Bolivia may be just the start...

Bolivia may be just the start
Much of Central and South America ripe for leftist revolutions

Peter Goodspeed
National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/world/story.html?id=CE62CCFC-155E-4420-
A0C3-C97A319B781D

Tuesday, October 21, 2003

Wracked by deep social and racial divisions and plagued by profound
economic problems, Bolivia has just passed through its worst crisis
in two decades.

But it is the rest of Latin America that should feel uneasy.

Weeks of deadly clashes between government troops and indigenous
peoples, leftist labour leaders and student groups saw Bolivia's
streets barricaded, its capital placed under siege and its elected
president forced to flee.

While Bolivia's revolution may be rooted in poverty, it is also
anchored in racism and has a distinctly undemocratic leftist flavour.

After decades of being left out of the country's power structure,
Bolivia's native peoples took the lead in weeks of violent protest
that left dozens dead and the country paralyzed before former
president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada finally resigned on Friday and
fled to Miami.

The trigger for the massive street protests was a government plan to
sell Bolivia's natural gas to the United States and Mexico by
exporting it to Bolivia's archrival Chile. But the proposed pipeline
project was a symbol for something much more troublesome -- the
government's inability to improve the economy or to transform a long
entrenched culture of social exclusion that has effectively shut out
the Indian majority.

Despite two decades of democratic reform and economic turmoil,
Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America. Unemployment
officially stands at 12% and six in every 10 people live on less than
US$2 a day.

Agriculture, the backbone of the country, employs more than half the
workforce but it accounts for only about 23% of the country's gross
domestic product. And only 2% of Bolivia's land is arable.

For most farmers, who overwhelmingly are natives, the future holds
hope for nothing more than a hardscrabble existence. Twenty per cent
of indigenous children die before their first birthday and 14% more
die before they reach school age.

Nearly two decades of economic liberalization, in which successive
governments, under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund,
have privatized public companies and mines and moved to modernize the
oil and gas industries, has failed to improve the lives of ordinary
people.

Bolivia's Indians feel rich whites do nothing but exploit their
country's resources, leaving nothing behind for the poor. Now, they
are demanding fundamental political change.

"The constitution is like a mirror, but we have never seen our faces
reflected on it," says Felipe Quispe, a leader of the indigenous
Pachakuti Party and one of the opposition leaders who led the street
protests.

Evo Morales, a fiery leftist opposition leader of Aymara Indian
descent and another leader of last week's rebellion, wants to see the
creation of a constitutional assembly of Indian people to create a
new Indian-led government.

His solutions smack of the old "liberation politics" of the
tumultuous 1960s.

Mr. Morales lost Bolivia's past election by just 1% of the vote to
the now-deposed president, Mr. Sanchez de Lozada. Rather than wait
for another turn at the polls in 2007, he jumped at the opportunity
to lead a mob in the streets.

In the past, Mr. Morales has said, "Latin America must build many
Cubas" and has promised "oil and gas must return to the Bolivian
people."

His critics accuse him of accepting a US$50,000 "peace prize" from
Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

In Miami, Mr. Sanchez de Lozada charged: "Democracy is under siege by
co-operative groups, political groups and unions that don't believe
in it."

He angrily predicted the alliance of Indian coca growers and leftist
labour leaders that forced him to resign may lead to "a narco-labour
government that could lead to the disintegration of the country."

By removing Bolivia's president through street protests, democracy
may already be damaged right across Latin America.

Huge swaths of Central and South America are vulnerable to just the
same combination of opportunistic populism, economic despair and
racism. Ecuador, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico and most of Central America
all have racial and class tensions similar to those of Bolivia.

Indigenous movements may already be reshaping Latin America's
political arena.

Bolivia's revolution could be the spark that ultimately ignites
something far more significant than a simple reform movement.