11 August 2006
Newton GarverA Genius at Work in the Andes
On August 6th, the 61st anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and 181st anniversary of the independence of Bolivia, Evo Morales opened the long-anticipated Constituent Assembly in Sucre, the legal capital of this two-headed nation. The Constituent Assembly is to rewrite the nation 's constitution in a way that ensures greater benefits to the indigenous people and greater participation by them. The pundits all say that Evo (as everyone in Bolivia calls him) will be unable to achieve what he wants because his party has only a 60% majority and not the two-thirds needs to override opposition. Perhaps. But the pundits make their calculations on the basis of ordinary politics, and Morales has consistently broken out of the box of ordinary politics. In particular he has consistently refused to treat anyone as an enemy. Carl Schmitt, in one of the most powerful essays of the twentieth century, defined politcs as beginning with a distinction between friends and foes, and we see this dynamic described by Schmitt operating everyday in both local and international politics, overriding attention to real problems. It is by defying this tradition of politics that Evo has set himself apart.
So Evo Morales does not fit into any of the simple categories by means of which pundits normally comment on the political scene. That is part of his genius.
Two Recent Cases in Point
Two recent incidents serve to illustrate Evo 's refusal to acknowledge enemies. One has to do with the Catholic Church and the other with the conservative entrepreneurs of the eastern departments of Bolivia, especially Santa Cruz and Tarija, where the new wealth and the neocon ideology are concentrated.
The run-in with the Church concerned education, sparked by remarks of the Minister of Education, Mr. Patzi, about how he was going to implement the new requirement that indigenous religions and languages be taught in both public and private schools in Bolivia. Patzi interpreted the requirement for courses that deal even-handedly with all sorts of religion to mean that Catholic schools could not teach Catholicism, which led to an exchange of harsh epithets with a priest. Evo quickly said that the wording of the new education law would need to be reconsidered, and he scheduled a meeting with the bishop. (The bishop forgave him for being two hours late, since Evo had stopped at the hospital to bandage his nose, which he had just broken playing soccer.) Church schools will continue teaching Catholicism, the Church will remain friendly to Evo 's aims, and there will overall be more instruction in indigenous language and religion.
In the runup to the December election last fall and again in the referendum held at the time of the Constituent Assembly elections this spring, regional or departmental autonomy was a prominent slogan from the eastern departments, reluctant to share their wealth with the poorer departments of the Altiplano. Evo 's response has again been a surprise: he has made more autonomy one of his goals in the Constituent Assembly! As in his meeting with the bishop, his agreement with an opponent 's demand goes along with an insistence on the priorities of MAS, namely justice and national unity. By sticking firmly to these principles and being accommodating about details, Evo arranges that anyone who insists on being his enemy will have to be an enemy of either justice or the nation, or both. This is statesmanship rather than modern politics, but it also evidences a kind of political genius, albeit very different from that of Karl Rove.
Background
Bolivia was relegated to the ranks of the unreported and unnoticed until October of 2003, when Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was forced from office by a campesino uprising against his policies and against him personally. In the ensuing 30 months Bolivia has become one of the headline nations and its new President, Evo Morales, emerges a rising star in South America. Little known outside Bolivia before his election in December of 2005, he is regularly introduced with en explanatory epithet: 'socialist, ' 'leftist. ' 'populist ' or 'radical populist ' (NY Times 7/31/06), 'former coca farmer, ' 'ally of Hugo Chávez, ' 'friend of Fidel Castro, ' and so on. Even George Soros (Age of Fallibility, 121) sidelines Morales as 'leader of the coca growers ' association. ' None of these epithets is inaccurate, but each is belittling to the man, attempting to confine him in a nutshell or a pigeon hole. The trouble with the epithets is that they presume to identify just who Morales is, and to do so with enough accuracy that the reader can make the inferences necessary to further understanding of the news. But President Morales over and over exhibits subtleties and surprises that lay bare the inadequacy of such epithets. Though short in stature, he proves a much bigger person than is generally acknowledged.
A big step toward overcoming the gap in reporting comes with Alma Guillermoprieto 's essays in the New York Review, the first of which appeared in the issue of August 10, 2006. Here we learn that the vice-president of the party, Sacarias Flores, lost his father because the family lacked the bus fare needed to take him to a hospital. A comparable part of Evo 's history is that four of his siblings died before reaching the age of two. None of us has grown up with such poignant reminders of poverty. Flores is Quechua rather than Aymara, belonging to the largest of the indigenous ethnic groups, all of which share memories of the agonies of oppression and poverty.
Evo Morales is a genius, and if epithets are necessary one might best say that he is both a pragmatist and a nationalist. He has continued to make a place for himself on the world stage, although he presides over a very small and very poor country. Like his triumph in the December election, his nationalization of the hydrocarbon resources of Bolivia on May 1, 2006, made headlines and stimulated much speculation and comment, even though it was exactly what he said he would do and should have come as no surprise. He is now preparing the stage for the next act of nationalization, concerning tens of thousands of square miles of potentially productive agricultural land in the departments of Santa Cruz and Beni, and again it is world news. Part of his genius lies in his balancing a variety of interests and issues, part lies in making people think he is doing something other than he is in fact doing, and part lies in a remarkable blending of principle and pragmatism. It is worth reviewing again the context for his policy and action, just what he did and proposes to do, and how it plays in hemispheric politics.
The Big Underlying Issue
Bolivia is rich in resources but impoverished in its standard of living, and everyone in Bolivia realizes the reason: foreigners came, put in the infrastructure to extract the resources, made themselves rich in the process, and exported both the products and the wealth. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century it was the Spaniards, who financed their empire and their famous 'Armada ' with silver from Potosí, and more recently it has been international consortiums. It is true that some wealth was left behind in the hands of European ex-pats, the privileged elite who remained to govern the nation (with appalling incompetence) and lord it over the Indians. The indigenous population, however, remained impoverished and so did the nation as a whole. The indigenous people were also deprived of education until the regime of the MNR (National Revolutionary Movement) under Victor Paz Estenssoro, in power from 1952 through 1968. It is true, as the NY Times lamented in an editorial, that the peasants lack sophisticated understanding of modern economics, but educational progress over the past half century has given them a clear grasp of the big picture -- that their resources have been looted, that they have been left with nothing, and that they are generally treated as inferior beings.
So when Morales proclaimed 'An End to Looting!!' as he nationalized the gas wells on May first, everyone in Bolivia understood perfectly, however perplexed neocons may have been.
It was with great dexterity that Evo Morales channeled the indigenous protest that arose from this increasing awareness of exploitation, impoverishment, and racist discrimination, and he came to the presidency on the crest of this wave of indignation. I have previously described in detail the strikes, roadblocks, rallies, and marches that led to the resignation of two presidents, Gonzalo Sánchez in October of 2003 and Carlos Mesa in May of 2005. (See Buffalo Report 10/17/03, 12/5/03, 3/25/05, 6/6/05, 7/12/05, and 2/19/06.) Evo Morales came in second in the presidential balloting of 2002, when Sánchez was elected by a post-balloting vote of the Bolivian Congress (with strings pulled in Washington), but he was a secondary figure in the popular protests that overthrew Sánchez the following year. The presidential campaign of Morales had called for a 51% stake in the hydrocarbons, but the popular demand in 2003 through 2005 was for total nationalization without compensation. These differences about how to proceed, and about who should lead the protests, could have split the opposition, as had been the case in the past. But Morales let the details slip, emphasized the unity of indigenous people on the big issue, and came to power in the election of 12.18.2005.
The big issue of looting and oppression is mostly a simple issue of justice, but Evo has turned into a matter of nationalism as well. While keeping principles of justice in focus, he has also insisted on national unity as the route to growth and prosperity, and has developed the ideal of nationalism into both an appeal for consensus and a bulwark against globalization. Details are negotiable, and indeed justice demands that they be negotiated, but it is a matter of principle that the people will no longer be deprived of power over their destiny and that the wealth of the country will no longer be exported for the sole or principal benefit of foreigners.
Matters of principle are commonly turned into confrontations, which in turn (with the press aiding and abetting) become zero-sum power struggles. There may be occasions for such zero-sum confrontations, but not when the prosperity of an impoverished people is at stake. Prosperity and development require cooperation, not confrontation. A large part of the genius of Morales consists in his determination to invite and nurture cooperation at the same time as he insists on justice. He is not a Gandhi, but he is not a Chávez either.
Slashing his Salary
Soon after his inauguration in January, headlines around the world announced that Morales had slashed his salary in half. What a brilliant move! Both in substance and in P.R. Again the headlines were not wrong but missed the heart of the matter. Morales issued a Presidential Decree, called the 'Austerity Decree, ' that reduced about 400 government salaries, with bigger reductions for the higher salaries. There was a secondary effect on some salaries not directly mentioned in the decree, because of a Bolivian law saying that no one paid from the public treasury can receive a higher salary than the President, which led to protests by some high-paid university professors. The overall savings come to about $127 million annually, which Morales further decreed should be used for health care and education. Subsequently teachers salaries have been raised by 10%, though the professors have not been entirely pacified. So Morales not only grabbed headlines but also made significant inroads on two of the country 's entrenched problems, the gap between the rich and the poor and the deplorable inadequacy of health and educational services.
In terms of public relations, internationally this move showed Morales to stand apart from numerous heads of third-world governments who have enriched themselves through public office. In this respect it continued to emphasize and reinforce his claim to be a leader of stature even though from a small country, and it continued to gain him international headlines. Domestically it showed that he was seriously shifting public resources from sinecures that benefit the elite to the prime needs of the indigenous people. In this respect it showed, as clearly as and more practically than his famous sweater, that he is remaining with his indigenous supporters and not joining the privileged elite.
In terms of substance, the decree was more than a P.R. stunt, for it really did move resources around in a way that conformed to his election promises. It is true that it is not much, and that improvements in health and education by themselves will not remove the need for jobs and public services (water, power, sanitation). But a ten percent increase in the salaries of primary and secondary teachers in the public schools does make a real difference, besides being an important symbol.
The Gas Business.
On May first, a traditional day of celebration, Evo Morales announced that he was nationalizing the natural gas reserves of the nation. Re-nationalizing them, since they had been privatized less than a decade earlier by free-market predecessor President Sánchez. His move was again a combination of headline-grabbing panache and cautious pragmatism.
The panache involved Morales going around from one installation to another, with the press and the army, and posting at each one a large banner proclaiming this the property of the nation, and then stationing a detachment of the army to guard the newly acquired national property. These gestures had all the appearance of a grand takeover, seeming to fulfill the old campesino demand for expropriation without compensation, and were sure to gather world-wide attention. Which they did.
The legal details, however, were more cautious. Something was indeed nationalized, namely the gas reserves underground. But there was no expropriation of infrastructure installed by the international consortiums. Furthermore the contracts under which the internationals were operating were abrogated on the ground that they were unconstitutional, since they had been approved by presidential decree rather than by a vote of Congress, as the Constitution requires. There appears to be no dispute about the facts of the matter -- that there is this clause in the Constitution and that the contracts were approved in this deficient manner ' so the internationals seem to have little chance of recovering 'damages ' at the World Court. Therefore there will be no compensation, but no expropriation either. The internationals are invited to continue their operations under new terms, including that a 51% stake in the operation go to Bolivia, and are given six months in which to renegotiate contracts with the Bolivian government. If there is no new contract after six months, they may forfeit their investments.
Here we have a good example of Morales insisting on justice while inviting cooperation, and of national interests trumping globalization. Neither the insistence on justice nor the nationalism is dogmatic or ideological or punitive. Instead they are forward looking and pragmatic. Others no doubt differ in their conception of justice. By not insisting that his conception be applied across the board, to past actions as well as to future contracts, Morales avoids a range of bitter contests, but his insistence does mean that he is engaged in a power struggle. Can he prevail against the internationals with his view that the new contracts will give them a 'fair ' return on investments? Brazil, with heavy investments to date, quickly said that it planned to make new investments elsewhere rather than in Bolivia, but did not rule out a renegotiated contract for extracting and exporting gas. Gazprom (Russia), on the other hand, has more recently announced that it is considering investing two to three billion dollars in exploiting the gas reserves of Bolivia, presumably on Bolivia 's terms; and China is probably in the wings. So even though Morales is standing up against big players who have far more experience, his power play still looks like a winning gambit.
Why was the army involved in the operation? Good question. The army was not needed for abrogating unconstitutional contracts or setting deadlines for renegotiations. Perhaps it was not needed at all. But Morales accomplished two things by using the armed forces. He was aware that at the time of his election the USA slashed its military aid to Bolivia, a large part of which was earmarked for sending officers to Fort Benning 's special sort of nefarious training, and that many officers took pleasure in this junket and resented its being curtailed. So Morales was probably mending his relations with the military by showing that he needed them for an operation in which national pride and national well-being was at stake. The army also added to the dramatic panache of the May Day event and helped grab headlines. The panache helped convince the campesinos that he was doing what they wanted him to do, even though the details (hidden in the shadows) were different. Army units have since been withdrawn from the gas wells.
The Land Grab
On the day of the nationalization of gas reserves, the government announced that it also was preparing plans for the next step in reclaiming national natural resources, the confiscation and redistribution of thousands of square miles of potentially productive land in the departments of Santa Cruz and Beni, which lie east of the Andes in the Amazonian basin and are the two largest department of Bolivia. News reports at the time alleged that 80% of the land in those departments is controlled by just 17 families, that most of this land was granted by former dictators as political favors, and that most of it is lying idle. I have no way of independently confirming these allegations, but the sources that reported them are generally reliable and generally report opposing views, so I am inclined to believe them. The announcement did, of course, stir controversy.
Santa Cruz, like La Paz and New York, is the name of both a city and a department (state), and for the past decade or two Santa Cruz has seemed the economic engine of Bolivia. The city is the second largest in Bolivia, and during the past decade it has grown faster than any other Bolivian city with the exception of El Alto, which is poor rather than rich, indigenous rather than Euro-Bolivian, and high (14,000 feet) rather than low (1,500 feet). Santa Cruz contrasts with El Alto in being the capitalist center of the country, with new businesses as well as new agriculture in the surrounding area. Together with Tarija, which has grown comfortable on crumbs from the investments of the internationals, Santa Cruz forms the base for the opposition to Morales and the campesinos, as well as to policies that aim at social and economic justice. At the same time as the vote to elect representatives to a Constituent Assembly (June of 2006), there was a referendum on a proposal for more regional autonomy, overwhelmingly supported in Santa Cruz and Tarija but rejected by the country as a whole: the rich departments don 't look forward to sharing wealth with the impoverished peasants. So there are many factors combining to consolidate opposition in Santa Cruz to the land distribution plan.
While details of the implementation of this proposal are still being developed, it is likely to take account of the following factors:
--that the current title to the land is legally dubious; Morales does not wish to flout the law
--that the owners, or supposed owners, reside outside Bolivia, since that not only appeals to widespread nationalism but also minimizes the chances of incensed internal opposition
--that the land is not currently in use, since one of the aims of Morales is to make Bolivia richer by increasing its output
--that the land is potentially productive, since otherwise achieving increased production would be illusory
While redistribution of land to peasants has often been a battle cry of the left, and seldom implemented effectively, and while Morales still has to make his move and show his hand, he has repeatedly said that no one whose land is currently productive has anything to fear from the program, which is not part of the usual leftist rhetoric. Morales seems to be paying close attention to prospects for increased production as he prepares his move, and again exhibits a priority of pragmatism over ideology.
The Movement Towards Socialism (MAS)
But Morales IS a socialist, isn 't he? After all his party is called 'Movement Toward Socialism.' Yes, of course. But there is no evidence that Morales is a Marxist, and his alliance with Chávez and Castro, such as it is, seems more pragmatic than ideological. The United States openly opposed his election in 2002, continued to do so in a more guarded manner in 2005, and then dramatically cut aid to Bolivia once he was elected. He was thrown into the anti-American camp by US policy rather than by ideology.
The official name of the party is indeed 'Movimiento Al Socialismo.' ' In Bolivia, however, it is uniformly referred to by its acronym MAS, which happens also to be the Spanish word for 'more.' So there is a delicious ambiguity when it is reported that the Spanish-speaking voters want MAS.
There is an interesting story about the name of the party. In 2002, when Morales and his supporters wanted to contest the presidential election, they filed papers to create a party with a different name, but the election commission found errors in the papers and declared the application invalid. Under time pressure, and fearing that the election commission would make a similar finding again, Morales approached an already existing party that was not planning to contest the election and agreed to be its candidate. His supporters eventually took over key positions in that moribund party, which happened to be called 'Movimiento Al Socialismo,' thereby achieving an end run around the bureaucratic red tape. So there really seems a lot more pragmatism than ideology behind the socialist label that Morales wears.
The Grim Prospects for Genius
So 'genius ' appeals to me as a more accurate epithet for Morales than any of the others. Morales initially raises hopes, and his election has been a source of inspiration and renewed sense of opportunity for the indigenous peoples of Bolivia. Even some of the business people in Santa Cruz have decided that they have more to gain by working with Morales than by opposing him. Besides having achieved the presidency by a convincing majority and having won over some skeptics since then, Morales also enjoys a favorable moment in history. For the administration in Washington, which deplores his election and his friendship with Castro and Chávez, is too bogged down elsewhere to tangle with the poorest nation in South America; and the demand for energy has dramatically increased the value of the gas reserves with respect to which Morales is insisting on negotiating new contracts. Everything seems to be looking up.
Nevertheless the prospects remain grim. For one thing the gap between the indigenous peoples ' freed from virtual slavery less than 60 years ago' and the elite remains huge. The most visible part of the gap is, of course, in wealth, income, and living standards. But equally important is the gap in education and training. Many of the indigenous people are shrewd and intelligent, with excellent judgment, but the level of education and technical training remains very low, and this obstacle cannot be overcome overnight. The problem is exemplified in the Ministry of Justice, where the minister lacks legal training ' and of course many attorneys are unhappy. Increasing the pay of teachers by ten percent is no doubt a step toward rectifying this imbalance, but one that will take decades to come to fruition. So one big question is how much even a genius can accomplish towards reducing this gap and also increasing GDP.
Another problem is that geniuses tend to be resented as much as they are loved. So far Morales has maintained his identity as a man of the people, first by the alpaca sweater worn on his world tour last winter and more recently through his cabinet appointments and his implementation of long-standing campesino priorities. He is bound to have loyal and enthusiastic supporters, but there are also bound to be those who resent someone who always keeps both the big picture and the details in focus, who always sees things both more clearly and more quickly than they do, and who regularly combines principle and pragmatism when they see them in opposition. While there are now few signs of this ressentiment, Morales is still in only the first stages of what will have to be a long strenuous course if his visions are to be achieved.
At the moment prospects look better in Bolivia than in Venezuela or Cuba, and I will continue to work in the small ways open to me to improve indigenous education in Bolivia; but no one should suppose that having a bright horizon and a genius at the helm guarantees a successful voyage.
Newton Garver
SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, and President, Bolivian Quaker Education Fund www.bqef.org
August 9, 2006
Copyright 2006 by Buffalo Report, Inc.