Bolivia. You land at 4 000m above sea level, so it is not just the scenery that takes the breath away.
Surrounding the country’s international airport are the poverty stricken shanty towns of the world’s highest capital city, La Paz.
Like Cape Town, the airport’s location is such that you cannot evade the poverty as you head towards town. Buildings fight for space with jutted rock and a cobweb of narrow streets accommodating government offices and the country’s Congress.
In October this year the city was the dramatic setting for the ‘forced” resignation of a democratically elected government. Not the self-lampooning stereotype of the 1970s military coup, of which Bolivia had more than its fair share, but the intoxicating clamour of social mobilisation. Protesters poured down from El Alto, taking over the streets of La Paz and cutting it off from the outside world for more than a week.
The forced resignation of president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozado (Goni, as he is universally known) discomforts the defenders of liberal democracy in the region. Writing in The Washington Post recently, Goni himself argued that ‘mob rule had overwhelmed respect for Bolivia’s democratic process”. But his army killed 60 people in a week and Goni may still face the criminal charge of massacre that has been laid against him.
Appalled, a group of middle-class intellectuals went on hunger strike against the government’s apparent shoot-to-kill policy. Goni’s vice-president, Carlos Mesa, withdrew his support and within the week, on October 17, Goni fled to the United States.
Unwittingly and possibly unfairly, Goni had become a symbol of a desiccated, anachronistic and out-of-touch political class and the receptacle for a string of interlocking complaints.
The first being that Goni was a lackey of US commercial and political interests — this was encouraged by the American accent with which Goni speaks Spanish. The second relates to coca and the long-running controversy about its eradication in the Chapare region of central Bolivia.
As former Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs has commented, Bolivia’s ‘impoverished peasant coca cultivators are seen by the US not as poor, indigenous people trying to stay alive in a region otherwise without jobs, but as drug traffickers that need to be taught a lesson through military force”.
Ironically, many of the illegal coca growers flooded to the Chapare after they were laid off when many mines were closed during the structural adjustment phase of the mid-1980s — a policy designed and implemented by the then minister of planning, Sanchez de Lozado himself.
But the third, more interesting and important, relates to natural resources of a different, subterranean kind. In the past decade huge reserves of natural gas have been discovered in Bolivia; economic prosperity is now a tantalising prospect for Latin America’s poorest country.
But how to turn these natural resources into wealth for the nation? Goni decided that the answer was to pipe the natural gas to Mexico and California through Chile — the historical enemy that stole Bolivia’s coastline in the late 19th century. To his detractors on the left, this was a typically arrogant and provocative decision, taken with barely any consultation with Congress, let alone the broader public. Information dissemination about the rationale for the policy was poor and misinformation flourished.
To Evo Morales, the original leader of the coca growers, it represented a heaven-sent opportunity to reposition himself strategically. The coca constituency is too narrow and too easily demonised because of its link with cocaine. Morales offers an incisive critique of the gas issue, arguing that the referendum planned for early next year should be a referendum about ownership, control and domestic industrialisation and not just the method of exportation.
Capturing the mood of the global new left, Morales argues for a return to democratic ownership and for the gas to be processed in Bolivia so that Bolivians can maximise the profits rather than transnational companies.
This is familiar ground. In 2000 the American company Bechtel was expelled when it raised water prices by 35% after having bought the privatised water concession. So in this Bolivian microcosm of a global struggle, Morales has tasted victory before, when his people won their ‘water war”.
Yet it is unclear how far Morales was behind the protests of October. There is an urban legend that when, after Goni’s fall, Morales met with Lula de Silva, the former radical trade unionist president of Brazil, Lula’s advice to him was to ‘be patient”. To moderates, the fact that Morales is even talking to Lula encourages the belief that Morales is determined to stick to the democratic route he chose when standing for president in the 2002 election (coming a close second with 21% of the votes).
Nonetheless, the property-owning middle class of Bolivia is alarmed by the political upheaval of the past year. It is abundantly clear that as well as regional and race dimensions it is also a period of deep class cleavage. Many refer to it as a ‘special period” of history, one that may have to get worse before it gets better.
It has hard to say that this is the end of a ancien régime, given that democracy only arrived in the early 1980s after a long and turbulent period of military dictatorships, but it feels like it. Certainly the old political class is in trouble, as the leaders of most of the mainstream political parties recognise. Recent polling shows that Bolivians’ trust in the government stands at just 3%.
President Mesa’s personal popularity means that he has a short window of opportunity to reinvent the government and its relationship with the people. He is an unusual person to find as president of a country — a former investigative journalist, the best known in the country, Goni invited him on to his 2002 electoral ticket to add popularity and credibility to his campaign’s anti-corruption pledge. Picture, if you can, a rather more suave version of Max du Preez at the helm of South Africa in, say, late 1993.
After October 17 Mesa selected an entirely new Cabinet of non-aligned individuals, and astutely distanced himself from Congress and the now isolated battery of former coalition partners and traditional opposition parties.
But his prognosis may not be bright. There is no consensus around the question that the gas referendum will pose. Felipe Quispe, the radical leader of the indigenous movement, and the more dogmatic trade union leaders, presented Mesa with a list of demands as long as the Amazon. There is certainly no way he can meet them in the 90 days that Quispe has set.
Some say he may not make it to Christmas. More likely, after the carnival period in February, Mesa may meet his own Ides of March. The doomsday scenario is that the eastern, natural gas-laden part of the country loses patience with the boisterous Highlanders and tries to secede.
A civil war is not beyond the realms of grim fantasy. A parable of our times, Bolivia’s crisis of representative democracy is as much a product of the failure of a global economic model as it is of competing domestic class interests. The face of ‘new” politics, Morales, as much as the old order, faces his own testing strategic choices. Great leadership, as well as international solidarity, is needed if democracy is to yet survive and one day flourish.
The writer reports on his recent visit to Bolivia, his third in the past year working as a consultant on anti-corruption law and policy