Bolivia: when is a democracy not a democracy?

BOLIVIA is a perfect democracy: it fully respects two fundamental human rights: freedom of the press and political freedom. That the rights to work, housing, health, education, food and many others have been systematically eroded seemingly does not diminish its democratic perfection. Bolivia has around 8.5 million people and is blessed with some of the most fertile subsoil on Earth. For 200 years a tiny, moneyed minority has hogged its wealth and dominated its politics while 60% of Bolivians live below the poverty line. There is discrimination against the Amerindian majority, child mortality is at frightening levels, unemployment is endemic, illiteracy the norm and 51% of the people do not have electricity. But none of that detracts from the important fact that Bolivia is thought of as a democracy.

So when, on 11-12 October, the Bolivian president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Losada, ordered the army to use heavy machine-gun fire against demonstrators, killing 60 and wounding hundreds (1), Condoleezza Rice, security adviser to the United States president, made a statement. At the Interamerican Press Association in Chicago, she warned demonstrators against any attempt to remove by force a “democratically elected government” (2). Yet on 11 April 2002, when Hugo Chávez, the democratically elected president of Venezuela, was briefly deposed by soldiers supported by an elite and the media, the US quickly recognised the coup on the false pretext that Chávez had “ordered fire on his own people”.

Sanchez de Losada, known to Bolivians as “the butcher”, then naturally sought refuge in Miami, arriving on 17 October. The US has no plans to try him for crimes against humanity. Why does he deserve to be tried? He was minister for planning from 1986-89, advised by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, and he subjected Bolivia to the shock therapy that the US demanded. Tens of thousands of state sector workers were laid off. During his first term as president, this ultraliberal (one of the richest men in Bolivia) agreed, again under US pressure, to enforce a coca eradication programme that ruined hundreds of thousands of farmers without providing them with any alternative income. They are now in permanent revolt.

He also undertook to privatise almost all the state sector: railways, mines, oil, electricity, telecommunications, airlines and water. US firms bought up most of it. Water distribution in Cochabamba was privatised and handed over to the US company Bechtel (one of the great beneficiaries of the privatisation currently being carried out by the occupying forces in Iraq). In April 2000 this led to a popular rising that forced Bechtel to depart, a government u-turn and the renationalisation of water.

Out of the conflicts of the coca growers and Cochabamba, there emerged an uncommon popular leader: Evo Morales, 42, a self-educated indigenous Aymara and a prominent unionist. He has been leading the peasants ruined by coca eradication, who have the most reason to be angry. Across Latin America and within the worldwide movement seeking alternatives to globalisation, he is now a highly popular personality, figurehead of an indigenous peoples’ movement emerging as a major force in Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Paraguay. Along with another indigenous leader, Felipe Quispe of the Pachakuti Indigen ous Movement, Morales and his organisation, the Movement for Socialism, led the offensive against the neoliberal policies of Sanchez de Losada and his social democrat ally, Jaime Paz Zamora: these two, working with a group of multinationals, were about to tackle the next item on their agenda, selling off Bolivia’s gas reserves to the US. This eventually caused the explosion of demonstrations.

Bolivians have had enough after centuries of grief. The export of Bolivia’s natural resources of silver, tin and oil did nothing to help the poor and never allowed Bolivia to modernise. Just as the Ecuadorians rose against Jamil Mahuad in January 2000, the Peruvians against Alberto Fujimori in November 2000, and the Argentinians against Fernando de La Rua in December 2001, the Bolivians, in overthrowing Sanchez de Losada, are rejecting an economic model that has fed corruption, driven millions of people into poverty, and increased social exclusion all over Latin America.

Ignacio Ramonet

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Translated by Gulliver Cragg

(1) International Herald Tribune, Paris, 15 October 2003. The repression killed 78 and wounded several hundred; 34 died and 205 were wounded in February 2003, when workers and police rose against a new tax on low incomes. Not one French newspaper put the news on the front page.