By most accounts, the opening salvo in Bolivia’s ongoing revolutionary cycle occurred in 2000.1 Mothers, unionists, campesinos, students, in fact, citizens of all kinds seized the streets and plazas of Cochabamba to take back their water. Management of city’s waterworks had been privatized in September the year before, and within weeks household water bills had skyrocketed by 200%.2
A coalition opposing the water contract and rate hikes nicknamed La Coordinadora led intermittent protests and strikes in the first months, but then declared an all-out “final battle” for April. The battle broke out as announced and, while under martial law, the people of Cochabamba fought armed troops throughout the tear gas-choked city. In about a week, the government succumbed and announced it had canceled the contract. The city’s walls were still scrawled with the then-victorious rallying call, “¡El agua es del pueblo, carajo!” (“The water belongs to the people, damn it!”).
It’s fitting that the current cycle of struggle began by reclaiming such a basic and symbolic element of life. Since then, through similar mobilizations, Bolivia stands as the only country in Latin America—and perhaps the world—that has successfully rolled back some of the key impositions of dominant military, economic and political paradigms underlying current patterns of globalization. What’s more, the social movements have done so by attacking, weakening and in some cases circumventing the power structure within its borders and beyond that determines what’s “permissible” under conditions of Empire.
Bolivia’s rich histories of tightly knit campesino communities (called ayllus), workers’ unions, campesino unions, neighborhood associations and many other forms of collective organization have long made it one of Latin America’s most organized societies. “Hence when Bolivians began the latest cycle of resistance and insurgency in 2000,” write historians Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, “their radical traditions of organizing provided unexpected reserves of strength. Revolutionary forces and aspirations, only recently thought to have been buried, suddenly resurfaced with surprising energy and creativity, albeit in new forms and under new circumstances.”3 These conditions make Bolivia uniquely poised to resist and overturn reigning global economic, political and military arrangements, and it has begun to do so with stunning success.
The early 1980s were desperate times for bolivians. The widespread food shortages, astronomical hyperinflation and general instability led the government to call early elections in 1985. Víctor Paz Estenssoro of the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR) party won a fourth term as president. Paz had been a leader of Bolivia’s Revolution of 1952, which in its early years had instituted broad reforms: nationalization of key industries, land reform, universal suffrage, education programs, subsidies and other social protections.
In a dramatic reversal from his more radical past, after the 1985 election, Paz enlisted the help of his U.S.-educated Finance Minister Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada to map out an economic strategy. Under the tutelage of Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, it took Goni and his team just 17 days to cobble together what they called the “New Economic Policy.” Three weeks after his inauguration, Paz signed “Supreme Decree No. 21060,” initiating the radical neoliberal transformation of Bolivia and the systematic dismantlement of the state built by the Revolution.
“Rather than a strictly economic program,” explained Goni, “the New Economic Policy is a political plan…. Its aim is to recover the basic principles of republican life without which we run a serious risk of national disintegration.” The next part of his analysis, an ominous warning, would later prove tragic: “The first political task consists of restoring the state’s authority over society at large.”4 State-oriented economic policies were reversed, industries and services were privatized, government spending was cut, hyperinflation was stopped, the unions and labor laws were weakened and the financial sector was deregulated. The country was open for business.
“Using the contemporary tools of economic power—holding up loans, aid, and debt relief—the [World] Bank and IMF influenced and outright coerced the Bolivian government into selling or leasing its public enterprises into corporate hands,” says Jim Shultz of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center. In debt negotiations with the government in the 1990s, for example, the World Bank made $600 million in debt relief contingent on the privatization of Cochabamba’s waterworks.5 Eventually the cash-strapped government complied, awarding a 40-year contract to the sole bidder—the consortium Aguas del Tunari, whose majority owner was the U.S.-based Bechtel corporation. During this same privatization push by the Bank, the government also privatized the joint water system of El Alto and neighboring La Paz, awarding it to the private consortium Aguas del Illimani, mostly owned by France-based Suez.
This January, five years after residents of Cochabamba won back their water and reestablished a public utility company with mechanisms for citizen participation, the Neighborhood Associations (FEJUVE) of El Alto won a similar battle. Illimani pegged El Alto’s rates to the U.S. dollar and water bills shot up by 35%, while water and sewer hookup fees reached $445. According to the latest census, 53% of El Alto residents still lack these basic services.6 After negotiations over the water crisis stalled, FEJUVE called a general strike on January 10. Protests paralyzed the city and shut down the international airport; some residents even seized Illimani offices and facilities. Two days later, the government was forced to scrap the contract.
Aguas del Illimani will likely bring charges against the government for canceling the contract at the International Center for Investment Settlement Disputes (ICISD), an arm of the World Bank. Bolivia already faces a pending $25 million suit at the ICISD for canceling Tunari’s contract in Cochabamba. An ICISD case brought by Illimani, however, would have the added irony that the International Finance Corporation, which is also an arm of the World Bank, happens to be a shareholder in Illimani. In the contorted logic of global capitalism, this means that the World Bank Group, which demanded and funded the privatization in the first place, and was then a partial owner, will also decide whether the government complied with the “deal.”
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), often working in concert with the Bank, has also played an insidious role in determining economic policy. In early 2003, the IMF recommended budget targets for Bolivia and suggested taxation as the best way to reach those goals. Then-Vice President Carlos Mesa told Jim Shultz of the Democracy Center that the first option, which was raising the taxes levied on private oil and gas companies, was immediately ruled-out. “The great alibi, the great argument of the multinational corporations, is legal security,” said Mesa. “The moment that you change your tax rules, you are changing the rules of the game that establish the possibility that those companies will come and invest in Bolivia.”7
The only way the government could meet the IMF’s requirements was by raising income taxes. At first, the government considered only raising the income tax of the richest Bolivians, but budget projections showed the country would still fall short of the IMF’s target. Finally, in early February 2003, Goni, who had recently been elected to a second presidential term, decided on a tax structure that included Bolivians earning only twice the minimum wage. The country erupted in protest, especially La Paz, where already-striking policemen joined the demonstrations and eventually had a daylong shootout with military forces in front of the Presidential Palace. Days later, the government was again forced to comply with the public’s demands and repealed the tax.
Álvaro García Linera, a La Paz–based analyst, notes that the water revolts in Cochabamba and El Alto along with other localized mobilizations—against coca eradication, for example—have been mostly reactive and defensive.8 Although the tax revolt fits this characterization, it differed in that it was national in scope. The so-called “gas war” in September-October 2003 that toppled the Goni Administration and its continuation in May this year was profoundly different from these previous uprisings. Instead of a responsive rearguard action, the movements—led by the insurgent communities of the altiplano (highland plateau) and the FEJUVE of El Alto—preempted the sale of the country’s vast natural gas reserves by foreign corporations. Moreover, the social movements—in an unprecedented alliance—united around a common set of demands that eventually included the unequivocal nationalization of the country’s hydrocarbons industry. “This constitutes a qualitative leap in the social movements’ construction of an alternative political project,” writes García. “They have gone from the defensive and the local, to a position that is national and on the offensive.”
The ongoing battle over the fate of the nation’s gas reserves had the adverse effect of destabilizing long-standing fault lines in Bolivian society: between the indigenous peoples of the impoverished highlands and elite groups from the resource-rich eastern and southern lowlands of the country. These elites and their well-heeled civic and business groups are intimately tied to private energy companies. They argue that the future of the gas reserves should not be held hostage by what they see as extremist indigenous movements. Most of these rightwing groups also advocate for greater regional autonomy and some even call for the resource-rich regions to secede from the western highlands.
When President Carlos Mesa was forced to resign last June, the movements scrambled to prevent a surrogate of these elites, Senate President Hormando Vaca Díez—the next in succession for the presidency—from taking office. Protestors traveled across the country from La Paz to Sucre—where Congress had met to escape the La Paz demonstrations—encircled the colonial city and managed to block Vaca’s appointment. In a dramatic development, the movements even counted on the tacit support of the military. At a press conference the military high command warned Congress “to listen to the voice of the people” and “popular demands.” Despite the military’s bloody history and Vaca’s overtures for repression, even the Armed Forces sought to prevent “a confrontation at all costs between brothers,” as one commander stated. (Juan Coro, a miner en route to Sucre, was killed, but reports indicate it was police that shot him, not the Armed Forces.) This restraint is all the more noteworthy because the U.S. Embassy had shown support for Vaca, and the military has a long-established history of bending to the will of the Embassy, which provides it with generous funding, weapons and training.
The Embassy forged this dependency of the military through the U.S.-sponsored Drug War. The protracted low-intensity conflict in Bolivia over U.S.-mandated coca eradication has led to widespread human rights abuses and the death of at least 33 cocaleros (coca growers) between 1998 and 2003. Under this violent repression, however, cocalero unions and the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) party led by congressman Evo Morales have scored important, yet partial, victories against the bellicose imposition of the Drug War.
Most recently, cocaleros reached an agreement with the government in October 2004 that allowed the marginal expansion of government-sanctioned coca in the Chapare, where most of the country’s “illicit” crop is grown. Perhaps more significantly, in 2002 the U.S.-trained and -financed Expeditionary Task Force (ETF), a paramilitary counterdrug unit, was disbanded due to widely publicized abuses. Using their primary pressure tactic of road blockades—which effectively shut down the entire country with military precision—the cocaleros have won government reprieves on coca eradication and the construction of more military bases.
The social movements, particularly when acting in concert, now wield a veritable extra-governmental veto over government policy; a veto that was once the exclusive preserve of the U.S. Embassy and transnational capital. Among their many accomplishments, Bolivians have blocked a sweetheart deal with private energy companies, reestablished public companies, raised the debate of nationalization, thwarted rightwing efforts to takeover the state and gained support for a new Constitution. Despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles cemented by reactionary forces within Bolivia and abroad, the social movements have succeeded at the very least in moving the goalpost: whether the issue is overturning facets of the neoliberal model, resisting the cycle of violence of the Drug War (increasingly subsumed by the War on Terror) or disregarding the strictures of Wall Street.
Official pronouncements of organizations in the social movements allude to the strategic assumption that the power of local elites and the more nebulous global networks of power are not merely symbiotic, but one and the same. The day after Vaca was forced to step aside, La Coordinadora, which remains one of the country’s most vibrant and active social movement organizations, released a revealing communiqué stating:
Through the enormous mobilization of Bolivians and the indigenous people throughout the country we have temporarily averted a grand maneuver by the transnational corporations, the U.S. government, the Santa Cruz oligarchy and the traditional Bolivian political parties…. This, compañeros, is no small thing: all the power of global capital was brought down against us yesterday, and we managed to stop it.9
Under conditions of Empire, which makes the already-limited spaces of political maneuverability even more contested, the current state of affairs in Bolivia brings to sharp focus some core, familiar questions for the Latin American left: what is the most effective path for national self-determination and social justice? Would a broader alliance including less politically progressive forces widen the appeal and viability of a transformative project, or would such an approach be doomed by compromise and stagnation? Broadly stated, the two competing left currents in Bolivia are generally associated with Evo Morales, on the one hand, and radical Aymara leader Felipe Quispe and his allies on the other.
Since the 2002 elections in which Morales lost by less than 2%, he and his cocalero-based party, the MAS, have focused on local elections as a springboard for winning the presidency. Quispe leads the much smaller Indigenous Pachakutik Movement (MIP) party and is closely linked to the militant Aymara communities of the altiplano. When asked about his relationship with Morales and the MAS, Quispe charged, “Evo Morales wants the presidency; we want our autonomy…. While we’re fighting in the streets, they are there, happy, on the balconies watching us, and then at the last minute when we’re about to overthrow the government they join us.”10
At the June 17 meeting of the MAS, its bases called for an allegiance, “principally, with other sectors of the social movements.”11 Morales has subsequently begun constructing an “anti-neoliberal coalition” for the December elections. But in an effort to gain middle class support, Morales’ first move was to ally (albeit unsuccessfully) with the Movement Without Fear (MSM) party, which opposes the nationalization of the hydrocarbons industry. It seems like the beginning of a now-familiar Latin American story.
Regardless of the electoral outcome, the social movements will continue to be a dominant, oppositional force no matter the government in power. Moreover, the all-or-nothing ties between political parties and the social movements are currently much more fluid and flexible in Bolivia than in other Latin American countries. But for now, the country’s fate is sealed in the outcome of the constituent assembly that will convene in 2006 to rewrite the Constitution. Only then will it be seen if the new country that emerges from that process will be capable of translating the demands from the street into the actions of the government.
About the Author
Teo Ballvé is a NACLA editor and a contributing news editor for the Resource Center of the Americas www.americas.org
Notes
1.Title from a popular Bolivian protest chant heard frequently in El Alto: “El Alto de pie, nunca de rodillas!” (“On your feet, El Alto! Never on your knees!). Also borrowed from Luis A. Gómez’s authoritative blow-by-blow account of the 2003 “Gas War”: Luis A. Gómez, El Alto de pie: Una insurreción aymara en Bolivia (La Paz: Self-published, 2004).
2. For a comprehensive account of Cochabamba’s “Water Revolt” see the information compiled by Jim Shultz of the Cochabamba-based Democracy Center, http://www.democracyctr.org/bechtel/.
3. Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, Revolutionary Horizons: Indigenous and National-Popular Struggles in Bolivia, 1781-2005, (New York: Verso, forthcoming).
4. Sonia Dávila, “In Another Vein,” NACLA Report on the Americas, “Bolivia: The Poverty of Progress,” Vol. 25, No. 1 (1991), p. 12.
5. See, http://www.democracyctr.org/bechtel/.
6. “Bolivia: Privatized Water Company Defeated,” NACLA Report on the Americas, “Social Movements: Building from the Ground Up,” Vol. 38, No. 5 (2005), pp. 41-43.
7. Jim Shultz, “Deadly Consequences: The IMF and Bolivia’s ‘Black February’,” (Cochabamba: Democracy Center, April 2005), http://www.democracyctr.org/publications/imfreport.htm .
8. Álvaro García Linera, “La segunda batalla por la nacionalización del gas,” El Juguete Rabioso (La Paz), Vol. 5 No. 131, p. 6.
9. “Comunicado de la Coordinadora de Defensa del Gas,” June 10, 2005, posted on The Narcosphere: http://narcosphere.narconews.com/story/2005/6/10/165054/060 .
10.“Evo Morales quiere la presidencia; nosotros, nuestra autonomía: Felipe Quispe,” Interview, Crónica (Mexico), June 10, 2005.
11.Walter Chávez, “El MAS y el MSM optan por un frente tradicional,” El Juguete Rabioso (La Paz), Vol. 5, No. 132, June 25, 2005, p. 8
