Wall Street Journal Spins a Bolivian Fairy Tail

Last week the Wall Street Journal weighed in on Bolivia's elections, with a fairy tail of a piece. The article below by Mary Anastasia O'Grady’s ("All About Evo") correctly cites the Cochabamba water revolt as the spark that set Bolivia's anti-'Washington Consensus politics into high gear. She then relies on totally discredited five-year-old spin from the PR staff of former President Hugo Banzer to explain what happened. It is actually embarrassing, really.

This just proves how utterly wrong writers can be when they try to paint themselves as experts about places they have never been. It also doesn’t say much for the journalistic standards of the Wall Street Journal. Below is my letter to the editor of the WSJ and then the original article.

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Dear Editor,

The role of economic globalization in Bolivia's recent presidential election is certainly worthy of debate. However, it also worthy of a debate based on actual facts, as opposed to the unfortunate misrepresentation of the facts included in Mary Anastasia O'Grady's recent WSJ article ("All About Evo", 12-23-05).

O'Grady is quite correct in suggesting that the citizen revolt against water privatization in 2000, in which the Bechtel Corporation was kicked out of the country, was the spark that ignited a string of events that led to the election of Evo Morales as President earlier this month. That makes her twisting of the facts surrounding the water revolt all the more serious.

First, the reason that citizens revolted against Bechtel had nothing to do with coca farmers, as O'Grady suggests, and everything to do with Bechtel raising water rates for the poor an average of nearly 50% overnight, and in many cases by much more. Second, it was not the citizens of Bolivia who rioted but the government. A former dictator, Hugo Banzer, responded to peaceful protests by sending 1,200 national police to take over the country's third largest city. An army sharpshooter, caught on camera, shot an unarmed 17 year old in the face and killed him.

These well-documented facts, and others, may not lend themselves to the ideological myth that O’Grady seeks to market, but they are facts. They are also a good part of the reason that Bolivians are justifiable skeptical of the suggested wonders of the Washington Consensus formula of privatization.

Jim Shultz
Executive Director
The Democracy Center
Cochabamba, Bolivia

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