The Democratic Revolution in Bolivia
Article by Emir Sader

Text sent to the group list Rede do 3° Setor on 12/21/2005
http://br.groups.yahoo.com/group/3setor

Bolivia is one of the most miserable countries in the Americas, along with Haiti. Besides the massacre of colonization – of which all countries were the victims – Bolivia suffered two other blows: The War of the Pacific, in 1879, in which it lost its outlet to the sea to Chile, and the Chaco War, in the 1930s, in which it lost territory to Paraguay.

This latter war was the death sentence of the liberal system existing until then. It marked the decline of the hegemony of the mining oligarchy, while in the 1950s a process of national consciousness developed, whose clearest expression was the Revolution of 1952, with nationalization of the tin mines, agrarian reform and substitution of the Army by popular militias. The exhaustion of this process led to the implementation of a radical neoliberal program, exactly in the government of the former leader of the 1952 movement, Victor Paz Estensoro. The liberal-democratic system reestablished in 1985 wound up adopting neoliberal policies to overcome hyperinflation, accepting the prescription of Jeffrey Sachs, which virtually liquidated the Bolivian economy, with the medicine killing the patient (as customarily happens in these cases). A new defeat for the popular movement practically terminated the mineworkers’ union movement, until then the heart of the popular forces in Bolivia.

But these forces gathered new steam at the end of the 1990s, when the coca growers managed to prevent the implementation of the U.S. plan to eradicate coca plantations, under the government of Hugo Banzes – then an elected president after having been dictator. This movement was followed by the great mobilization of the peasants in the Cochabamba region, in April 2000, which prevented the privatization of the water system to a French company, a process during which the Movement for Water and Life formed, which became a permanent organization.

In a country with such low self-esteem, caused by the accumulation of defeats, this movement represented a turning point from the defensive to the offensive by the social movements. This movement was followed, in September that same year, with land occupations, road blockages and encircling of cities by organized peasant groups. In July 2001, a new wave of blockages hit the Altiplano (high plains) region, along the highway linking La Paz to Cochabamba, in the west of the country, the most politicized region, traditional indigenous areas of the Aymaras and Quéchuas, who joined with union organizations of Chapare – the coca growing zone – and the Water and Life Movement.

Against this backdrop, Bolivia after two decades of neoliberal promises, is poorer and more unequal than ever. In the countryside, the number of salaried workers has diminished from 73 thousand to 64 thousand. The number of self-employed family units – basically following a subsistence economy – has jumped from 43 thousand to 447 thousand. In the cities, the so-called informal sector, composed of household units involved in artisanal work without fixed salaries, has grown from 60% to 68% of the total of the occupied population. The number of people employed in the formal sector has thus shrunk from 40% to 32% of the total workforce.

Bolivia has shameful income distribution indices, only surpassed on the continent – negatively – by Brazil. The wealthiest 20% have an average income 30 times that of the poorest 20%.; 60% of the people live in poverty country-wide, and this index rises to 90% in rural areas. Official unemployment has tripled in the past 17 years, since the monetary stabilization plans started being implemented, reaching 13.9%, while the proportion of people in the informal sector – meaning with only precarious work – has increased from 58% to 68% in the past 15 years. Infant mortality is 60 per thousand live births, against a continental average of 28. Life expectancy is 63 years, while the average for Latin American and the Caribbean is 70 years.

Roughly 2.5 million peasants eke out a living in traditional agriculture, with virtually the same technology as 3000 years ago. The latest technology is only used in the oil and gas, telecommunications and banking sectors and 10% of mining and industrial production. The promised “modernity” has reduced Bolivia to a world of cybercafés, luxury cars and sumptuous goods consumed only by the elite, in the words of Álvaro Garcia Linera, the leading Bolivian intellectual, elected Vice President with Evo Morales, the newly elected President.

It’s no surprise, then, that in such a country the presidency of Sanchez de Losada – a Caucasian with an American accent – was toppled in October 2003, with over 50 deaths, just as that of his Vice President, Carlos Mesa, in June this year. And that Evo Morales, the head of the MAS (the Spanish initials for the Movement to Socialism), a party constituted directly by social organizations, won the recent elections with the largest vote in Bolivia’s history. Its majority would have been even greater if over a million people had not been prevented from voting because their names had been removed from the voter rolls, particularly in the countryside.

The coming period will be the most important in Bolivia’s history, as an indigenous leader, an Aymara, for the first time in 513 years since the European conquest assumes the presidency, promising to rescue the identity and the right to govern of indigenous peoples – Aymaras, Quéchuas, Guaranis – who make up over 70% of the population. This is a democratic revolution, as defined by the victorious candidates, when the effort will commence – by calling a nationwide constituent assembly – to build a truly multicultural and multiethnic nation reflecting the faces of all Bolivia’s people.

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