La Paz, Bolivia – At this moment, the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS, the political party of President Evo Morales) steers a government that is against the current and has the job of following through with a promised plan.
The true debate is being fought between visions of a Bolivia with more possibilities than a return to statism, distinct from that of the first half of the twentieth century – or a country with a traumatic privatizing drive and in liberal excess.
This is why "MASist" domestic policy is wavering on the nationalization of hydrocarbons, the Constituent Assembly and the Second Agrarian Reform. Actions that, in the view of the leaders of radical sectors of the left, will come to be seen as "lukewarm," while politicians and conservative business sectors brand them as potentially "radical."
While those sectors argue about the Bolivian State that they want, the indigenous barricades yearn for the possibility of concluding a painful historical process that happened to them and condemned them to live in a species of apartheid within their own country.
In summary, the crossroads that the MAS and Bolivia are standing at, for vice president Álvaro García Linera , are "core problems": "a fight between sectors that are struggling for different visions of how to organize the economy, the state and the political system. It is an ugly fight, a fight for the ability of make decisions in the state environment." Could it be that the MAS and its domestic policy will end up with a character that is colonial, monocultural and centralist, driven by the republican state and Bolivian liberal? There are already a few signs.
The Long Awaited Nationalization?
When the Bolivian government recuperated the foreign owned hydrocarbon reserves [1] on the symbolic first of May, by means of a Supreme Decree and the military occupation of the refineries and oil and gas fields, the news spread like wildfire. Decree 28701 deems that, through the work of their historic struggle, the Bolivian people have won the right to the country’s natural riches, which should to return to the hands the nation and to be used for the benefit of the country.
For journalist Mirko Orgaz, author of the book "The Gas War," Decree 28701 "is nothing new". In this context, Orgaz considers it important to consider that, in this Decree from MAS "they take the illegal contracts and treat them legally." In this way the petroleum industries convert themselves into service lenders that will maintain the property of their installations and machinery.
This is, according to Orgáz, the other problem that nationalization presents: "Yes, the right of property is kept for the country and the name changes, but the businesses also stay in the same place," he says, alluding to the lack of true expropriation.
Expropriation is precisely the word that the government does not want to put in its mouth. Roberto Ruiz Baswerner, member of the Civic Committee Pro Interests of Tarija [2], clarifies that "there is no possible nationalization without compensation." In spite of everything, the government wants to sound tough and has added the fatal deadline of 180 days, so that the businesses can adjust themselves to the rule, the sentence of "shape up, or ship out."
According to MAS, one of the keys of nationalization is the modification of the formula of distribution of revenue: the State keeps 82% and the oil companies keep 18%. With this change, within only this year the eleven oil companies that work in Bolivia will have revenue of 300 million dollars, while the Bolivian state will receive around 750 million dollars.
Millions more, millions less, the Civic Committee Pro Interests of Tarija wants to look with caution and be stingy with its money. At this date, it has maintained that as long as the 220 million dollars it receives in royalties are not reduced, the department will not oppose itself to the nationalizing process.
Are there other positions to be found? It is nothing new that for the Bolivian Worker’s Center the measure is "insufficient" in respect to its effects and scope. Because the Civic Committee of Camiri (COB), one of the southern regions of Santa Cruz that pushes for independence as a part of the "tenth department" of Bolivia seems "complacent" with the new rule.
Maintaining Nine Departments?
Apparently, the theme of the Tenth Department is a pending discussion that the MAS does not want to initiate. Orgaz maintains that the demand of the creation of the Tenth Department of the Chaco seeks to "avoid the disintegration of the country and finish with the dry centralisms of Tarija and Santa Cruz that have impoverished the Chaco [3]".
More than finishing with "centralisms," the Tenth Department has provoked an immediate political reaction from the Civic Committees of Santa Cruz and Tarija, which have seen the possibility of losing the territories in which the hydrocarbon reserves are found. It is calculated that the region of the Chaco harbors more than 80% of Bolivian gas reserves.
The fact that the impulse to the determination of the new department is driven by the Deputy and representative of the conservative party of the opposition, Social Democratic Power (Podemos), Wilman Cardozo does not make the administration of Morales any less susceptible. "(The creation of the tenth department) is a flag for generating conflicts with the state and the government", maintained the Bolivian vice president, Álvaro García Linera, who marked the "impartial" line in respect to this demand and diverted its discussion to the Constituent Assembly (AC).
Is Social Armistice Possible?
The question is in the air: would the MAS prefer a revolutionary or a reformist Constituent Assembly? Evo Morales swore before the people and promised a "foundational" Assembly, against the desires of the oligarchies and conservative sectors of the right that don’t want to change anything en the Bolivian Political Constitution of the state (CPE) that isn’t the regime of autonomies to preserves their privileges. However, to confront the situation, García Linera threw out the modest figure of "20%" as the percentages of changes the new CPE will have.
This definitively does not sit well with the common desire of the Bolivians who see in the Assembly the magic formula that will give them more and better work, education, health and even water, and that will be able to definitively rip out discrimination and poverty. What kind of Assembly could satisfy both sectors?
A large part of the analysts agree – taking the political philosophy of John Locke – in which the AC will lay the foundation for a new "social agreement." So, on one hand it has the spirit of an agreement, and on the other the hope of deep, almost revolutionary, changes.
The social movements on the left like the COB and the Indigenous Movement Pachakuti (MIP) will newly denounce their marginalization in the AC. The prevailing Trotskyism in the National Instruction of Educators indicated that the autonomous exit and Constituent Assembly are "reforms" and not structural changes.
Perhaps for this reason, García Linera shows a pessimistic honesty and says that "nothing guarantees that the Constituent Assembly will be successful." So, for the Dignitary of the State an AC is evaluated for having to resolve the problem that created it, and if it does not, it fails. Within this idea, García Linera predicted that the discourse of "recuperation of natural resources" (RRNN), autonomies and the same October Agenda, might not function either."
So, why should we believe in the Constituent Assembly? According to García Linera’s reasoning, because it is the "reflexive and agreed way" to resolve the Bolivian crisis: "the alternative form (other than the AC) is civil war (like that of 1952)." This possibility is understood by the vice president as a "social armistice," that, according to García Linera is "the agreement of the recognition of one another."
What is certain is that in these actions the grass-roots MASists don’t feel very "recognized." A clear example are the MAS’s lists of candidates for the Contituent, which did not convince the indigenous sector, due to the isolation of important indigenous organizations from the east [4] and west.
García Linera recognizes the ideological break that exists with "the other lefts" and maintains that "a part of the radical social movements ( ) want to see the MAS as a fully reformist and not revolutionary movement." But what revolutionary can come from the Movement to Socialism?
This is definitively demonstrated in the agenda that MAS is taking to the Assembly. García Linera says that the themes that must be discussed en the Assembly are: the regime of property, which has to do with the RRNN, water and land; the new economic line that could be mixed (between liberal and state) or communal; the administrative division of Bolivia, where the character of the state as federal, autonomous or centralized will be discussed, besides rewriting fundamental social rights.
The "War for Land"
Lastly, will MAS be able to maintain a position of true change in the Agrarian Reform of 1952, when it has been demonstrated that this model of repartition has not worked? Proof of this is that the property of land is almost identical to that of 1953: 87% of land is in the hands of 7% of large property owners know as "latifundistas," who do not work the land. With the hydrocarbon "boom," the majority of these landowners have given origin to the articulation of a new power elite, denominated "petrolatifundistas."
These elites, which direct the land and petroleum, are pawned off in the execution of an autonomous referendum that will permit them to escape adverse results in the Constituent Assembly on the subject of land. It has been a little less than a week since the Government timidly demonstrated its intention to redistribute "unused" land that is presently in the hands of private land owners.
The project says that approximately 11 to 14 million hectares (27 to 35 million acres) of land could pass to the hands of 2.5 million rural farmers, indigenous people and settlers.
The measure could include the confiscation of land from foreign owners, such as Brasilians who have entered into Bolivian territory. But the Eastern House of Agriculture (CAO) made up of large business landowners of Santa Cruz, surreptitiously has insinuated that it will not cede even a millimeter of land and that it will defend its land "as it is able."
Mariell Cauthin is a journalist for www.UpsideDownWorld.org in La Paz, Bolivia. Photo from Bolivia.indymedia.org
Notes:
[1] With this, Bolivia confronts the third nationalization of hydrocarbons, after the confiscation in 1937 when it nationalized the property of the U.S. owned Standard Oil Company, an action that was repeated in 1969 when the leftist leader Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz nationalized Guld Oil Company. In 2006, the form in which the hydrocarbons will be recuperated is by means of the hand over of property of the links of commercialization, exploitation and exploration of natural resources. All this passes into the hands of the state business Bolivian Fiscal Oil Fields (Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales Bolivianos, YPFB).
[2] The Committee has demonstrated to be the entity that prevents the interests of powerful business leaders and traditional families in the department of Tarija, city found in the south of Bolivia. The opinion of the committee is an important voice, due to the fact that the department of Tarija contains 89.9% of the natural gas reserves in the entire country. In turn, Bolivia contains the second largest reserve of natural gas in the continent, of 48.6 trillion cubic feet (TCF).
[3] The initiative of the Tenth Department of the Chaco is a twenty year old demand, present in the Treaty of Quebracho, signed in the region of Villamontes in 1983 by the provinces of Cordillera (Santa Cruz), Luis Calvo and Hernando Siles (Chuquisaca) and O’Connor and the Gran Chaco (Tarija). The Chaco is a region that coexists with 75% of poverty, three indigenous communities live here: 100 thousand Guaraníes, 2.525 Weenhayek and 200 Tapiete, organized in turn to the Asamblea del Pueblo Guaraní (APG).
[4] The Confederation of the Indigenous People of Bolivia (Cidob) in a public manifesto demanded "the autonomy of the indigenous peoples in our Communal Lands of Origen (TCOs), the use and advantages of our natural resources, participation in the benefits of the exploitation of the natural recources, and respect for our dignity as human beings.", but the Law of Announcement of the AC does not vindicate their demand for 33 indigenous constituents from the east, the Chaco and the Amazon. The same occurred with the requirements of the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of the Qollasuyu (Conamaq), who could not put even one representative in the ranks of the MAS. Other guilds such as the Regional Workers’ Center of El Alto (COR) that presented lists of candidates to the MAS were not included either. The delegations from Pando and Beni, eastern departments of Bolivia, could not agree on candidates.