He has a gentle face and an engaging smile; the Americans like to call him names. First he was branded a “communist”, then a “drug trafficker”. But nowadays it’s the more elevated “narcoterrorist”.
Evo Morales is the head of the Movimento Accion Socialism party and president of the Confederación Unica de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia — essentially, head of the coca-growers. And the branding, and the refusal to sit down and talk with him, is there despite the fact that Morales has chosen the democratic road, standing for election and coming second in the July presidential poll.
So far there has been little reward for this choice. There is, instead, a sad impasse. On the one side, on the basis that coca is the derivative for cocaine, the United States says that the coca eradication policy must continue. On the other, Morales argues that more coca should be legalised as it is used for medicinal, traditional and other uses — such as the famous Mate de Coca (tea) that is said to have rejuvenating qualities, especially in the face of the altitude sickness that greets most visitors to the extraordinary Andean capital of La Paz.
The Bolivian government is caught somewhere in between, as it tries to appease both its domestic and international masters. According to a sympathetic report in the Wall Street Journal recently, it is hesitatingly considering a study of the commercial viability of expanding the production of legal coca despite opposition from Washington. Rocks and hard places come to mind.
Though both arrived much more recently, independence and democracy have been much kinder to South Africa, at least so far. Both have to confront the particular challenges of contemporary nation state democratic government in the face of intense global economic and political forces.
Speaking two weeks ago at the start of a Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) organised meeting of Palestinian and Israeli academics and activists, the keynote speaker, Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel, spoke intriguingly about the acute dilemmas of the contemporary nation state. Palestinians and Israelis are staring into the same abyss that South Africans faced in 1985; admirably, the meeting was sharing the experience of the South African escape. Manuel’s paper, titled Reconstructing a Divided Country Under Globalisation: Challenges and Possibilities, described the “restricted policy room” imposed by international financial institutions such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Western powers of the G8. Manuel told his audience that “while there was a verbal enthusiasm for the termination of apartheid and the establishment of democracy, this did not translate into huge flows of donor aid”. Then, the delicate addendum: “Which may be just as well — it provided us with a bit of additional policy room.”
Of course his detractors from the left would argue vigorously that he — and President Thabo Mbeki — have failed to make the most of this “additional policy room”. Indeed some of us would say that long before Manuel’s appointment, it was the Mandela government that could and should have made more radical use of the political global goodwill that existed; that the great forces of contemporary globalisation could have, in Manuel’s words, “tolerated policy nuances, if this was deemed a prerequisite for a buy-in by the people”.
Which brings me back to wonderful but troubled Bolivia. With little or no space it is slowly suffocating, trapped by the trilemma pressures of trans- national corporations, the international finance institutions and the US. This triumvirate has made it clear that it will not tolerate any “nuances”. Quite the reverse in fact. Public spending must be kept to the minimum; loans even more so; and coca must be eradicated. The results are painful to behold. Earlier this year the government felt compelled to increase taxes to raise the money it needed for social expenditure (at the behest of the IMF). The result was that a dissident police force took the opportunity to lead the protest against the tax change, which in two distressing days, February 12 and 13, resulted in the deaths of almost 30 people. The army stayed loyal, thankfully, though the sight of police and army exchanging deadly shots in front of the presidential palace was as sobering as it was dangerous to the democratic government.
Bolivia is now facing a dual political and economic crisis. There is dispute about which is the cause and which is the effect. A significant contributing factor, advanced not just by Morales, but by local civil society organisations as well as far-away yet respected liberal commentators such as the Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs, is the policy of the US.
In recent years, says Sachs writing in the Financial Times in April, Bolivia made the “fateful, perhaps fatal, mistake” in implementing a US demand to eradicate coca leaf. Bolivia agreed to comply by reducing coca cultivation from more than 33 000ha in 1997 to less than 8 000ha in 2001, according to the United Nations. For about 70 000 families, and more than 200 000 dependents according to Sachs, this meant a miserable descent into even greater poverty and naturally greater social disarray and instability.
I heard the Bolivian Vice-President, Carlos Mesa, speak about the events of February just a few weeks afterwards in Atlanta at the start of a conference on democracy in Latin America. Mesa is — or was — Bolivia’s best-known television journalist and presenter — a charismatic and intellectual version of Larry King — brought in by Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (“Goni” as every person and every headline refers to the Bolivian president) to add popularity to his 2002 presidential election campaign and to lead the assault on the chronic corruption that contaminates Bolivian bureaucracy.
Both are decent men, intent on a package of governance reforms, such as a transparency law aimed at rebuilding trust in the government. These are important reforms in terms of changing the rules of the political game. But I cannot help wondering if this is “software” compared with the “hardware” of the predominant issues of political economy — the fiscus and the social consequences of privatisation — terms that the architect of the HSRC meeting, Wilmot James, used to apply when he was my boss at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa. Everywhere I travel and work I see the same thing: a “hyper-inflation” of law, to use the expression of one Bolivian MP, but with little impact on the core issues of poverty and social exclusion.
As Mesa spoke from the heart in a manner that no professional politician could or would, I felt my eyes well up with the sadness of Mesa’s crie de cœur. Sadly, there is no transcript, but what he said was a plea for nation state democracy, trapped in a corner by the unaccountable power of global forces.
It is in this light that I have to concede that Manuel and his policies look a damn sight better when viewed from the high altitude of the Bolivian Andes. When he says, “a country in fiscal surplus with a level of domestic savings sufficient to finance its own development has far more policy room” I begin now to see what he means and to see it in a more favourable light. Whereas before I saw weak deference and sell-out, now I am more inclined to see strategy and wit. For however intense the challenges facing South Africa, I know which democracy I would currently bet on.
Morales can pursue a dual strategy — part parliamentary and part extra-parliamentary. If the former fails, he can up the ante of the latter. But Goni’s dilemma is far more acute than that of Morales. The US is giving him no space to manoeuvre. Can Goni summon the courage to stand up to it? Why should he be made to face such an awkward situation? And, how pitiful a conclusion to reach, that for both Goni and Morales the democratic path seems more likely to end in failure. In comparison, South Africa is as fortunate as it is stable.
Archive: Previous columns by Richard Calland