We’re not crazy: The days of May and June in Bolivia
Jeffery R. Webber was present during Bolivia’s dramatic mass confrontations in May and June. In this article, Jeffery looks at the emergence of revolutionary democracy as well as the political confusion and the threats ahead.
Let’s begin with some unpleasant facts. Bolivia is South America’s poorest country. Within Latin America, only Nicaragua and Haiti suffer higher rates of poverty. According to the most recent statistics from the Bolivian government, almost 60 per cent of the population is “poor,” with half of this sector “extremely poor.” John Crabtree points out, “Only 16 per cent of the population is believed to have sufficient income to cover basic needs.” How that doesn’t signify an 84 per cent rate of poverty only the government and the World Bank could ‘explain.’
Add to this the fact that inequality levels in Bolivia are among the highest in Latin America, which in turn is the most unequal region in the world. Still worse, much of the suffering from inequity and poverty in Bolivia correlates with being Indigenous, people who make up more than 60 per cent of the population.
Pernicious racism is hard to express through statistics. Sometimes anecdotes tell a fuller truth. Aymara intellectual Pablo Mamani Ramírez works at the Public University of El Alto. El Alto is a shantytown with a population probably in excess of 700,000. The shantytown overlooks the colonial valley city of La Paz. Over 80 per cent of alteños (residents of El Alto) self-identify as Indigenous. Mamani writes: “From within the spaces of power is imagined, is constructed, the city of El Alto as the Other City, the city of Indians. Relations of ethnic discrimination are so strong so as to seem natural. One notes this in daily life, when listening to the radio waves: ‘El Alto is a dirty and disorganized city.’ It’s also evident in the minibuses that transit between La Paz and El Alto, when ‘distinguished’ ladies and gentlemen use deodorant perfumes to try to erase the stench, and possibly the colour, of the rest of the passengers.”
In May and June of 2005, Bolivia witnessed massive Left-Indigenous mobilizations once more, on a scale not seen since – and in some senses surpassing – the October 2003 “Gas War.” That October, president Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada was thrown out of power. He was the personification of the neoliberal economic model first introduced in 1985. Carlos Mesa Gisbert was vice-president at the time and assumed office after Goni fled the country for exile in the United States. Mesa promised the masses in the streets that he would carry through with their “October Agenda” of nationalizing natural gas, convening a Constituent Assembly and ensuring a trial of Goni and his closest ring of hacks and gangsters.
Alas, Mesa was a gangster too. He wouldn’t gun down unarmed civilians as Goni did in October 2003, but he refused any course but to be the lackey of local factions of the internationally oriented bourgeoisie, the international financial institutions, the United States embassy, petroleum transnational corporations and European and even Brazilian capitalists. And so, on June 6, 2005, the radicalized poor-indigenous threw him out, too. Peasants, miners, the urban unemployed, students, informal workers and Indigenous forces that transcend these sectors forced Mesa to resign as they joined together massively – if only for a moment – under the demand for complete nationalization of the hydrocarbons industry, the most important resource of which is natural gas.
I want to introduce three parts to this scenario: first, Goni and Mesa and their similarities that represent the class-ethnic forces from which they emerged; second, the days of May and June, and the strengths and limitations of the popular forces during this struggle; and third, the incipient tragedy of the Centre-Left exit strategy of the Movement Toward Socialism party (MAS), led by Evo Morales.
To introduce these parts it was necessary to begin with the broad brush of poverty, inequality and racism that permeate Bolivian reality. The mainstream media and the official political discourse throughout the country has sought to characterize the protesters as irrational – a deeply racist discourse that has profound historical roots in social Darwinism and the idea that Indigenous peoples can’t think properly – and/or funded and manipulated by the dark forces of external narco-terrorist-communist infiltrators.
The truth, of course, is that in the setting described at the outset, the only dignified and rational thing to do is to tear this system down and create a new system of racial and economic equality. Readers of this magazine might call that socialism.
The Bolivian super-elite and neoliberal rationality
Former president Goni was a fair-skinned mining magnate, a multi-millionaire amidst a sea of poverty who spoke broken Spanish after having been raised in the United States. He was a key founder of neoliberal economic restructuring. He represented the hyper-rich and the backwards colonial, racist condition of the Bolivian state. He was also willing to kill between 70 and 80 unarmed civilians to defend this order in September and October 2003, before the middle class – disgusted by innocent blood in the streets – abandoned his side. He was forced into exile in the United States.
Replacing Goni through constitutional channels was Carlos Mesa Gisbert, Goni’s vice-president who had distanced himself publicly from Goni’s butchering. Accepting Mesa’s assumption of power illustrated the weak political depth of popular forces in the mobilizations of October 2003, despite their massive protest capacity. Mesa was an established neoliberal through and through. How could he be expected to carry through with the quite radical “October Agenda?”
By May and June 2005, the utter contempt that emerged for Mesa – born out of the president’s unwillingness to carry through his mandate – was plain to see in the streets of the capital and throughout much of the country. But there was also a deepening sense of political consciousness. In meetings with miners, neighbours, peasants and so on, a common refrain was that it was not the man at the top of the system that was the problem, it was the system itself. Some ventured further the capitalist system itself, the colonial-racist system had to be abolished.
Yet even if Mesa the individual represented little other than the system from which he emerged, it still teaches us something about that system to examine his words at a critical moment. After a particularly intense period of social mobilization and roadblocks earlier this year, Mesa went on television and announced his – what turned out to be revocable – resignation to the Bolivian people. He denounced Evo Morales (of the Movement Toward Socialism) for “blockading” the country and proposing irrational measures against foreign capital, especially in the hydrocarbons industry. Abel Mamani, leader of the Federation of United Neighbours of El Alto (FEJUVE-El Alto) came under the same vicious attack.
The fact that Mesa’s speech infantilized Morales and Mamani, and that Morales and Mamani are both Aymara, touched on the racist currents of the Bolivian situation as well. But the important axis of the speech reflects what Forrest Hylton describes as the conflict between conceptions of democracy: radical democracy versus (neo)liberal democracy; whether people rule their lives or whether capital rules their lives.
“Brazil has told us, Spain has told us,” Mesa pleaded that evening, “the World Bank, the United States, the International Monetary Fund, Great Britain and all of the European Union: Bolivians, approve a law [on hydrocarbons] that is viable and acceptable to the International Community.” The needs of international capital, not those of the 84 per cent of Bolivians who can’t meet their basic needs, according to Mesa, determine what is “viable and acceptable.” Mesa repeated ad nauseam in his address how the parameters of the possible were set by the “international community,” and therefore it was irrational to propose alternatives.
Recently at a lecture in La Paz called “The Colonial President,” Leftist political philosopher Luis Tapia wondered about the implications of Mesa’s televised appearance that night. It is impossible to determine the economic policies of your country. They are determined by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the interests of international capital. So Mesa says to the popular forces demanding social justice in the streets and countryside, “Don’t even think about it, don’t be irrational.” Tapia wondered, then, if to be rational meant to give up thinking.
The rationality of revolutionary democracy
The mobilizations of May-June are particularly significant for four reasons: (i) they were national in scope, even if the most intense confrontations and concentrations of people were found in La Paz-El Alto; (ii) the demand around which all the innumerable popular sectors and organizations mobilized was the nationalization of gas; (iii) because of the failure of the popular Indigenous-Left forces to lay the foundations for an alternative basis of revolutionary power, the Right has maintained – even if in perpetual crisis – its grip on state power and is looking to rearticulate itself forcefully in the December elections this year; and (iv) there has been a decisive increase in the political consciousness of many social movement actors evident in the fact that at every meeting, assembly and march, the theme of popular power, of taking power, is on everyone’s lips, even if its realization remains a relatively distant hope.
The most critically important popular organization in the articulation of the nationalization demand was clearly FEJUVE-El Alto. The idea was first powerfully brought to life in the Gas War of September-October 2003, but had become somewhat diluted, faded and confused after Mesa’s manipulative gas referendum of July 2004 effectively demobilized many social movements. It was FEJUVE-El Alto, in the organization’s 2004 Congress, that approved as part of its new mandate the struggle to nationalize gas. And it was FEJUVE-El Alto that formulated the idea of a massive mobilization for this demand in the months leading up to the days of May and June. They inaugurated the struggle with an incredible march from El Alto to La Paz on May 16. FEJUVE-El Alto was joined by numerous other radical popular forces on this impressive day which set in motion the general strike that would last over three weeks. Despite the fact that on the same day the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party initiated a march of a separate coalition of forces calling for only 50 per cent royalties in a new hydrocarbons law, FEJUVE’s demand for nationalization became the demand of the countryside and the streets in the weeks following.
FEJUVE-El Alto forged the nationalization consensus, shut off access to gasoline and natural gas to La Paz through the barricading of the Senkata plant in El Alto, and drove La Paz into a more generalized state of scarcity (in basic food products, etc.) through a three-week long general strike and the blockading of road access to the capital.
Meanwhile, in the intense street struggles in La Paz, the protagonists in descending order of importance were the Federation of Peasant Workers of La Paz (“Tupaj Katari” led by Aymara revolutionary Gualberto Choque), the Federation of Bolivian Miners (FSTMB), and student radicals from the Public University of El Alto.
Again, though, the struggle was national. All nine regions of the country experienced effective roadblocks of the major highway arteries. Even the historically less politicized and radicalized Indigenous movements in the Eastern lowlands (due to their origins in non-governmental organizations) occupied oil and natural gas well-heads in support of the struggle.
June 6 witnessed somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 people in the streets of La Paz. Standing in the centre of downtown, I saw nothing but waves of dignified, poor-Indigenous revolutionaries in every direction stretching out to the horizons of the city streets. It is impossible to convey the weight of this assembly of radicalized people. Mesa sensed the end and announced his resignation – which would then have to be approved by Congress. This was an extraordinary popular victory, but events that followed revealed the weaknesses in the revolutionary forces.
Centre-Left myopia, and the Right wing threat
Next in line for the presidency, according to the constitution, was president of the Senate Hormando Vaca Díez, a hated Right-winger from Santa Cruz. If he did not assume power, it would be Mario Cossío, president of the lower house of Congress, who could take over the reigns of the country constitutionally. He is a member of the Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) which is Goni’s old party. The special session of Congress to decide on the post-Mesa situation was held in Sucre rather than La Paz in an attempt to avoid protesters. Vaca Díez was maneuvering to take power.
The revolutionary miners wouldn’t have it, however, and spontaneously set-off to Sucre to shut the place down if Vaca Díez assumed the presidency. A miner was killed in confrontations that followed, but the second popular victory of May and June – even if limited and defensive – was won as both Vaca Díez and Cossío were forced to refuse power and allow Supreme Court president Eduardo Rodríguez to take over the presidency with the assumption that elections would be pushed forward to December of this year. After a few weeks of confusion in Congress, this is precisely what was decided in early July.
A new phase of this historic struggle has begun with the focus on elections bringing its weight to bear on social movement and political party strategies. The MAS and its leader Evo Morales quickly decided to further align their political trajectory with that of Brazilian President Lula and his neoliberal orientation since taking office. Morales has been having intense conversations with the mayor of La Paz and leader of the Movement Without Fear party, Juan Del Granado. They are discussing forming a united front electoral bloc against neoliberalism. The only catch is they don’t appear to be against it. Granado, a fervent devotee of Mesa, was a clear opponent of the popular struggle earlier this year in El Alto to kick out the private water company Aguas del Illimani and to establish a public water system under popular social control.
There is confusion and division among popular Left-Indigenous forces, but no illusions that the MAS-MSM spectacle is any path forward. Discussions of a National Aboriginal Popular Assembly with a clear revolutionary flavour are beginning to take root, but are still in their incipient stages. A longer-term plan to construct a revolutionary political school in El Alto is gaining excitement and momentum, but won’t be part of any necessary resistance to a Right-wing electoral re-articulation in December. The trajectory of the revolution is muddy and contingent on a thousand factors, but the people are not through fighting.
