quagmire in which the absence of a graceful exit strategy becomes the only real reason we don't exit.

So for those interested in this question, an important one with many lives at stake, Afghani and U.S. – I encourage you to have a look at The Fifty Year War. And if others have other good articles to suggest, please feel encouraged to post a link to them here [please, not the full article, just a link].

Jim Shultz

Cochabamba’s Poorest Neighborhoods Take on the Challenge of Water

Dear Readers:

Today we bring you a special edition of the Blog which took a good deal of work, by a team of people, to produce.

A decade ago the streets of Cochabamba were made known worldwide when the people of this city came out by the thousands to take back their public water system from Bechtel in the now-famous Cochabamba Water Revolt. In the days of that revolt and in the ten years since the Democracy Center has written a good deal about these events – Blogs, briefing papers, magazine articles, book chapters and more.

As the ten year anniversary of the Water Revolt approaches, we are going back to it, to dig deeper, and especially to look at a basic question – What difference did it make? We have already written a good deal about that, including this chapter from our recent book Dignity and Defiance and this briefing paper published last year. These writings have not been varnished versions of that history. They have included accounts of the ongoing problems with Cochabamba's state-run water company along with the stories of the heroism and courage involved in taking it back a decade ago.

With this Blog we want to focus on a very specific piece of the post Water Revolt story, one of the lesser known: How the neighborhoods of Cochabamba’s impoverished south side have taken into their own hands the challenge of getting water.

To get that story we bring you an important new video that examines the issue and brings you right into the neighborhoods involved and with their leaders. We also have an extensive article, below. Because of it's length, 15 minutes, we have broken the video into two parts. You can see part one by clicking on the screen above, or you can go directly to these links on YouTube:

Part One
Part Two

The production of the video and Blog post was a collective effort of the Democracy team but in particular Elizabeth Cooper, a student at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts who joined us for part of her summer to work on the project, along with Democracy Center stalwarts Leny Olivera and Aldo Orellana. I think you will see that they have offered up something truly worth watching and reading.

This is just the first installment of what we hope will be a series of reflective pieces on the legacy of the Water Revolt leading up to the ten year anniversary next April.

Jim Shultz

Cochabamba’s Poorest Neighborhoods Take on the Challenge of Water

Written by Elizabeth Cooper

In 2000 the attempt by the World Bank, the Bolivian government and the California-based Bechtel Corporation to privatize Cochabamba’s water system led to a powerful popular revolt. The state-owned water company, SEMAPA (Servicio Municipal de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado) resumed control of the water system after Bechtel was expelled.

However, the successful revolt against privatization did not end the struggles over water access and control for the city. Unfortunately, SEMAPA’s continued problems of unaccountability, institutional corruption, and inefficiency have only increased the popular dissatisfaction with the state-owned model of water management.

Frustration with the failures of both models – corporate-run and state-run – has spawned strong interest in an alternative that challenges this state/private dichotomy. In fact, in the wake of Bechtel’s expulsion, calls for social control over the state company gave rise to “citizen representative” elections which were meant to bridge the gap between the company bureaucracy and the people. But when elections for those positions were held less than a year later public passions had dissipated and only four percent of the population voted.

The Search for Water in Cochabamba's Impovershed South

In the Southern Zone of the city, however, where SEMAPA water service has never truly reached, “public/social control” over water implies a completely different level of accountability and participation. Many neighborhoods have developed water cooperatives, through which they have built the infrastructure of wells, pumps and piping to connect their households to the regional water grid. They have organized themselves into asambleas, consensus-based councils in which the entire community participates. These asambleas in turn elect Presidents, who are unpaid and whose service rotates among community members. The Presidents answer to the ultimate authority of the entire asamblea.

The Primero de Mayo Cooperative, in a neighborhood in the 9th District of Cochabamba, sits some six miles south of the city center. In its office, Don Zenón, the cooperative’s president, describes the organization’s roots. He tells us that in 1989, when the neighborhood of Primero de Mayo was still a small settlement, the neighbors together began developing a system to distribute the water. They discovered a spring from which water flowed at a rate of one half liter per minute. First they transported the water in old milk containers on the backs of donkeys. Then they built a container to capture the water from the spring. With the help of an NGO, they were able to build a larger tank to store the water. Later, between a small grant they received and the contributions of the residents themselves, they dug a well. When they dug the well, they needed electricity to make the pump work, and this too they brought themselves from a neighboring town, with each of the 45 residents contributing 50 dollars to lay the wires.

After they dug the first well, Don Zenón says that more and more people began to arrive. They continued expanding, digging more wells, until they had three. “The people kept arriving,” he says. “And with more people, there are more problems. A lot of things happened—the residents fought, money was lost, but we were able to maintain the system. After that came the idea of organizing a [formal water] cooperative. In the run up to the Water Revolt in 1999 we began to organize the cooperative, and it was created in 2000.” The Primero de Mayo cooperative now serves 1000 families.

The Villa Venezuela cooperative, also located on Cochabamba’s southern periphery, was born out of a similar process. The residents of what was then a small settlement each contributed money, and they partnered with a Catholic sisterhood to construct their first well. As the community grew, they sought other financing and continued digging wells. As the water system grew, so did the population. The system now consists of three elevated tanks and wells. Doña Silvia Martínez, one of the administrators of the cooperative, says that they now serve 270 families.

Like Villa Venezuela and Primero de Mayo, the majority of the Southern Zone is not served by SEMAPA. For neighborhoods without cooperative water systems, residents must buy their water from aguateros, the trucks that pass through, selling water of totally unguaranteed and generally dangerously low quality, at a price five to 10 times that of the cost of water provided by SEMAPA in the city center. While water coming through SEMAPA’s system to homes in the center costs 2 or 3 Bs. ($.30 to $.40 USD) per cubic meter, the poor quality water Southern Zone residents are obliged to buy from the aguateros costs around 25 Bs. ($3.60 USD) per cubic meter.

Despite the facts that Southern Zone actually makes up nearly two thirds of the area of the municipality of Cochabamba, and that its population accounts for half of that of Cochabamba city, it is often treated like a marginal area and is traditionally attended to last, if at all, by municipal representatives. For Ramiro Balderrama, a researcher on the Southern Zone for Fundación Ghandi in Cochabamba City, the challenges that the residents of the Southern Zone confront, including those of lack of access to water, are indicative of this neglect. According to the World Health Organization, he says, an individual requires 50 liters of water a day to live in a dignified way. In times of Revolt or natural catastrophe, individuals need at least 20 liters a day to get by. In the Southern Zone, the average individual “gets by” on a permanent basis with 11 to 19 liters of water a day. “It is as though those in the Southern Zone have lived through two tsunamis, or two Iraq Revolts,” he explains.

In contrast, those who live in the center of the city enjoy easy enough access to use at least 50 liters of water per person per day, and wash their cars, bathe pets and water their gardens on top of that.

Even though they had been excluded from the benefits of SEMAPA’s supposedly public services, these neighborhoods were some of the most active in the resistance against the Bechtel privatization. Along with the government decision to turn SEMAPA over to the California giant came a new water law that would have required the wells they built to secure government permits and possibly be put under Bechtel’s control.

In the face of that threat, and given the resident’s history of organization and resistance, the privatization became an obvious target. Many of those southern neighborhoods are populated by ex-miners who moved as whole communities to Cochabamba when neoliberal reforms closed some of the mines in the country’s highlands and sought to break the miners’ unions.

For these Bolivians it has always been clear to them that “water is life.” It is not hard to understand why they would organize to challenge the idea that water, a public resource and a shared responsibility, would have to come to them through hands other than their own, and especially hands controlled by a corporation a hemisphere away.

An Alternative to the State-Run Company

In other parts of Cochabamba people struggled in the Water Revolt to bring the water back under the control of SEMAPA. But in the Southern Zone, they fought to return the water to a different kind of public control. They pushed not to return to the status quo of an ineffective state company. Rather, they fought against the possibility that Bechtel might be able to control and regulate the water they take from their own wells. They refused to let a foreign corporation override their own asambleas and they opposed a system of water for profit.

On this side of the Water Revolt, the water cooperatives are seen as the most viable option for solving issues of water access in the Southern Zone. As complaints of SEMAPA’s inefficiency and corruption mount and the cooperatives’ good reputation spreads, some foreign creditors are now disposed to lend to the cooperatives themselves rather than to the municipal company for development projects. Abraham Grandydier, the president of ASICA-SUR, which is an umbrella non-profit organization of water cooperatives in Cochabamba, explains that the birth of the water cooperatives came out of the idea that to deal with the systematic corruption they were seeing in SEMAPA, the people should be participating in every level of the administration—management, administration, finances, everything.

Even as the cooperatives are successful in developing the organization and infrastructure to connect more and more households in their neighborhoods to the systems, the shortage of good water is still a problem. Silvia Martínez explains that even as Villa Venezuela works with creditors from the EU and ASICA-SUR to increase the reach of the network, it does not want to install the system only to find that there is no decent water to deliver to the users. Right now the water in their system is salty. Most people use it mainly for washing, although some people drink it too, but always with the risk that their children or they themselves will get sick, she says.

Currently Villa Venezuela is negotiating with SEMAPA, hoping to have the company deliver better water in large quantities a few times a week to the cooperative, which would then distribute it through its tanks, explains Humberto Orellana Coca, the cooperative’s vice president. Villa Venezuela isn’t far out of SEMAPA’s reach—it is practically a matter of a few blocks, but up until this point extending the network to include the neighborhood has not been a high enough priority. When asked if Primero de Mayo would be interested in a similar arrangement with SEMAPA, the cooperative’s president Don Zenón says wryly that in Primero de Mayo they don’t believe in SEMAPA anymore, not even for that. “At first, we brought the managers and the mayor’s office here a number of times. They talked to us about miracles, so that we would believe them, and when they came, we prepared them all kinds of food, but afterwards when they went back to their offices they had already forgotten about us.”

Though the cooperatives have different visions about bringing the water to their communities, they share the certainty that once the water arrives, they will not hand over its administration to anyone else. For them, it works. Abraham Grandydier, the president of ASICA-SUR, explains how efficiently members resolve problems in the cooperative when the cooperative’s president is their neighbor, which not only drastically increases the accountability of the organization, but also facilitates open communication between the users and the administrators—who are essentially one and the same. All the policies and prices are common knowledge, having been decided upon communally in the asamblea. “It is decided, and then it is done,” says Don Zenón. Grandydier contrasts these familiar relationships in the communal model to the relationship between SEMAPA’s bureaucracy and its customers, in which the clients couldn’t tell you how much their water costs, much less to whom they pay their monthly fees. For members of the cooperatives, a public service is a service powered by their work, according to their decisions and carried out by their own members.

Bolivia’s Election Part II: The Candidates for President

Dear Readers:

Today we bring you our second installment of our Blog series on the Bolivian Presidential vote.

Last time we looked at some of the peculiarities of the vote and the politics surrounding it. In this post we look at the major candidates on the ballot in the December 6th election.

We will be back again shortly with a look at the major issues in the race. This article was written with assistance from the Democracy Center’s stellar intern, Jessica Aguirre.

Jim Shultz

_______________________

Three major candidates are competing for the Bolivian Presidency in December, accompanied on the ballot by five others, none of who have polled at more than 5% in recent voter surveys.

Evo Morales – The Incumbent President of Bolivia
Movimiento al Socialism (Movement toward Socialism)

Biography in a Nutshell

Morales is wrapping up his fourth year as Bolivia’s President, elected with 53% of the vote in December 2005. Morales rose to political prominence as leader of the coca growers in the Chapare region of Bolivia and later as a member of Congress with the MAS party, which he founded. Prior to his presidency Morales played a role in many of the prominent protest movements in Bolivia over the past decade, including mobilizations against forced eradication of coca, the Cochabamba Water Revolt, the 2003 Gas Revolt and others.

As President Morales has championed three major changes – a deeper role of the state in exploiting the countries gas and oil reserves, adoption of a new Bolivian Constitution, and broader economic support for the nation’s most impoverished. Morales’ presidency has also generated strong opposition, mostly from wealthy members of Bolivia’s traditional elite and the broader public in the nation’s eastern lowlands. In foreign affairs Morales has steered Bolivia toward close relationships with Venezuela, Iran and Cuba, among others, and has had a combative relationship with the U.S., including his ouster of the U.S. Ambassador and U.S. DEA last year.

Running Mate

Alvaro Garcia Linera; a one-time prisoner charged with guerilla activity, Linera is a well-known intellectual who served for many years as a television analyst on Bolivian politics.

Platform and Campaign

Morales’ key campaign promises deal with implementation of the new Constitution; elimination of corruption; and greater social equity and indigenous representation along with regional integration and alternative development. He also hopes to win a 2/3 majority for MAS in the new Bolivian Congress.

Political Base

Morales enjoys support hitting the 80% mark in many parts of rural Bolivia and especially in the western altiplano highlands. His support is weaker in the cities and weaker still in the western departments such as Santa Cruz. Recent polls show Morales winning 47% of the vote, more than thirty points ahead of his nearest opponent.

Morales on the Web: Facebook


Manfred Reyes Villa
Plan Progreso para Bolivia-Concertación Nacional (Progress Plan for Bolivia-National Convergence)

Biography in a Nutshell

Reyes Villa is the former mayor of the city of Cochabamba and the former Governor of the State of Cochabamba. He is also a former military captain who served in the early 1980s as the personal guard to one of the nation’s most brutal dictators, Luís García Meza. As Mayor, Reyes Villa was popular for his construction of numerous public works projects, including city parks, the world’s largest stautue of Jesus, and a new airport, all of which were primarily financed with public debt. A candidate for President in 2002, he finished third behind the winner, Gonzalez Sanchez de Lozada and Morales. He later formed a political aliance with Sanchez de Lozada just before the President’s political ouster in 2003. Elected Governor in 2005, Reyes Villa’s popularity sank when he thrust himself into national political matters and opposition to Morales. When a voter referendum was held in August 2008, Reyes Villa was removed from office by a vote of 2 to 1.

Running mate

Leopoldo Fernandez; former governor of the department of Pando. Fernandez was arrested and imprisoned a year ago by national authorities, accused of having organized and authorized the September 11, 2008 massacre in Pando of Morales supporters.

Platform and Campaign

Reyes Villa has pledged to reopen debate over the MAS-driven constitution approved by voters last January. He also has declared his intent to seek greater departmental autonomy and to increase foreign capital investments in mining and other resources. Generally favors closer relations with the U.S. and has close ties to conservative groups in the U.S.

Political Base

Reyes Villa has been polling at about 16% in recent voter surveys, well behind Morales. While he could once count on solid support from both the city and larger department of Cochabamba his ouster by voters a year ago makes that much less certain. His selection of the jailed Fernandez as his running mate can be seen as a bid to solidify a support base among the country’s most bitter anti-Morales factions but makes it virtually impossible for him to carve into any significant part of the Morales base.

Reyes Villa on the Web: Website, Facebook, Twitter


Samuel Doria Medina
Unidad Nacional (National Unity)

Biography in a nutshell

Medina is a wealthy Bolivian businessman who owns both the nation’s Burger King chain and significant interests in the cement business. This is his second run at the Presidency (he was a candidate in 2005 finishing a distant third) and has sought to position himself as a moderate between Morales and conservative political forces in the country. Originally from La Paz, Medina attended the London School of Economics. In 1995 he was kidnapped by the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement and held for 45 days. He was also a member of the constitution-writing Constitutional Assembly in 2006-2007.

Running Mate

Gabriel Helding, from the conservative stronghold of Santa Cruz, elected deputy to the National Congress.

Platform and Campaign

Medina’s emphasis is on being a businessman who wants to develop employment for Bolivians. His slogan is: We’ll put Bolivia to work. His campaign, though he trails a distant third, is well financed and visible.

Political Base

Unlike Morales and Ryes Villa Medina has no specific geographic or ideological base. He is seeking to create a base out of pockets attracted to a more moderate message, a tough sell in politicized Bolivia. Recent polling shows him with the support of 12% of voters.

Doria Medina on the Web: Website, Facebook

The Others

None of the remaining five candidates, according to polls, have significant enough voter support to be a major factor in the race. They include:

Rene Joaquino (Social Alliance)
Roman Loayza (People)
Ana Maria Flores (Patriotic Social Unity Movement)
Alejo Veliz (Pulse)
Rime Choquehuanca (Bolivia Social Democrat)

Written by Jim Shultz and Jessica Aguirre

Announcing: The Network for Justice in Global Investment.

Those of you have who have been followers of the Democracy Center's work for any length of time remember the campaign that we and our allies waged for years against the Bechtel Corporation, when it sued the people of Cochabamba for $50 million in the aftermath of the Water Revolt. That case was filed before ICSID, the secretive trade court operated by the World Bank. Thanks to pressure from citizens worldwide, Bechtel dropped its case in 2006 for a token payment of two Bolivianos (30 cents).

In the years since the Democracy Center has continued to work globally to help bring greater justice and more active citizen engagement to the rules of economic globalization. Today we announce a new project that we have been building over the past year with our friends at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington – the Network for Justice in Global Investment.

The Network, involving activist groups and scholars from across the Americas, is aimed at helping us all better understand the world of global investment rules and to provide a platform for debate and campaigns for changing those rules for the better.

Together, the Democracy Center and IPS have just launched a new Web site for the Network. With information in both English and Spanish, the site is a new and valuable tool.

What can you find at http://www.justinvestment.org/?

Join the Debate! An electronic forum on the question, “Dispute Resolution Between Governments and Foreign Investors: Does the Current System Work?” with commentaries ranging from social movement groups to Chevron’s chief lawyer, and others.

Blogs from the Front Lines: Highlighting campaigns for justice in global investment rules from El Salvador, Argentina and more.

Reports and Analyses: In depth examinations of the key issues at the heart of the global debate over international investment rules.

Where are the Battles? A comprehensive list of the current cases around the world where corporations are using international tribunals to pressure governments to weaken environmental and public interest protections.

What’s Coming Next?

· Debate about how the current system should be changed.
· Interviews with government leaders trying to create an alternative system.
· Outreach across the Americas and beyond in the fight to make a more just system.

Join us today by visiting the NJGI Web site and by signing up for ongoing updates.

The NJGI is a joint effort by groups that have been working across Latin America, the U.S. and Canada to battle injustices in international investment agreements through which multinational corporations may sue governments for protecting their people.

Network for Justice in Global Investment Advisory Committee:

Alberto Arroyo, RMALC, México
Angel Ibarra, Unidad Ecológica Salvadoreña, El Salvador
Elyzabeth Peredo and Gisella Villamil, Fundación Solon, Bolivia
Sebastian Valdomir, REDES Amigos de las Tierras, Uruguay
Jeff Conant, Food & Water Watch, United States
Maude Barlow, Council of the Canadians, Canada
David Schneiderman, University of Toronto, Canada
William Waren, Forum on Democracy & Trade, United States
Sarah Anderson and Manuel Perez Rocha, Institute for Policy Studies, United States
Jim Shultz, The Democracy Center, Bolivia

Visit the new NJGI Web site today!