- Sundaram
I n the troubled times we live in there are few greater pleasures possible for most ordinary people than the sight of US Imperialism getting a bloodied nose. That is happening on an almost daily basis in Iraq now and all power to the Iraqi people for their wonderful accomplishments.
But in mid-October this year Uncle Sam and his local stooges got a public thrashing in another part of the world too – in faraway Bolivia. Little publicized by the cross-eyed global media the tumultuous events in this small and desperately poor Andean nation are making waves among populations throughout Latin America and beyond.
In a nutshell what happened in Bolivia this October was the ouster of an extremely unpopular President, elected to power just last year with ample help and intervention by the United States. Faced with a nationwide insurrection against his aggressive neo-liberal economic policies, President Sanchez de Lozada finally packed his bags and fled the country along with his defense and interior ministers.
A business tycoon turned politician, widely reviled as the ‘Gringo’ for speaking Spanish with a thick American accent, Lozada and his men, not surprisingly, found shelter in that first refuge of all international scoundrels – the United States of America.
Sanchez de Lozada was replaced by Carlos Mesa, his vice-president, who withdrew his support from the former government after massacres of unarmed protesters had brought Bolivia to the brink of revolution. Mesa announced the formation of a new cabinet of “technocrats,” which he called a government of ‘national unity’. Protest leaders have decided to give Mesa a grace period of 90 days to undo Lozada’s policies or face the wrath of the people yet again.
Though there is a much longer history to the ongoing social upheavals in Bolivia the immediate provocation for the recent national uprising had to do with a move by the Lozada regime to privatize the exploitation of Bolivia’s gas reserves. The deal involved building a US$ 5 billion pipeline to export the gas to the US and Mexico via a port in Chile. Critics of the deal charge that it will yield super-profits for energy multinationals and enrich a small group of local businessmen, while robbing Bolivia of its most valuable natural resource. According to them Bolivia could earn much more by renationalizing the natural gas fields and liquefying the gas itself than by implementing Lozada’s plan to locate the liquefaction plant at an export terminal in Chile or Peru.
Fed up with over two decades of privatization of public utilities and fire sale of national resources, Bolivia’s farmers and workers unions along with the general population rose up to challenge the dubious gas deal. Brutal military and police crackdowns on agitating miners and farmers, in which several dozen unarmed protestors were killed, only served to mobilize even greater numbers of people against the regime.
Finally, in a spectacular display of people’s power, tens of thousands of peasants and workers converged on the Bolivian capital La Paz and laid siege to the city bringing all life to a standstill. A general strike called by the Confederation of Bolivian Workers (COB) paralyzed the country while citizens groups took over police stations and students occupied universities.
“This uprising of the Bolivian people has resulted not only from the issue of natural gas, but from a collection of many issues; from discrimination and from marginalization, but fundamentally from the exhaustion of neoliberalism” said Evo Morales, leader of Bolivia’s coca farmers federation which along with the United Confederation of Workers and Peasants of Bolivia (CSUTCB) spearheaded the mass rebellion. Morales narrowly failed to defeat Lozada in last year’s presidential election after the US government issued open warnings of retaliation against Bolivia if Morale’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party came to power.
The public humiliation and ouster of the Bolivian President is now a particularly hard slap in the face for not just the United States, which backed him to the hilt, but also the International Monetary Fund, which held up Bolivia as a great model for the rest of the world during Lozada’s first term in office between 1993-1997. At that time Lozada sharply accelerated the privatization of the state sector, particularly the country’s petroleum industry and auctioned off the country’s resources and essential services, including telephone and railroads, at bargain prices.
These policies were hugely unpopular with the Bolivian people who faced growing unemployment and social misery due to the closure of public utilities and imposition of IMF-mandated austerity measures. The country’s indigenous communities, many of whom grow coca, the plant from which cocaine is produced, have been up in arms also against a US sponsored program to eliminate all coca production through fumigation of the crops.
Indigenous Bolivians have traditionally used coca as part of their diet to withstand the hardships of the cold mountainous regions they live in. The US has used its so-called ‘War on Drugs’ to build up its military presence in Bolivia and gain control over the country’s natural gas supplies.
In many ways the issue of Bolivia’s natural gas became a rallying issue for the opposition because of the deep symbolism of selling of natural resources in a country that for the past five hundred years seen the export of one major commodity after the other without benefiting the majority of people. From the days of Spanish colonialism successive corrupt governments have enriched themselves and their foreign partners by selling off the country’s silver, tin and oil resources.
After all these years of looting Bolivia, with a GDP per capita of around US$1,000 and social indicators similar to Sub-Saharan Africa countries, is one of the poorest countries in Latin America. About two-thirds of the Bolivian population is poor, with low levels of education, health and nutrition. The average schooling completed is less than seven years, infant mortality stands at 69 per thousand live births, and 10 percent of the children under five are malnourished. For decades together the country has been run by around a 100 oligarchic families that have controlled both political and economic power, keeping the majority indigenous population in dire poverty.
The oppressive realities of Bolivia have always met with great resistance and the country has had its share of social upheavals in the past too. In April 1952, one such upheaval led by tin miners and left militants brought the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR), a left-nationalist party to power. In a bid to meet the demands of the radicalized masses of workers and peasants the MNR nationalized the country’s mines, introduced universal suffrage by giving the vote to illiterates and women who were previously barred; initiated free and compulsory primary education and announced an agrarian reform program to give land to the tiller.
The MNR however could not maintain even its reformist momentum for long and came under increasing pressure from the United States to change course and shift rightward. Finally US-trained armed forces seized power in a bloody military coup in 1964.
Since then, the country has been ruled largely by dictators of one kind or the other – some using military and others purchased electoral power to stay in government. With the collapse in the mid-eighties of international prices for tin, the country’s major export for a long time, the Bolivian economy went into a tailspin. The situation of the general population has been further worsened by the ill-conceived structural adjustment plans imposed on the country by the IMF that saw the dismantling of the country’s entire state-run economy.
Today, while the country’s official unemployment rate stands at 12 percent, according to Bolivia’s Center for the Study of Labor and Agricultural Development, fully 45 percent of the economically active population lacks any steady work and is forced to survive on part-time jobs or in the so-called informal sector. And according to the United Nations World Food Program, out of a population of 8.8 million people, at least two million Bolivians are facing chronic hunger, while only 12 percent of Bolivian families are able to consume the minimum daily requirement of calories.
It was these kind of social and economic conditions that four decades ago prompted the legendary Che Guevara to choose Bolivia as the starting point of what he hoped would be an armed revolutionary uprising against elite rule in Peru, Argentina, Parguay and Brazil. For a variety of reasons Che’s mission was a failure and he himself became a martyr in Bolivia fighting its military dictators. But the events of this October have rekindled memories throughout the region of Guevara’s dream – a series of revolutions throughout the continent that will bury Latin America’s image as the backyard of Uncle Sam forever.