Ahmad: Revolution Through the Ballot?

We have to refound Bolivia in order to end the colonial state, to live united in diversity, to put all our resources under state control, and to make people participate and give them the right to make decisions… If I become President, I have to swear to respect the laws - and if the laws are neoliberal, I can’t do that.”

–Evo Morales

Aijaz Ahmad
Bolivia: Fire in the Plains, Fire in the Mountains
Frontline

The first part of a series on Latin America

“I would rather be an illiterate Indio than a North American billionaire,” said Che Guevara before he perished in the Andean foothills of Bolivia 38 years ago. Evo Morales, who won the Bolivian presidency by a landslide in the third week of December, is not exactly illiterate, even though the United States’ corporate media like to call him a high school dropout and a “narco-trade unionist”. But he is an “Indio” all right, indeed the first man of full-blooded indigenous origin to be elected President of any Latin American country by universal suffrage. “I am not only a follower of Chavez, but a follower of Castro and a follower of Che as well,” he exults immediately after his massive victory, but then introduces a note of caution: “This does not mean that I am going to implement their programmes here, because Bolivia is not Cuba.”

Bolivia is no stranger to either seismic political upheavals or to revolutionary possibilities. Liberated from colonial rule and founded as a separate country in 1825, by Simon Bolivar, the legendary Latin American revolutionary hero of Venezuelan origin whose name is consecrated in the country’s name itself, Bolivia has known no less than 200 coups in its tortured history and came close to a workers’ revolution in the 1950s which failed but did open up the way for sweeping left-populist reforms. Both these legacies - the Bolivarian one of anti-colonial nationalism and continental resistance against North American domination, as well as that of the revolutionary populism of the 1950s and early 1960s - are palpable in today’s Bolivian political imagination. That alone gives to Morales a certain affinity with Hugo Chavez who of course refers to his own revolutionary programme as a “Bolivarian revolution” and has even re-named his country as a “Bolivarian Republic” and now speaks of working toward a “socialism of the 21st century”. Almost a decade before Chavez even uttered the word “socialism”, Morales had founded a party in Bolivia which he called a “Movement Toward Socialism” and he consciously invokes that Bolivarian vision when he says, “I respect Chavez because Chavez talks of one big Latin American nation.”

An anti-imperialist nationalist, a self-professed socialist as well as an authentic, full-blooded Indio, Evo Morales is in some ways a unique phenomenon. The son of cocoa farmers, he was raised in the lush but impoverished Altiplano region, where he himself worked as a coca farmer and llama herder before rising to prominence as the national leader of the cocoa-growers’ union. In 1995, he founded the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo), a political party which brings together three different Bolivian, and indeed Latin American - political currents: the historic hatred of what is generally known in Latin America as “gringo imperialism”, a socialist inspiration which tends to erupt periodically in a variety of countries across the continent, and the explosive revolutionary politics of the indigenous peoples which is sweeping not only Bolivia but also Peru, Ecuador, Guatemala and even parts of Mexico. He first ran for President on the MAS platform in 2002 and the imperious U.S. Ambassador to Bolivia, Manuel Rocha, let it be known publicly that the U.S. was likely to cut off aid if Morales got elected. His popularity shot up immediately and he eventually lost the election to the U.S. favourite, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, by less than two percentage points. Condoleezza Rice, the current U.S. Secretary of State, communicated her jitters from Europe on the eve of the recent elections. Only a little earlier, on October 21, Charles Shapiro, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Hemispheric Affairs, had e-mailed to Andres Oppenheimer of Miami Herald: “It would not be welcome news in Washington to see the increasingly belligerent Cuban-Venezuelan combo become a trio.”

Well, the trio seems to be very much in the making. Morales often introduces cautionary words but his essential message has been repeated a thousand times. Just before the elections, he gave an extensive interview to a Swedish journalist where he summarised his platform well. “We will nationalise the forests and the petroleum and natural gas reserves,” he said. “In several cases the management of the companies has been disastrous. To develop the country, we have to get rid of the colonial and neoliberal model. We want to tax the transnationals in a fair way, and redistribute the money to the small- and medium-size enterprises, where the job opportunities and ideas are. To get this on its way, we want to create a development bank. The properties of big land owners will have to be redistributed; we’ll respect the productive land, but the unproductive land must be handed out to landless peasants - this will start a true process of economic redistribution… We will ask for the total [forgiveness] of the debt, negotiating with the World Bank and the IMF [International Monetary Fund]. We are looking into the possibility of presenting a demand that Bolivia be compensated for genocide and 500 years of oppression and violations of human rights. It would be a historic thing to do, especially for an indigenous government.”

The distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” land in the above paragraph is inaccurately translated. What Morales means is that landowners can keep the land they actually cultivate but the uncultivated lands will have to be surrendered for redistribution. We shall return later to the immense difficulties that the Morales government, due to come into office on January 22, is likely to face in implementing so ambitious a project but there is no gainsaying the fact that in the boldness of its conception the project itself is revolutionary and remarkably similar to the one Chavez has already launched in Venezuela. And, like Chavez, Morales has a comprehensive vision that encompasses the whole of Latin America and recalls Bolivar’s famous declaration that “the name of our country is America”. In that same interview, he goes on to say, “There are many progressive leaders in Latin America right now; presidents like Fidel and Chavez, but also Kirchner [in Argentina], Lula and Tabarez Vasquez [in Uruguay]… I have a vision of integration, like the European Union, with a single market and a single currency and with the corporations subordinate to the state. . . If I become president Bolivia will support ALBA [Alternativa Bolivariana para las Am