Indian revolt in Bolivia
By Tom Hayden
For The Nation - May 24, 2004
Bolivia, the poorest country in the hemisphere, is the center of a three year old indigenous insurrection that has twice routed multinational corporations and nearly achieved the rarest of political successes, the election of an openly- Indian president in the Americas.
The cause of native people today is widely considered "lost" to genocide or assimilation, except perhaps as a spiritual legacy, an exotic consumer market, and isolated moments of resistance. This common understanding not only ignores the phenomenon of tribal people from Iraq to South Asia still resisting, but is blind to the "mountain chain of indigenous uprisings in reaction to U.S. neo-liberalism in Latin America, the most radical thing that has appeared in thirty years", as described to me by the respected Bolivian intellectual, Alvaro Garcia Linera.
What began with the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas in 1994 has surfaced in Ecuador, Guatemala, and especially Bolivia, where Garcia says one-fifth of the population, or 1.5 million Indians, live in autonomous communities where official government structures have virtually faded away.
"There is no other country where leaders of the Left and the anti-corporate movements are Indian", Garcia, a former guerilla and political prisoner, notes. "The Indians here have always been carriers of water but never in charge of social movements". They are not attempting to turn back the historical clock, but are becoming "post-modern" and "post-national" bearers of an alternative narrative of the country. Bolivia is now the focal point, he believes, because of its large indigenous majority and the prospect that
"the option for exercising power has become real."
The first of these post-modern revolutionaries I interviewed during a May visit to Bolivia's highlands was wearing a bright yellow sweatshirt with a G.U.E.S.S. USA logo. Thirty year old Nestor Guillen Daza Mayta described how the Bolivian soldiers stormed into his tiny barrio last October 12, the same date as Christopher Columbus arrival in the indigenous world 611 years before. Nestor's barrio, Villa Ingenio, is the coldest and poorest neighborhood in El Alto, a ramshackle city of over one million Aymara and Quechua people who migrated during the past two decades from Bolivia's altiplano, making El Alto the largest, most Indian city in Latin America.
Last year El Alto residents rose against a pro-corporate government plan allowing foreign investors to exploit Bolivia's natural gas resources for Mexican and southern California energy markets. While energy-hungry Californian consumers were being "gamed" by one of the pipeline sponsors, Sempra Energy (which made $518 million in earnings during the California energy crisis), Nestor's people in Villa Ingenio were freezing at 13,000 feet without gas hookups.
They joined a nationwide protest of Indians, workers and campesinos against the gas giveaway, against neo-liberalism, and against President "Goni" (Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada) the white mining executive, University of Chicago-trained free market economist who had privatized the Bolivian economy since the mid-1980s. "Our economy was dead, there was no formal work, and we were sick of it", Nestor remembers.
In his post-modern G.U.E.S.S. shirt, Nestor hardly appeared to be a militant subversive, but more like the young researcher that he is, meticulously saving clippings on the country_s oil and gas reserves ("second to Venezuela in Latin America", he says proudly). But in October 2003, he was in the streets resisting the soldiers when they came through the small, sun-filled churchyard where our interview took place, killing 26 people in a three-hour spree.
In that September-October uprising, 65 people were killed and hundreds wounded in confrontations here last September-October, bringing last year's cumulative death toll of indigenous protestors to 110, and more over a 14 month period than the total killed during seven years of Hugo Banzer's military dictatorship in the Seventies. As last year's Indian uprising and military repression intensified, La Paz frightened white middle class finally opted for reform. With hunger strikes by one thousand Indians in El Alto, middle class activists formed a human chain of "hands for peace" that spanned the length of the Prado, the colonial-era avenue that traverses La Paz. So broad was the outrage that an American-born policy analyst, Tom Kruse, found himself arm-in-arm with a World Bank economist. While some Bolivian radicals felt the middle class intervention forced a moderation of their struggle, it also convinced the Goni government to give up.
On October 17, five days after the massacre in Villa Ingenio, Goni fled to Miami, where, through intermediaries, he sought a safe haven at Harvard's Institute of Politics, where I happened to be teaching a study group on globalizaton and social movements. Harvard passed on Goni's application, at least temporarily, when one insider noted that "the guy just killed a hundred people."
The American Embassy in La Paz was stunned by Goni's overthrow. They had no Plan B. Not only was their architect of Boliivia's privatization off to private pastures, but so too was the $7 billion World Bank-backed natural gas project. "Let's just say, because of nationalist fervor", a Sempra consultant told me, "that the project is, well, not dead, but on hold". With breezy confidence, he added that Sempra was confidently "inking deals" in Australia and Indonesia.
Bolivia has suffered from resource plunder since colonial times, starting with silver and tin. The 2003 "gas war" was preceded by a 2002 "water war" against the Bechtel Corporation_s privatization of water in Cochabamba, Bolivia's third-largest city. When Bechtel's subsidiary announced rate increases beyond what people could afford, continuous street demonstrations forced Bechtel's retreat.
More frightening for American officials and the tiny Bolivian upper class in 2002 was the presidential campaign of Senator Evo Morales, a Quechua-speaking socialist leader of the union de cocoleros, the major target of the U.S. drug eradication program in the Andes. Morales, a handsome 44 year old from the Chapare region where the drug wars still rage, finished just one point behind Goni, riding a nationalist wave that rose every time a US Embassy official lectured Bolivians on the "consequences" of voting for him. Morales_ party, a loose coalition called the Movement to Socialism (MAS) surprised even itself by earning eight senate and 27 congressional seats, up from four only a few years before. The presidential runoff was decided by the conservative Legislature, not by popular vote, or Morales would most likely be president today. Except for Mexico's Benito Juarez in the mid-nineteenth century, it is difficult to recall an elected indigenous-identified president in the Americas over the past two centuries.
The U.S. military is sounding the alarm. In Congressional testimony this March, Gen. James Hill, head of the U.S. Southern Command, warned that "If radicals continue to highjack the indigenous movement, we could find ourselves with a jnarco-state that supports the uncontrolled cultivation of coca." (Mar. 24, 04 testimony to House Armed Services Committee) While media and political attention is being absorbed by Iraq, the U.S. Southern Command is rapidly establishing a major military base of operations in Colombia that extends across the region. In the hyper-rhetoric of Bolivian conservatives, Morales is "the Bin Ladin of the Andes".
But the October 2003 uprising in El Alto was launched by people like Nestor, not elected leaders like Morales, who called for Goni's resignation only at the final hour. In fact, Morales has been playing a pragmatic role by supporting President Mesa thus far on the oil and gas legislation. When I Interviewed Morales in his bustling La Paz office, he spoke of the need for a "new bilateral relationshiP" with the United States, and offered to travel to Washington for discussions if provided a visa. While Morales must defend his cocolero base, there is no doubt that he seeks to "renegotiate the imposition" of the U.S. drug policy, not promote a suicidal "narco-state.
The U.S. policies of economic globalizing and militarizing are both failing and deepening in Bolivia. Since 1996, U.S. military assistance as a percentage of total US aid to Bolivia has risen from 17 to 40.4 percent. (www.wola.org, "Paint by Numbers: Trends in US
militarty programs with Latin America and Challenges to Oversight", Aug. 2003, p7.) Where Al Gore once proclaimed that "the entire world is marching on the Bolivian road", Goni is in Miami and ten years of forced interdiction policies against coca plants have failed to produce a viable alternative. Regardless, U.S. trade officials are still pushing a NAFTA-like Andean Free Trade Agreement that would impose sanctions against any Bolivian regulatory, tax or natural resource actions adverse to multinational investment interests.
When Goni flew off to Miami last October, his vice president, a former journalist named Carlos Mesa, stepped gingerly into the power vacuum, pleading for Indian consent. Mesa stood on a platform in El Alto with Felipe Quispe, considered the most militant of Aymaran nationalists, while thousands of Indian people came to look him over, including Nestor's delegation who still waited for the gas hookups in Villa Ingenio.
Mesa has made three extraordinary promises in exchange for an interlude of peace: first, to revise Bolivia's current oil and gas law to at least triple Bolivia's revenues, if not nationalize the industry; second, to assure a national referendum on new oil and gas proposals; and third, to permit a constituent assembly within one year to rewrite Bolivia's constitution. The promises brought breathing space for staggered government functionaries and the panicked upper class, while at the same time raising Indian expectations higher than anyone could remember.
Today, however, eight months have passed and the gas still isn't hooked up in Nestor's barrio. The government's reform of the oil and gas law has been mired under threats of litigation. The July referendum is less than two months away, and the constituent assembly has become deeply confusing and problematic to the political establishment. Popular expectations remain high too; for example, indigenous and women's groups are holding grass-roots meetings on the constitution hoping to write themselves into history for the first time.
A perplexed U.S. official told me, "There could be a complete meltdown here. It could get worse, you know. The poor can be even poorer", he warned cryptically. The Bush Administration's fiscal 2004 budget for Bolivia cuts food aid by nearly half and child survival and health funds by 15 percent. The U.S. government spends over thirty times more in one month in Iraq than it will in all assistance to Bolivia this entire year. (http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2004/28203.htm) Bolivia_s current foreign debt is $5 billion and internal debt over $2 billion. "You just can't develop your way out from under such a debt, says economist Kruse.
"It's all hanging by a thread", says Nestor. "People are still mobilizing, talking about strikes, and if the government still makes fun of us there will be another October. "It's not up to radical politicians like Evo Morales or revolutionary nationalists like Quispe, he says. While they may be important symbols in the media, their leadership capacity is shaped by Indian assemblies with a strong emphasis on communal participation.
If the government presence in El Alto is shaky, an hour's drive into the countryside beyond El Alto envelops one in a kind of Indian liberated zone, in the phrase of L.A. Times correspondent Hector Tobar.
Remote Indian communities like Achacachi, Warisata, Sorata and Huarina ring the vast rim of Lake Titikaka, are at the center of creation for both Aymara and Inca cultures, and the source of deep foreboding in white psyches. When we considered a visit to Achacachi, our guide, a good-hearted, blue-eyed blond who has lived in Bolivia for a decade, joked nervously about "being eaten" there. She was not alone; the travelers Rough Guide to Bolivia advises that though the lurid tales you may hear of anthropophagous Aymaras should be ignored, this is not a place to linger long if you are an outsider. (pp 120-21).
We drove to Achacachi anyway, a place of several thousand people from tiny outlying hamlets who tend sheep, grow potatoes, quinoa and other grains. We entered the small central square with an Aymaran driver, parked in front of the alcalde's (mayor's) office, and managed to introduce ourselves face to face with the town's mayor, Francisco Quispe Ramirez, who seemed friendly and eager to tell a story. While everyone in town seemed quietly aware of our presence, I felt not the slightest tension. It seemed clear who was in control, and it was not the gringos.
We sat in his office overlooking a square where about 200 young people, faces painted, were boisterously enjoying a school celebration. The Mayor, a campesino in a blue and green striped shirt, proudly acknowledged that "we are known as a fierce people, warriors, because we face extreme poverty, we still use oxen in the fields and hand hoes." A main demand of the town, he said, was for direct marketing access in La Paz, so that revenues could be invested in Achacachi's schools.
The mayor was elected in 1999 as a leader in the campesino union and "a revolutionary man". One year later, the Indian rebellion started across the altiplano. In Achacachi, they blocked the road to La Paz and skirmished with the military, who killed one campesino on April 9, 2000. "That did it", he said, waving his arms to dramatize the local rage. Townspeople grabbed a military captain who they blamed for the shooting, and "didn't kill him but beat him up" before he was rescued and hospitalized.
Still furious, the Indians next burned government offices in the town and dumped official files all over the square. "A donde mas?" ("where next") they cried, and marched to the local jail to free the inmates. Next they burned the beds and television in the police quarters. Still raging, one shouted, "Damnit, where is the captain?", and off they marched to the hospital. As the Mayor explained, "it was unfortunate that the military
didn't take him back to the base. So the people killed him."
The Mayor nevertheless felt the uprising has accomplished something positive. Look at the 2002 elections - white people began to respect people with names like Quispe, Mamani, and Huanca (common Aymaran surnames). "We have senators who are Aymara. Felipe [Quispe} became a leader because of the movement here. And we are teaching our children to occupy the space that is ours, to create our own government in the vision of Tupac Katari", the warrior chief who led a siege of La Paz in the eighteenth century.
During that same week, the Aymara killed another public official in Ilave, on the Peruvian side of Lake Titicaca, in response to the murder of an indigenous leader there. Nervous Peruvian newspapers reported "sightings" of Felipe Quispe, the Bolivian Aymara radical, in Ilave, which was claimed by villagers as "the capital of the Aymara Republic." (LAT, May 20, 2004)
I was able to find interview Felipe Quispe ("El Malku", the condor) in his La Paz office, sitting under a poster of Tupac Katari. Quispe is the devil himself to middle class pacenos, though he seems more like a Malcolm X in his deliberate choice of inflammatory words. For example, he casually told us that the "whites are here as renters on our land, and we need to put a giant fence around them, a reservation, a safe place for white people to be."
Quispe is the Aymara ghost that haunts the present. "We lost in the colonial era, but it was not a complete loss because we still exist thanks to our warrior ancestors." In the subsequent era of the Bolivian republic, we also lost because we didn"t create our own nation. But since 2000, there has emerged a third war, he says, "against gringo neo-liberalism and racism, and to change our government to an Indian one."
In Alvaro Garcia_s perspective, there are both moderate and radical tendencies, sometimes converging, sometimes not, in the current insurrection. The radicals like Felipe Quispe, he said, have a strong argument for communitarian Indian nationalism, but their rural experience leaves them without a concrete urban economic policy. The more Evo Morales represents both a broader social base, in Alvaro's view, and a program which would retain the Bolivian state and the neo-liberal model but with an Indian face and progressive economic reforms.
Alvaro, who shared a common guerrilla experience with Felipe Quispe, today believes Bolivia is closer to a political revolution than a social and economic one. At the two extremes are possibilities of a full Indian insurrection or a US-backed coup, he says, but there also could be "radical reform" of the system, through electoral means such as the Mesa transition, the July 18 referendum on gas and oil, and reconfiguring the state through the constituent assembly. Or, he added, there could be a sudden "rupture of el modelo" if the gas crisis goes unresolved, bringing all the social movements together to replace the failed government with one led by indigenous people.
I finally asked a US embassy contact their "threat assessment" of Bolivia, and whether it was possible to turn Nestor's gas back on. Back in October, gas was certainly the unifying theme, along with all the deaths, said the spokesman. But the Indians have lost a unifying theme at the moment, he claimed, and the new president is popular. U.S. officials are working urgently to peal away parts of the Evo Morales base, and keeping the insurgents from "bubbling up' in El Alto is a top priority. "If El Alto joins in again, there is the potential to overthrow the government."
As for Nestor's gas being hooked up, the American official seemed surprised at the failure, then threw up his hands. "These Bolivians just don"t do the basics, just don't pay attention." When I asked how the gas might be made available to Villa Ingenio, he launched into the need for a study committee, the cost of distribution networks, the problems for rate of return, etcetera, I closed my notepad as a final metaphor dawned, that natural gas is an invisible substance which, if improperly handled, explodes with a
sudden fury.
Tom Hayden is the author of The Zapatista Reader (Nation Books 2001) and Street Wars (New Press 2004). |
Tom Hayden is national co-director of No More Sweatshops!, a coalition of labor, clergy, community and campus advocates of "sweat-free" guidelines on public procurement and enforceable labor standards for corporate behavior.
