BOLIVIA: OCTOBER OR JANUARY AGENDA?
Regional division, class struggle and indigenous rebellion
by Jeffery R. Webber
The “Agenda de Octubre” (October Agenda)-a list of popular demands to remake Bolivia in the name of the poor and the indigenous majority-emerged from the inspiring rebellion of the indigenous and popular classes of the altiplano (high plateau), the shantytown of El Alto and the neighbourhoods on the hillsides of the capital city, La Paz, in the “Gas War” of October 2003.
January 2005 witnessed the ongoing struggle for the October Agenda in the “Water War” of El Alto, led by the Federation of Neighbours of El Alto (FEJUVE), and the coca growers’ (cocaleros) 10-day road blockade in the Yungas region that was brought to an abrupt end by tear gas and rubber bullets.
However, we’ve also seen the first impressive counter-mobilization of the Right in the massive, bourgeois-led demonstrations for “autonomy” in the city of Santa Cruz. As the social movements in the western departments (provinces) of the country persist in their commitment to the October Agenda, the departments of Beni, Tarija, and, most importantly, Santa Cruz have fortified the Right’s “Agenda de Enero” (January Agenda).
The regime of President Carlos Diego Mesa Gisbert-put in power by the forces of October after the ousting of Gonzálo Sánchez de Lozada (Goni)-provided enough rhetorical support for the October Agenda to pacify temporarily the radicalized sectors of the altiplano and El Alto. But in practice it continued subservience to IMF dictates, the US “war on drugs” and the neoliberal model first set in place in 1985.
Meanwhile, the strongest leftist political party, the MAS, led by Evo Morales, has generally opted for passive support of the Mesa administration. The historic window of opportunity forced open by the October rebellion is slowly closing as Mesa follows a middle of the road path and Morales, who dreams of winning the presidential election in 2007, moderates the MAS’s demands and moves away from direct action in the streets.
January’s almost three-week-long hunger strikes, occupations of public buildings, airport blockade and massive marches in Santa Cruz-some say more than 300,000 took to the streets-demonstrate the frightening capacity of the “Cruceño” [the people of Santa Cruz are Cruceños-NS] elite to mobilize students, unions and the popular sectors behind a bourgeois agenda, concealed beneath the banner of regional “autonomy.” In this case, the region’s people are asked to unite against the “centralism” of the capital city, La Paz.
ORIGINS OF OCTOBER AGENDA
To understand the current conjuncture we need to look back. From the 1952 National Revolution until the neoliberal counter-reform of 1985, the tin miners, working through the Trotskyist- and syndicalist-influenced Bolivian Workers Central (COB), represented the vanguard of the Bolivian Left. In 1985, the newly neoliberal National Revolutionary Movement party (MNR) unleashed orthodox shock therapy. The neoliberal model continues to this day.
The principal targets in 1985 were the state-owned mines, more for political reasons than economic ones. The brutal process of privatization was facilitated by the unlucky coincidence of a crash in the price of tin on the world market. More than 25 000 of the 32 000 miners were laid off. Many miners migrated to the cities (especially El Alto), or to the Chapare region, near the city of Cochabamba, where they became coca growers. They took their Marxist traditions with them. US foreign policy and its “War on Drugs” helped spur to life an anti-imperialist, campesino-indígena [small farmer-indigenous-NS] movement in the Chapare region. The cocaleros emerged as the new vanguard of the left, mixing as they did the traditions of the miners and the Indigenous traditions of the longer-standing coca growers. The MAS emerged out of the cocaleros as a Leftist/Indigenous force in the national panorama of political parties.
But it was not until 2000 that popular forces took the offensive against neoliberalism. The February-April 2000 Water War in Cochabamba successfully booted out a multinational consortium and reversed the privatization of water. This revitalized Bolivian social movements, bringing a sense of hope back into the struggle after the dark years of retreat.
This new cycle of contention reached its zenith in the dramatic mobilizations of the Gas War of October 2003. It was a revolt against neoliberalism and the social consequences of economic restructuring. It sought national sovereignty in the face of pressure to adapt to a vicious new world order. It aimed to reclaim Bolivia’s natural resources. It strengthened the class struggle. It demanded real power for the Indigenous majority.
The most important, all-encompassing component of the October Agenda is the call for a Constituent Assembly. This represents a potential threat to the large landowners, the petroleum multinationals and the business elite that run the show in Santa Cruz and used to run the whole country.
THE REBELLION OF SANTA CRUZ
To understand recent events in Santa Cruz, one needs to appreciate what’s at stake for the Cruceño elite. The funnelling of state largesse to the region of Santa Cruz, in an effort to dynamize its oil, gas and agroindustrial export economies, began soon after 1952. It reached exaggerated proportions under the dictatorship of Hugo Banzer (1971-78).
Since 1985, the traditional political parties (MNR, ADN and MIR) have acted as veritable channels of power for the Cruceño bourgeoisie. Cruceño elites occupied key ministerial positions that defined the political economy of the last 20 years, as well as the highest levels of the three key neoliberal parties.
State support for the Cruceño elite has had a considerable impact on Santa Cruz’s role in the Bolivian economy. As is common with corporate welfare bums, the Cruceño bourgeoisie has constructed an elaborate ideological edifice that inverts their actual historical relationship with the state and the rest of Bolivia: “we generate almost half of the national taxes, and carry on our backs the major part of the economy.”
Over the last five years, however, the dominance of Cruceño capital has slowly been put in jeopardy. There was a decline in the ideology of free market capitalism at the outset of the 2000s. There was the considerable collapse in the performance of the traditional neoliberal parties in the 2002 presidential elections. These parties fell still further from grace in the municipal elections of last year. Finally, and most importantly, the October Agenda challenged the fundamental ethos of the Cruceño elite and its material basis. The January Agenda is the answer to this threat.
MESA’S NEOLIBERAL REFORMISM
President Mesa, vice president under the Goni regime, was brought to power on the crest of the October Rebellion after distancing himself from the violent repression ordered by Goni. He then surrounded himself with “gonistas” and other neoliberal ministers.
Unlike Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Mesa has never denounced neoliberal orthodoxy when attending international forums. His administration has agreed with the IMF to continue with the neoliberal model, to respect previous privatizations and to persist in paying the crushing external debt.
Indeed, it was an IMF dictate that sparked the mobilizations that would become the January Agenda. In early December 2004, a Bolivian government team travelled to Washington to finalize the details of a loan, which was to come into effect on January 1, 2005 and to continue until the end of March 2005. A medium-term plan was reached that called for measures to improve the precarious fiscal situation of the Bolivian state.
On December 29, the newspaper La Razón reported that the IMF was explicitly opposed to existing subsidies for diesel and gasoline. The next day Mesa ordered an increase in the price of both. This sparked mobilizations all over the country, including the business-led demonstrations in Santa Cruz, which morphed from a fight to maintain subsidies on diesel and gas to the Cruceño elite’s January Agenda.
THE CURRENT IMPASSE
In one sense the gigantic mobilization in Santa Cruz demonstrates the first significant counter-reaction to the October Agenda. But the fact that the Cruceño elite have regionalized their struggle and have, in a sense, temporarily forsaken the “national” struggle to control the Bolivian state, is also a sign of their weakness. It indicates that the October Agenda has effectively crushed the bourgeois ideology of the free market, foreign investment and racism outside of Santa Cruz (and Beni and Tarija). The Right is stronger than they were after October 2003, thanks to Mesa’s neoliberal reformism, although their power is restricted primarily to Santa Cruz.
Even in Santa Cruz itself the elite faces challenges. On January 27, university students and indigenous groups marched against the January Agenda, mobilizing over 1000 people. Workers, some business people, campesinos and others marched on the same day in Sucre against the Cruceño rebellion. San Julián, on the road connecting the departments of Santa Cruz and Trinidad, was blockaded by peasant colonizers. Apparently the influence of the Landless Movement (MST) in this blockade was impressive.
The next day, university students, the Civic Committee, market vendors, the Federation of Neighbours of La Paz, and others marched in the capital against the January Agenda. Morales’s MAS party appears, haltingly, to be taking to street politics once again. Morales announced plans for a march, concentrated in the city of Cochabamba, of campesinos, cocaleros, and others in defence of “dignity and demanding the approval of a new Hydrocarbons Law.” The march would also be in defence of the democratic process and against the Cruceño revolt, which he said threatened liberty and constitutional government in Bolivia. Marches took place over these weeks in other cities as well. Finally, the mayors of all major cities apart from Santa Cruz came out against the January Agenda.
Bolivia has entered a time of uncertainty, a time of regional division in the class struggle and clearly delineated, conflicting national projects. The hope for the October Agenda lies in the radicalization of the social movements of the western part of the country which would pressure Mesa to grant reforms while emboldening the courageous dissidents within the Santa Cruz department
POSTSCRIPT-SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2005
Much has happened since I wrote this article in early February, but the basic polarization between Left and Right national projects has not changed.
Undoubtedly, the event with the most political and social consequence in the last two months was Mesa’s faked resignation. On the evening of March 6, Mesa announced that he would present his (revocable) resignation before Congress the next morning.
Late that Sunday night and into the early hours of Monday morning I went to the Plaza Murillo, which hosts the Presidential Palace, to witness thousands of spontaneously organized middle-class right-wingers from La Paz work themselves into frenzied chants of “Death to Evo!” (Morales), “Evo and Abel are the Apocalypse!” (Abel Mamani is a key leader of the Federation of United Neighbours of El Alto), and “mano dura” (“iron fist”). They asked Mesa to stay in government and repress the social movements that had effectively shut down most of the country through blockades and strikes in the preceding week.
In retrospect, it seems clear that Mesa never intended to resign. He announced his resignation for Congress to consider, expecting that they would rally behind him. The un-elected President-Mesa holds office as a result of the October 2003 popular insurrection-was looking for a new mandate from the political Right. In his manipulative speech of Sunday evening he named the enemies of the state-Evo Morales and Abel Mamani-and announced the necessity of proceeding with policies around natural resources that would be “viable” in the face of the “international community” (in other words, the imperialist and sub-imperialist states, the international financial institutions, transnational corporations and the local bourgeoisie with extensive ties to international capital).
To do this the country needed to rally around Mesa, to clear the roads of blockades and protect the “human right” of free transit and commerce, and to denounce the Aymara-indigenous social movement and Leftist political party leaders Mamani and Morales. As Mesa hoped, the middle class came out in force, drawing on a long tradition of racial hatred and fear of the lower classes. In Congress Mesa abandoned his tacit 17-month old pact with Morales and MAS and built a new Right-wing coalition with the traditional parties MNR, MIR and NFR. This part went as Mesa planned.
What he didn’t predict was a radicalized unity of Left forces. On March 9, an “anti-oligarchic” pact was signed in the historic La Paz headquarters of the COB by Morales, Jaime Solares (leader of the COB), Felipe Quispe and Román Loayza (leaders of the campesino union, the CSUTCB), Roberto de la Cruz (councillor of El Alto, who played a central role in the October rebellion), Alejo Véliz (leader of the Trópico de Cochabamba, an association of coca-growers), leaders of the MST, Oscar Olivera (a leader in Cochabamba’s “Water War”), and Omar Fernandez (from the irrigating farmers’ association in Cochabamba) and others. Journalist Luis Gómez has commented that these folks don’t normally pass time comfortably together, never mind sign pacts of solidarity. So, at the time, the potential seemed great.
The unifying theme was the demand that the new hydrocarbons law, then in front of Congress, would increase royalties paid by transnationals to the Bolivian state on hydrocarbons (mainly natural gas) to 50%. Blockades went up in force in support of this demand, especially those led by the cocaleros, who are closely aligned with MAS.
Then followed a complicated and bizarre set of events. As the blockades persisted and a “light” hydrocarbons law passed through the lower house and moved to the Senate, on March 15 Mesa announced on television that he wanted presidential elections, scheduled for 2007, moved forward to August of this year because it was impossible to govern. This was rejected as unconstitutional by Congress, and Mesa continues as President (although now with significantly less support from within the middle class). The blockades were lifted, however, as Morales helped to de-radicalize the cocaleros, many of whom wanted to continue with blockades until the demand for 50% royalties on gas was won.
The proposed hydrocarbons law is before the Senate, and the outcome remains unclear. There are no roadblocks, and the capital is eerily quiet given the tradition of many residents of La Paz to leave the city for religious vacations during Holy Week. The “tense calm” that everyone here refers to is likely to break in the near future, as the extraordinary underlying tensions and social divisions within this country persist.
Jeffery R. Webber is a PhD student at the University of Toronto and a member of the New Socialist Group. His regular updates on the situation in Bolivia are found at www.newsocialist.org