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| Sunday, 22 January 2006 |
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| News Business Features Editorial
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Bolivia: The new democracy by Emir Sader Bolivia is one of the most sufferable countries in the Continent along with Haiti. Beyond the massacre of colonization -of which all countries were victims- Bolivia suffered two complementary blows: the War of the Pacific in 1879, when it lost its access to the sea with Chile and the Chaco War in the 30 th of last century when it lost territories with Paraguay. The latter condemned to death the existing liberal system in place. It declined the hegemony of the mining oligarchy and at the same time in the 50 th a process of formation of national conscience developed which had its clearer expression with the nationalization of tin, the agrarian reform and the replacement of the army by popular militias when the 1952 revolution. The depletion of that impulse caused the implementation of a radical neo-liberal program just during the administration that had led the 1952 movement -Vˇctor Paz Estenssoro. The democratic-liberal system reestablished in 1985 ended up adopting neo-liberal policies to control the hyper-inflation, adding recipes sold by Jeffrey Sachs which destroyed the Bolivian mining economy -with the medicine that kills the patient as it is used to happen in those case. This new defeat of the popular movement practically put an end to the miners' movement that was until that time the heart of the popular powers in Bolivia. These powers will only recover at the end of the 90 th of last century when the coca cultivators achieved stopping the execution of the U.S. plan to eliminate the coca plantations during Hugo Banzer government -by then elected President after being a dictator. This movement was followed by the huge mobilization of the peasants from the Cochabamba region on April 2000 that impeded the privatization of the water by a French enterprise. During that process the Coordinator for Water and Life was created and then it became an Organization. In a country with people's self-esteem at such a low level due to so many defeats, this movement represented the transition from a defensive stance to an offensive one by the social movement. That social movement was followed in September of that same year by the occupation of territories through blocking of roads and siege of cities done by the peasants' movement. On July 2001 there was a new wave of blockings at a sector of the high plateau, in the road that goes from La Paz to Cochabamba on the country's western region. This is the most politicized region where the aymaras and the quechuas, along with unions from the Chapare -the zone of coca cultivators- and from the Coordinator of Water are usually located. Two decades of neo-liberal promises passed with this background and Bolivia is poorer and with more inequalities. At the countryside the number of salaried workers decreased from 73 thousands to 64 thousands. The number of families working by their own means -with economies basically of subsistence- went from 43 thousands to 447 thousands. In the cities the so-called non-official sector composed by domestic, handicraft units with non-salaried relatives augmented from 60 to 68% from the total of working people. Likewise the number of contracted people diminished from 40 to 32% from the total of the labor force. Bolivia has a very bad rate of distribution of incomes, only exceeded -negatively- by Brazil. 20% of the richest people have an income 30 times bigger than 20% of the poorest ones. 60% of the population lives in poverty in the country as a whole, but that rate reaches 90% in the rural areas. The unemployment officially registered tripled during the last 17 years, since the monetary stabilization plans were applied, reaching 13,9% while the proportion of people of the so-called "non-official" sector -it is to say precarious work- increased from 58 to 68% in 15 years. The infantile mortality is 60 by every thousand of the born alive, while the average of the continent is 28. The hope of a lifetime when born is 63 years, while the average in Latin America and the Caribbean is 70 years. Two and a half millions of peasants have as their main working instrument the Egyptian plow from 3000 years before. The state-of-the-art technology only is used in the extraction of oil and gas, in telecommunications, in the banks and in 10% of mining extraction and industrial production. In Bolivia the promised modernity is reduced to cybercaf‚s, automobiles de luxe, and the luxury goods consumed by the elite according to Alvaro Garcia Linera`s words, the most important Bolivian intellectual, elected by Vice- president of the Republic in Evo Morales ballot. Then, it is not surprising that in a country constituted in that way -white with a U.S. accent-, Sanchez de Losada tentative had collapsed on October 2003 -with more than 50 people killed by the regime- as well as Vice-president Carlos Mesa admitted defeat in June of the present year. Likewise, that Evo Morales, heading -Movement to Socialism (MAS after its initials in Spanish), party directly constituted by social movements- won the elections of this year with the greatest balloting in the history of Bolivia -that would have been even greater if millions of people, whose names were erased from the list -specially at the Bolivian countryside- had not been impeded to vote. The most important period in the history of Bolivia begins when an indigenous leader -aymara- assumes the Presidency of Bolivia for the first time in 513 years since the invasion to the territories of Latin America and the Caribbean by the colonizers. He promises to rescue the identity and the right by the indigenous populations -aymaras, quechuas, guaranis- to govern themselves with which more than 70% of the country's population is identified. A democratic revolution, as defined by the winning candidates, that gives way -summoning a National Assembly- to build a multicultural and multiethnic nation: the face of the Bolivian people. - Courtesy: Cubanow.net |
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