Frederico Fuentes
Facing extradition proceedings to stand trial in Bolivia for the deaths of 67 people during the October 2003 popular uprising that forced his resignation, former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada told the October 22 Miami Herald that his country was in the grip of a "lynch-mob environment".
Sanchez de Lozada's sentiment was echoed in the following days by representatives of the big foreign-owned oil and gas companies operating in Bolivia, the pro-business civic committees in the cities of Santa Cruz and Tarija, and by Carlos Mesa, Sanchez de Lozada's vice-president and successor as president.
Branko Marinkovic, president of Santa Cruz's Business Federation, said: "Let us be frank, in Bolivia, we can no longer talk of a crisis, but rather chaos... We live in a chaotic situation which can only have one solution: confrontation and disintegration."
These comments have been provoked by three important events that have taken place in Bolivia during October.
Three pivotal events
On October 3 a memorandum of understanding was signed by President Mesa and the cocaleros (coca-leaf growers) in the Chapare region, near the city of Cochabamba — known as the Tropic of Cochabamba. The agreement allows a temporary halt to the forced eradication of coca crops and the cultivation of 3200 hectares of coca crops in the Chapare. Under the MOU, this land will be divided between the 23,000 members of the Six Federations of the Tropic of Cochabamba, the main coca growers' federation.
During the truce, a study on the demand for legal coca consumption will be carried out, as requested by the cocaleros.
The agreement came in the wake of the death of a cocalero as a result of a confrontation between growers and the military in the town of Bustillos on September 28 when the military resumed forced eradication of coca crops at the demand of the US embassy. Enraged by the killing, thousands of growers surrounded military outposts in the Chapare region, leaving the government with little choice but to temporarily halt the forced eradication program.
The agreement was celebrated by Evo Morales, the cocalero leader, who declared the result "a product of many years of struggle with previous governments, who were subject to the will of the US embassy". Since 1988, the US has pushed its program of "zero coca", an attempt to forcibly eliminate coca production, on successive Bolivian governments.
The second event was the decision by the overwhelming majority of the Bolivian parliament on October 14 to put Sanchez de Lozada — a mining tycoon — and 15 members of his government on trial for the deaths of protesters during last year's uprising. Pressure from the victims' families and other protesters, who surrounded the parliament building as the legislators met, and vowed not to leave until they won justice for the victims.
The final, and decisive, event was the vote by the lower house of parliament (Chamber of Deputies) on October 20 to reject Mesa's proposed hydrocarbon bill and instead begin discussion of a new bill presented by the parliamentary commission on economic development.
Bolivia, South America's poorest nation, in which 70% of the population lives below the poverty line, is rich in natural gas, with reserves of around 800 billion cubic metres. Of its current annual output of four billion cubic metres, 75% is exported.
The new bill was written in consultation with leaders of the social movements, and is supported by Morales' Movement Towards Socialism (MAS), the main opposition party in parliament.
If it is passed, all the existing contracts favourable to the foreign companies would be nullified and the royalty on natural gas production would be raised 50%. The companies that dominate Bolivia's natural gas production — the British-owned BG Group (formerly British Gas), BP, France's Total, Repsol of Spain — currently pay a royalty of 18% on gas they buy at 12 times less than that sold back to Bolivians.
The bill also proposes that a new state-owned company, PetroBolivia, would acquire a monopoly over gas exports.
Morales calls the bill's proposals "nationalisation by right", while the US government, Mesa, and the energy companies claim it is "confiscatory".
While preliminary reading of the bill was accepted almost unanimously by legislators on October 20, the government parties have stated that they aim to amend the bill so as to produce a new law that is comes closer in content to the government's rejected bill.
The day after its preliminary passage, government legislator Luis Eduardo Siles questioned whether it would have been passed had the parliament not been "besieged by social groups". This was a reference to the thousands of miners and peasants, mostly coca growers from Chapare, who had marched on La Paz to demand that parliament adopt the new bill.
The three events reflect the fact that today in Bolivia the capitalist ruling class and its traditional governing parties are unable to maintain political stability while trying to implement the neoliberal economic agenda favoured by their US imperial masters.
Mobilisations on the rise
Since 2000, the various social movements across Bolivia have been on the ascendency. The initial break came with the defeat of the attempted privatisation of water in Cochabamba. Faced with the situation where Cochabambans would have had to pay the giant US construction company Bechtel even for the rainwater they collected, the workers and peasants of the region rose up and in April 2000 forced the government to back down.
Since then Bolivia has lived through tumultuous times, as the poor have time and time again risen up, from the coca war in the Chapare and Yungas regions to opposition to Sanchez de Lozada's attempt in February 2003 to tax the poor.
These struggles have been not just against aspects of the neoliberal agenda, but to defend Bolivia's national sovereignty from Washington's pressure and from the plundering of its immense gas resources by foreign corporations. They culminated in the massive popular mobilisations that forced Sanchez de Lozada to resign in October 2003.
His replacement by Mesa put a temporary halt to the mobilisations, as the key organising groups — the MAS, the Confederation of Peasant Unions (CSUTCB), led by Aymara Felipe Quispe, and the Bolivian trade union federation (COB), under the newly elected left-wing leadership of Jamie Solares, gave Mesa a three-month truce to fulfill his promise of a fundamental shift away from the neoliberal policies of governments.
The truce came to an end in April, when the COB and the CSUTCB, declared Mesa's proposed July gas referendum a fraud, as the option of nationalisation, supported by 80% of the population was not on the ballot.
The MAS, which continued to give "critical support" to Mesa, called on their followers to participate in the referendum, but to vote in a way contrary to that proposed by Mesa.
However, resentment among the MAS's traditional base, the cocaleros, as well as sections of the working class, grew as Morales watered down his criticisms of Mesa in order to win the support of the wealthier middle class in the December municipal elections. Morales' support for Mesa gave Sanchez de Lozada's former deputy the credibility he desperately needed to restore political stability to the country. Mesa hoped that this would be consolidated through a decisive vote in favour of his referendum proposals.
The soldiers' attack on the cocaleros on September 28 seems to have led Morales to end his backing for Mesa. Since then Morales has again taken up the banner of nationalisation of the gas industry, albeit in a more moderate form than the COB-CSUTCB call for outright expulsion of the foreign energy companies.
Morales once again is calling his supporters to mobilise in the streets in order to pressure the Mesa government to cede to the movement's demands — or be removed from office.
The mobilisation in La Paz, beginning in Morales strongest base, the cocalero heartland of the Chapare, was an indication of this shift.
The recent mobilisation was also significant for several other reasons. One was the role of the mining cooperativists, in essence independent contractors, who were crucial to the complete shut down of La Paz. According to two Bolivian activists, Lina Britto and Lucia Suarez, in an October 22 article published on the Counterpunch website, unlike last year when the miners arrived as 'last-minute reinforcements", this time they "acted as a vanguard" in the mobilisations. The miners were able to force the government to approve allocating US$7 million towards reactivating some of Bolivia's closed tin mines.
Another key difference with last year's mobilisations was the fact that this time, according to Britto and Suarez, "the militant actions of urban, peasant, and mining sectors did not spread to progressive urban middle classes, who are firmly behind the Mesa regime".
From Green Left Weekly, November 3, 2004.
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