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Bolivia: Social Tensions Erupt 

By Federico Fuentes
August 15, 2010
Green Left Weekly (Australia)
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/45140

Recent scenes of roadblocks, strikes and even the
dynamiting of a vice-minister's home in the Bolivian
department (administrative district) of Potosi,
reminiscent of the days of previous neoliberal
governments, have left many asking themselves what is
really going on in the "new" Bolivia of indigenous
President Evo Morales.

Since July 29, the city of Potosi, which has 160,000
inhabitants, has ground to a halt. Locals are up in
arms over what they perceive to be a lack of support
for regional development on the part of the national
government.

Potosi is Bolivia's poorest department but the most
important for the mining sector, which is on the verge
of surpassing gas as the country's principal export
because of rising mineral prices.

Julio Quinonez, a miners' cooperative leader told El
Diario on August 4: "We don't want to continue to be
the dairy cow that the other regions live off as they
always have. Potosi can move forward whether through
independence, federalisation or autonomy as established
in the constitution."

Local media reported that 100,000 people attended a
rally in the city of Potosi on August 3. A hunger
strike was initiated that swelled to include more than
600 political and social leaders, including the
governor, some local deputies aligned with Morales'
Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and 20 sex-workers.

The trigger for the protests was an age-old dispute
over departmental boundary demarcations with
neighbouring Oruro following the discovery that a hill
in the area contains minerals used to make cement.

Locals are demanding the government invest more in the
region, frustrated that the government has not resolved
the daily problems of a poverty-stricken region with an
infant mortality rate of 101 in every 1000 babies born
- despite sitting on 50% of the world's lithium.

They are proposing the construction of a cement
factory, the completion of a road between Potosi and
the department of Tarija, the reopening of the
Karachipampa metallurgical plant and an international
airport for what is one of Bolivia's premier tourist
destinations.

Another demand is the preservation of the Cerro Rico.
These legendary mountains overlooking the city of
Potosi used to hold the world's largest silver mine.
Now it is in danger of collapsing as a result of
centuries of rapacious looting dating back to colonial
days, when Potosi was the same size as London and
financed much of Europe's development.

Locals have occupied an electricity plant and
threatened to cut off supplies to the nearby Japanese-
owned San Cristobal mine - the largest in Bolivia.

Supplies of food and other essentials are beginning to
run extremely low.

Many roadblocks have been lifted, but negotiations
between the government and local authorities stalled as
they demanded that Morales himself, and not his "right-
wing" ministers, come to the table.

Meanwhile, locals in Uyuni in the south of the
department, home to the famous salt lakes and Bolivia's
lithium reserves, voted on August 12 to blockade roads
against the protests being organised by the Potosi
civic committee. They claim the civic committee wants a
lithium processing plant to be built closer to the city
so that it solely benefits the city of Potosi.

They are also demanding that the government install an
interconnected electrical system in Uyuni and build a
Uyuni-Huancarani highway.

These protests have been preceded by similar, though
smaller protests, by workers over wages, clashes in
Caravani between rival local peasant organisations over
the site of a new citrus processing plant and a march
by Amazonian indigenous peoples demanding consultation
before any state activity to exploit natural resources.

These are warning signs of some of the challenges that
the process for change underway in Bolivia faces.

To understand the protests it is necessary to look at
the relationship that exists between social movements,
the government and Morales.

The MAS, or Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of
the Peoples (IPSP), as it was originally known, emerged
both as a result of the process of decentralisation of
Bolivia's political system through the creation of
municipal councils and local National Assembly deputies
in the early 1990s, as well as the crisis that the
political system underwent around the same time.

With the old ruling political parties in a state of
terminal decay and the old left-wing groups having
either disintegrated or incorporated itself into the
traditional party system, it was Bolivia's rising
indigenous and peasant organisations that gave birth to
their "political instrument" with the aim of entering
the electoral arena and moving from resistance to
power.

The core of this new political instrument was the
peasant confederation, CSUTCB; the "Bartolinas," a
peasant women's confederation confederation; the
colonisers confederation, CSCB (now know as
intercultural communities, CSCIB) and the coca growers
of the Chapare, from whose ranks Morales emerged.

Through winning control of a number of local councils
and seats in congress, the cocaleros became the core
around which the various regional and sectoral
organisations would coalesce in the late '90s to make
up the IPSP (more commonly known as MAS, its
electorally registered name).

In 2000, an important cycle of revolutionary struggle
exploded, beginning with the opposition to water
privatisation in Cochabamba and uprisings in support of
indigenous self-determination in the Aymara highlands.

The first wave of this cycle peaked with the overthrow
of the-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October
2003, when a diverse range of worker, peasant and
indigenous organisations first united against the
government's attempts to cheaply export the country's
gas via Chile. The movement demanded the president's
resignation following the massacre of more than 60
people.

A second wave of resistance brought down his successor
in June 2005, again with diverse organisations uniting
around the issue of gas. This paved the way for
Morales' victory in December 2005 presidential
election, with a historic 54.7% of the vote.

Fierce resistance from the traditional elites, who felt
they were being pushed out of power, triggered the
third, most powerful revolutionary wave in this cycle
of struggle.

Bunkered down in the wealthier eastern states, the
right-wing opposition set off a chain of events aimed
at overthrowing Morales. However, the combined action
of Morales' government, the social movements and the
armed forces crushed the coup attempt in September
2008, a blow the opposition has yet to fully recover
from.

Ironically, while its electoral base grew to 64% in
December 2009, the MAS itself was greatly weakened.

The MAS was born in the countryside, where the
structures of the "political instrument" and the
powerful peasant and indigenous organisations were one
and the same. But it began to expand into the cities
following its 2005 victory, where social organisations
are much weaker and individual affiliation prevailed.

In many cases, due to the lack of trained professionals
in the peasant and indigenous organisations, Morales
was forced to rely on "invitees" from the already
existing state bureaucracy to run the government.

Most of Morales' first cabinet came from these sectors,
causing concern among the founding organisations of the
MAS, who felt they were not being treated as they
should be, with quotas in the government.

While the relatively autonomous social organisations
united to defend "their" government during times of
intense confrontation, they have also tended to retreat
to more local and sectoral demands.

Now in government, many of these groups began to view
the MAS as a vehicle to access employment in the public
service, just as the middle classes did with their
parties when they were in power.

The absence of internal structures in the MAS that
could allow a debate over its future led to it becoming
increasingly irrelevant as anything more than a place
to look for work.

Above all this stood Morales: at the same time as
leading the process of change, he is head of state,
head of the MAS and even continues to head the cocalero
union in the Chapare.

With a debilitated MAS, Morales increasingly plays the
role of mediator between ministers, social
organisations, party leaders, militants, and
"invitees".

This created the rise in demands on the government by
various sectors, who having supported "their"
government through the intense battles of the last few
years, now want it to resolve all the problems
inherited from centuries of colonialism.

Here the government is encountering a number of
challenges. There is a state bureaucracy which works
more to undermine than advance the government's
projects and social organisations with political
baggage inherited from the previous society. The
government points out it is impossible to resolve
century-old problems overnight.

According to an August 9 article by Pablo Stefanoni,
Morales outlined the fight against narcotrafficking and
contraband, low levels of public investment, personal
ambitions and the industrialisation of natural
resources as key problems.

"It is in the construction of the state that the
success or failure of the reforms underway will play
out", Stefanoni said.

But to do this, it is vital to reconstruct a political
instrument that can truly become a space for the
exchange of debates and ideas about the future of the
process, capable of generating proposals and uniting
the necessary forces to implement a coherent project of
change.

Otherwise, indecision, improvisation, inaction and
incoherence will continue to plague Bolivia's process
of change.

_____________________________________________

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