8 November 2008
Newton Garver
Massacre at Porvenir: A catalyst for transformation in Bolivia
9/11/08, anniversary of the overthrow of Allende in Chile (1973) as well as of the al-Qaida attacks on the USA (2001), was a bloody day in Bolivia. A group of about 1000 campesinos were marching on foot to Cobija, capital of the departamento (state) of Pando in the northeast corner of the country, for a rally in support of the new constitution and a demonstration against the landed-industrialist right-wing “autonomy” movement, which included the prefecto (governor) of Pando. At the small town of Porvenir, a few miles outside Cobija, paramilitaries loyal to Governor Leopoldo Fernàndez, reinforced by mercenaries from Brazil and Peru, waited in ambush. When the peasants arrived at this point, the troops opened fire with automatic weapons and the mercenaries with rifles and shotguns, leaving at least eighteen dead and more than a dozen others wounded. There has been struggle and confrontation for the past eight or ten years, but this was the first large-scale use of armed force since the Sunday and Monday of October 12-13, 2003, when some sixty deaths (on top of 40 deaths earlier in the year) led to public outrage that forced then-president Gonzalo Sánchez to resign and flee the country.
The impact and aftermath had been dramatic. Pando was put under martial law, Governor Fernández was arrested and remains in San Pedro Prison charged with genocide, the other opposition governors entered serious negotiations with President Morales, both the US and Bolivian ambassadors have been sent packing, Washington curtailed Bolivian trade preferences and withdrew the Peace Corps, Bolivia expelled US DEA agents, and President Morales received strong unanimous support from the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Overall Morales emerged stronger and the country calmer.
To understand the event and its aftermath requires perspective on the long struggle between the indigenous peoples and the mestizo or European elite. The elite of 2008 is far different from the elite of 1908 or even 1958 , and the Indians, too, are far different from what they were 50 or 100 years ago. Evo Morales and the wealthy land-owning/entrepreneurial opposition represent the culmination of dramatic developments that have taken place over the past half century, both movements inaugurated by Victor Paz Estenssoro and the revolution of 1952.
Two Powerful Movements
For the past decade there has been a deepening struggle in Bolivia between two forces, both of which continue to grow stronger. One is the indigenous people, dozens of distinct ethnic groups, of which the largest by far are the Quechua (about 1,200,000) and the Aymara (about 900,000); together indigenous people comprise nearly 2/3 of the nation. The other is the lighter-skinned elite that includes new capitalists, ranchers, landholders, agro-industrialists, and free-trade entrepreneurs. This elite is centered around the booming city of Santa Cruz, and its strength extends through the departamentos (states) of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, Tarija, and Chuquisaca. These five states form a crescent from the north (Pando) through the east to the south (Tarija) and are therefore sometimes called the “Half Moon.” Their principal aims are autonomy and retention of proceeds from sale of natural gas. Their Council for National Democracy (CONALDE), a non-governmental group representing commercial interests, aims to “free” the eastern lowlands, rich in natural resources, from the mountainous western regions where Indians have become politically dominant.
The two forces now clashing both had their birth in the revolution of 1952, under Victor Paz Estenssoro. On the one hand his party, the National Revolutionary Movement (MNR), enfranchised the Indians and provided them for the first time with opportunities for education as well as political expression. The government of Evo Morales is a direct beneficiary of this initiative. On the other hand the MNR opened a road from Santa Cruz to La Paz, enabling the huge Amazonian states (Beni and Santa Cruz) to supply food to the capital. In recent decades the city of Santa Cruz has grown faster than La Paz and is now the largest city in Bolivia. The autonomy movement is the current manifestation of this rebirth of Santa Cruz half a century ago.
Evo Morales was elected President in December 2005 and inaugurated in January 2006. He is not only the first indigenous President of Bolivia, but also the first President in recent history elected with an outright majority of votes - 54%. His election marked a culmination in the explosive growth of the political power of indigenous people in Bolivia, after centuries of servitude under the Spanish conquerors and their successors. Within living memory the dominant minority had a disdain for Indians similar to the disdain of Southerners for their slaves. Just last year I met an Aymara Indian (now in his eighties) who had, perhaps foolishly, boasted to his boss that he had started attending a Quaker school in order to learn to read and write - and his boss threatened to cut off his hand if he went back to that school! The MNR revolution of 1952 broke the legal grip of that domination and allowed Indians to begin to grow stronger educationally, economically, and politically.
Ten years ago the most charismatic Indian leader was Felipe Quispe (“el Mallku” - the condor), who organized disruptive roadblocks on the Altiplano to protest government policies. Quispe was unabashedly racist, at times demanding that all except Aymara people leave the state of La Paz, or at least the part of it on the Altiplano. His charisma and his radical demands galvanized peasants on the Altiplano, and although roadblocks were no match for the army, the massacre of unarmed peasants was not a good option for the government. But Quispe’s appeal was limited on the national scene, even among other indigenous ethnic groups.
Evo Morales ran for President in the 2002 elections and emerged in second place, with 22% of the vote - Gonzalo Sánchez, a mining millionaire, won with 23%. His electoral strength escalated dramatically in the final days of the campaign, thanks to the US Ambassador warning Bolivians that a vote for Morales would jeopardize relations with the US. At this point a national issue was added to the grounds for the roadblocks and other protests, namely who should get the proceeds from the sale of oil and gas. Bolivia has been one of the richest nations of the world in terms of natural resources - its silver financed the Spanish empire and the construction of the Armada - but both the resources and the proceeds from exploiting them had always left the country, leaving Bolivia the poorest nation in South America. Now it was happening again with oil and gas. The slogan became, “The looting must stop!” This demand fit the charisma of Morales better than that of Quispe, and has continued as a central policy thrust of the government since his election.
The cry of the revolt against the democratically elected national government is for autonomy. The strength of the movement lies in European immigrants to Bolivia, who find the lower elevation and the virgin rain forest more congenial than the higher cities and the arid, overworked Altiplano. The Bush administration has aided this movement financially through a number of government programs, all fueled by its myopic view that democracy consists more in “free” trade and regional independence than in national elections. This conception of democracy, deeply rooted in right-wing thought, underlies the actions of the Bush administration to curtail federal regulation in the US as well as its attempt to thwart national (as opposed to regional) programs in Bolivia. From the perspective of the Half Moon, the principal threat to human rights and dignity is not poverty, not lack of educational opportunity, not racism, not conditions of slavery, but the “tyranny of centralism” and restrictions on business opportunity.
The strength of CONALDE depends partly on old families but much more heavily on immigrants who arrived after WWII. Its leaders are diverse. Some are ranchers, some are large landholders with Indians maintained in conditions of servitude, some are mining executives, some are agro-industrialists, and some of the last group burn thousands of acres each year to create new land for soy beans or cattle. The very rapid growth means that newcomers are a big part of CONALDE, but there are many others descendent from post WWII immigrants. Branco Marinkovic, for example, son of successful Serbian immigrants, heads the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, one of the components of CONALDE.
The Event
August 10 was the date of the recall referendum that CONALDE had initiated in its attempt to topple Evo Morales. The result was a devastating blow to the opposition: Morales increased his support from 54% to 67.4% in the nation as a whole, and he increased his support by a comparable percentage in every one of the nine states. There were two contrary reactions to the referendum results. On the one hand the frustrated opposition, led by the youth in Santa Cruz, resorted to increased violence, occupying and ransacking government offices. On the other hand, peasants who were encouraged by the results increased their marches and demonstrations and roadblocks in support of the government, and in particular demanded action on the new constitution (CPE) drafted in Oruru in August 2007.
The second week in September 1,000 peasants were marching to Cobija, capital of the state of Pando, for a rally and demonstration in support of these demands. Such a thing had not happened before in Pando, and it was more than Governor Leopoldo Fernández could tolerate. He was the oldest and most entrenched of the governors of the Half Moon states, having begun his career forty years ago under the military dictators. Pando, of course, had a state militia, and it was loyal to Fernández personally. It appears, though the evidence I have seen is not conclusive, that for the occasion he augmented his militia with machine-gunners and sharpshooters, mercenaries from Brazil and Peru. The ambush took place in a remote area, and it was some days before on-site reports appeared, and even then there were rumors of dozens still missing.
The event was immediately labeled a massacre. It was the first large-scale use of armed force since October of 2003, and the first significant bloodshed in these five years of confrontation. A tragedy and outrage, but also an opportunity.
The Aftermath
The reaction of Evo Morales was swift and decisive. He immediately declared martial law in Pando, and declared its governor a criminal. He sent in the army - his first serious use of the army - to secure Cobija and its airport. Two members of the Pando militia were killed at the airport, but the city and the airport were secured in a matter of hours. Leopoldo Fernández was arrested a day or two later and remanded to San Pedro Prison in La Paz, where he remains without bail, charged with genocide. These events showed that Evo Morales could and would act swiftly and forcefully in a crisis, and that he had the support of the army. His prestige rose dramatically.
The following Monday in Santiago, Chile, there was an emergency meeting of UNASUR. Heads of state came, summoned by Michelle Bachelet, president of Chile and current head of UNASUR, and they unanimously approved a nine-point declaration that strongly endorsed President Morales, condemned the massacre, and urged CONALDE to enter dialogue with Morales about details of their demand for autonomy. When Morales was elected, the only South American states he visited were Venezuela and Cuba. This time he had the support of all the states of South America. Another big boost to his prestige.
Evo Morales had been calling for dialogue on autonomy and other issues in the draft constitution approved in Ururo in the summer of 2007, but the opposition leaders had always found excuses for declining. The unanimous declaration of UNASUR changed their mind. Dialogue began the following week, with working parties to hammer out details. Two of the working groups reached resolution of major conflicts. With respect of sharing gas revenues it was agreed that they would first fully fund the new and increased old-age pension and then be distributed among the state governments. With respect to autonomy there was agreement on 30 exclusive jurisdictions for the states and 20 more they would share with local districts and ethnic communities, provisions included in an amended version of the new constitution. This amounted to enormous progress on what had seemed unresolvable disputes, but not yet enough for consensus. At the end of the week one major opposition leader balked, saying that it failed to provide “full autonomy,” and another complained that the provision allowing a president to be elected for two consecutive five-year terms would give Evo Morales too much time in office. At the same time there were huge peasant marches calling for passing the CPE as it was drafted in Oruru. There are clearly ideologues and pragmatists on both sides.
On October 21, it was clear that pragmatists had the upper hand. The provision about presidential re-election was reworded so that Morales could not be re-elected in 2014, when his new term would expire. The referendum on the CPE would be combined with a referendum on a limit on the maximum size of property holdings, whether it should be 5,000 or 10,000 hectares, and a further concession from the government agreed that this law would not be applied retroactively. With that, key leaders in CONALDE agreed to back the double referendum on the CPE and acreage limitation.
Less than a month of dialogue had achieved compromise and agreement on four major issues and resulted in a revised CPE that commands wider and more durable support. That brings Evo Morales much, much closer to two more goals of his presidency, land reform and a new constitution. What is demonstrated by the dialogue and its results is that Morales, while holding to basic principles, is a pragmatist. Another boost to his prestige. CONALDE has not disappeared, but the referendum of August 10 was a sharp blow, and the aftermath to the massacre Porvenir has left it divided, partly adamant in opposition and partly cooperative with Morales.
The Future
On October 21 the Bolivian legislature enacted a measure allowing the President to call a referendum on the new constitution and the acreage limitation, and a few moments later, at 2 pm, Evo Morales appeared before tens of thousands of supporters in the Plaza Murillo and issued the necessary decree, for a referendum to be held on January 25, 2009, and general elections to be held on December 6, 2009. This time leaders of the three main opposition parties have cooperated in drafting the documents, and they support both the referendum and the elections. It is a huge achievement, precipitated by the massacre at Porvenir. It is wonderful to see a month of intense negotiations turn a tragedy like the massacre of Porvenir (9/11/08) into a human achievement of this grand scale.
Within Bolivia Morales has maintained momentum on his main objectives: increasing funding for education, health, and welfare of indigenous people, retaining profits from natural resources within the country, creating a new constitution, reviving land reform, providing limited autonomy, and motivating the old established elite to work under these new conditions. Outside Bolivia he has established closer ties with Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and the strong unanimous support he received from UNASUR shows how dramatically he has reduced his earlier reliance on Venezuela and Cuba. For a while Bolivia tolerated the US having appointed secession-expert Philip Goldberg (while in Pristina he oversaw Kosovo’s separation from Serbia and in Bolivia he conferred with anti-government separatist leaders) as ambassador, but relations with Bush and Rice are now chilly, another scar on the reputation of that passing administration. Bolivia remains the poorest nation in South America, Guyana excepted, with left-over elements of corruption and inefficiency, but it has a dynamism, unity, and pattern of growth that it has never seen before.
Although he did send the army into Pando, it is remarkable that Morales has achieved all this through negotiation and reiteration of high principles, without using armed force to threaten or suppress his opponents. It is a refreshing model of political leadership. It is also apparent that, although during his first year in office he depended heavily on the support of Venezuela and Cuba, he has now come to rely more heavily on UNASUR and on Michelle Bachelet. Such a change bespeaks a regional rather than a Marxist ideology - or perhaps it represents pragmatism rather than ideology. The intense negotiations with his adversaries to obtain their backing for the new CPE shows a priority of constitutionalism over personal power. In all these ways Morales is proving to be a leader radically different form Castro or Chavez. It is now high time for the US to change our policies toward Bolivia.
Newton Garver is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and President of the Bolivian Quaker Education Fund. He has traveled to Bolivia in eight of the past nine years and reads a Bolivian daily on line. He is a regular contributor to Buffalo Report.
Copyright 2008 by Buffalo Report, Inc.