Home > BOLIVIA: THE COUNTRY THAT WANTS TO EXIST
By Eduardo Galeano
The Progressive
December 2003 Issue
A gigantic gas explosion: This was the popular uprising
that shook all of Bolivia and culminated in the
resignation of President Sanchez de Lozada, who fled,
leaving behind him a trail of corpses.
The gas was to have been shipped to California—for a
minuscule price in exchange for a few miserable gifts—
across Chilean land that used to be part of Bolivia.
This last detail was just salt in the wound for a
country that for more than a century has been
demanding, in vain, restoration of the sea access it
lost in 1883 in the war that Chile won.
But the route of the gas was not the primary cause of
the fury that erupted throughout the country. There was
another, which the government responded to with
bullets, as is its custom, leaving the streets strewn
with dead. The people rose up because they refused to
allow to happen with gas what had previously happened
with silver, saltpeter, tin, and everything else.
***
In 1870, an English diplomat in Bolivia was the victim
of a disagreeable incident. Dictator Mariano Melgarejo
offered him a glass of chicha, the national drink made
from fermented corn. The Englishman thanked him but
said he preferred chocolate. So Melgarejo, with his
customary delicacy, made him drink an enormous vat of
chocolate and then paraded him on a mule, seated
backwards, through the streets of La Paz. When Queen
Victoria, in London, heard of the incident, she had a
map brought to her and pronounced ’’Bolivia doesn’t
exist,’’ crossing out the country with a chalk "X."
I’d heard this tale many times. It may or may not have
happened exactly this way. But this phrase, attributed
to British imperial arrogance, could also be read as an
involuntary synthesis of the tormented history of the
Bolivian people. The tragedy repeats itself like a
revolving wheel: For five centuries, the fabulous
riches of Bolivia have been a curse to the people, who
are the poorest of South America’s poor. Indeed, for
its own people, ’’Bolivia doesn’t exist."
***
For over two centuries, back in colonial times, the
silver of Potosí was the primary nourishment of the
capitalist development of Europe. ’’It’s worth a
Potosí’’ meant something was priceless.
Midway through the sixteenth century, the most
populous, most expensive, and most spendthrift city in
the world sprouted and grew on the foot of the mountain
that oozed silver. This mountain, called Cerro Rico,
swallowed Indians. ’’The streets are thronged with
people,’’ wrote a rich miner from Potosí: Entire
communities were emptied of men, marched as prisoners
from every direction to the opening into the mines.
Outside, it was freezing. Inside, it was hell. Only
three of every ten men led in left alive. But these
short-lived inhabitants of the mines generated the
fortunes of Flemish, German, and Genovese bankers,
creditors of the Spanish crown. It was these Indians
who made possible the accumulation of capital that
transformed Europe into what it is today.
What remained in Bolivia of all this? A hollow
mountain, an incalculable number of Indians worked to
death, and a few palaces inhabited by phantoms.
***
In the nineteenth century, when Bolivia was defeated in
the so-called War of the Pacific, it not only lost its
access to the ocean and found itself locked into the
heart of South America. It also lost its saltpeter.
Official history, which is military history, has it
that Chile won the war. But real history confirms that
the winner was British businessman John Thomas North.
Without firing a shot or wasting a penny, North won the
lands that had belonged to Bolivia and Peru and made
himself the king of saltpeter, which at the time was
the fertilizer necessary for the tired fields of
Europe.
In the twentieth century, Bolivia was the primary
supplier of tin to the international market. The tin
cans that made Andy Warhol famous came from the mines,
which produced both metal and widows. In the depths of
the mineshafts, silica dust gradually asphyxiated the
workers, who ruined their lungs so the world could have
cheap tin.
During the Second World War, Bolivia contributed to the
Allied cause by selling its precious mineral at a tenth
of its usual price. Workers’ pay was slashed to almost
nothing, a strike ensued, and the machine guns opened
fire. Simon Patiño, owner of the business and master of
the country, didn’t have to pay compensation because
killing by machine gun is not a workplace accident.
At the time, Don Simon paid $50 a year in taxes on his
profits, but he paid much more to the president of the
nation and his cabinet. He had been a dirt poor man
touched by the magic wand of Fortune. His grandchildren
entered the European nobility and married counts,
marquis, and the relatives of kings.
When the revolution of 1952 dethroned Patiño and
nationalized tin, little was left of the mineral—the
meager leftovers from half a century of boundless
exploitation in the service of the world market.
***
More than 100 years ago, historian Gabriel Rene Moreno
discovered that the Bolivian people were ’’cellularly
incompetent." He had compared the weight of an
indigenous brain and that of a mestizo and found that
they weighed between five, six, and ten ounces less
than the brains of members of the white race.
Time passed, and the country that doesn’t exist remains
ill with racism. But the country that wants to exist,
where the indigenous majority is not ashamed of what it
is, doesn’t spit at the mirror.
This Bolivia, tired of living to fuel foreign progress,
is the true country. Its history, ignored, abounds in
defeat and betrayal but also in those miracles that
scorned people are capable of when they stop scorning
themselves and fighting each other.
These fast-moving times are marked by astounding,
impressive achievements.
***
The year 2000 featured the so-called ’’water war’’ in
Cochabamba. The peasants marched from the valleys and
blockaded the city, which also rose up. They were met
with bullets and tear gas as the government declared
martial law. But the collective rebellion continued,
unstoppable, until in the final clash the water was
wrested from the grip of the Bechtel Corporation and
restored to the people and their fields. (Bechtel,
based in California, is now receiving relief from
President Bush, who has awarded it multi-million-dollar
contracts in Iraq.)
A few months ago, another popular explosion throughout
Bolivia vanquished nothing less than the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF made them pay dearly for
the defeat—more than thirty assassinations by the so-
called forces of order—but the people succeeded in
their task. The government had no option but to annul
the payroll tax that the IMF had demanded.
Today, there’s the gas war. Bolivia contains enormous
reserves of natural gas. Sanchez de Lozada called this
false privatization ’’capitalization,’, but the country
that wants to exist showed it has a good memory. Would
it allow a rerun of the old story of the country’s
riches evaporating in foreign hands? ’’Gas is our
right,’’ proclaimed posters at the demonstration. The
people demanded and continue to demand that the gas be
used for Bolivia and that the country not submit again
to the dictatorship of its underground resources. The
right to self-determination, so often invoked, so
rarely respected, begins with this.
Popular disobedience derailed a juicy deal for Pacific
LNG, comprised of Repsol, British Gas, and Panamerican
Gas, known to be a partner of Enron, renowned for its
virtuous ways. Everything indicated that the
corporation stood to make ten dollars for every one
invested.
As for the fugitive Sanchez de Lozada, he lost the
presidency but he won’t be losing much sleep. Though he
has the crime of killing more than eighty demonstrators
on his conscience, it wasn’t his first bloodbath. This
champion of modernization is not bothered by anything
that can’t turn a profit. In the end, he speaks and
thinks in English—not the English of Shakespeare but
that of Bush.
Eduardo Galeano, a Uruguayan journalist, is the author
of "The Open Veins of Latin America," "Memory of Fire,"
and "Soccer in Sun and Shadow." Published with the
permission of IPS Columnist Service, which holds the
copyright.