Morales and Opposition Agree to a January 25 Vote on New Constitution

Readers:

Thank you for so much support for our action campaign to stop the Bush administration from putting more than 20,000 Bolivians out of work by removing Bolivia from the ATPDEA trade program. At this writing more than 400 people have viewed or video testimony and signed the petition in support of these workers.

For those who haven't gotten involved yet but would like to, you can have a look at the video here, and you can add your name to the petition here. We also have a version now in Spanish here.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

Morales and Opposition Agree to a January 25 Vote on New Constitution

Just before 1pm – before a crowd 100,000 strong, that packed Plaza Murillo so tightly that even elbow room was scarce – President Evo Morales signed into law a measure setting a January vote on his party's embattled proposal for a new constitution.

Approval of the law caps a process that began more than two years ago with election of delegates to a constitution-writing Constituent Assembly. That process ran through a national battle over how many votes should be required to approve it; violence over demands by Sucre that it be named the country's capital; a political showdown in a voter referendum last August; and finally a week of violence in September in Pando and Santa Cruz that left more than 30 people dead.

The vote by Congress today was supported by more than 2/3 of its members and by Morales' MAS party along with the three major parties of the opposition, PODEMOS, UN, and MNR. The vote on the constitution is set for January 25, 2009.

[Here is a link to The Democracy Center's November 2007 briefing paper: Re-Founding Bolivia: A Nation's Struggle Over Constitutional Reform and other articles we've published on the constitutional reform process.]

How did Bolivia Get Here?

How did Bolivia – a nation so polarized that serious analysts spoke of 'civil war' – arrive at a place of such startling agreement (at least on the decision to hold a vote)? Three events were key.

The first was the August 10 elections. Before then the political duel between Morales and his opponents, most notably the renegade governors, seemed roughly balanced. It was an election launched by one of Morales' fiercest opponents among the governors, Cochabamba's Manfred Reyes Villa. But when the votes were counted, 67% of Bolivia's electorate sided with the President and both Reyes Villa and the governor of La Paz, another Morales adversary, were trounced out of office.

After months of the opposition talking tough it turned out that all their bluster had only solidified Morales' base more broadly behind him.

The second event that led to today's agreement was Bolivia's own version of 9/11, the massacre on that date in Pando that left more than 30 campesino backers of Morales dead. Coming on the heels of opposition mobs in Santa Cruz torching and looting public buildings there, the opposition combined its loss at the polls with a loss of whatever moral authority it might have had up until then. The balance of political clout tilted quickly and heavily toward Morales.

Finally, there is the intervention just after the Pando massacre of the other South American Presidents. Led by the two women, Cristina Fernandez of Argentina and Michelle Bachalet of Chile, the continent's leaders wasted no time in weighing in diplomatically. At a summit held in Chile with Morales at the center the Presidents made clear that he had their support, told opposition leaders to forget any dreams they might have had about independent deals to sell gas and oil from their departments, and called on all sides to negotiate.

Those negotiations began in Cochabamba nearly a month ago and stretched into La Paz this week, given added urgency by a 200 kilometer march to the capital of tens of thousands of Morales supporters demanding a national vote on the constitution. Opponents had criticized the march as it headed toward La Paz, deeming it a violent mob.

But as the multitudes camped overnight in the historic plaza at the steps of Congress, the sounds were not of smashing windows, but of music and song. A starker contrast could not be found between that scene and the one hosted by Morales opponents just over a year ago in Sucre, when they used violence to shut down the Constituent Assembly.

What Did Evo Give Away?

It will take a while to get the details on exactly what was negotiated in the last days in La Paz. At first glance it seems like plenty.

Of the 411 articles in the proposed constitution, more than 100 were modified in some way according to Bolivian news reports. Opposition leader Jorge Quiroga of PODEMOS, Morales' chief opponent in the 2005 election, was boasting on CNN mid-afternoon that his party had secured more than 200 different changes. Among them are significant concessions from MAS on provisions dealing with the media and establishment of mechanisms for "social control" of public agencies, something that had been a key demand from Morales backers.

Bolivian news reports also say that Morales has agreed to recognize and support the autonomy statutes approved in four departments. One newspaper, Los Tiempos, also reported that the key issue of land reform had been delegated to "future action." What that means precisely is more than unclear. The devil is in the details and the details have yet to be fully analyzed.

The issue, however, that leapt to the forefront in the final negotiations was one simple to understand and close to the heart of the politicians on both sides – presidential re-election. Under Bolivia's current constitution presidents may not serve consecutive terms. It is five years than out, though they can seek to return to office five years later, as Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada did in 2002.

Originally Morales and MAS wanted unlimited opportunities for re-election. That eventually got negotiated, in the document approved by the Constituent Assembly, down to letting the President seek just one additional term. But since it was not to include the five-year span Morales is currently serving, the chance at two additional terms translated out to the possibility of a Morales presidency through 2019, a poison scenario for the opposition.

The compromise worked out this week, and the basis for Congress' approval, is a concession by Morales that the term Morales would seek would count. If approved in January, the new constitution would allow Morales to campaign for just one more consecutive term, in elections that would be held in December 2009. That limits Morales' potential presidential horizon to 2014, a substantial concession.

Two Long Roads

Bolivia's constitutional story is one of two long roads.

The first is the one that led to today. The demand for a constituent assembly, which goes back decades in many indigenous communities in Bolivia, was envisioned originally as a process that excluded politicians and political parties. The idea was to create, at a national level, a process akin to community decision making at the local level. The people would be sovereign and the politicians and parties would have to sit on the sidelines and watch.

That vision of things went out the window fast and early when, shortly after taking office in 2006, Morales and MAS had to negotiate with their opponents in Congress to win approval of a law convening the vote for delegates to that Assembly. In a deal mutually beneficial to politicians of all parties, they were not only let back into the process but put in charge of it. Candidates had to be affiliated with a political party to run, and the Assembly ended up looking pretty much like Congress, but with another name and a less-decorated meeting venue.

The scrambled negotiations this month between Morales and the Congress put the political icing on a political cake. In the end it was not an Assembly of the people or a process of long deliberation that did the final sculpting of Bolivia's likely new Magna Carta. It was politicians acting in haste to cut a deal.

The other long road is the one that comes next. In any nation, but in Bolivia especially, the distance between words on paper and actual changes in people's day-to-day lives is measured not in weeks or months but in years and decades. What difference a new constitution will make in terms of broader economic opportunity, deeper accountability of government, or greater social justice is unclear.

Nevertheless, for those who have invested great hope and emotion in the fight for a constitution they want to call their own, today is a historic day in Bolivia. Given Morales' strong backing in August, it seems unlikely that he and his supporters will have trouble securing the simple majority support they will need in January. So the constitution approved by the Congress seems clearly headed for enactment.

It is also a historic day for those who favor peace over conflict. Once again, after having looked over into the abyss, the nation has inched itself back onto the ledge. In Bolivia the "most dangerous road in the world" is not the one that foreigners dare on mountain bikes that stretches from La Paz to Coroico. The most dangerous road in Bolivia is the one that marks the route for political change. Today that road looks both a little more hopeful, and a little safer as well.

Remembering Bolivia's Febrero Negro

It was exactly five years ago today that Ana Colque, a 24-year-old nurse and single mother, was murdered by Bolivian soldiers as she climbed to the rooftop of a building in La Paz. Arriving in an ambulance, she went to the roof to come to the aid of a handyman who lay dying, also from an army sniper attack.

It was five years ago this month that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) demanded that Bolivia take a new massive dose of its economic medicine, setting up a chain of events that not only produced Colque's murder but a shooting war between the Army and the National Police on the steps of the Presidential palace. Over the course of two days 34 people – mothers, fathers, children – were left dead.

It is time to remember, once again, Bolivia's Febrero Negro.

The bloody events in La Paz those two days in February 2003 remain, not only one of the nation's ugliest political scars, but a powerful lesson about the global system and how its darker side effects the lives of real people. Not long afterwards, The Democracy Center undertook a serious and in-depth investigation of Febrero Negro, including the events that led up to it and the violence that spiraled into the streets. We interviewed Bolivia's then-Vice President, Carlos Mesa, senior government economic officials, the IMF, the leader of the rebelling police, Ana Colque's mother, and many, many others to get a full perspective. Our report, Deadly Consequences, can be read here.

Five years in retrospect, there are some new developments and some new lessons in the Febrero Negro story.

One lesson is about criminal impunity in Bolivia. To this day, despite ample evidence about who fired the shots that killed Ana Colque, no one has ever been convicted for the murder that sent bullets through her chest.

Other lessons are about economics.

The day Colque was killed, IMF officials fled Bolivia. On the wau to the airport they passed the building where her murder took place. They left, convinced as always, that deep deficit reduction was a required formula for Bolivia, even if their prescription aimed at "economic stability" turned into tax increases on the poor and produced 34 coffins. Three years later, at the start of 2006, Bolivia became one of a parade of Latin American nations that divorced itself from the IMF, declining further loans from the Washington-based institution and freeing itself from the IMF economic doctrines that have proven so damaging across the region.

Five years ago, as the government of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada struggled internally to craft a plan to respond to the IMF's deficit reduction demands, the President's economic advisors urged him to close the fiscal gap with new taxes on foreign oil companies. It was his gas and oil privatization schemes years before that had helped drain the national treasury and contributed to the country's large deficits, so it made sense, they argued, to close the budget gap by recouping some of that lost revenue. Sánchez de Lozada overruled his advisors and sought to keep the IMF happy, instead, with a new income tax that reached all the way down to the working poor – police, nurses, teachers and others that earned as little as $100 per month.

Later, after Sánchez de Lozada was toppled by his own people and fled himself to exile in suburban Maryland, Bolivia's leaders (starting well-before the Presidency of Evo Morales) embarked down the road that Sánchez de Lozada would not, raising the taxes paid by foreign oil firms by more than $1 billion. The result was not the mass departure of the firms that the IMF and Sánchez de Lozada predicted, but a new round of long-term contracts and Bolivia's first budget surplus in many years.

The economic lesson of Febrero Negro and its aftermath is this: Not only did the IMF/ Sánchez de Lozada approach send the nation into bloody, needless conflict. It was also economic stupidity.

On this day in which 34 Bolivian families, including Colque's will mourn losses deeply remembered, we hope our readers will also remember those events and their importance. Again, you can read our report in full here.