June 12, 2006

Viva Bolivia! Will Morales' movement towards socialism be good for his people?

by Daniel Abasolo & Elizabeth Chapman
April 8, 2000: A 17-year-old boy is shot dead at a rally in Cochabamba, Bolivia - killed for protesting a law privatizing the area's water supply. The privatization of the Bolivian water supply faced a disapproval rating of 96 percent of the Bolivian population. However, the government still refused to consider revising the contracts until six more Bolivians died, which led the police to force off the capital mutinies at La Paz.

February 2003: Approximately 70 people die protesting Bolivia's corrupt and unpopular capitalist government. Facing a nation crippled by strife, President Sánchez de Lozada was forced to resign.

June 6, 2005: Lozada's vice president also resigns, with his presidential palace surrounded by 80,000 protestors.

Bolivia had seen nearly a decade of economic recession and political strife when current President Evo Morales took office. He won the December 2005 election with 54 percent of the vote, a true majority and the widest margin of victory of any Bolivian candidate in history. Beyond earning the most votes of any candidate ever, Morales was also the first Bolivian president of poor indigenous origin, and he promised to elevate the status of his people, which account for more than two-thirds of the Bolivian population. His party, Movimiento al Socialismo, shifts the country dramatically to the left to the cheers of the oppressed Bolivian majority and to the scorn of the United States and the elite foreign interests and corporations of Bolivia.

Morales has nationalized Bolivia's natural gas industry and has started land reforms, which will take millions of square miles of unused lands from wealthy corporate landowners and turn them over to the poor indigenous majority. Yet, despite the apparent socialism of these moves, they are good for the Bolivian people and follow a classic Latin American pattern of governmental reform.

"The fact that Bolivia is now revisiting a land reform project should not come as a surprise among scholars and Latin American enthusiasts," said Yamile Regalado Someillan, a Latin American historian and doctoral student with the University of Maryland.

Many other Latin American politicians, military men or political unknowns have since enacted similar reforms or have pushed their countries into chaos and revolution, resulting in a direct confrontation (military or otherwise) with the United States - Brazil's Getulio Vargas (1930-45,1951-54); Argentina's Juan Perón (1946-55, 1973-74); Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz (1951-54); Chile's Salvador Allende (1970-73); Grenada's Maurice Bishop (1979-1983); Jamaica's Michael Manley (1972-1980); Venezuela's Hugo Chávez (1999-present) and Cuba's Fidel Castro (1959-present).

The neo-liberal capitalist reforms backed by the United States in the 1990s failed across much of South America. This left resentment in the hearts of Latin America's poor majorities who were still dealing with a lack of basic health, education and even nourishment. This poor majority often sees the radical leftist as the only honest political candidate with their interests in mind rather than the interests of foreign investors or the United States.

"Unfortunately, many of the reforms introduced by Latin American politicians hoping to balance the effects of economic dependency vis-à-vis the U.S., mirror socialist/communist programs," Someillan said. "Scholars have argued that Latin American politics are naturally set toward the left of American politics as a direct result of repeated economic, cultural and political confrontations with the United States itself. If this is true, then who's to blame for the Cuban Revolution? Or, Chávez's Venezuelan Revolution? Or, now Morales' Revolution?"

The United States' repeated disapproval of the so-called communism of Latin America shows our deep misunderstanding of Latin American political culture. There are untold millions of poor South Americans who desperately want to see a brighter future. The American neo-liberal capitalist model has failed them time and again, resulting in corruption and political chaos. With that kind of history behind them, Bolivians have elected a popular president and taken steps toward social justice and equality. The United States needs to genuinely support the people of Latin America, or risk more leftist revolutions that distance the United States from the Latin American population.


By Elizabeth Chapman

Stalin, Che, Mao - the 20th century buried the most influential demagogues of the socialist movement, and with them any serious consideration of communism as a workable social system. Yet the world is seeing a perplexing resurgence of leftist political sentiment, the latest in Bolivia, under the leadership of President Evo Morales and with the guidance of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Cuba's Fidel Castro.

A thousand Cuban consultants, although observers unofficially peg the number closer to 2,500, paid for by the Venezuelan government, are in the process of helping Bolivia shift to a leftist political and economic model. One questions the prudence in taking advice from a country whose citizens attempt their eager escapes via rafts and air mattresses. Surely the Bolivian people have no desire to repeat the most failed social experiment of the past century.

"In their hearts, they're actually pro-market," muses Bolivian expatriate and Texas A&M professor of political theory, Diego von Vacano.

A nation of peasants who have traditionally subsisted on what they could grow and at one time the supplier of a third of the world's cocaine, Bolivia is not wont to the entrepreneurial spirit. But the country's large indigenous population has become frustrated by the failures of neo-liberalism and its status as the continent's poorest country. Last year, it elected the leader of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) and a former coca farmer, Evo Morales, over the pro-market candidate Jorge Quiroga (the once-President of the country and a former A&M student).

Supporters of the movement contend that this is not our mothers' revolution - socialism today, they say, has relinquished the romantic notion of a cooperative communist paradise and accepted some market policies as essential to their Bolivia's success. It's a Diet Socialism without all the flavor of the original leftist ideology, but probably better than the real thing.

Eudoro Galindo, Class of 1964, is not sure the new movement is as healthy as some paint it. Galindo, a former Bolivian presidential and vice-presidential candidate from a family boasting 17 Aggies, is convinced that his country is beginning the descent into anti-democratic authoritarianism.

The real issue isn't that Morales plans to seize and redistribute one-fifth of the nation's land, or that his regime has set its sights on absorbing other large foreign investments, but that these changes are taking place through the whim and will of one man. Morales' flirtation with despotism smacks of Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe's notoriously violent land redistribution schemes.

Galindo said clashes between different groups over the possession of land started last week in Bolivia.

"If this becomes a socialist democracy, fine!" he exclaims.

But the important thing, Galindo says, is that it becomes a democracy - "beyond the electoral act." Morales won the 2005 presidential election with an unprecedented 54 percent of the popular vote, but can a country, which seizes property by the barrel of a gun, truly call itself a democracy?

Galindo's work to establish lasting democratic institutions, what he calls "the only tool we have to preserve sanity in this part of the world," might be just what Bolivia needs.

CIVITAS, his think tank, is committed to maintaining an open dialogue about the direction that the government is taking and to promoting discussion over violent confrontation.

But his efforts cannot be successful without popular endorsement from the Bolivian people. Morales' policies must certainly seem attractive to a nation with such a history of poverty and oppression, but in the long run these policies jeopardize Bolivian's security and liberty through the peoples' support for him.

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