27th July, another Bolivian anniversary

This is a country very keen on its anniversaries and its history, a country with a big chip on its shoulders keen to emphasise national unity and create the semblance of a nation state. This, even though the state does not get to all those corners of the country where there is no health care, no education, no police presence, no justice…

So, anniversaries cover every single important event in Bolivia and in Latin America’s history. It was from current Bolivia after all, that the Latin American liberation from Spain was instigated exactly 200 years ago. There are, however, less memorable anniversaries; Bolivian defeats in the Pacific War, the Chaco War…just some of the many Bolivian defeats at war with her neighbours.

This time the anniversary is mine. I arrived here exactly on 27th May 2008 and I am now only weeks away from leaving (if they let me out of the country but that’s another story). In the interim, political events have been exhilarating (some) and depressing (others). These are some of them.

I arrived in the middle of a political campaign like I have never experienced before. Having taunted the president for endless months accusing him of being a ‘dictator’ scared to put his position under the scrutiny of the electorate, the opposition won the right to expel Evo Morales through a recall referendum – the first such event in Bolivian political history – to be held on 10th August.

I have never seen a more ruthless, unpleasant, vile campaign. One accepts that lies and politics are one and only thing. But in Bolivia, I heard open calls to the military to overthrow the president on live radio and TV, accusations of fraud before, during and after the referendum, in the most biased media campaign I have ever witnessed. It was a truly bizarre experience.

The result in favour of the president (with a 67 % support nationwide, even greater than expected) was followed by a mature call for dialogue with the opposition prefects. Not a chance. Those who before the election took the mantle of guardians of democracy, instigated from the regions a violent uprising led by violent thugs – racists and not a few neo-fascists paid by the opposition and the infamous civic committees in Santa Cruz – designed to destabilise the government, force a military intervention and provoke a few deaths that could serve as the basis to overthrow the same government that two thirds of the electorate had just legitimised with its support. The provocation went as far as to lead to the massacre of peasants in the northern department of Pando in the middle of September.

Fortunately for Bolivia, the events of 2003, when a previous president had to leave the country, did not repeat themselves. Instead, the government chopped off the head of the snake, so to speak, when the US ambassador was expelled from Bolivia, leaving the opposition prefects without a political rudder. Very soon things got back to a tense normality. Along with the ambassador, the DEA and USAID were also soon expelled from the country. The US response was swift and petty, suspending Bolivia’s special trade agreement ATPDA, something that new president Obama has only confirmed. Oh well, no surprises there in spite of some initial high hopes that Obama’s presidency symbolised a new beginning for US-Latin American relations.

For me, the second ‘historic’ moment took place on 21st October in the presidential square, Plaza Murillo. As the country has become accustomed to expect, there was a blocking of the law needed to call a referendum that would put to the Bolivian people the constitution drafted by 255 men and women elected for the purpose in 2006 (after many, some would say illegal changes made on it by Congress and a group of negotiators that included the opposition prefects in October 2008).

I have never seen a demonstration like this. Some estimate that as many as 100,000 people from all over the country marched on to La Paz to demand from congress their right to vote. They came, led by their own president, and they stayed for 30 hours outside congress, chanting, dancing, and listening to speeches. Every now and then the president himself, surrounded by the leaders of the social movements, had to make an appeal for calm, especially at 6 am when a group of miners, dynamite in hand were ready to storm congress. At last there was a law and it would be January 25th 2009 when Bolivia approved the new constitution that many hope will be the basis for refounding the state. We will know how when, after new elections in December, the new plurinational assembly – this is the new name for congress – begins to work.

The shine was rubbed off this process of change when days after the new constitution was approved, the head of the ‘nationalised’ oil and gas company was arrested after being involved in the worst corruption scandal of this administration. That the head of YPFB was someone with the total confidence of the president didn’t help. Oops, the MAS appeared to be not quite as virtuous as we thought.

At last (and at least), after such high level social and political confrontation, you could think that it was time for the country to pacify itself. Not a chance, I’m afraid. Only a couple of months later, antiterrorist police arrested two members of a terrorist cell (three others died in the shooting that ensued during the arrest) in Santa Cruz, just meters away from where I had been staying a couple of weeks earlier. There is more than enough evidence to link them to opposition leaders and businessmen from the Santa Cruz region. It seems that the same forces at work behind the recent Hondurean coup will not give up. Will they ever?

This month we have just celebrated the bicentennial of Bolivia’s role in the war of liberation from Spain. Celebrations are over and now begins the race towards the December elections that will continue the process of change that was set in motion with the victory of MAS in December 2005. It is difficult to know what might happen. All we can guarantee is that this will be another hot pre election period full of surprises.

General elections will take place in December

Apologies for not having written for a little while; I have had too many distractions lately.

For those of you who haven’t been following Bolivian politics in the last couple of months, you might not know that the approval through referendum last January of a new Constitution established that general elections would take place on December 6. This would give the current president, if he wins, one final term in office instead of the two the new constitution establishes. The acceptance of only one term was one of the last minute compromises Evo Morales had to make back in October in order to unblock the opposition’s refusal to let the constitutional referendum take place.

Now we come to another attempt to paralyse congress. For any public consultation to take place, Congress (or the now renamed plurinational assembly) has to enact a law calling for such consultation. But, as has now become customary, the opposition have dug their heels and refused to support the law, reaching the point of walking out of congress last week. The reasons are many but the real intention has always been to make the country as ungovernable as possible preventing, if possible, the elections from taking place.

Two are the main reasons why the opposition wouldn’t approve the law calling for elections in December. The first is that the law would give the vote to the various millions of Bolivians living abroad, a process that would take place through the embassies. The accusation from the opposition is that, the embassies being the institutional representatives of the state, would not guarantee the lack of electoral fraud. What? What other institution can possibly administer the electoral process abroad? I’ve always gone to my embassy…In any case, support abroad is the only hope the opposition has of denting the government’s majority so why oppose it, I wonder. But that’s another matter.

The second reason is that according to them the electoral roll is inaccurate and therefore a tool that permits the government to commit fraud. It is interesting that fraud is an accusation one constantly hears from the opposition when every single legal popular consultation since the election of Evo Morales has had international observers and been declared clean and fair. This, by the way, is more than can be said for previous elections and for the illegal autonomic consultations that took place in a number of opposition departments last year where the president of the civic committee of Santa Cruz is well known for his remarks about how in Santa Cruz they didn’t need any foreigners telling them how to organise a referendum. Fraud? Most definitely.

Back to the electoral roll. It is obvious that there are mistakes in it like in all of them but an audit commissioned by the electoral court to the Organisation of American States last year determined that Bolivia’s roll is 97 % accurate and as such, the best in Latin America. Yet, the only possible way out of this crisis has been for the president, who had joined the social movements in a hunger strike demanding that congress gives the people of Bolivia the right to go to the polls, to divert funds earmarked for a presidential plane to the creation of a new biometric electoral roll for the 4.3 million Bolivians with the right to vote.

So why the opposition? The answer has to be the same as always. This country’s opposition is an obstacle to democratic practice, not a guarantor of it. The opposition belongs to a different political era where votes could be bought and public office was a way to self-enrichment. The opposition’s strategy is not to shape or contribute to the process of change in Bolivia, it is to make the country as ungovernable as possible by any means necessary, including the paralysis of congress and the provocation of civil unrest, while denouncing as loudly as possible to any international institution that will listen, that the country is descending into dictatorship.

No wonder new graffiti near the house says “the electoral census is clean, the right is not”.

Rebels no more

By Stephen Gibbs
Central America correspondent, BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7947378.stm

Historians attempting to write a definitive history of how the the Cold War ended need to leave plenty of space for some unexpected appendices.

Take what happened on Sunday night in El Salvador.

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), once targeted by the US government as a threat to the world as we knew it, whose defeat was seen as being worth billions of dollars and thousands of lives, gains power.


The young revolutionary leaders who once attracted the attention of the Kremlin or the CIA are now middle-aged men

The US administration sends its congratulations, and says it "looks forward to working with the new government".

The man who will finally bring the party of former Marxist guerrillas from the jungle to the presidential palace is not perhaps the person the Pentagon analysts of the 1980s expected.

Mauricio Funes has never been seen in army fatigues, or carrying an AK-47. He likes a grey suit and designer spectacles. His weapon of choice is a natural eloquence, and a glowing CV from his former employer - CNN.

His view of the American administration is yet more evidence of how the world, and the White House, has changed.

Mr Funes is an admirer of President Barack Obama. He even used his image in his election campaign - something the local US embassy thought was taking things too far.

Reagan's strife

The FMLN's journey from guerrilla army to government has many parallels to the voyage made by another group of (confusingly similarly abbreviated) left-wing rebels, over the border in Nicaragua.

The FSLN, or Sandinista Nation Liberation Front, took power in 1979, establishing a revolutionary government.

Throughout the 1980s the Reagan administration, fearing communism in its back yard, poured money and weapons into the hands of the group's opponents, collectively called the Contras, to try to unseat the rebels.

Finally, the Sandinistas were voted out of power in 1990.

But fast-forward to 2006, and they are back. The group's historic and once-feared leader, Daniel Ortega, is president of Nicaragua.

He undoubtedly remains an irritation to plenty in the US government and elsewhere, who still question his commitment to democracy. Yet it is hard to imagine President Obama spending much of his time worrying about Mr Ortega, as President Reagan once did.

New Cold War?

Plenty has changed. The young revolutionary leaders who once attracted the attention of the Kremlin or the CIA are now middle aged men.

If age has not tempered their radicalism, years in opposition have done so.

Since it was established as a legal political party, El Salvador's FMLN has spent 17 lonely years out of power, watching three of its candidates for president be soundly defeated by the conservative Arena party.

The radicals were left almost voiceless as El Salvador became the most steadfast ally of the US in Latin America.

They stood by as Salvadorean troops were sent to Iraq, and the US embargo on Cuba - where many FMLN guerrillas had trained - was not opposed.

Those years led the the party to rethink its strategy, and drove it to Mauricio Funes.

Some suggest that he is a front man, and point to the the fact that his running mate is Salvador Sanchez, a former guerrilla commander.

Others suggest that a new Cold War in Latin America is beginning, only with different protagonists: Venezuela's Hugo Chavez cast as the new Khrushchev, gathering acolytes into his fold.

With the economic crisis putting real pressure on the economies and people of Latin America, there will be plenty of opportunity for division and radicalism.

But look at Mr Funes, and it is tempting to believe that the real war is over.