A new path for Bolivia
Newly elected President Evo Morales promises to break with 20 years of U.S.-imposed conservative economics
By Jim Shultz --Newly elected President Evo Morales promises to break with 20 years of U.S.-imposed conservative economics
Late last year, Bolivians made history, for their own country and for all of Latin America, when they elected, by a wide margin, an Aymara Indian as their next president. The victory of Evo Morales signals many things here, but first and foremost it marks a broad popular rejection of two decades of conservative economic policies imposed on Bolivia from Washington.
The vote brought to the ballot box a wave of public anger that has been exploding in Bolivia's streets for more than five years.
The poorest nation in South America, for two decades Bolivia has been the unwilling lab rat for a set of economic experiments known as the "Washington Consensus." These policies have included giving control of national resources to foreign corporations and economic belt-tightening that hits the poor hardest. The World Bank and International Monetary Fund - both Washington-based and dominated by the United States - made the adoption of these policies a condition of receiving critical foreign aid.
In Bolivia, one government after another has dutifully followed those orders from Washington. The nation's economy, however, has only gotten worse. Five years ago, Bolivians began to take to the streets to demand reversal of those policies, winning one major victory after another.
In 2000, the citizens of the city of Cochabamba stood down government troops to take back their public water system from the U.S. corporate giant, Bechtel, reversing a privatization forced by the World Bank. In February 2003 in the nation's capital, La Paz, mass protests that included national police, forced the government to drop plans for a tax increase on the poor, a program initiated under IMF pressure.
In October 2003, Bolivians took to the streets again to block a mistrusted government plan to export the nation's gas to California. After soldiers killed more than 50 protesters, the president backing the plan was forced to resign, setting up the chain of political events that eventually led to last month's early elections.
Morales and his Movement Towards Socialism party have played a key role in many of these protests. Recently he told his supporters, "We will change the economic models that have blocked development for the people."
That change begins with Morales' plans to take back control of the nation's vast gas and oil reserves and renegotiate all the nation's contracts with foreign oil companies.
The economic battle that led to Morales' huge victory is less a debate between left vs. right ideology than about the staggering gap between Washington economic theory and Bolivian economic reality.
Time and time again, Bank and IMF officials proclaimed that privatization and austerity would deliver huge leaps in economic growth, new jobs and skilled management of the nation's resources. Time and time again, however, Bolivia's economy contracted and faltered. Austerity translated into tax increases on people earning $120 per month. Privatization produced huge leaps in water prices and backroom deals that made foreign companies the owners of the nation's resources at bargain prices.
If the economic prescriptions handed down from Washington had worked, Bolivians would likely have embraced them. I have lived here among Bolivia's poor for eight years. Ideology, left or right, is generally a luxury that poor people can't afford. They are more interested in practical things. Do they have water? Are there jobs? Do they have any economic hope for the future? The Washington Consensus has been rejected soundly here - first in the streets and now at the polls - not because of ideology but because it just plain failed to deliver the goods after a 20-year opportunity to do so.
I knew that Morales might well be on his way to the presidency last October, when I spent five days in a small Quechua Indian village. One sunny afternoon I sat with the village leader. I asked him if the coming election was big on people's minds.
"No, we are really more worried about whether it will rain soon."
I asked him if people were excited about Evo Morales and the prospect of electing an Indian as president.
"Well, he is really just a politician."
Then I asked him whether the people of the village would vote.
"Oh yes, we will vote. All 400 of us will walk together 45 minutes to the place where we vote and we will all vote for Evo."
On Dec. 18, Bolivians by the millions marched distances short and far to give Morales the biggest mandate of any president in half a century. Now Morales will seek to turn that mandate into a new economic course, including a reversal of the market fundamentalism brought here from the north.
To be sure, there are many in Washington who would love to see Morales fail. He rose to political prominence here as leader of the nation's coca growers and has been a nemesis of the U.S. government's "war on drugs."
For months U.S. officials have been pounding out the message that he and the social movements that back him are pawns of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Cuban President Fidel Castro.
But, as the United States claims to be fighting a war in one part of the world to support the cause of democracy, it will now need to demonstrate whether it means those words here, with a clear democratic choice not to its liking. Last month Bolivians chose a new course, whether those in Washington agree with it or not.
About the writer:
Jim Shultz, formerly of Sacramento, is the executive director of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia and author of, most recently, "Deadly Consequences," a study of the IMF in Bolivia. The Democracy Center investigates and reports on the impact of globalization.
