Justice on the streets

By Isabel Hilton
The Guardian (UK) - October 21, 2003

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1067411,00.html

Bolivia’s president of 15 months, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, was
protesting to the last when he finally resigned on Friday after months
of street protests. His resignation, he remarked sourly, was a blow
for democracy in Bolivia and Latin America.

The president’s democratic credentials were not impeccable: he was
elected, certainly, but with only 22% of the vote. By last week, he
retained the loyalty of less than half of even the small minority who
had actually voted for him. He presided over government forces that
shot 50 demonstrators dead in the days leading up to his resignation.

Democracy, it is true, has had a pretty patchy run in Bolivia. In the
50s, one president abolished the army, only to be overthrown (with US
encouragement) shortly thereafter. Twenty years of military
dictatorship finally reached its apogee in the early 80s - after one
spectacular episode when there were five presidents in a single day -
with the coca-peddling General Luis Garcia Meza. At this point the US
belatedly concluded that military dictatorships were not necessarily
reliable allies.

Perhaps the fact that Bolivians have not been blessed with much in the
way of sound government goes some way to explaining why, when they are
exercised about an issue, they tend to take to the streets rather than
write to their MP. Experience has taught them that governments give
them little that the people have not wrested by force, and that when
foreigners take an interest in Bolivia’s natural resources, fortunes
are made by the few and the mass of Bolivians stay hungry. It was like
that under the Spanish, when tens of thousands of Quechua and Aymara
died working the great silver mountain at Potosi to fund the Spanish
empire. It was like that under the military dictatorships and now,
they have discovered, it is like that under elected governments too.

The Spanish left them the tin, which Bolivians continued to mine under
inhuman conditions. Sánchez de Lozada - the owner of Bolivia’s largest
mining group - is one of a handful of Bolivians who benefited. For
tens of thousands of miners, tin meant poverty and early death. Living
in one of the world’s most spectacular landscapes, at high altitude
and mostly in dismal poverty, Bolivians learned to survive through
solidarity and militancy. Two-thirds of the people live below the
poverty line and one-third in absolute poverty. When the tin market
collapsed in the 80s, tens of thousands of unemployed miners turned to
the cultivation of Bolivia’s other major export - coca leaf. Now the
government is implementing a US-financed coca-eradication programme
which criminalises cultivation without offering any alternative. The
methods are not pretty: violence and imprisonment are the penalties
for non-cooperation; destitution is the reward for compliance.

The immediate trigger for the recent protests was a British-backed
consortium’s plan to sell natural gas, of which Bolivia has a huge
reserve, to the US and Mexico through Bolivia’s old enemy, Chile. On
the surface the protest seems irrational. Why should the poor of a
poor country object to the money-spinning exploitation of that
country’s natural resources? The answer lies both in the memory of
Potosi and 15 years of the kind of free market reforms which Sánchez
de Losada had pioneered in his first term of office in the 90s.

But like the poor of Honduras and Argentina, Peru and Ecuador,
Bolivians have understood that it is they who pay the bill for
privatisation, that the growth they were promised has stalled, that
the country’s exports are worth less than they were before Bolivia
signed up for globalisation and that the gap between their miserable
standard of living and that of the tiny elite has widened. They have
understood that privatisation means higher prices for essential
utilities, that however hard they work their children remain
unschooled and that they live and die in poverty. They have learned,
too, that when they protest, an elected government will shoot them,
just as the dictatorships used to.

None of these lessons is likely to lead to a happy outcome for
Bolivia. Just one percentage point behind Sánchez de Losada in the
elections 15 months ago was Evo Morales, the head of the national coca
growers’ union. Given the country’s mood, he would probably win if an
election were held tomorrow, an outcome that would precipitate an ugly
confrontation with the US.

Recent reports claim that local leaders are forming armed factions to
challenge the government and its armed forces, formulating the
grievances of the poor into a powerfully nationalist, anti-foreign
message. Unless Bolivians can be convinced that democracy can be more
than the rule of the same elites in the interests of the rich and the
outsider - and that to be part of the world’s economy does not have to
mean that your country is plundered - that message will take hold.

In the last century, Latin America lived through decades of bloodshed
after legitimate demands for social justice were ignored. The signs on
the streets of La Paz are that it could happen again.

isabel.hilton@guardian.co.uk