Bolivia's vice president on indigenous rights, coca crops, and relations with the US

An interview with Vice President Álvaro García Linera of the Movement Toward Socialism Party (MAS).

Staff writer Sara Miller Llana's interview with Bolivia's Vice President Álvaro García Linera of the Movement Toward Socialism Party (MAS).

What has been your personal motivation for supporting indigenous causes?

When I was in high school in the 1970s, Latin Americans were taking back democracy from military dictatorships. Practically everyone in my high school was on the left. I was a participant in the political awakening of those times. Back then, you couldn't excite people if you didn't talk about Lenin, Trotsky, Hegel, or Gramsci.

In 1979 I witnessed the first siege of the city of La Paz by Aymaras. It was eye-opening how the siege aroused, among the upper and middle classes, the fear of rebellious Indians. But I was most interested in how this peasant – indigenous – blockade didn't answer to the trade unions. It was a very different thing. Its social impact here in the city, and the power of its language, of its symbols, left a very deep mark on my intellect and on my commitments. That's when I took it upon myself to find out who [the Indians] were, where they came from, what was going on here.

Three things have fascinated me about the indigenous world ever since: first, the history of their struggle for equality, for Indians and non-Indians to be equals before the state and society; second, the question of how to create mechanisms for correcting mistakes in the management of our state and society that have done injustice to the indigenous world; and third, the communal component of indigenous social structures, which I consider to be a vein of a future postcapitalist society, a tiny, almost invisible vein that is nonetheless present.

I don't have a romanticized idea of the indigenous world: in the indigenous world there are social classes, personal appetites, personal interests, divisions and injustices, but deep down there is also a small, communal nucleus that could be strengthened.

A goal of Evo Morales's government is to improve the lives of Bolivia's indigenous people. In the year since the MAS took power, has this been achieved?

Last week I was visiting a town in Potosí with the president. A young peasant boy, who couldn't have been more than 7 or 8 years old, walked up to the president. He was wearing his best poncho because the president was there. The president asked him if he'd received his Juancito Pinto voucher yet, and the boy said, "Yes." Then the president asked, "What are you going to do with the 200 bolivianos?" And the boy responded very proudly, "I'm going to prepare myself to be like you, Mr. President."

Indians used to see themselves as servants, peasants, laborers, or in a best-case scenario, as salaried workers. That would be the limit or ceiling of their ascent. Now Indians see themselves as having rights on all levels.... President Evo Morales has brought about the most important symbolic and cultural revolution in centuries.

Just as important, in one year of government, per capita income has risen from US$950 to $1,035. That isn't a huge difference, but it's still an 8 to 9 percent increase. We are improving access to information technology by bringing computers to high schools in the countryside, some in areas where there wasn't even electricity before. We are also carrying out what we are calling a "technological revolution" by implementing modern machinery for agricultural work.

Members of the political opposition have claimed that the government's efforts to "re-found Bolivia" are causing division. Some say that the president and the vice president are governing for the indigenous people and not for the rest of the country. How do you see this issue?

It's not true that we've caused division. This country has always had terrible, profound divisions between indigenous and nonindigenous people. We didn't invent this. The elites were used to thinking that there was no problem because they didn't want to acknowledge it, but the problem was there. These fissures from colonialism, from discrimination still exist, and what we're doing is ... seeking out their resolution through practical, democratic measures of equality, justice, structural reforms, improved earnings distribution, and the broadening of rights. What is happening in Bolivia can be summarized this way: the broadening of rights and the redistribution of wealth. The idea that we're only governing for the indigenous people is a biased ideological interpretation.

What do you think of the recent criticisms from the US over Bolivia's coca policies?


The latest report from the [US] State Department has a balanced reading of what we're doing in terms of drug interdiction, but in terms of coca production, we believe that it commits a series of mistakes, and, in some cases, injustices, regarding what the Bolivian government is doing. The [previous] governments established a vicious cycle that was unsustainable. They militarized everything, detained people, killed people. More people have been killed in democracy than in dictatorship. Human rights were brutally violated. Coca cultivation was reduced from 100,000 to 8,000 hectares in a single year; they showed the international community their achievements, with dozens of people injured and tortured, and then the very next year the previous level of coca would be produced. We don't want to play this kind of phony game with the international community.

To what extent might the government's new policies for capturing more [revenues from] natural resources for the benefit of the Bolivian people serve as a model for other countries in the region, such as Ecuador?

We offer our humble contribution to what we see as 21st century-style nationalization, which means that foreign companies with capital and know-how are present in the country with their machinery, and they can earn profits, but never again can they be the owners of the gas and the petroleum.

Today, sovereignty has acquired a new dimension. Sovereignty can't be viewed as it was in the 20th century, as virtual autocracy, enclosure. Sovereignty is the ability to decide the kinds of links and relationships you want to have to globalization processes. Sovereignty doesn't disappear; it is modified. We can't return to the 20th-century sovereignty of enclosure, because we are profoundly tied to the markets, to the financial markets, to the labor force and to the power of capital.

There has been talk of "a new Latin American socialism." If this exists, how would you define it? Is Bolivia part of it?

We debate this amongst ourselves, and we haven't defined a position. If you will allow me a very personal view on this issue, what is happening in Latin America today is a search for diverse paths to post neo-liberalism. The experience of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, mainly, and Uruguay in its own way, is a search for a road to post- neo-liberalism, of ways to disassemble the processes of financial colonization and public resource privatization of the 1980s and 90s. But where is socialism? I think it's part of a horizon, of a future that you have to start building now. Fortunately, it's no longer possible to associate socialism with the statism that characterized the [former] USSR for almost 70 years. The debate of socialism as statism has been tossed aside, and today the debate is about defining socialism, socialism understood as a post-capitalist society, and not just a post neoliberal one like what we have today. I think we are just seeing the beginnings of this.

There is no single model for socialism; every country has to find its own internal post-capitalist forces. In Bolivia, I think post-capitalism will be grounded in the medium or long run in two forces: in the force of modern industry and in the nonmodern, communal tradition. For Bolivia, and perhaps Peru, perhaps Ecuador, perhaps Guatemala, it's unimaginable to envision postcapitalism without taking into account the communal strength of the indigenous communities. This is what makes us different from other parts of the world.

One criticism by opposition parties has been that the government of Hugo Chávez has too much influence on [Bolivia's] government, citing Venezuela's economic and military cooperation. What's your view on the matter?

Look, the most important business dealings we've had as a government have been with Brazil and Argentina, not with Venezuela. We have excellent relations with Venezuela. The impact of Venezuelan aid is felt in many areas, and we are very grateful for it, and we want to maintain it. But this doesn't mean we can't do business and have friends in other parts of the world.

You mentioned the military issue, and it's very important to clarify that Venezuela has not sold us planes or weapons and hasn't brought us missiles or bullets. Ninety-five percent of Venezuelan aid is aimed at production: hydrocarbons, microcredit, agriculture, and the military sector. But Venezuela has not and will not sell us weapons.

Can you say how many Venezuelans are currently working for the government?

Venezuelans, Argentinians, Cubans, Brazilians, and Americans are present in the social area. American pediatricians are coming, we have Cuban eye specialists, Cuban and Venezuelan teachers are working on the literacy issue, computer technicians are helping to prepare ID cards, and Argentine officials are working on reconstruction and providing civil support for the flood victims. The number varies, because they do a job and then they go. We don't have any advisers or collaborators in political areas or in areas that aren't social.

There is a possibility that the US Congress will not renew the Andean Trade Preference Act [known in Spanish as the ATDPEA]. How is the government preparing for this?

We started to fight for our own ATDPEA because Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, which also benefit from this treaty currently, were moving forward in their free-trade negotiations. We said that a free-trade agreement would be problematic for our economy, that it didn't take into account the asymmetries [in relation to the US]. We're talking about a country with a 16th-century level of agricultural development and another one with a 21st-century level. This is why we don't think a free trade agreement is convenient. But we clearly wanted, still want, and are working to try to link ourselves in a lasting way to the most important economy in the world, which is the US. While these countries negotiate free-trade agreements, we will negotiate the ATDPEA because it takes into account these asymmetries. It doesn't provide for the unlimited opening of our borders, in which case we would have to compete in everything.

So the government of Evo Morales would never sign a free-trade agreement with the USA?

A free trade agreement, no. But a just and lasting trade agreement, yes. We need to move ahead on that and we want to move ahead. And we hope that the authorities responsible for international commerce in the US understand.

The international press has asserted on various occasions that your political ideology is more leftist than Evo's. Is this true?

We are here to collaborate with President Morales. I have a Marxist/Indigenous intellectual and academic background, and I don't know if it's more or less radical [than his]. But because my background is very rationalist, with a strong Hegelian influence – according to which all that is real is rational, and all that is rational is real – this allows me to have a very realistic view of the world rather than a utopian one. I don't have a utopian reading of the world today, as a part of this government. I have a more realistic reading of the possibilities, and in this sense I try to collaborate with President Morales. That's all I can say.



"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell

“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano

One Year of Evo: economic boom, the threat of balkanisation and the role of the military

by Alberto Cruz




On January 22, Evo Morales celebrated his first year as Bolivia’s president. No one can deny that in this time, despite the problems he has had to confront, there has been a clear improvement in the majority of principal economic indicators, possible thanks to the fact that one of the first measures of his government was ending the relationship with the International Monetary Fund. By allowing the agreement with the IMF to expire it has given the government of Morales a certain liberty to push forward with new economic and development policies.

One of the first measures put in march by the government of Evo Morales was to increase its control over hydrocarbons. The high prices on the international market and the increase in taxes for petroleum companies demonstrated to Bolivians that the changes could reach their pockets in beneficial way, along with the social plans that have reached even the most distant and abandoned places: literacy programs, soft credit loans for the purchasing of tractors by agricultural cooperatives, extension of healthcare thanks to the 2000 Cuban doctors and other improvements.

With a starts, and criticism for what has been considered a timid policy at the time of putting into practice the nationalisation of hydrocarbons, what is certain is that it has allowed the country to have a growth rate –talking always in macroeconomic terms – of 4.1% this year, a percentage not seen in Bolivia during the 20 years that the country was subject to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank.

Nevertheless, the critics are not without reason. Although it is true that their exists is an anti-imperialist position, one of independence from the IMF and World Bank, everything possible has been done to preserve macroeconomic stability. “Evaluating the contracts [with the multinationals such as the Spanish Repsol, Brazilian Petrobras, British BG or French Total] and its reaches in working in the interest of national development, it is worrying to verify that we continue to prioritise responding to the interest of the companies who have found in the new terms of the contracts, terms not only acceptable, but moreover, conditions favorable to their transnational character: they conserve their strategic role in the hydrocarbon industry in the country and are obtaining large profits as they further consolidate the role they have consigned to us in their international strategy, that of a primary exporting country” reads one of the specialised reports published at the end of 2006. It continues, saying something even more disturbing: “the possibility of Bolivian initiatives to industrialise gas and petroleum, are possible but overall they do not promise to be of great impact; in large part because the economic resources that should be destined for YPFB are, if not omitted, frankly reduced for a decent time. What is certain is that under the new conditions we have taken on, the interrogation over which resources will be capitalised on by YPFB to assume the strategic challenge of industrialisation remains without answer. Industrialisation within the nation territory and through YPFB loses viability because the new contractual terms opt for ratifying YPFB as a supervisory company and administrator of contracts; renouncing the taking of operative control of the industry and becoming an effective manager of its development.” [1]

The government of Morales has maintained a more pragmatic behaviour and has not given the state company, Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales de Bolivia (YPFB), the predominant role that, for example, Venezuela’s PDVSA has been playing, to push forward a drastic change in the improvement of the living conditions of the great majority of the population. A lost opportunity, where one has to point out the important role that Lula’s Brazil has played in “moderating” the application of the nationalisation. Regardless of this, it is not just a few voices who are asking for a “refoundation” of YPFB so that production and exploitation of hydrocarbons is really in the hands of this state institution.

The oligarchy's game plan

The moderate nationalisation of hydrocarbons did not expressly disturb the oligarchy (according to the polls 90% of the Bolivian population supported the nationalisation), but what did was the passing of the new agrarian reform law which if applied to the full extent would suppose the redistribution to campesinos of some 123,000 kilometres squared of idle and unproductive land, a size equivalent to two countries, Austria and Switzerland put together. For now, only 11% of the idle land in the hands of large landowners has been handed over to campesinos. It is not a frontal attack on the large landowners, nor less so, but it is a measure that the oligarchy considered a vital threat to its status quo, given it is where their power is situated: the actual Episcopal Conference of Bolivia considers that 90% of productive land in Bolivia is in the hands of 50,000 people.




Since then the attempts to overthrow the Morales government have been continuous, only changing in form, amongst which the latest is the demand of “autonomy” from a series of departments: Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija. The oligarchy’s proposal for regional autonomy only won in these departments, and was abruptly defeated in the rest of the country, but the US ambassador in this Andean country, Phillip Goldberg, is playing a crucial role in the plans for what is now occurring. This man has occupied important positions in the US diplomatic missions in ex-Yugoslavia and in Kosovo, which is why his naming was not coincidental, given it occurred only months after the failure in the referendum on autonomy pushed by the oligarchy. In Bolivia the trajectory of this ambassador has been followed in great detail and they speak openly of the dangers of the “balkanisation” of the east of the country [2].

Since that moment, the objective has been to overthrow Morales. The so-called opposition and the economic elite consider that the reforms put in march are a threat to their way of life and they are using all the means possible to impede them being consolidated. It is also a racist struggle: “if us cambas [white, majority inhabitants of these departments] don’t unite, the collas [indigenous peoples] will want to ruin us, given that unfortunately we have an indigenous president” [3]. It could be said louder, but not clearer than this.

Following the partial failure at that moment to impede the passing of the agrarian reform law – and although it is moving forward very slowly – the oligarchy has opted to agitate around the banners of autonomy for what in Bolivia is know as the “half moon”, the most eastern departments which hold the largest reserves of gas in the country and where the most fertile lands exist. During the months of November and December, the oligarchy launched various ultimatums warning the government that if it did not attend to its demands it would declare “de facto” autonomy, to which Morales responded with a call to the armed forces to defend national unity.

Campesino-military alliance

Although the separatist pretensions are not likely to succeed in the immediate future, it is worth looking at the role that the government of Evo Morales has given to the army and recall what the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, did after winning the 1998 elections: rely on the army as the only institution implanted across the whole territory.

One of Morales’ first objectives after winning the election was to neutralise the army, which was a hypothetical obstacle for his government. The Bolivian Army has always been classist, strongly influences by the National Security Doctrine that the US sponsored, which in synthesis considered the army as the guarantor of internal security, that is to say, controlled social mobilisations. Morales wanted to convert the army into his ally and, following the Venezuelan model, “guarantee the democratic revolution”. For this he took advantage of the “missile crisis” – the sending of Chinese missiles in the hands of the Bolivian army to the US during the term of the preceding executive – to put into retirement 28 generals, promoting people in intermediary posts such as colonels, opened the military academy to indigenous cadets (vetoed from entering until that moment) and thereby gained a greater fidelity on the part of the new military estate.




The change in the army, carried out not without fears given that the oligarchy counts on important ties with the estate which have always being faithful to them, was visualised on May 1, 2006, when Evo Morales decreed the nationalisation of hydrocarbons and the army occupied the gas fields and refineries of the multinationals, provoking a undisguised malaise in the European Union, expressed to Morales via the European commissar on energy, Andris Piebalgs and the Austrian minister of the same branch, Martin Bartenstein (at the time Austria held the presidency of the EU). Half a year later the same operation was carried out with the nationalisation of minerals, symbolised in the take over by the state of the Vinto tin smelter plant in Oruro last February 9. Here again members of the army were used and Morales announced that it would be this institution which was to be put in charge of controlling 25 technological centres where future technicians in the field of minerals would be trained up.

At the same time, Evo Morales gave the armed forces of Bolivia the mission of extending social development to all parts of the country in front of the incapacity of the state to guarantee its presence in all the territory and guarantee attention to the basic necessities of the population. That is why it is not uncommon to see a soldier carrying out tasks in eliminating parasites, vaccination programs, teaching literacy – in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and Culture – or building roadways. The army has also carried forward the “Free Surgery Campaign” in separated zones, covering aspects that the Cuban doctors, in charge of the preventive medicine, do not.

And this in a moment in which Morales has decided to accelerate the campesino-military alliance by giving military status to the “red ponchos”, Aymara campesino soldiers with a long combative tradition in Bolivia, who he entrusted with defending territorial integrity “together with the armed forces” [4].

The oligarchy has seen in this a real threat and considers them “illegal armed groups”, threatens a civil war and affirms that the popular vote of the departments who accepted the autonomy proposal has to be respected. Here we have an example of the manipulation of information, much liked by the defenders of liberty, and in the footsteps of Globovision in Venezuela: “the government [of Evo Morales] is promoting violence, the exclusion of minorities, racism, sectarianism, it deepens differences of ethnicity, social class, campesinos and city dwellers, rich and poor and is dangerously polarising the country into regions. It does not have the vision to accept that the “half moon” wants autonomy, that they won the vote. It wants to centralise, taking power and control of the state institutions, and lacks a program of government. The election of the judges to the Supreme Court by appointment, signifies the buying of justice” [5].

This is the universal discourse of the oligarchy when it sees its privileges in danger, valid in any country in the world. The first year of Evo Morales has bright and dark spots, but it is necessary to support an experience that has rescued the sovereignty and dignity of Bolivia, at the same time as pushing forward a multicultural and participative democracy never before seen in this Andean country, even despite the rejection of the oligarchy and US. Maybe more and better things could have been done, but what has been done until now is nothing small.

Alberto Cruz is an analyst at the Center of Political Studies for International Relations and Development. Translated from Rebelion

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Endnotes

[1] Bolivia Press nº 12, 3 de diciembre de 2006.

[2] CEDIB, 15 de enero de 2007.

[3] Declarations made by David Torrico, president of the Comité Cívico de Pando to La Razón el 4 de julio de 2006.

[4] La Razón, January 24, 2007.

[5] La Razón, January 25, 2007.