Bolivia Rising

El Alto - A Colorful Bolivian Bastion, Floating Above It All

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 14 May 2013 07:36:00 +0000

William Neuman

EL ALTO, Bolivia — Turn a corner in this sprawling, bustling, fast-growing city and the Ovando family home suddenly bursts into view, a party-colored mirage floating above the drab, brick-red metropolis like a beacon of an alternate Andean future.

Brightly colored buildings are often topped with homes for the newly prosperous merchant class.

“We didn’t want it to be just another brick house,” said Karen Ovando, 26, a government customs lawyer, standing on the terrace of her parents’ bright yellow, orange and red penthouse, six stories above the street. “They’re all matchboxes here, all the same. We wanted to show something about ourselves, something about our family.”

But the Ovando home and others like it — popularly called chalets for their size and extravagance — also have a lot to say about the unbridled energy, aspirations and political contradictions of this churning, whirligig city and its place in a changing Bolivia.

Rising incongruously above much poorer dwellings, these urban, Andean versions of the suburban McMansion reflect the economic growth that Bolivia has been able to achieve in recent years — and how unevenly it is often distributed. But rather than stir widespread resentment in this bastion of rebellious politics, these open displays of wealth are often embraced by El Alto’s residents, an illustration of the city’s unusual mix of leftist uprisings and capitalist strivings.

“El Alto is simultaneously the most revolutionary city, perhaps in all of Latin America, at the same time as it’s the most neoliberal city, the most individualistic city in all of Latin America,” said Benjamin H. Kohl, an associate professor of urban studies at Temple University in Philadelphia.

El Alto sits at about 13,150 feet on the barren altiplano. Directly below it, Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, spills down the slopes of a steep valley, with the towering snow-covered peaks of the Andes as backdrop.

La Paz has long had a clear geography of status. The wealthiest residents live at the bottom of the valley, and the poorer ones live higher up. On top of everything is El Alto, whose name means “the Heights.” For years a slum appendage of La Paz, it became an independent city in 1988.

El Alto’s location is also the source of its power. The airport is here, and the main highways connecting La Paz to the rest of the country pass through El Alto. In times of unrest, El Alto can lay siege to the capital. The model was set by Tupac Katari, an Aymara Indian leader who led a late-18th-century rebellion against the Spanish colonialists, using El Alto’s position to cut off La Paz.

Centuries later, in 2003, a similar strategy was used by the modern residents of El Alto, who rose up against a government proposal to export natural gas to the United States through a port in neighboring Chile, Bolivia’s traditional enemy. Scores of people died in the unrest, and President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was forced to flee the country.

El Alto residents then became a key source of support for the leftist president, Evo Morales, supporting him overwhelmingly when he was elected in 2005 and again in 2009. But even Mr. Morales found that he was not immune to the anger of El Alto. In 2010, when his government proposed changes to subsidies that would have led to a sharp rise in the price of gasoline, El Alto’s residents again blockaded the capital and forced Mr. Morales to back down.

Still, for all its rebellious spirit, El Alto is far from being a typical bastion of the left. It is a hive of commerce, small-scale manufacturing, international trade and contraband.

“Lots of people describe El Alto as a revolutionary city, but it’s the capital of capitalism,” said Mario Durán, an activist who works to improve Internet access.

Home to about 220,000 residents in 1985, the city swelled as poor farmers and out-of-work miners poured in from the countryside. It is now bigger than La Paz, with an estimated size of well over one million. The population is overwhelmingly Aymara, one of the country’s main indigenous groups, and the immigrants have brought with them a fierce work ethic and a laissez-faire zest for business.

The most prominent feature of El Alto is its vast open-air market, which fills mile upon mile of city streets every Sunday and Thursday. Here vendors by the thousands offer a huge array of goods: piles of used T-shirts and other clothing that arrive in bales from the United States; cars, new or used (and sometimes stolen); neatly arranged arms, legs and heads from broken Barbie dolls; electric guitars; mummified baby llamas; pickax handles; and myriad other items. Each week, millions of dollars pour through the market, which operates in an almost total vacuum of government intervention, taxes or regulations.

Residents describe El Alto as a nonstop city financed by immigrant dreams of a better life. Beyond the market, there are thousands of small businesses, including importers, manufacturers and garment shops that make knockoff brand-label clothing. The city seems to be in a constant state of construction, fueled by the commerce and, locals said, by money from Bolivia’s drug trade. And there are language academies that give courses in Chinese for El Alto entrepreneurs.

“El Alto can be Hong Kong in the middle of the altiplano,” Mr. Durán said. “Or it can be a slum. You’re in the exact point where you need to establish the foundations for the city’s development.”

The other key aspect of El Alto is its indigenous character. Bolivia is a majority indigenous country, but El Alto is special, scholars say, because of the way it has developed. It has no old colonial town center with a plaza, church and government buildings, a significant departure in a country that still struggles with the legacy of conquest.

“It is the first indigenous city since the colonial period,” said Félix Muruchi, a professor of pre-Columbian culture at the Public University of El Alto. “A Spaniard didn’t make it. A Creole, a descendant of the Spanish, didn’t make it. It was the indigenous people themselves, the Aymaras, who made it.”

Now El Alto’s brightly colored buildings topped with luxury chalets have become a symbol of this vibrant, dynamic city, representing a homegrown architectural style with a crazy quilt of building materials and decorative motifs, including some copied from pre-Columbian ruins.

Some have giant diamonds raised in bas-relief on the stucco facade, or plaster lions or a condor perched on a penthouse terrace railing. Some look like castles; others have slashing diagonal swaths of reflective or colored glass. Most buildings have stores or restaurants on the ground floor and often a large event hall on the second and third floors, for weddings or parties. At the top sits the chalet, often with gabled roof and many-tiered chimney.

But most of all they are oases of color: electric greens, blues, yellows, reds. Other buildings here are made from brick and concrete, and few are painted, creating a subfusc cityscape exacerbated by the dust blowing across the altiplano. Paint is expensive, and Bolivians are poor. And residents believe their property taxes will rise once a home is finished and painted. Government officials say that is no longer true, but the belief, and the lack of paint, persist.

In that context, there is no surer sign of wealth than a painted house, and the brighter the paint the better.

“We came from zero,” Ms. Ovando said, recalling how her family used to live in a single room behind her parents’ restaurant. The family now runs two restaurants, a cattle ranch and other businesses. Now, she said, she can drive around El Alto and see copies of her family’s home popping up all around.

Mónica Machicao Pacheco contributed reporting.

Republished from Washington Post

Morales Inaugurates Bolivia’s 1st Natural Gas Liquids Separation Plant

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Mon, 13 May 2013 00:37:00 +0000

LA PAZ – Bolivian President Evo Morales inaugurated his country’s first natural gas liquids separation plant, saying it marks the start of a new era.

He presided over the start-up of the plant in the eastern town of Rio Grande, Santa Cruz province, in a ceremony also attended by Vice President Alvaro Garcia Linera, Hydrocarbons Minister Juan Jose Sosa and the president of state energy company YPFB, Carlos Villegas.

“Today we can say that after having taken our fatherland back, now we’re building a new fatherland through industrialization,” Morales said, urging the workers at the new facility to act with “great commitment.”

The Bolivian government obtained a loan from the central bank to fund the cost of the $181.3-million plant, built by Argentine company Astra Evangelista, Villegas said.

YPFB also paid just over $1 million to Guarani Indians living in the area as compensation for the work carried out on their lands.

The plant will process 6.5 million cubic meters per day of natural gas to obtain 361 tons per day of liquefied petroleum gas, 350 barrels of “stabilized” natural gasoline and 195 barrels of isopentane-rich gasoline, the government said.

Villegas said a portion of the plant’s LPG production will make the country self-sufficient in that fuel and allow it to save the money used to import it and subsidize its prices on the domestic market.

He said that in 2012 $48.9 million was spent on LPG subsidies and $61 million to import the fuel.

The other portion of the plant’s LPG output will be exported to Paraguay, which will receive 5,500 tons of that Bolivian fuel every month.

“The plant marks a turning point in our hydrocarbons history. We’re not only going to produce LPG for the domestic market, but we’re going to become net exporters of liquefied (petroleum) gas,” the executive said.

Using the Cold War: The Truman Administration’s Response to the Bolivian National Revolution

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Tue, 07 May 2013 05:28:00 +0000

Benjamin Dangl

Author’s note: At a May Day speech this month, Bolivian President Evo Morales announced that his government would be expelling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) out of the country for seeking to undermine the leftist policies and agenda of the Morales government. As I wrote in an investigative article on this topic in 2008 for The Progressive Magazine, the US government has for years been attempting to oppose the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the political party of Morales, and weaken Bolivia’s leftist social movements.

Washington is no stranger to interfering in leftist and nationalist politics in the Andean nation. As the following paper, originally published in the University of Vermont History Review in 2012, outlines, the Harry Truman administration worked against the progressive policies, self-determination and grassroots base of Bolivia’s transformative National Revolution in 1952. This history's legacy lives on; Washington’s power is woven into the fabric of Bolivian politics, from the dreams and nightmares of the National Revolution, into the MAS era of today.

***

At the beginning of the Cold War, Bolivian miners and peasants took to the streets in what would become one of the most transformative and symbolically-rich political events of the twentieth century for the Andean nation. Bolivia’s National Revolution in 1952 initiated shockwaves that are still felt among the country’s impoverished and indigenous majority. From land reform and the nationalization of the tin mines, to expanding access to voting, education and healthcare, the changes and promises wrought by the National Revolution were historically unprecedented for Bolivia.

Public support for the National Revolution was fed by many Bolivians’ dissatisfaction with working conditions in the fields and mines of the nation and the country's widespread social and economic inequalities. A testimony from Bolivian miner Domitila Barrios de Chungara conveys the perception of injustice that was common among Bolivian workers at the time of the revolution: “Why should we allow a few to benefit from all of Bolivia’s resources while we go on forever working like animals, without having higher aspirations, without being able to provide a better future for our children? Why shouldn’t we aspire to better things when our country is rich thanks to our sacrifice?”[1] Barrios de Chungara’s complaints illustrate the rage felt by many poor Bolivians, a rage which gave expression to the demands of the revolution. Yet, in the months and years following the uprising, many of the National Revolution’s promises remained unrealized. A string of military dictatorships, corrupt presidents, racism and vast inequality in the country contributed to these challenges. But a look at Washington’s response to the revolution in 1952 points to some other roadblocks to development and social change.

This essay explores the ways in which President Harry Truman’s administration undermined the historic nationalist changes that took place during the National Revolution in Bolivia. In the US fight against communism in the Cold War, the decisions of leading Truman administration foreign policy officials working on Latin America were consistently informed by US commercial interests. Such US policy fought against nations who challenged those commercial interests in their own countries by way of the state-led expropriation of private businesses, industry and land. Diplomatic cable exchanges between government officials and diplomats in Washington and La Paz detail how the Truman administration worked against the self-determination of Bolivia’s National Revolution. Of specific interest here is the extent to which the Truman administration, following Bolivia’s nationalization of tin mines, pressured Bolivian officials into reimbursing the private businessmen who were the former owners of the government-expropriated mines, a move that was against the popular sentiment of the grassroots base of the Bolivian revolutionary government.

Considering the roots of the Truman administration’s foreign policy in the wake of World War II, and the development of the Truman Doctrine, the administration’s response to the National Revolution took place at an important juncture in US-Latin American relations. In the years following Bolivia’s revolution, Washington notoriously helped orchestrate bloody coups against leaders with nationalist leanings elsewhere in the region. The way in which Washington dealt with this earlier threat to US hegemony in the Andes sheds important light on the machinations of US foreign policy in Latin America in the early Cold War.

Good Neighbors and Tin

Coming out of the commercial, economic and political disruption of the Great Depression and World War II, Washington sought to mend crises and prevent further decay in relations with Latin America through the Good Neighbor Policy, which essentially served as an “international counterpart of the New Deal.”[2] The Good Neighbor Policy was aimed at developing a more reciprocal trade relationship with Latin America, a departure, at least rhetorically, from the more interventionist policies of many previous US administrations. While directed toward developing more equal economic and political partnerships between Washington and the governments and people of Latin America, the Good Neighbor Policy was also aimed at expanding US influence, commercial presence and political power in the region. US President Herbert Hoover, elected in 1928, was considered one of the fathers of the Good Neighbor Policy in his plan to not view Latin America simply as a little brother. President Franklin Roosevelt expanded these neighborly policies toward Latin America, focusing on pro-trade approaches and a non-interventionist stance, which also involved cutting back on military spending due to the financial constraints imposed by the Great Depression.[3]

The Good Neighbor Policy was a shift away from the more explicitly interventionist Roosevelt Corollary, which was established in 1904 by President Theodore Roosevelt and served as an expansion of the Monroe Doctrine. The Roosevelt Corollary basically claimed that the US had the right to intervene militarily in Latin America in order to protect US commercial interests in the region, and to stabilize economies and penalize nations if they did not pay back debt to the US. The Corollary was based on the belief that if the US did not establish a strong presence in the region through intervention, then European powers would encroach on Latin America.[4]

When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor took place on December 7, 1941, Latin American countries rallied to resist Axis incursions into the region and supported the US in World War II, in part by breaking relations with Axis nations. The solidarity with the US on the part of many Latin American nations was due in part to a fear and disdain for the Axis Powers as well as an expectation that by supporting the US, they would receive helpful financial aid from Washington.

Latin America was a war-free zone in World War II, providing much in the realm of natural resources to the US.[5] Each year, from the 1920s and into the 1940s, the US used 160 billion tin cans and 75,000 tons of tin metal. This was roughly 45 percent of the entire global use per year. During World War II, Bolivia provided most of the tin for the US; from 1940 to the early 1950s, the US purchased nearly half of all of Bolivia’s tin ore.[6] This tin trade was the most important aspect of US-Bolivian relations throughout the war, and would continue to be a key concern during the National Revolution in Bolivia.

Truman entered office in 1945, with Dean Acheson acting as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953. This dynamic partnership created a foreign policy legacy that continued to influence US politics for the rest of the century. During the Truman years, the US established itself as a dominant ally in Europe with the Marshall Plan. The Soviet Union posed a threat to US economic and political interests, and Truman responded to this in March 1947 by developing the Truman Doctrine, which established Washington’s objective in the post-World War II era of using political and financial support to contain the Soviet Union to prevent its further expansion. Bolivia’s National Revolution in 1952 provides an interesting case study for measuring the impact of the Truman Doctrine in its early days.

The timing of the revolution was also significant in that it took place following the signing of the Rio Military Pact in September of 1947 between the US and Latin American nations. The pact involved collaborations in defense of the region, establishing that any nation would come to the defense of another in the case of a foreign intervention. Following the precedent set by the Truman Doctrine, Washington’s initial goal with its participation in this agreement was to curb the influence of communism and the Soviet Union in the region. Later, in April 1948, the Organization of American States was also established initially to protect the region from communism.

The Cold War and US containment policy quickly pushed aside the more “neighborly” language and approaches of the Good Neighbor Policy as fears of Soviet Russia and communist expansion in the region took center stage. Yet perhaps more notable than the Truman administration’s concern for the spread of communism in Latin America was its general ignorance and lack of concern toward Latin America. A brief look at leading political and diplomatic officials connected to the administration illustrates this view.

The View from Washington

On February 18, 1950, George Kennan, a senior Foreign Service officer and State Department counselor, boarded a train in Washington, DC that was bound for Mexico City. Kennan was a Cold War expert on Russia whose reports from the Soviet Union helped form the US containment policy toward communism. Yet he knew next to nothing about Latin America. The US State Department sent him on this trip to assess the threat of communism in the region and how to deal with it.[7]

The trip took Kennan to major cities in Panama, Venezuela, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. “I found the journey anything but pleasant,” he later wrote. Indeed, the 10,000 word memorandum to Dean Acheson painted a grim picture of the region. In his report, he essentially said that Latin American nations had to be pressured into following US wishes, either through coercion or intervention, because they were too weak on their own to resist communism. While these views were more typical of the stance of Washington within the framework of the Roosevelt Corollary, rather than the Good Neighbor Policy, they offered some insight into the views of the region from the perspective of the Truman administration at the time, in part because of Kennan’s influential role in shaping US policy toward Latin America in the Truman years. Kennan’s racist 1950 report following his travels in Latin America incredibly pointed to “nature and human behavior” as key obstacles to progress in the region. Kennan said that “extensive intermarriage” between people of Spanish, indigenous and African ethnicity was an impediment to development that was written in “human blood.”[8]

How this played out on the ground was a clear clash between what the Truman administration and others said the Cold War was all about. As historian Gaddis Smith explains, “The public rhetoric of American foreign policy, enshrined in the Truman Doctrine and innumerable other declarations, proclaimed that democracy, freedom, the rights of the individual were the answer to Communism. But in Latin America Kennan saw a political culture too weak and selfish to support a democracy strong enough to resist the superior determination and skill of the Communist enemy.”[9]

Kennan’s views were reflective of general perceptions and ignorance toward Latin America in Washington at the time. Truman, for his part, said Latin Americans were simply “very emotional” and hard to work with.[10] And in Acheson’s own almost 800 page memoir the only opinion he shares about Latin America was that the region’s challenges were caused by a lack of “population control,” “primitive politics, massive ignorance” and “archaic” societies.[11] Acheson himself admitted in 1950 that he was “rather vague” regarding Latin America, and unclear about whether Latin Americans were “richer or poorer, going Communist, Fascist or what.”[12]

Condescension was typical of the Truman White House toward Latin America during the early Cold War. Leaders in Washington could afford that condescension because they were extremely powerful in the region, expected obedience from most Latin American governments, and were generally unafraid of actual Soviet interference. “They were far more concerned about nationalism, especially its economic variety, and the threat this posed to private U.S. investments,” writes US foreign relations historian Robert Beisner.[13]

The Truman administration’s work in Latin America represented an important juncture in US-Latin American relations. Not only did Truman’s time in office coincide with the years immediately following World War II, but it also represented a shift away from the Good Neighbor Policy and to the Cold War interventionism that came to define the approach of subsequent administrations toward Latin America. For example, in 1954 the socialist president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, was overthrown in a US-backed coup largely organized by the CIA under President Dwight Eisenhower. This was in response to a direct threat against US business interests in that Arbenz had expropriated land used by the United Fruit Company, a US-based company. The case of the Bolivian National Revolution, therefore, is unique in that Bolivia nationalized its tin mines, affecting US investors, but the US continued working with the country, pressuring it diplomatically and commercially rather than seeking to overthrow the revolutionary government. How Truman worked with Bolivia in the National Revolution says much about US policy in the early Cold War.[14]

The events in Bolivia were dramatic and unparalleled in the country’s history. For Washington, it posed a challenge and opportunity to test the Truman Doctrine and continue the purchase of tin from the impoverished country. Though the revolution later transformed into a dictatorship, it began hopefully with a broad participation of society overthrowing a military ruler, and establishing long sought after rights for the impoverished indigenous majority.

“There Will Be a Lot of Bread”

The National Revolutionary Movement (MNR) party grew out of the camaraderie that was established between soldiers in the trenches of the 1930s Chaco War, a bloody fight with Paraguay over land and access to oil. In its early days, the MNR was led by a multi-class coalition of veterans of the war who allied with radical students. In the months leading up the 1952 National Revolution, the MNR also drew from the vital support of miners, workers and farmers, many of whom joined the party out of impatience with Bolivia’s traditional political parties; they saw in the MNR a more inclusive and progressive set of platforms and political beliefs.

In 1951, the party ran Victor Paz Estenssoro as a presidential candidate. He won a resounding victory at the ballot box, but the military would not allow him to take power; they put military General Hugo Ballivian in Estenssoro’s rightful place. After the legitimate victors were barred from entering office, the MNR decided that their only option would be armed revolution against Ballivian and his faithful supporters in the government and army.[15] Washington at the time was keeping a watchful eye on Bolivia, monitoring developments from afar. In the lead up to the revolution, they simply waited to see how things would turn out before taking a stance on either Ballivian or the MNR’s claims to power.

On April 10, 1952, Ballivian called for the lights to be put out in La Paz in order to impede the advance of the MNR rebels as they descended into La Paz from the neighboring city of El Alto. Yet a full moon lit the way, providing the rebels with guidance in their march down the steep hills from El Alto into the capital city. Many of the MNR rebels were members of the working class neighborhoods in El Alto, and so knew the terrain very well. They effectively cut off Ballivian’s forces by blocking key routes on the outskirts of the city. Conflicts flared up in the night, leaving wounded and dead on both sides. But news of the MNR rebels’ victory spread throughout countryside, inspiring similar uprisings across the nation. Three days later, with over 600 dead from the battles, the MNR was victorious over the Ballivian regime and took power.[16]

Estenssoro flew into the El Alto airport from exile in Argentina on April 15, 1952. When he entered La Paz he was met by a crowd of 7,000 people waving signs that read “Nationalization of the mines,” “Agrarian Reform,” and “Welcome, father of the poor.” The crowd was so massive that it took Estenssoro a full thirty minutes to arrive at the presidential palace half a block away. He greeted the crowd in Aymara, the indigenous language most members of the crowd spoke: “Jacca t’anta uthjani,” he said—“There will be a lot of bread.”[17]

Just three days after Estenssoro took office, the Bolivian Workers’ Center (COB) pressured the new president to nationalize the country’s tin mines, expropriating the industry and natural wealth without paying the private owners of the mines. The COB also demanded that the MNR government redistribute land to poor farmers, grant citizens universal suffrage, and formalize the armed worker and campesino militias as a replacement for the military. Such demands coming from the COB and other worker and farmer movements pushed the MNR to turn the radical changes they promised on the campaign trail into a reality.[18]

On July 21, 1952, the government granted the right to vote to all Bolivians over the age of 21, bringing 80 percent of the formerly marginalized indigenous population into the electorate. Further rights were gained through grassroots pressure on powerful institutions. Campesinos and rural workers’ unions, using their weapons from the revolution, applied their own systems of justice through militias, took over land, reorganized systems of production and often superseded the power of local political authorities.

As a result of the pressure from labor organizations and miners, the MNR signed a decree that nationalized the country’s tin mines on October 31, 1952. An enormous crowd of miners gathered to celebrate the signing with cheers, dynamite explosions and gunshots into the air. The festivities went on for days. The worker-run Bolivian Mining Corporation took over the operation of 163 mines and 29,000 workers formerly controlled by the three Bolivian “tin baron” families: the Patiños, Hochschilds and Aramayos. In spite of the COB’s demands not to pay the owners a cent, the Bolivian government ended up paying these families a total of $27 million to buy back Bolivia’s underground wealth.[19]

Poor, armed campesinos in various parts of the country also occupied land and pressured the government to break up large land holdings and expropriate and redistribute the land. In August of 1953, the MNR passed the Agrarian Reform Law to appease protesting grassroots organizations, but a difference remained between the rhetoric of the MNR’s policies and the actual change on the ground; on a national level, the land reform only affected 28.5 percent of large landowners.[20] In the US, there was alarm regarding the revolution in Bolivia, but the State Department was mostly concerned about the nationalization of the tin mines as it affected US businesses.

Moderating the Revolution

From the very beginning of the revolution in April 1952, the Truman administration was opposed to the MNR government’s plan to nationalize the tin mines. In a memorandum from Secretary of State Acheson to President Truman on May 22, Acheson argued for the US to recognize the MNR government. Acheson believed this recognition would help the moderates in power of the MNR maintain their legitimacy against more radical sectors of the government, particularly the Minister of Mines and Petroleum, Juan Lechín, a popular union organizer who was advocating vociferously for the nationalization of the tin mines. The US ended up recognizing Bolivia, but only as part of a power play to draw moderates in the government closer to US interests, leading them away from more radical voices such as that of Lechín.[21]

In subsequent correspondences both Acheson and Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs Edward Miller were primarily concerned about nationalization, how that would affect US investors in the country, and how it would be a dangerous example of nationalist policies to others in the region. On September 8, Acheson wrote to the US Ambassador in La Paz to tell the Bolivian government that the US would not purchase tin from Bolivia if the country nationalized its tin industry.[22] This case of blackmail from the US State Department against the sovereignty of the Bolivian people demonstrates that the Truman administration was more interested in protecting US commercial and security interests than respecting the rights of Bolivia to develop its own economy in a nationalist direction.

Finally, when Bolivia did nationalize its tin industry on October 31, 1952, the US State Department responded with strong recommendations that Bolivia pay back the major tin companies, including US investors. This went entirely against the will and demands of much of the organized labor in Bolivia and the indigenous and peasant population that formed that backbone of the popular support for the MNR. In the view of this significant sector, the three main mining companies had been enriching themselves through the enslavement of Bolivian people in the tin mines for decades, and that therefore the tin barons should not be compensated for their cruelty. None the less, the US demanded that the Bolivian government compensate the tin barons of the mining industry a total of $27 million, a huge sum for the impoverished government.[23]

The National Revolution in Bolivia was met with pressure from Washington, and the “reluctant revolutionaries” of the MNR responded by compensating owners of the nationalized tin mines, an approach that was unpopular among tin miners and the grassroots base of the MNR, but pleased Washington. Shortly following the compensation plan, “US officials announced that the United States was doubling its purchases of Bolivian tin and that Bolivia would begin receiving food exports.” Over the next decade, into the 1960s, the Bolivian government received a third of its funding from US aid, totaling $100 billion, a higher amount than any other country in the region received at the time. In exchange, the Bolivian government had to follow Washington’s commands.[24]

The US government used its clout as a major purchaser of tin and provider of financial aid to the poor nation to pressure the MNR government into a more moderate approach in its policies toward the tin industry. In this way, Washington was able to maintain its supply of cheap tin as well as its hegemony over the country’s politics. The Truman administration thus paved the way toward a form of intervention that was not based on covert operations or a military coup – as was the case with President Arbenz in Guatemala just two years later. Instead, Washington was able to achieve US objectives in the country through diplomatic pressure to uphold US commercial interests.

In the US-dominated Latin America in the early Cold War, the odds were against nationalism in Bolivia from the beginning. As historian Stephen Zunes writes, “The decision to expropriate, rather than confiscate, the mines—despite immense pressure from the miners and other Bolivians for the latter option—was directly related to concerns by the MNR that they had to acknowledge that at least some form of compensation was necessary, otherwise they feared that the United States would label them communist and deny them foreign aid.”[25]

As tin was the main export for Bolivia, and the US was the biggest buyer of the tin, Bolivia was beholden to the US, and Washington used this dependency adeptly. Willard Thorp, the Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs, told Acheson early on in the tin negotiations with Bolivia, that the US would get what it wanted in the end: "We will almost certainly get the Bolivian tin eventually. They have no other place to sell it."[26]

Conclusion

When Domitila Barrios de Chungara was a young girl in a family of tin miners, her father, a union organizer in Bolivia’s National Revolution, told her a story about the millions of dollars the MNR government paid to the tin mine owners. In telling the story, he used the metaphor of a doll. “Suppose that I bought you a beautiful doll or one of those puppets that can walk and talk,” he said. Then the doll is stolen by a man who exploits it in back-breaking labor. “But one day, after so much fighting, you grab [the man] and hit him hard and take the doll away from him.” After so much work, the doll is dirty, broken and weak. “[S]hould you pay him for the way the doll has aged? Don’t you see you shouldn’t? It’s the same with the ‘tin barons’ who’ve gotten rich with our mine.”[27]

The National Revolution had the momentum to place power in the hands of Bolivia’s poor majority. However, according to Barrios de Chungara, the “new bourgeoisie” in power started “undoing the revolution” in spite of the fact that the revolution was made by the working poor. “Everything’s been betrayed because we left the power in the hands of greedy people,” she said, explaining that in the end, most of the MNR’s policies just enriched a new group of elites.[28]

She saw the MNR leaders as playing a key role in the ultimate failure of the revolution, and believed the solution would involve electing a working class president who understood the plight of the people. Barrios de Chungara explained, “Because only those who know what it’s like to dig into a rock, only those who know what it’s like to work every day and earn your bread with the sweat of your brow, are going to be able to make laws that control and watch out for the happiness of the great majority, the exploited people.”[29]

The MNR leadership’s distance from the rank and file of their party contributed to the unfulfilled promises of the National Revolution. Yet Washington limited the revolution’s transformative capacity as well. The Truman administration’s role in pushing the MNR away from full expropriation of the mines demonstrated a Cold War tactic of putting US commercial interests above the rights to national sovereignty in Latin America. Certainly, the Cold War did involve economic and political battles against the Soviet Union and its allies across the globe. Yet in Latin America, the Cold War was often used by Washington as simply an excuse to squash nationalism, movements against US imperialism, and governments that were seeking a more independent and defensive route within the arena of a global market increasingly dominated by the US.

The case of Washington’s pressure on the National Revolution in Bolivia is illustrative of this dynamic. Just two years later, the Eisenhower administration overthrew the Arbenz government. In 1973, the US backed a military coup against democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile, leading to a bloodbath orchestrated by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the US propped up repressive dictators in Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. When the socialist Sandinistas took power in Nicaragua in 1979, the US began a covert military operation against this government that lasted throughout the 1980s. These are the tragedies that came to define the Cold War in Latin America. This conflict that was ostensibly against the Soviet Union and communism was fought out in part in the streets and government palaces of Latin America. The US pressure against Bolivia in 1952 was but an early sign of this development.

***

Benjamin Dangl is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press) and Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press). Dangl is the editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events, and UpsideDownWorld.org, covering activism and politics in Latin America. He is currently a doctoral student in Latin American history at McGill University.

Republished from Upside Down World

Notes:

[1] Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Let Me Speak!: Testimony of Domitila, A Woman of the Bolivian Mines (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 51.

[2] Mark T. Gilderhus, The Second Century: U.S.-Latin American Relations Since 1889 (Lanham: SR Books, 1999), 71.

[3] For more information see Graham Stuart, “The Results of the Good Neighbor Policy in Latin America,” World Affairs vol. 102, no. 3 (1939): 166–70.

[4] For more information, see John M. Mathews, “Roosevelt's Latin-American Policy,” The American Political Science Review vol. 29, no. 5 (1935): 805–20.

[5] Gilderhus, Second Century, 91, 98. Also see G. J. Dorn, “Pushing Tin: U.S.-Bolivian Relations and the Coming of the National Revolution,” Diplomatic History vol. 35, no. 2 (2011): 203–28.

[6] Kenneth D. Lehman, Bolivia and the United States: A Limited Partnership (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 62, 75.

[7] R. R. Trask, “George F. Kennan's Report on Latin America,” Diplomatic History vol. 2, no. 3 (1978): 307–12.

[8] “The American Republics: Views Within the Department of State Regarding United States Policy Toward The American Republics as a Group,” 4 January 1950, Miller Files, Lot 53 D 26, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950: The United Nations; The Western Hemisphere, vol. II (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1976), 589–690.

[9] Gaddis Smith, The Last Years of the Monroe Doctrine, 1945–1993 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995), 70.

[10] Ibid., 67.

[11] Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 569.

[12] Gilderhus, Second Century, 134.

[13] Beisner, Dean Acheson, 570.

[14] For more on US relations with Latin America during the Cold War, see Arne Odd Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 143–52.

[15] Herbert S. Klein, A Concise History of Bolivia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 206–08.

[16] James Dunkerley, Rebelión en las Venas: La Lucha Política en Bolivia, 1952–1982 (La Paz: Plural, 2003), 67–69.

[17] Ibid., 67–69, 70–71.

[18] Pablo Solón, La Otra Cara de la Historia (La Paz: Fundación Solón, 1999), 27–29, 30–31.

[19] Benjamin Kohl and Linda C. Farthing, Impasse in Bolivia: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Resistance (London: Zed Books, 2006), 64.

[20] Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Oprimidos Pero no Vencidos: luchas del campesinado aymara y quechua 1900–1980 (La Paz: HISBOL—CSUTCB, 1984), 122–23; Dunkerley, Rebelión en las Venas, 104–6.

[21] Memorandum by the Secretary of the State to the President, 22 May 1952, 611.24/5–2752, in Foreign Relations of the United States: The American Republics, 1952–1954, vol. IV (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1983), (hereafter cited as FRUS), 490.

[22] The Secretary of State to the Embassy in Bolivia, 8 September 1952, 824.2544/9–852:Telegram, in FRUS, 502.

[23] The Secretary of State to the Embassy in Bolivia, 23 December 1952, 824.2544/12–2352:Telegram, in FRUS, 516–22.

[24] Lester Langley, America and the Americas: The United States in the Western Hemisphere (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 182–83.

[25] Stephen Zunes, “The United States and Bolivia: The Taming of a Revolution, 1952–1957,” Latin American Perspectives vol. 28, no. 5 (2001): 33–49.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Barrios de Chungara, Let Me Speak!, 51–52.

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., 51.

Bolivia Earns $16 Billion from Energy Industry Since Nationalization

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sat, 04 May 2013 02:20:00 +0000

LA PAZ – Bolivia has earned more than $16 billion from the energy industry since President Evo Morales nationalized the sector in 2006, officials said.

“Seven years before the nationalization, from 1999 to 2005, the state received around $2 billion. After these seven years, the state received more than $16 billion,” Hydrocarbons Minister Juan Jose Sosa said.

Morales issued an executive order on May 1, 2006, nationalizing the seven oil companies, the majority of them foreign firms, operating in Bolivia.

The government later acquired stakes in the nationalized units of Spain’s Repsol and Brazil’s Petrobras, and it forced other companies, such as Argentina’s Pluspetrol and France’s Total to negotiate new contracts.

Energy industry investment nearly tripled from $1.86 billion in the five-year period before nationalization to $5.24 billion in the 2006-2012 period, state-owned oil company YPFB said.

Natural gas production nearly doubled over the past seven years from 35 million cubic meters per day to 60 million cubic meters per day, YPFB CEO Carlos Villegas said.

The government plans to fulfill another of the promises made by Morales before taking office in 2006, opening a facility to put Bolivia’s vast natural gas resources to industrial uses, Villegas said.

A plant that will separate the gas liquids exported to Brazil will open on May 10 in the eastern region of Santa Cruz, the YPFB CEO said. EFE

Bolivian President Morales Shuns USAID: Why He May Not Need The Money

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 02 May 2013 22:31:00 +0000

Jacey Fortin, International Business Times

Bolivian President Evo Morales sparked controversy on Wednesday when he called for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, to leave his country.

The statement came during a May Day rally in La Paz, the Bolivian seat of government. Morales, who leads the Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS, has long accused the U.S. government of conspiring against his leftist administration.

“They might think that they can manipulate us economically and politically here, but that is no longer the case,” he said to the crowds gathered outside of his presidential palace.

“The U.S. is still conspiring -- that is why we have decided to expel USAID of Bolivia.”

American State Department officials have denied Morales’ claims, calling them “baseless allegations.” But rumors of clandestine U.S. efforts to destabilize the Bolivian government have been circulating for years, lending some credence to the president’s suspicions.

A Falling Out

Bolivia and the United States have had a tense relationship since Morales was first elected in 2006. The American ambassador Philip Goldberg and other officials were expelled from the country in 2008, and Bolivia’s ambassador Gustavo Guzman was sent home from Washington in retaliation. Full diplomatic ties have since been restored, but the two ambassadors have yet to be re-exchanged.

At the heart of ongoing disputes is the coca plant, whose leaves are traditionally chewed by Bolivian indigenous groups; Morales himself once cultivated the crop as a farmer. But coca is a primary ingredient in cocaine, and U.S. officials have sought to curb production of the stimulant as part of Washington’s war on drugs.

Official assistance from the United States to Bolivia has been on the decline. In 2011, the last year on record with USAID data , aid disbursements to Bolivia totaled more than $96 million. That’s down from the $131.1 million disbursed in 2008, the year relations fell apart following the ambassador expulsions.

Though he has not made it official by notifying USAID itself, Morales seems prepared to renounce that assistance on the basis of Washington’s opposition toward his own administration.

“There’s been a number of declassified documents that came out, which point to a long history of efforts to undermine and limit the influence of the MAS political party,” said Jake Johnston, a research associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. “This dates back to well before Morales was elected.”

In 2008, for instance, ABC News published statements from an American Fulbright scholar in Bolivia who said that U.S. embassy officials had asked him to provide information on any Venezuelan or Cuban nationals he might come across in Bolivia. Peace Corps volunteers had reportedly received similar requests a year earlier. American officials deny those claims.

Wikileaks cables from 2009 show U.S. antipathy toward the constitution that was implemented under Morales in 2009, and toward the MAS party, which would go on to sweep general elections later that year.

Another cable from 2006, just after Morales was first elected, reveals then-Ambassador David Greenlee acknowledging that “many USAID-administered economic programs run counter to the direction the [government] wishes to move the country.”

USAID’s own data are too vague to shed much light on these implications. Official records name the sectors and agencies that implement American disbursements in Bolivia and other recipient countries, but they do not break the information down further to reveal the precise recipients of development monies.

“This gets to a larger issue with USAID: a lack of transparency on who’s getting the funding,” Johnston said.

Changing Dynamics

If Morales follows through on his threat to expel the aid organization, Bolivia stands to forfeit tens of thousands of dollars of American assistance funding on an annual basis.

That could have serious consequences for one of South America’s poorest countries, where about 26 percent of the population lives below the poverty line.

Then again, Bolivia’s economy has been doing well in recent years. It has enjoyed seven consecutive years of fiscal surplus, and the administration expects GDP to grow by 5.5 percent in 2013 to hit a record $28.7 billion.

This growth is fueled in large part by growing domestic demand for goods and a shrinking wealth gap. That’s not to say the administration’s fiscal policies are entirely sound; the country is still vulnerable due to high dependence on volatile mining and oil revenues, and extreme poverty still affects rural areas. But Bolivia’s ongoing growth is promising. A loss of USAID assistance would be detrimental, but not insurmountable.

In the end, Morales’ call to cut USAID could be little more than an empty threat -- an effort to get the organization in line with his own objectives. The president has called for its expulsion once before, in 2011. But given the suspicions surrounding USAID in Bolivia, combined with shrinking disbursements during a time of unprecedented economic growth in the South American country, Morales’ ideas about ending the assistance program aren’t as outlandish as they once were.

Bolivia Celebrates May Day by Expelling USAID

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:51:00 +0000

Juan Valencia

May 1, 2013 – Today Bolivians are celebrating May 1, “International worker’s day”. In Bolivia this date has become even more important because is the seventh anniversary of the nationalization of oil and gas that Bolivian President Evo Morales carried through on May 1, 2006. That was just a few months after he was sworn in as the first democratically elected, indigenous president of Bolivia in January 2006, winning with 54 % of the ballots.

Without this sovereign and historic decision, the country would have been forced to request a loan from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, or other foreign entities. That is why it can be stated that without the nationalization of oil and gas all the later transformational changes in Bolivia would have not been accomplished.

During the seven years prior to the nationalization (1999-2005) the government received US$2.1 billion in oil/gas revenue. After the nationalization (2006-2013) it has received eight times more: $16.09 billion.

All the new resources have been invested in social programs to benefit the majorities, large infrastructure projects, and benefits for the elderly, children, and pregnant women. Poverty has been reduced and the economy has grown steadily. Prior to Morales between 1999-2005, the economy grew 2.6% a year; between 2006-2012, growth was 4.8% a year.

Every May 1 Evo Morales and his cabinet come with a message to the workers of the country – usually the recovery and nationalization of strategic companies that were privatized in the 90s. But today it comes with a different type of announcement. On May1, 2013, the Bolivian government decided to expel USAID (United States Agency for International Development), which has been frequently accused of political interference in peasant unions (sindicatos campesinos), and other social movements in order to conspire against the government.

This May First is a highly symbolic day in Bolivia .USAID was the last US-based agency left in the South American country, after American Ambassador Philip Goldberg was declared persona non grata in September 2008. Goldberg was the architect behind a regional conflict between Bolivia's western highlands and eastern lowlands.

Goldberg was considered by Bolivian authorities an expert in encouraging separatist conflicts. He had clandestine meetings with rightwing political and separatist business leaders. Two months later, in November 2008, came the expulsion of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, which was caught in flagrant conspiring activities.

Dignity and sovereignty are terms frequently used by Bolivian President and social movements that support the Morales presidency. The expulsion of USAID strongly reflects that commitment.

Juan Valencia is a Bolivian and a member of Toronto Bolivia Solidarity

Republished from Toronto Bolivia Solidarity

Bolivian President Evo Morales expels USAID

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 02 May 2013 02:01:00 +0000

BBC

Bolivian President Evo Morales has said he will expel the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

Mr Morales accused the agency of seeking to "conspire against" the Bolivian people and his government.

US state department spokesman Patrick Ventrell rejected the allegations as "baseless and unfounded".

USAID has been working in Bolivia for almost five decades, and had a budget of $52.1m (£33.4m) for the country in 2010, according to its website.

The agency said it deeply regretted Mr Morales' decision.

'Nationalise dignity'

On previous May Days, Mr Morales had announced the nationalisation of key industries, such as hydroelectric power and the electricity grid.

But on Wednesday he said he "would only nationalise the dignity of the Bolivian people".

Speaking at a rally in La Paz, the president said there was "no lack of US institutions which continue to conspire against our people and especially the national government, which is why we're going to take the opportunity to announce on this May Day that we've decided to expel USAID".

He then turned to his Foreign Minister, David Choquehuanca, and asked him to inform the US embassy of his decision.

The president said the expulsion was in protest at a recent remark by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who referred to Latin America as "the backyard of the United States".

Mr Kerry made the remark as he tried to persuade US Congressmen of the importance of the region.

Mr Morales has threatened USAID with expulsion in the past, saying that its programmes have "political rather than social" ends. He has also accused it of "manipulating" and "using" union leaders.

Mr Ventrell said Mr Morales' decision "harms the Bolivian people".

"We think the programmes have been positive for the Bolivian people, and fully co-ordinated with the Bolivian government and appropriate agencies under their own national development plan," he said.

In a statement USAID said: "Those who will be most hurt by the Bolivian government's decision are the Bolivian citizens who have benefited from our collaborative work on education, agriculture, health, alternative development, and the environment."

Coca disputes

Mr Morales, who heads his country's union of coca growers, has also been critical in the past of US counter-narcotic programmes in Bolivia, repeatedly stating that the fight against drugs is driven by geopolitical interests.

In 2008, Mr Morales expelled the US ambassador and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for allegedly conspiring against his government.

Bolivia is among the top three producers of coca in the world, according to the United Nations World Drug report. Coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, has been used in the Andes for thousands of years as a mild stimulant and sacred herbal medicine.

USAID cites as its main aims the strengthening of Bolivia's health system and the provision of "equal access to health care by eliminating social exclusion", as well as improving "the livelihoods of economically and socially disadvantaged people by increasing income and managing natural resources".

The agency also supports programmes to help Bolivian farmers to replace coca with other crops.

The US government had a separate budget of $20.3m (£13m) for its counter-narcotics and military programme in 2010, but it is not clear which agency distributes that money in Bolivia.

Evo Morales became Bolivia's first indigenous president in 2005.

He was re-elected by a landslide in 2009, but has since faced protests from indigenous communities angered by the construction of a major road through their territory, and by police and army officers demanding better pay.

USA Behind Coup Attempt in Venezuela, Says Morales

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 05:32:00 +0000

La Paz, Apr 16 (Prensa Latina) The Government of Bolivia considered today that the US questioning of electoral results in Venezuela is a way to trigger instability in that country in order to justify a coup and intervention.

In a press conference today, President Evo Morales rejected the attitude of a Whote House spokesperson, who demanded yesterday a vote recount because of the tight margin between the two main candidates Nicolas Maduro and Henrique Capriles.

“I am certain that behind those remarks, the United States is preparing a coup d’ Etat in Venezuela,” Morales denounced, who described the US spokesperson’s attitude as interference in the internal affairs of Latin America, and questioned the White House’s moral authority to question electoral results worldwide.

“I would like to express that this is a flagrant US interference in Venezuela’s democracy, as neither that spokesperson nor the US government has moral authority to question electoral results in any Latin American country or around the world,” he said.

Morales confirmed his attendance to Nicolas Maduro’s inauguration next Friday as an expression of support to his government.

Last Sunday, Venezuelan Acting President Nicolas Maduro won 50.75 percent of votes against Capriles’ 48.97 percent.

US ends logistical support for Bolivia drug fight

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 03:14:00 +0000

AFP

LA PAZ — The United States is ending its logistical and financial support of Bolivia's fight against drugs with a donation of equipment, Washington's top envoy said.

"This is the end of an era," Larry Memmott, the US embassy's charge d'affaires and highest-ranking official in Bolivia, told private radio Erbol.

Within the framework of counternarcotics conventions, the United States donated eight helicopters, as well as three transport aircraft and a small plane.

Memmott said the Bolivian government had been formally notified of the donation, a move confirmed by Felipe Caceres, Bolivia's deputy social defense minister.

A source at the US embassy in La Paz who requested anonymity told AFP that the transfer of all material would be made by September after talks with the Bolivian government that began last year.

The development comes amid unresolved diplomatic friction between La Paz and Washington, mainly in the form of verbal attacks by the country's leftist President Evo Morales, a friend of US foes Cuba, Iran and Venezuela who often condemns White House policies.

With the arrival to power of Morales in January 2006, US assistance gradually decreased to $11 million in 2013, while in years past it had exceeded $60 million annually.

Morales expelled the US Drug Enforcement Administration in late 2008 along with the US ambassador, accusing them of supporting an alleged plot to overthrow him. Washington denied the existence of such a plot and reciprocated by expelling the Bolivian ambassador.

Morales has on several occasions said that his country was better off without the United States in fighting drug trafficking.

Bolivia and the Changing Shape of U.S. Power

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 23:31:00 +0000

Ethan Earle

IN NOVEMBER 2011, BOLIVIA AND THE UNITED STATES signed a "framework agreement" to resume diplomatic relations, more than three years after President Evo Morales ejected the U.S. ambassador on charges of conspiracy. In contrast to the diplomatic breakup, which made international headlines, the reconciliation, held in Washington and presided over by a Bolivian vice minister and a U.S. under secretary, was sparsely covered in the news media.

Afterward, Bolivian vice minister for foreign relations Juan Carlos Alurralde declared that future developments between the two countries would be based on principles of "mutual respect and shared responsibility"1 While at first glance this statement looks like diplomatic boilerplate, on closer consideration it reveals a major shift in the history of the two countries' relationship. For the first time, the United States has let Bolivia - a small, poor, and geopolitically disadvantaged country - reframe the terms of the bilateral relationship through a progressive (and aggressive) campaign to halt what Morales has repeatedly characterized as a history of imperialism. Moving beyond Bolivia, this event also has potentially important implications for power dynamics throughout the region.

Since at least World War II, when the United States became interested in the country for its tin deposits, it has dictated the terms of its relationship with Bolivia. Ranging from its demand for natural resources to a fear of falling Communist dominoes, from military outposts to the war on drugs and experiments in neoliberalism, U.S. actions in Bolivia have in many ways been representative of its behavior in Latin America as a whole. Morales's September 2008 expulsion of Ambassador Philip Goldberg, part of a diplomatic firestorm in which he also expelled the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and appropriated certain U.S. Agency for International Development programs, was a fierce response to this historical dynamic of domination followed by dependency that in turn opened doors to new forms of domination.

Many on the international left have long considered Morales and his MAS party to be shining examples of an emerging political "pink tide" in South America, driven by widespread rejection of U. S. -style neoliberalism. In this context, Morales's 2008 actions were viewed as an achievement, a mile marker in the continent-wide movement away from the long shadow of the United States. As such, the recent reconciliation has been greeted with quiet disappointment by many left-leaning observers.

There seems to have been a collective knee-jerk aversion to taking a second look at something that at first glance portends a backslide in Bolivian and indeed regional independence. Meanwhile, some in the Bolivian and international left who have become increasingly critical of the MAS see the agreement as yet another step down the slippery slope toward "reconstituted neoliberalism," in the phrase of historian Jeffrey R. Webber, or "neoliberalism with an Indian face," as Aymara political leader Felipe Quispe Huanca has put it."2 As a result, there has been a broad failure to note something that is truly significant for anyone who feels that Bolivia and all of Latin America would benefit from more "mutual respect" in their relationship with the United States.

Notably, the November agreement is almost entirely concerned with broad principles. The document's founding principle is the aforementioned mutual respect for national sovereignty. The accord additionally refers to respect for human rights, non-intervention, the rights of states to choose their political and economic systems, and peaceful resolution in all disputes. It then calls for the establishment of a joint committee to oversee and approve all further actions between the two countries, particularly mentioning the allocation of U.S. financial assistance.

As the only technical point in the agreement, this proposal is a powerful one, speaking to a half-century in which Bolivia was among the world's highest per capita recipients of U.S. aid, often distributed unilaterally with the goal of bolstering U.S. interests in the country and region.

NACLA blogger Emily Achtenberg, in one of the few Englishlanguage analyses of the accord, published in her article "A Political Victory for Bolivia," paints a more complete picture of the agreement's basic thrust.3 While advising a waitand-see attitude before reaching any final verdict, Achtenberg concludes that "the framework agreement provides a powerful symbol of enforced equality between a weak and a powerful nation."

Considered in the historical context of Bolivia-U.S. relations, this founding document is indeed a powerful symbol. As Deputy Foreign Minister Juan Carlos Alurralde points out, it is the first accord since 195 1 to move beyond mere technical cooperation to include broader issues of political dialogue and shared responsibility. While Alurralde was speaking only of Bolivia, it is in fact the first time in more than half a century that the United States has signed any accord in South America that so directly addresses its position of dominance and exploitation.

Indeed, while many Latin American governments have criticized U.S. influence when trying to break away from the country, none before the MAS have maintained their critique during the subsequent thawing of relations. Instead, some mixture of U.S. gunboat and dollar diplomacy has pressured the transgressing government into returning to the United States with hat in hand, asking for forgiveness in the form of more aid or more trade. Bolivia has taken strides to break free from this dynamic by winning not only the war - in this case the diplomatic conflict of 2008 - but also the subsequent cold war, for which the November agreement effectively serves as a peace treaty. So while the 2008 conflict was the more exciting story, the recent detente has been by far the more groundbreaking, setting a diplomatic precedent that could be used by other countries in the Americas to appeal for more equal relations with the United States.

AT THIS POINT, A SKEPTIC might contend that the devil is in the details - in this case, not the document's grandiose language but the concrete actions between the two countries. In this regard, it thus far appears that Morales and the MAS intend to do things differently. On January 20, Bolivia signed a new drug accord with the United States and Brazil, additionally including the United Nations in a supporting role. In preparing the agreement, Morales was reported to have repeatedly dragged his heels, threatening to call off negotiations if further concessions to Bolivian sovereignty were not made. This tenacity marked a clear intention to immediately apply the principles of the newly established accord.

The resulting document has created a more substantive balance of power than had previously existed in the U.S. war on drugs, certainly in Bolivia and perhaps in the continent as a whole. While the United States will continue to provide equipment and some training, Brazil will also assist in training and monitoring duties, and Bolivia will be responsible for anti-narcotics efforts. Meanwhile, the United Nations will act as an observer. While the precise terms of the new drug accord have not been disclosed, it appears to give Bolivia greater flexibility to implement more of the voluntary "social control" programs favored by the Morales administration and never before featured in any U. S. -Bolivia drug accord.

Some may criticize any continued U.S. involvement in Bolivian drug policy, while others question the rising regional power aspirations of Brazil. Indeed, as the disastrous exploits of the United Nations' Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) remind us, foreign intervention is always troublesome, regardless of how many countries are involved in its oversight.

However, the U.S. war on drugs has been a powerful element and symbol of its military and political domination of much of the Americas over the past two decades, and the sight of the country losing its grip over the terms of that war is a powerful affirmation of growing South American independence.

Over the next several months, as if to reassure those doubting the direction of the relationship, Morales fired off a series of sharp reprimands of U.S. power in Bolivia and the region. These included calling out the Obama administration's foreign policy as interventionist and authoritarian, and culminated in a renewal, on March 19, of his threat to expel the United States if its embassy continued to infringe on Bolivian sovereignty. He did not reveal the specific nature of the alleged transgression, but following the 2008 expulsion, the threat surely cannot be taken as mere empty rhetoric.

This string of accusations and threats also made apparent another possible reading of the previous months of cooperation: that Morales, in the face of dipping approval, both nationwide and particularly within his party's base, had invited the United States back to provide the MAS with a common enemy around which to again rally popular support, much as it had in 2008 against its political opponents. While this is only one of several interpretations, it is an alternative explanation for Bolivia's desire to reconcile that, in light of the threat, appears more logical than any intended capitulation to U.S. pressure.

One week later, on March 27 in the eastern department of Beni, Bolivian officials stopped a U.S. embassy vehicle transporting unauthorized weapons, munitions, and communications equipment. This type of extra-official behavior had been commonplace in previous years, escalating particularly in the eastern parts of the country leading up to 2008. Again, the Morales administration showed itself determined to push back against any perceived U.S. incursions, taking the opportunity to further give shape to the principles espoused in the November agreement.

Despite these recent hiccups - or perhaps in concert with them if we are to believe that the current administration has invited the United States back as a target of critique - on March 29, Morales officially ratified the "framework agreement." Foreign minister David Choquehuanca characterized the move as an act of good faith by Morales, despite his "many bitter experiences" with the United States. He again echoed the demand that the new relationship be based on "full respect for national legislation" and "the sovereignty of the people."4

Aside from Morales's continuance of fiery rhetoric - such as calling for an end to the U.S. dictatorship over South America at the Summit of the Americas in April - in the past months there have been relatively few developments in the Bolivia-U.S. relationship. Taking account of the present state of affairs, we see the Morales government again pushing back against what it considers undue U.S. influence, while at the same time reengaging the country through diplomatic channels.

As often as not, this push-andpull is executed simultaneously, with Morales issuing combative rhetoric while other MAS officials stress points of agreement and cooperation. Regardless of whether this dynamic is the result of political calculation or a genuine rift within the MAS, it has so far been effective in permitting Bolivia to shape the contours of the relationship more than it ever had in the past.

The danger of backslide is of course still present. Various U.S. Embassy and USAID officials in Bolivia, interviewed April 2010 on condition of anonymity, repeatedly likened Morales and the MAS to Victor Paz Estenssoro and his MNR party, leaders of the country's 1952 revolution who later gave up more radical political goals in exchange for U.S. financial assistance. The hope then is that Morales and the MAS can also be swayed by the sirens of dollar diplomacy. For the United States, the November agreement likely offers greater opportunities to work this black magic. But the United States has had to concede far more control than ever before to reach this point, and Morales and MAS thus far appear intent on accentuating their gains.

ON THE WHOLE, WHAT emerges from the November agreement and subsequent developments is a plausible blueprint for a new way of relating to the United States in the 21st century. While it might not be revolutionary it does appear to be a relatively practical and potentially durable way forward. Regionally another step away from United States domination has certainly been taken. The November agreement serves as an admission by the United States that it is more willing than ever to accept the terms pushed on it by a sufficiently stubborn country regardless of size or power disparities.

Much as the 2008 expulsion of the U.S. ambassador in Bolivia was soon followed by similar moves in Venezuela and Ecuador - as well as more open critiques of U.S. power throughout the continent - so too does the recent accord create more space for other countries to redefine historic power dynamics on more equal terms.

Indeed, Argentina's April expropriation of Spain's Repsol oil subsidiary YPF was closely followed by Bolivia's May Day nationalization of its principal power-grid company, formerly owned by the Spanish Red Eléctrica Española. More recently, Ecuador's decision to protect WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in its London Embassy has received widespread support from South American leaders, several of whom - Morales included - have been quick to note the hypocritical rhetoric emerging from countries like Britain and the United States, both of whom have long histories of granting asylum to murderous dictators. In both cases, albeit in different ways, we see a region that appears to be gaining consciousness of an increased freedom of independent political action vis-à-vis the 20th century's great powers, all the more so when its governments act in concert.

While the future of Bolivia-U.S. relations is far from set in stone, the November agreement serves as a quietly powerful precedent for reshaping power dynamics on the American continent in the 21st century.

References

1. See Bolivia Information Forum, "BIF News Briefing." December 5, 2011, available at http://boliviainfoforum.org.uk

2. See Jeffery R. Webber, From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales (Haymarket Books, 2011).

3. See Emily Achtenberg, "A Political Victory for Bolivia" (NACLA blog), November 19, 2011), available at nacla.org.

4. See Bolivia promulgò un acuerdo para recomponer la relación bilateral con Estados Unidos Telam (March 29, 2012): http://www.telam.com.ar/nota/20324/

Republished from NACLA

Informal Economy Bolivian Style

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 01:26:00 +0000

Nico Tassi

There are a couple of basic premises which I need to lay out at the beginning of this paper. First of all, the following considerations are mostly based on an ongoing research on Bolivia’s ‘popular and indigenous economies’ as well as on the analysis of a specific historical, political and economic context. Second, my research mostly addresses a type of economic actor who either combines production and trade or participates simultaneously in a variety of markets and economic activities to the point of making the label ‘small-scale producer’ partially inadequate.

Different connotations of informality

Since its inception the term informality has gone through a series of different interpretations. In the early seventies when the concept of informal economy took off (Hart 1973), the state was perceived as the best institution that could organize a push for enhanced economic development. Therefore, informality was thought in the terms of how the state (conceived both as a planning agency and a welfare provider) could solve the problem generated by the demands of a growing urban population for jobs, housing education and healthcare and above all the rising unemployment. Only a decade later, when the IMF and the World Bank produced a series of unheard attacks on excessive public expenditures, state monopoly and restrictions on free trade and capital movement, the informal economy was highly fostered as an image of popular creative energies finding expression in an unregulated market (cf. de Soto 1987). As usual, the ideology of Third World development mirrored trends in the West and the concept of informality swung with it.

On the one hand, from the perspective of the state as the only agent of development, the informal economy was envisioned fundamentally as a problem. Rather than supplying the population’s needs through a spontaneous and self-organised system, informality was often interpreted as a symptom of low productivity in predominantly agricultural economies, weak mechanization and even as causing technology to stagnate. Informality came also to be envisioned as a structural irrelevancy, a remnant of the past and tradition, to be soon absorbed into the mainstream economy. The efforts of international agencies and policy initiatives aimed at improving the informal sector were often cosmetic and fragmentary. They often ended up negating it, making it official and rule bound – issuing licences, offering bank credit, organising market-places, setting up training schemes and, above all, taxing operators made visible by formalisations. On the other hand, from the perspective of the unregulated market as the one and only agent of progress and development, the analysis of informality dramatically failed to take into account the structural inequalities of the market system, the geopolitics of power which justified them while simply envisioning informality as a symptom of the excess of state regulations.

This polarised tension between market individualism and state collectivism (Hart 1992) has had the effect of marginalising intermediate levels and forms of association, and their own organizational structures, many of which are compatible with the market. Despite being largely invisible to modern social theory, these intermediate forms of association may result essential to the functioning of institutions at all stages of economic development.

The Marxist perspective was highly critical of the concept of informality. Marxist thinkers tended to oppose the use of the term ‘informal economy’ for mystifying the essentially regressive and exploitative nature of this economic zone. They tended to prefer the label ‘petty commodity production’. In fact, several studies have tended to establish a series of interdependencies between the formal and the informal economies.[1] Portes and Castells (1989), for instance, have insisted on the subordination of the informal economy to the formal one as a consequence of the attempt of privileged capitalists and entrepreneurs to reduce costs by seeking to subordinate petty producers and traders. A similar argument has been developed in Bolivia in the 80s both as a consequence of the severe measure of structural readjustment suggested by the IMF which generated the dismissal of thousands of employees of the public sector and of a series of studies of the peasantry and their relation with the urban economy (Calderón and Dandler 1984). The peasantry first and the informal economy second came to be seen as subordinated “structures” which allowed to feed cheaply the urban labour forcein order to maintain low wages and high capitalist profits and therefore “subsidising” or guaranteeing the reproduction of the capital.

After the millennium the attitude towards the informal economy changed again. International agencies were feeling that their investments in poor countries were suffering of a weak regulatory environment. Therefore informality came to be perceived as an impediment to the development of the ‘private sector’. The idea was that business corporations were undercut by informal economic actors who paid no taxes, evade costly regulations and took advantage of often illegal devices in order to reduce prices. The irony here is that those same institutions and corporations, which in the past had promoted the deregulation and flexibility of informal arrangements for their own benefit, they now wanted it to deny to those who would develop from behind.

Informal markets in Bolivia

Already in the second half of the ‘60s, Latin American scholars started to identify a series of new dynamics in the relations between capital and labour which excluded a growing number of workers from waged labour. This process was identified not so much as a consequence of well-known cycles of expansion and contraction of the accumulation structure but rather as a new tendency. The word used to refer to this phenomenon was “marginalization” (Nun 1969; Quijano 1977) not in the sense of an exclusion from capitalism but rather as a process intrinsic to capitalism (cf. Marx 1990). The oil crisis of 1973 and the growth of poverty in the region led to the coining of the concept of “subsistence strategies” of the marginalized sectors (Duque 1973).

However, the problem was not of a uniquely economic nature. In Bolivia, the constitution of the republican state was based on the alliance between the bureaucratic apparatus and the enlightened ruling classes of Spanish descent to the point that the state became a tool to further the economic interests of a small sector of the population and maintain a regime of exploitation of the indigenous majority (Zavaleta 1986; cf. Macgaffey and Bazenguissa-Ganga 2000, in the case of Congo). In other words, the state became the instrument which granted the participation in the formal economy to a small group of enlightened citizens (cf. de Soto 1987) while forcing the rest of the population to the absence of a regulatory frame for their economic activities. The main economic preoccupation of the state was the export of raw materials and the provision of food to urban and mining centers to the point that the indigenous-populated rural areaswere left in a state of semi-abandonment (Arnold and Hastorff 2008) and the development of internal structures of provision and distribution was highly neglected. In this situation a series of localized and unofficial political and economic institutions – often based on indigenous structures of power – sprung spontaneously in the interstices of the state and the export economy in areas which the state and the ruling classes were either incapable or disinterested in controlling.

In the absence of a supportive legal system, such local and unofficial organizations and institutions which guaranteed to popular and indigenous sectors not only the functioning of trade and the circulation of products but also forms of social control, sophisticated strategies of dealing with crimes and a even the provision of a local ‘healthcare system’. This articulated system of practices and structures enabled them to prevent the intervention of a dysfunctional bureaucratic apparatus – often uniquely preoccupied to further its own interests – and of foreign economic powers in their political and economic arrangements, ecologies of patronage, redistribution and survival. In other words, this lack of formal regulation from above was compensated for by a strong regulation from below, non-official and informal, posing a rather solid critique to a neoliberal discourse which had identified the informal economy with the excess of regulations by the state.

This generated a paradoxical situation where popular and indigenous sectors were retreating to marginal areas, consolidating local organizational structures and the control of territory while the central government became increasingly intertwined with the interests of economic conglomerates and pressured to comply with international agreements in order to defend the capitals they wished to attract. Up until today, for instance, the provision of food and goods to the remote towns and cities of the Northern Amazon region of Bolivia lies in the hands of popular and indigenous traders. Once stocked up in the city of El Alto, goods begin a five-day trip across dangerous unpaved roads with no facilities and no state presence. In these extreme conditions, the combination of a lack of infrastructure and juridical insecurity makes unviable the incursion of formal enterprises and conglomerates and feed the strengthening of informal actors. Despite being referred to in some occasions as a “structural irrelevancy” or the insignificant omission of a largely effective economic system, this kind of economy tangential to the official economic institutions has become the bulk of the market economy in La Paz as it supplies up to the 90% of the local demand for food, clothing, transport but also electronics.

These informal actors and institutions had mushroomed in the interstices slowly beginning to erode the legitimacy of the official powers and public institutions. In the city of El Alto, for instance, local settlers, mostly migrants from the rural areas of the plateau, had to build their own sewage system and chip in the construction of streets and sidewalks given the general disinterest and lack of resources of the public and private sector. If we look at the markets which have grown in the last years in El Alto, they have become spaces where the informal institutionality of the popular and indigenous sectors has taken over the formal one. In the recent construction of the Asodimin market, local traders have provided the market with all the necessary facilities; they have even built and paved the streets which, after naming them after the trade union leaders, they have handed over to the municipality which by law is supposed to look after them.

In the last years, every now and then, debates have sprung upon the legality and legitimacy of this kind of economic activities and organizations (van Schendel and Abraham 2005). In a context where the state has traditionally been identified with the interests of an exploitative minority and with foreign conglomerates, it becomes difficult to recognise it as the sole authority capable to unanimously define what is legal and illegal. The legitimacy of informal traders lies in their ability to generate a local economic ferment that neither the state nor foreign investments would have been able to engender. Their social recognition lays on their capacity to generate work opportunities, but also to grant access to the vast majority of the urban settlers with produces and goods of acceptable quality and affordable price. In other words a state – or a global economic system –that has not been able to generate economic opportunities for this type of economic actors appears to not hold the legitimacy to define obligatory standards and rules. For the economic actors we are working with, informality is a matter of perspectives. Their trade is illicit and informal only when you look at it form the perspective of the privileged formal entrepreneurs who have benefited from ample tax discounts and even conspicuous donations from the state.

When the rule of law is weak, the forms that emerge in its place may be criminal in character. Or, when the practice of law is criminal and corrupted this may generate reactions in the population. What has happened in Bolivia is that the rather impressive success of the informal traders and their heightened capacity of political mobilization has generated new forms of negotiation and a new equilibrium between these informally constituted groups and the state which has been forced to accept a degree of legal and economic pluralism.
In México, for instance, big chains and supermarkets have been resorting to informal imports and feeding informality by promoting the sale of their products by peddlers (Alba 2012). In Nigeria (Meagher 2010), these informal politico-economic systems (cf. Reno 1995, in Sierra Leone) have often degenerated into antisocial power structures with nucleuses of coercive power feeding forms of corruption, graft and rent-seeking. What happened in Bolivia is that informal street markets, governed by a series of rules and norms defined by dynamics of locality, gender and ethnicity, have grown into attractive spaces which have gradually begun to attract the products of formal enterprises.[2]

We are bound to face a series of contradictions when we try to analyse the informal economy. The informal economy has a plurality of contradictory connotations, is simultaneously good and bad. First, it is impossible to disentangle the formal and the informal. A good part of modern society appears concerned in protecting the public image of bureaucratic processes from a reality that mixes formal order with the illicit and corruption. Simultaneously, however, the informal economic actors we are working with are adopting practices of the state and elements of the formal laws in the regulation of their informal activities.[3] On the on hand, we are witnessing a series of ‘local’ economic spaces mushrooming in the interstices of the official economy. On the other hand, the current geopolitical situation seems to stress the capacity of global conglomerates to engulf local realities and suggests a new interventionist wave characterised by a series of “little, cruel wars” (Joxe 2002) in the defence of the interests of multinational companies. Informality seems both the attempt of certain groups to protect themselves from the laws and offices of state bureaucracy that make their search for self-preservation and improvement more difficult and the consequence of neoliberal policies which have reduced state controls to the point of transforming the world economy in an increasingly informal zone. For these economic actors the informal economy is both a source of enterprise and capital formation leading to economic growth in its own right and an exposure to a series of risks and to an endemic uncertainty. Idare to say that the economic actors we are working with do not particularly enjoy being ‘informal’, they would rather prefer a less corrupted custom system, a more effective police to deal with, a more equal access to public and private services and less arrogant and exploitative foreign economic partners. But since all this is unthinkable, they would rather have their informal institutionality recognised as licit.

Informality, modernity, globalization

In Latin America the social research on informal economies and traditional markets has been sometimes associated with the underlying intention to reveal alternative modes of production or economic models antithetic to capitalism (cf. Franco 1990; Matos Mar 1984; Coraggio 2007) and even practices of socio-economic restructuring from below. In the case of the economic actors we have been working with – and in the case of many other recent researches (Matthews, Ribeiro and Alba 2012) – they do not seem willing to destroy the market economy or aiming at constructing another world from the dominant and globalised one. It is often the rich and powerful – and formal – that through the control of state apparatuses and wider political structures depict a transgressive image of informal petty traders and producers (Ribeiro 2009). The characteristic of these actors is that they appear willing to take advantage of the market and their structures, and attempt to access the market economy in their own terms trying to avoid undergoing a process of social, political and economic destructuration as the process of modernization – and the recipes of development advocated by international agencies - would imply. However, it is by doing so that they counteract a series of globally defined – supposedly universal – standards of quality, economic rules and regulations, sets of practices, copyrights, patents and economic moralities which are being imposed as unique and universal.

Simultaneously and recently, one of the characteristics of these informal traders has been described as their capacity to generate translocal networks and articulations with a series of economic actors across boundaries and languages. The fragmentation and flexibility of non-hegemonic systems of production combined with the increasing facilities to transport produces and communicate with producers have generated the conditions for the growth of a system of commercialisation of a series of products which do not enter into the global regulation. While globalization is intended to operate, at least in theory, in a legal and transparent way, this kind of non-hegemonic globalization includes a series of different actors commonly functioning under the radar of the law (Matthews and Yang 2012). For this reason these economic actors are often referred to as smugglers and illegal traders revealing the hypocrisy of formal entrepreneurs who despite critiquing popular traders and their illicit activities are the ones who in the first place demanded a deregulation of the state and a liberalisation of the economy in order to take advantage of the goodness of globalisation. Once again, what we are seeing here is that these informal and popular traders are using the same instruments, channels and practices brought about by globalisation with the intention, however, to promote a kind of globalisation from below (Matthews et al 2012) or maybe simply their interests.

If for small producers and petty traders globalization had often been looked upon in terms of the benefits and disadvantages generated by dynamics from above such as free trade agreements and global value chains, a series of research works on the subject have begun to suggest an idea of globalization as slightly more plural and diversified from traditional recipes which tended to suppress the possibility of difference (Escobar 2005). These actors, groups and nonofficial organizations appears to be characterised by a kind of decentralised structure and by the combination of political practices based on locality (and control of informal local commercial spaces) and simultaneous articulation with a series of transnational and translocal networks. As opposed to an idea of modernity which had structured economic life around the logic of order, centralization and hierarchy, such actors and organizations shift the attention from free trade agreements and centralised projects from above to a series of dynamics much more reticular and less lineal.

The paradox of these actors and their practices is that they are not severed from processes such as globalization and modernity on the contrary they draw from such processes in order to consolidate a “local” type of economy and attempt to bend them towards their own interests. Unavoidably, it also appears that globalization, modernity but also formal enterprises and banking have started drawing from them in order to expand and reproduce their own system.

Footnotes

[1] In fact, the formal and informal were always linked as the idea of ‘informal economy’ entails the effort to organise society along ‘formal’

[2] In urban street markets in La Paz it is rather common to encounter by a stall, a butcher shop or along with sellers on the sidewalk, ladies in flashy cloths advertising the products of large companies which slowly begun to realise the commercial potential and the number of buyers attending these informal spaces.

[3] Informal wholesalers, for instance, they pay bonuses and health treatments to their informal ‘employees’ that despite not holding a contract they often assume that ‘by law’ the employer is obliged to pay.

References

Alba, Carlos 2012. Local Politics and Globalization form Below: the peddler leaders of Mexico City’s historic center streets. In Globalization from Below: the World’s Other Economy, Matthews et al (eds.), 203- 220. Abingdon: Routledge.

Arnold, Denise and C. Hastorf 2008. Head of State. Icons, Power and Politics in the Ancient and Modern Andes. Walnut Creek, California: Left Coast Press.

Calderón Fernando and J. Dandler 1984. Bolivia: la fuerza histórica del campesinado. Cochabamba: Ceres.

Coraggio, José Luis (ed.) 2007. La economía social desde la periferia: contribuciones latinoamericanas. Buenos Aires: UNGS and Altamira.

Duque, Joaquim 1973. Las estrategias de sobrevivencia de las unidades familiares del sector popular urbano. Santiago de Chile: PROELCE.

Franco, Carlos 1990. Imágenes de la sociedad peruana: la ‘otra’ modernidad. Lima: Cedep.

Escobar, Arturo 2005. Más Allá del Tercer Mundo. Globalización y diferencia. Bogotá: ICANH.

Joxe, Alain 2002. The Empire of Disorder. New York: Semiotext(e).

Hart, Keith 1992. Market and the State after the Cold War. The Informal Economy Reconsidered. In Contesting Markets. R. Dilley (ed.), 214-227. Edimburgo: University of Edinburgh.

Hart, Keith 1973. Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana. En Journal of African Studies, II(I), 61-89.

Macgaffey, Janet y Bazenguissa-Ganga Rémy 2000. Congo-Paris. Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law. Indiana University Press.

Marx, Karl1990 [1867]. Capital: ACritique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (trad. de B. Fowkes). Londres: Penguin Books.

Matos Mar, José 1984.Desborde popular y crisis del Estado: El nuevo rostro del Perú en la década de 1980. Lima: IEP.

Matthews, Gordon, G. L. Ribeiro and C. Alba (eds.) 2012. Globalization from Below: the World’s Other Economy. Abingdon: Routledge.

Matthews Gordon y Yang Yang 2012. How Africans pursue low-end globalization in Hong-Kong and mainland China. Journal of Current Chines Affairs, 2: 95-120.

Meagher, Kate 2010. Identity Economics. Social Networks and the Informal Economy in Nigeria. Suffolk y Rochester NY: Boydell and Brewer.

Nun, José 1969. Sobrepoblación relativa, ejercito industrial de reserva y masa marginal. Revista Latinoamericana de Sociología 5(2).

Portes, Alejandro, Manuel Castells y Lauren Benton (comp.) 1989. The Informal Economy: Studies in Advanced and Less Developed Countries, The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Quijano, Aníbal 1977. Imperialismo y Marginalidad en América Latina. Lima: Mosca Azul.

Reno, William 1995.Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Ribeiro, Gustavo 2009. Non-hegemonic globalizations: alter-native transnational processes and agents. Anthropological Theory 9(3): 297-329.

van Schendel, Willem and Itty Abraham 2005. Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: State, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

de Soto, Hernando 1987. El otro sendero. Lima, Instituto Libertad y Democracia.

Zavaleta, René 1986. Lo nacional-popular en Bolivia. México: Siglo XXI.

Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 09:23:00 +0000

A compelling contribution to our understanding of the challenges facing Latin America’s ‘pink tide’

Latin America’s Turbulent Transitions:
The Future of Twenty-First-Century Socialism
Roger Burbach, Michael Fox, and Federico Fuentes
Fernwood Publishing and Zed Books, 2013.
reviewed by Richard Fidler for Climate and Capitalism

Latin America was the first region targeted by the neoliberal phase of capitalism, and it suffered some of its worst consequences. But it is in Latin America that neoliberalism has been most contested in recent years by new social movements of landless peasants, indigenous communities and urban unemployed.

In a number of countries, this powerful democratic ferment has led to the election of anti-neoliberal, anti-imperialist governments — a process that started with the initial electoral victory of Hugo Chávez Frias in the late 1990s.

The untimely death of the outstanding Venezuelan leader on March 5 prompted many to reflect on his government’s important achievements and the still unresolved challenges facing not only Venezuela but the whole of Latin America.

What is the nature of these new governments of the so-called “pink tide”? And what are the prospects for building a continental movement toward a libertarian mass-based democratic socialism of the 21st century, the goal that Chávez embraced and advocated in the international arena?

This timely volume presents an excellent overview and analysis of the major developments in Latin America’s “turbulent transitions” in the context of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the weakening of U.S. hegemony, and the shifts in world trade and investment patterns that have opened new prospects for radical reform in the region. All three authors are well-known for their insightful studies of some of the countries in question. They acknowledge as well the critical assistance of two other contributors, Marc Becker (who wrote the chapter on Ecuador) and Greg Wilpert, founder of the valuable website Venezuelanalysis.com.

Introductory chapters describe and analyze the major developments and trends in Latin America in recent decades. They are followed by country-specific chapters providing greater detail on the experiences in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. Concluding chapters briefly discuss two countries at opposite ends of the political spectrum of progressive governments: Brazil (“challenging hegemony and embracing it”) and Cuba, attempting to update its socialism of the 20th century.

Although, as the title indicates, a subtext of this volume is the professed effort in some countries to build a “socialism of the 21st century,” the term itself (as the authors acknowledge) calls for clarification. Although Venezuela has established that as its goal, no Latin American government (with the partial exception of revolutionary Cuba) has gone beyond capitalism. However, some governments in South America are attempting with notable successes to reverse the ravages of neoliberalism. Each is pursuing distinct strategies tailored to meet the needs of its particular social conditions, subject to the limitations imposed on all of them by their insertion within the global capitalist system.

An opening chapter outlines the international context. “The old order is breaking down with the decline of the United States as the planet’s hegemonic power.” And while Washington is preoccupied with its wars in the Middle East and South Asia, its grip on Latin America has weakened as an emerging China enters this market in search of raw materials to supply its booming economy. China is now the largest trading partner of Brazil and Chile. Its trade with Latin America as a whole increased eighteen-fold in the first decade of this century, while U.S. exports dropped from 55 percent of the region’s total to 32 percent.

Although these shifting patterns do not free Latin America from economic dependency on resource exports, they do give its governments more leverage to diversify economic alliances and strategies, develop an independent foreign policy and ward off some of the worst effects of the global economic crisis. It might be added — although the authors don’t say this — that Beijing generally tends to be much more respectful than Washington of the national sovereignty of its trading partners. Its commercial relations, loans and other development assistance come with fewer strings attached.

In recent years, Latin American governments have been able to develop a number of mutually beneficial regional economic and political agreements (MERCOSUR, UNASUR and ALBA, to cite only those), while rejecting Washington’s attempt to foist a continental free-trade agreement, the FTAA, on the region.

These developments have created space for the more progressive governments to use the increased rents from resource extraction that they negotiate not only to carry out important anti-poverty income redistribution programs but also to begin to develop strategies aimed at endogenous industrialization and relatively eco-friendly processing of raw materials, a necessary step toward increasing economic sovereignty and development.

A second independence

Two hundred years after Simón Bolívar led the movement for political independence from Spain, Latin America is undergoing “a second independence,” say the authors. Bolivarianismo, the name for this movement in Venezuela, “stands for the expansion of democracy and national sovereignty to the fullest extent possible without necessarily going beyond capitalism.” However,

“the socialist project builds on this foundation, striving to construct deeper, more egalitarian democratic societies by transforming the economic order. Both of these projects are continental in character…. A critical attribute of twenty-first-century socialism is that it is built by social movements and by people organizing from below; it does not arise from government fiats nor from self-defined vanguard parties.”

Socialism, of course, has deep roots in the Latin American historical experience. Following the triumph of the Cuban revolution, there were many attempts to replicate its success through guerrilla movements in other countries. None was successful, although in Nicaragua the Sandinista guerrillas helped spark an urban uprising that toppled the dictator Somoza.

In Chile a different approach was attempted, with the election of the Popular Unity government led by Salvador Allende. It nationalized key industries, but was soon overthrown by the Chilean military backed by the Chilean bourgeoisie and Washington. The deadly repression that followed, under Pinochet, marked the inauguration of the neoliberal regime described so vividly by Naomi Klein in her seminal book, The Shock Doctrine.

The Sandinista government, while supported by Cuba, remained largely isolated. Its electoral defeat coincided with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Neoliberalism had devastating consequences in Latin America. Large-scale privatization, de-regulation and the gutting of existing social programs demobilized and dismantled working-class organizations. In Bolivia, for example, the powerful miners’ unions that had played an instrumental role in the 1952 national revolution were almost destroyed by privatization of the tin and silver mines, the country’s economic backbone. Throughout the continent, a vast urban precariat, the “informal economy,” was swelled by masses of peasants forced from their lands by agribusiness giants.

Trade and foreign direct investment boomed, but IMF-imposed “structural adjustment programs” prevented national governments from capturing the profits. At the same time, neoliberalism undermined the political legitimacy of Latin American governments, now “with ever fewer policy tools to lower unemployment, fight inflation, protect the environment and the workplace, or guide investment.” Parties that had once led nationalist struggles were now implementing neoliberal policies. Economic stagnation, indebtedness and poverty were augmented by successive financial crises (Mexico in 1994, Brazil in 1999, Argentina in 2001-02).

Although the traditional left was paralyzed, and a fragmented working class was unable to provide leadership, the “new multitudes” fought back in spontaneous uprisings that shook the political life of some cities and even countries.

In 1989 the Caracazo, a massive revolt in Caracas against sudden hikes in the prices of basic commodities and services, resulting in the massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands of the protesters, encouraged nationalist army officers led by Hugo Chávez to attempt a coup in 1992. Although unsuccessful, Chávez emerged a popular hero and was able to win election in 1998. The book’s chapter on Venezuela relates chronologically how his “Bolivarian revolution” radicalized in reaction to successive confrontations with the national bourgeoisie and imperialism.

In some countries, new indigenous movements arose, their struggles shaped by both their “long memory” of indigenous resistance to colonialism and (in Bolivia) the “short memory” of revolutionary nationalism, “best exemplified by the 1952 National Revolution when armed miners and campesinos marched on La Paz to demand the nationalization of the mines and a radical redistribution of land.” Some like the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, eschewed the struggle for state power and soon found themselves in a strategic impasse. But in Bolivia the indigenous-led movements waged powerful battles against water nationalization and plans to export unprocessed natural gas, and managed to bring down two presidents, in 2003 and 2005. In December 2005 the candidate of the indigenous campesino party MAS-IPSP, Evo Morales, was elected president.

In Brazil, the movement of landless farmers, the MST, became the largest social movement in Latin America, inspiring the creation of similar movements in other countries. The MST remains independent of the Workers Party (PT), which has formed Brazil’s government since 2002. The PT’s policies in government “have decreased inequality by expanding a series of social welfare programs for the poor. But they have also embraced financial capital, multinational corporations, and a booming agro-industry completely at odds” with the MST.

Overall, but uneven, progress

While generalizations may obscure significant differences, it is possible to identify some common approaches and policies shared by the new Latin American governments.

Pursuit of regional integration. The Cuban Revolution, embargoed by Washington and diplomatically isolated in Latin America, could not have survived without massive aid from the Soviet bloc in its early years. Chile’s Popular Unity government of the early 1970s faced not only Washington’s hostility but unsympathetic neighboring governments and became a hostage of the country’s military, which finally overthrew it. The new leaderships in Latin America operate in a quite different environment. They have managed to subordinate their military forces to civilian control, in a few cases (Venezuela, Bolivia) fostering an anti-imperialist and even anti-capitalist culture among nationalist military officers and recruits. And they have formed a complex network of new alliances to defend and promote regional trade, infrastructures, and political and economic assistance.

The most innovative of these alliances is ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our Americas, a “People’s Trade Agreement” founded by Venezuela and Cuba in 2004, which now includes six other Latin American and Caribbean countries as full members. “ALBA’s objective is almost diametrically opposed to the free trade agreements” favoured by the United States and Canada, write the book’s authors. It promotes

“trade on the principle of solidarity instead of competition — a state-centered instead of a neoliberal approach toward integration…. The key concept is to trade and exchange resources in those areas where each country has complementary strengths and to do so on the basis of fairness, rather than market-determined prices.”

An early example of this type of agreement is the exchange of Cuban medical personnel for Venezuelan oil. But ALBA has also been the vehicle for providing literacy training to peoples in other member countries, the creation of supranational enterprises for production of medicines and food, a continental TV broadcaster Telesur, and the regional oil company Petrocaribe supplying fuel at far below world market prices. ALBA has spawned a bank providing low-interest loans for agricultural and industrial development, and is now establishing a currency, the Sucre, as a step toward a common currency for member countries.

ALBA has influenced older regional trade blocs such as MERCOSUR, founded in 1991 by four Southern Cone countries but now including Venezuela. And in 2008 twelve countries formed UNASUR, the Union of South American Nations, which will have a parliament and a common defense council. Other projects include the founding of BANCOSUR, the Bank of the South.
In December 2011 the founding of CELAC, the Community of Latin American and CaribbeanStates, created a new alliance of 33 countries in the hemisphere, including revolutionary Cuba — but excluding the United States and Canada — as “a direct challenge to the U.S.-promoted OAS, which had dominated hemispheric affairs for decades.” As the authors note, “the United States has slowly lost its historic grip on the region.”

Anti-imperialism. In addition to regional integration, many Latin American governments look to multilateralism to counter domination and threats from the U.S. and other imperialist powers. They favour trade and diplomacy with all countries, but especially those such as Russia, China or Iran targeted by Washington because they defy Israel or threaten competition over access to oil and other vital resources.

Even Brazil, which has long acted as a “sub-hegemon, or sidekick to the United States in the region,” has, since the election of the PT government, begun “to carve out a new independent foreign policy,” the authors write. It has not just worked to expand the new continental trade and diplomatic alliances but it has played a pivotal role in standing up to U.S. hegemony — for instance, by opposing Washington’s blockade of Cuba, and sheltering deposed Honduran president Zelaya for weeks in its embassy in Tegucigalpa. And it stood behind Bolivia when that country’s eastern agro-business elites launched an attempt in 2008 to overturn the Morales government.

The record is not entirely consistent. For example, Brazil is the mainstay of the UN military forces occupying Haiti since the overthrow of its democratically elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide by the U.S., Canada and France in 2004. But even Ecuador, whose President Rafael Correa is reluctant to use the term “anti-imperialism,” has earned its radical reputation in part from his government’s clear opposition to the coup in Honduras (Ecuador was the only holdout when the OAS voted to readmit the coup regime); its support of Cuba (Ecuador was the only country to boycott the Sixth Summit of the Americas because of Cuba’s exclusion); its support of UNASUR (Ecuador hosts its permanent secretariat in Quito); and Correa’s granting of asylum to Julian Assange, the besieged founder of WikiLeaks.

Neo-extractivism? The authors note that “none of the pink tide governments entered office on a platform promising a transition to socialism.” They attribute this to several factors, not least the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the fragmentation and smashing under neoliberalism of traditional working-class organizations, the typical base for socialist transformation. Directly confronting the claim of the book’s title, they ask:

“Can any of these governments be said to have truly embarked on the construction of a post-neoliberal society, let alone a radical anti-capitalist one embedded in historic socialism?… Put simply, how real is the specter of twenty-first-century socialism in Latin America?”

All Latin American governments are heavily dependent on exports of largely unprocessed natural resources. In the case of Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, hydrocarbons, minerals and agricultural commodities account for more than 90 percent of their exports; but even Brazil, with a substantial industrial sector, derives over 50% of its export revenue from primary commodities.

“Are we just witnessing a neo-developmentalist twenty-first-century version of the failed import substitution industrialization project of the 1960s and 1970s, or have any of these governments begun to break with the logic of capital?,” ask the authors. They acknowledge the criticism of Uruguayan ecologist Eduardo Gudynas, that none of the pink tide governments has “substantially modified the extractive sector” or lessened its negative social and environmental impacts.

These are legitimate concerns. Excessive dependency on resource exports tends to block economic diversification. And it entails constant conflict with indigenous and campesino populations by contaminating their waters, spurning their ancestral rights and traditions, and violating international law on prior consultation of peoples expelled from their lands. Examples of such practices are legion in Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, among others.

New development models

Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera, however, is an articulate exponent of an alternative development strategy. His government, he says, has created a “regional space” that goes beyond neo-extractivism. It is indeed exporting more resources, but because it imposes much higher taxes and royalties on this production, some 80 percent of the wealth now stays in Bolivian hands. This is not neoliberalism. “The appropriation of wealth is collective.” García Linera argues that the continent rests on a new economic tripod: the diversification of international markets, greater regional economic ties, and a strong internal market.

The book cites the goals of Bolivia’s “new economic model,” which “seeks to roll back neoliberalism” by reasserting state sovereignty over the economy, promoting industrial processing of natural resources, using the higher rents imposed on resource exports to redistribute incomes through new social programs, and “strengthening the organizational capacity of proletarian and communitarian forces as the two essential pillars of the transition to socialism….”
As García Linera puts it:

“We try to prioritize wealth as use value over exchange value. In this regard, the state does not behave as a collective capitalist in the state-capitalist sense, but acts as a redistributor of collective wealth among the working classes and as a facilitator of the material, technical and associative capacities of farmer, community, and urban craft production modes. We place our hope of moving beyond capitalism in this expansion of agrarian and urban communitarianism, knowing that this is a universal task, not just that of a single country.” (quoted pp. 83-84)

It is worth noting, perhaps, that the allocation of increased resource rents to domestic economic and social development strategies contrasts sharply with the way such rents were used in the heyday of neoliberalism. When Third World petroleum producers formed OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Counties, in the mid-1970s as a cartel to increase the national income generated by oil exports, much of the new wealth appropriated by the semi-feudal Middle Eastern regimes or neoliberal elites in countries like Venezuela was deployed not to national development but as deposits in imperialist financial institutions — which then loaned out this money to other semicolonial countries, locking them into debt peonage that furthered neoliberal practices when higher interest rates in the 1980s forced them into new borrowing and onerous debt repayment terms coupled with demands for regressive “structural adjustments.”

Bolivia’s development strategy, while still limited in implementation, has its distinct counterparts in Venezuela and Ecuador, where the Chávez and Correa governments have also formulated programs for industrialization and community empowerment that demarcate these countries from others of the “pink tide.”

In Venezuela, notably, the Chávez government has sought to compensate for the relative underdevelopment of social movements — itself linked to the existence of a clientelist state structure inherited from a long history of hydrocarbon and mineral extractivism — by developing alternate forms of community organization, the “communal councils.”

These, it is hoped, will function to some degree as parallel institutions of popular “protagonistic” democracy alongside and even competing with the more traditional bourgeois institutions of electoral and parliamentary representation.

In all three of these countries, new constitutions have been adopted in attempts to refound the state as a more democratic representation of its citizenry — and in Bolivia and Ecuador, to include for the first time recognition of their substantial indigenous populations (a majority in Bolivia) in new state structures that are explicitly “plurinational” and, in Ecuador, even allocate rights to Pachamama, Mother Earth.

The expectations of popular empowerment these advances stimulate often give rise to conflicts between indigenous-campesino communities (whose right to autonomous organization is now constitutionally recognized) and state efforts to develop transportation and industrial infrastructures and agricultural exports. These conflicts, as over the recent TIPNIS highway project in Bolivia, have attracted considerable international comment and criticism. Bolivian vice-president García Linera, however, describes them as “creative tensions within the revolution.”

There is more, much more, in this rather slim volume. For example, I have not even touched on the important question of political organization and new political parties, or the problems stemming from the lack thereof — a topic discussed at length. This book is a compelling contribution to our understanding of the social forces and challenges involved in these “turbulent transitions” even if, understandably, the authors remain somewhat ambivalent about their ultimate destination.

The authors leave the last word to Brazilian political scientist Emir Sader, who in Gramscian terms writes: “Latin America is living through a crisis of hegemony of enormous proportions. The old is struggling to survive, while the new has difficulty in replacing it.”

Long-time socialist activist and writer Richard Fidler blogs at Life on the Left. He recently translated Álvaro García Linera’s book Geopolitics of the Amazon for Climate & Capitalism

Geopolitics of the Amazon: A defence of Bolivia’s development strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sun, 13 Jan 2013 21:00:00 +0000

Climate and Capitalism is pleased to announce publication of a full English translation of Geopolitics of the Amazon: Landlord Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation, by Álvaro García Linera, vice-president of Bolivia and one of Latin America’s leading Marxist intellectuals.

This important book-length essay, published in Spanish in September 2012, explains how Bolivia is attempting to address the need for both economic development and environmental protection.

In particular, it responds to criticisms from left critics who have attacked the Morales government for what they call ‘extractivism,’ and examines the real issues in the debate over plans to complete a highway in the TIPNIS region.

The text was translated by Richard Fidler, who also provides an introduction, a glossary, and explanatory notes.

To encourage the widest possible distribution, we are publishing it as a PDF pamphlet, under a Creative Commons license: it may be freely reproduced and distributed, but not changed, incorporated in any other work, or used for commercial purposes.

It is available for printing in either American (8½x11) or Metric (A4) page sizes.

Download PDF (1.7 Mb)—

Geopolitics of the Amazon (8½x11)
Geopolitics of the Amazon (A4)

The serial online publication of a translation of Geopolitics of the Amazon, by Bolivian V-P Álvaro García Linera, is also available. The respective posts, aligned with his chapter headings, can be found here on Bolivia Rising:

I - http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/alvaro-garcia-linera-geopolitics-of.html

Introduction

Revolution and counterrevolution

The Amazon and patrimonial despotic power

II - http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/alvaro-garcia-linera-geopolitics-of_13.html

Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

The Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS)

Plurinational State and dismantling of the Business-Patrimonial power

III - http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/alvaro-garcia-linera-geopolitics-of_14.html

The historic demand for construction of a road to unite the Amazon valleys and plains

IIRSA: The farce of empty chatter

Characteristics of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway

IV - http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/alvaro-garcia-linera-geopolitics-of_15.html

Colonialist fallacies

Who has the power in the Amazon?

V - http://boliviarising.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/alvaro-garcia-linera-geopolitics-of_16.html

Once again on so-called "extractivism"

Evo Morales’ historic speech at the Isla del Sol

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 07:36:00 +0000

by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left

Introduction

December 21, the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere, was unusual in 2012 in that many indigenous peoples there and around the world marked the end of an era and the dawn of a new one, based on a Mayan calendar. According to legend the old era, a dark period known as the Macha or “No Time,” began when Columbus set foot in what later became known as America. The next era, the Pachakuti,[1] will slowly eliminate hunger, disease and wars, and bring about harmony between humankind and nature.

The Bolivian government marked the occasion by organizing a grand celebration on the Isla del Sol, an island in beautiful Lake Titikaka. The largest fresh-water body of water within South America, the lake straddles the border between Bolivia and Peru at an altitude of about 4,000 metres (more than 12,000 feet). According to Inca legend, this was where the sun was born.

The Bolivian foreign ministry, headed by Minister David Choquehuanca, an Aymara poet and long-time activist in the indigenous and campesino (peasant) movement, established a web site to publicize the event. It featured articles on indigenous history and legends, as well as tourist information. In the days preceding December 21, the government organized 13 different public forums on such topics as climate change, the food crisis and capitalism, both at the Isla del Sol and online.

The event attracted some 40 indigenous groups from five continents, most from South America, as well as (of course!) a large number of “gringo” (non-native) tourists. Also attending were government leaders, including a few from other countries, as well as ambassadors and other officials. It was, by all accounts, quite a show.

A highlight of the festivities was the presence of Bolivian President Evo Morales. He arrived at the December 21 event on a huge balsa raft, a large replica of the boats designed and built by indigenous artisans that for centuries plied the waters of Lake Titikaka. After lighting the sacred flame, Morales addressed the crowd for almost an hour, presenting a Manifesto that set out his government’s professed philosophy in the form of ten commandments. The speech is remarkable for its identification of global crisis as multi-dimensional — economic, ecological, institutional, cultural, ethical and spiritual, a crisis of civilization itself — its denunciation of capital’s world-wide offensive and the capitalist system’s commoditization of property and nature, and its explanation of his government’s objective of building a “communitarian socialism of Living Well.”

Although Morales’ message was largely ignored by the foreign media, it has attracted considerable commentary — and controversy — in Bolivia and to a lesser degree in South America. Following my translation of his speech, below, I will allude to some of those comments while offering a few critical observations of my own. But first, here is the speech by Evo Morales. Although there are several versions of the speech now circulating, I have translated from the full Spanish text available here, which appears to be the text from which Morales was reading. The notes are mine.

* * *

Ten Commandments to confront capitalism and construct the culture of life

Sisters and brothers, I want to express my surprise at the size of this huge gathering that today brings together, on this Isla del Sol, sisters and brothers from Abya Yala,[2] America, Europe, Africa and Asia.

Greetings to our Vice-President of Bolivia, Álvaro García Linera; to the Vice-President of Nicaragua, Moisés Omar Halleslevens Acevedo; to the Minister of Communications and Information of Venezuela, Ernesto Villegas, and to the deputy ministers of Venezuela for Latin America and the Caribbean, Verónica Guerrero, and for North America, Claudia Salerno; to the Minister of Culture of Cuba, Rafael Bernal Alemany; to the ministers and ambassadors of Bolivia, of all of America, of Asia and of Europe.

Greetings, as well, to our leaders, men and women who are leading the social movements and organizations of the various sectors that were debating around this 21^st of December and expressing some profound thoughts on political, economic, social issues and on the environment and Mother Earth. They are engaged in an ongoing debate about equality and social justice.

Today we are all reunited here, in the time of Pachakuti, in the time of change.

The Isla del Sol, the birth of a new time

From the Isla del Sol, from the Sacred Lake Titikaka that we share between Peru and Bolivia, we want to tell you that we are reunited today, the 21^st of December 2012, not in the expectation that the world is to end, as some were saying. The world will never come to an end. We are here to provide hope in this new dawn for the peoples of the world.

In this Isla del Sol, where a thousand years ago the time of the sun began, Manco Kapac and Mama Ocllo, who were to found Tahuantinsuyo, were born.[3] That is why this island is the founding island of the time and the history of the children of the sun. But later, darkness arrived with the foreign invaders. Emboldened by greed, they came to our continent, Abya Yala, to subject the indigenous nations. It was the time of darkness, of pain and sadness, a time that for the children of the Willka[4] was a time of no time.

Today, from this same island that gave birth to Tahuantinsuyo, we are closing the epoch of darkness and of no time, and we are opening a new time of light: the Pachakuti.

Again, the peoples of the world, the social movements, the marginalized people, discriminated, humiliated, are organizing, mobilizing, gaining consciousness and arising again as in those times of the Pacha, the times of Pachakuti.

That is why, sisters and brothers, this great unprecedented historical event is a great surprise, as it is, too, for our brothers in Guatemala, Mexico, Ecuador and in other countries of the world that today are mobilizing to receive the Pacha.

This morning, with the brother Vice-President Álvaro García and with the brother Minister of Foreign Affairs, David Choquehuanca, we were informed that the peoples of North America, both in Canada and in the United States, are mobilizing to express their hope in this summer solstice.[5]

Sisters, brothers: The world is being hit by a world-wide multiple crisis that is manifested in a climate, financial, food, institutional, cultural, ethical and spiritual crisis. This crisis indicates to us that we are living in the final days of capitalism and unbridled consumerism; that is, of a model of society in which human beings claim to be superior to Mother Earth, converting nature into an object of their merciless predatory domination.

The ideologues of capitalism argue that the following are the solutions to the crisis of the capitalist system:

On the one hand, more capitalism, more privatization, more commoditization, more consumerism, more irrational and predatory exploitation of natural resources and more protection for companies and private profit.

On the other hand, fewer social rights, less public health, less public and free education, and less protection for human rights.

Today the societies and peoples of the developed countries are tragically experiencing the capitalist crisis created by its own market. Capitalist governments think that it is more important to save the banks than to save human beings, and it is more important to save the companies than to save people. In the capitalist system the banks have priority economic rights and enjoy first-class citizenship, which is why we can say that the banks are worth more than life. In this unfettered capitalism, individuals and peoples are not brothers and sisters, they are not citizens, they are not human beings; individuals and peoples are debt defaulters, borrowers, tenants and clients; in short, if people do not have money, they are nothing.

We are living in the kingdom of the colour green. Green like dollars are the monetary policies, green like dollars are the development policies, green like dollars are the housing policies, green like dollars are the human development policies and environmental policies. That is why, faced with the new wave of crisis of the capitalist system, its ideologues have come out in favour of privatizing nature through the so-called green economy or green capitalism.

However, the recipes of the market, of liberalism, of privatization simply generate poverty and exclusion, hunger and marginalization.

The images that unfettered capitalism leaves to the world are sinister:

(a) More than 850 million hungry people in the world, almost 200 million more than those who existed 30 years ago;

(b) Life expectancy of the poorest in the world continues to be the same as it was in 1977, that is 44 years of age;

(c) Approximately 1.3 billion people live in conditions of poverty;

(d) There are close to 230 million unemployed in the world, 40 million more than there were 30 years ago;

(e) Finally, the developed countries annually waste 700 million tons of food, that is, three times more than what Sub-Saharan Africa produces in a year.

Among the structural causes of the global crisis of capitalism are the following:

(a) The accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few countries and in small privileged social groups,

(b) The concentration of capital in production and marketing of resources and goods that produce the quickest and greatest profit,

(c) Promotion of massive and excessive social consumption of products in the belief that to have more is to live better,

(d) Massive production of disposable products to enrich capital and increase the ecological footprint,

(e) Excessive and unsustainable extractivist productivist use of renewable and non-renewable natural resources at high environmental costs,

(f) Concentration of capital in processes of financial speculation for the purpose of generating quick and generous profits,

(g) Concentration of knowledge and technology in the rich countries and in the richest and most powerful social groups,

(h) Promotion of financial practices and extractive and commercial productive schemes that undermine the economy and sovereignty of states, particularly in the developing countries, monopolizing the control of natural resources and their earnings,

(i) Reduction of the role of states to that of weak regulators, converting large investors into managers of the property of others, and states and peoples into weak servants or partners with the myth that foreign investment can solve everything.

Sisters and brothers of the world: Capitalism has created a civilization that is wasteful, consumerist, exclusive, clientelist, a generator of opulence and misery. That is the pattern of life, production and consumption that we urgently need to transform.

The planet and humanity are in serious danger of extinction. The forests are in danger, biodiversity is in danger, the rivers and oceans are in danger and the earth is in danger. This beautiful human community that inhabits our Mother Earth is in danger owing to the climate crisis.

The causes of this climate crisis are directly related to the accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few countries and in small social groups; to massive, excessive and expensive consumption resulting from the belief that to have more is to live better; to pollutant production of disposable goods to enrich capital, increasing the ecological footprint; as well as the excessive and unsustainable extractive use for production of renewable and non-renewable natural resources at high environmental costs.

Sisters and brothers: The Plurinational State of Bolivia, echoing the voice of the world’s peoples, accepts an ethical obligation to the planet and advocates the need for human beings to recover a sense of unity and relevancy with Mother Earth.

We are in a crucial moment for the definition of the future of our planet. In our hands and in our consciousness lies the responsibility to agree on the road we are going to follow to guarantee the eradication of poverty, the distribution and redistribution of wealth, and the creation and strengthening of our social, material and spiritual conditions in order to live in harmony and equilibrium with nature.

The rich and industrialized countries must contribute to promoting the socialization of wealth and welfare in harmony with nature while the poor and developing countries must distribute the little wealth that they have. There is no future for humanity if egoism and greed prevail, with the accumulation and ostentation that are part of a system in which he who has more rules over those without. We must share and complement each other in knowledge, wealth, humanity and respect for nature.

This 21^st of December is the day of the initiation of the Pachakuti, which translates into the awakening of the world to the culture of life. It is the beginning of the end of unfettered capitalism as well as the transition from the time of violence between human beings and violence to nature to a new time in which human beings will constitute a unity with Mother Earth and all will live in harmony and equilibrium with the cosmos as a whole.

This day is for the age-old societies the moment when major telluric-cosmic changes will occur in the planet and it is the omen that the culture of death, hunger and injustice will have reached its end. It means the end of a state of things and the beginning of profound changes in the world.

Likewise, this new time must be the beginning of the end of the monarchies, the hierarchies, the oligarchies and the anarchies of the market and of capital.

The Pachakuti has arrived, and you who now join with us in the sacred Isla del Sol, in Lake Titikaka, we are the Rainbow Warriors, we are the warriors of Vivir Bien [Living Well], we are the insurgents of the world.

In this context, let us suggest ten commandments to confront capitalism and construct the culture of life:

1. In politics

Refound democracy and politics, empowering the poor and serving the peoples

The world is experiencing a crisis of political systems because they no longer represent the peoples, they are elitist, exclusive, governed by oligarchical leaderships with the vision of filling the pockets of a few and not serving the people. The so-called democracies are the pretext for handing over the natural resources to transnational capital. In those false democracies, politics has been converted into an instrument for profit and not a vocation of service. Anachronistic forms of governments still survive that no longer respond to the demands of the world’s peoples. We must refound democracy. We do not want a colonial democracy in which the politicians are an aristocratic class and not militants in the cause of the poor and of service to the poor.

Democracy is not viable if it does not empower the poor, the marginalized, and does not respond first and foremost to the urgent needs of the neediest. A democracy in which a few become rich and the majority become poor is not a democracy.

Refounding democracy, refounding states, refounding republics and refounding politics requires the following actions, among others:

1. Refound the political systems, burying all forms of hierarchy, monarchy, oligarchy and the anarchy of the market and of capital. Democracy is the government of the peoples and not of the market.

2. Go beyond representative democracy, in which power is at the service of the interests of the elites and minorities, to communal democracy in which there are neither majorities nor minorities, but instead decisions are taken by consensus, and it is reason that prevails, not votes.

3. Promote the idea that political action means full and ongoing service to life, that is, in turn, an ethical, human and moral commitment to our peoples, recovering the codes of our ancestors: do not steal, do not lie, do not be lazy and do not be obsequious.

4. Service to the fatherland cannot be understood as using the fatherland as if it were a business; politicians cannot employ the administrative, legal and economic instruments of the state for their private and personal interests.

5. The people, through their social and community organizations, must take political power, building new forms of plurinational states, so that we shall govern ourselves within the framework of mandar obedeciendo (leading by obeying).

2. In social life:

Greater social and human rights, vs. the commoditization of human needs

An insulting and outrageous reality that persists in today’s world is the gap between rich and poor, the result of unequal distribution of income and unequal and discriminatory access to basic services. Capital and the market are no solution to inequality and poverty; they only privatize services and profit from needs. We have had a tragic experience with the privatization of basic services, especially water.

To overcome the serious social inequalities, it is necessary to undertake the following actions, among others:

1. It is imperative that we recognize, in international legislation and in national standards in all countries, that basic services such as water, electricity, communications and basic sanitation are a fundamental human right of the people in all corners of the planet.

2. In particular, water must be an essential human right because it bears directly on the development of life of all beings on the planet and is a fundamental component in the mobilization of all productive processes.

3. In addition to the recognition of basic services as a human right, we must proceed with the nationalization of those services, since private owners exclude the majority of the population from access to services that are fundamental to life, giving them an economic value that is unattainable for many.

4. There is a need to concentrate more economic resources in the hands of the state and to create mechanisms for distribution of this wealth between the regions and among the people who are the neediest and most vulnerable, in order to eliminate in the next few years all forms of social, material and spiritual poverty in the world through the democratization of economic wealth.

5. It is necessary to develop the formation of a new, full human being who is neither materialist nor a consumer, but focused consistently on the search for Living Well, with a profound revolutionary ethics based on harmony and solidarity, recognizing that all the peoples of the world make up a great family.

6. We must end the transnational monopoly of the pharmaceutical industry and recover and strengthen our ancestral and natural medicinal knowledges and practices.

3. In cultural and spiritual life:

Decolonize our peoples and our cultures, to build a communitarian socialism of living well

Sisters and brothers: We are living in a society in which everything is globalized and homogenized, in which cultural identities seem to smack of the past that everyone wants to ignore. The ancient and ancestral cultures are marginalized in economic and political processes and their cultural and spiritual force and energy are discounted. This has led to a profound dehumanization in the world and discrimination in the spiritual and cultural resources that can give us the necessary strengths to stop the brutality of capitalism. We must:

1. Decolonize ourselves of racism, fascism and all types of discrimination.

2. Decolonize ourselves of commoditization and consumerism, luxury, egoism and greed, and promote Living Well.

3. Recover the knowledges and codes of the ancient cultures of the world, to strengthen the awareness of individuals and societies of Mother Earth, understanding what it means to be a living and sacred being, that we are her daughters and sons and we are nourished by her, respecting the cycles of nature and understanding that all existing things are part of the balance and harmony of life. We are born from the womb of Mother Earth and we shall return to her womb.

4. Where there are multiple cultures in countries it is imperative to promote the construction of plurinational states that respect social, economic, legal and cultural pluralism.

4. In respect to the environment:

For the rights of Mother Earth, to live well and in opposition to the environmental colonialism of the green economy

In recent years the ideologists of the capitalist system have promoted the “green economy” as the salvation of this model of society. This simply means the commoditization of nature in the context of a green capitalism. The green economy is the economy of death, because in the context of protectionism of nature it is a death sentence for the world’s peoples. That is why we condemn the green economy as the new environmental colonialism and green capitalism. Similarly, the climate crisis of the planet is a matter of concern to us because the human community that inhabits our Mother Earth is in imminent danger owing to the catastrophic consequences of natural disasters.

To transform this situation the peoples of the world must promote the following actions:

1. Demand that the countries that have caused the climate crisis fulfil their historic responsibility to pay the climate debt to the peoples of the South, and drastically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions within the framework of binding international agreements.

2. We must implement the policies and actions that are needed to prevent and avoid the exhaustion of natural resources, accepting that life depends on sustaining the capacity for regeneration of the life systems of Mother Earth and the full and sustainable management of their components. We must always bear in mind that the planet can live better without human beings but human beings cannot live without the planet.

3. This is the century of the battle for universal recognition of the rights of Mother Earth in all legislation, treaties and national and international agreements, so that we human beings begin to live in harmony and equilibrium with the cosmos.

4. The countries of the world must promote decisively and aggressively the non-commercialization of the environmental functions and natural processes of Mother Earth, as well as the integral and sustainable management of her components. We cannot sell our sacred Mother Earth solely on the basis of false illusions that markets will promote some financing for our peoples. Our peoples and Mother Earth cannot now or ever be for sale.

5. In respect to natural resources:

Sovereignty over natural resources is a requisite for liberation from colonial and neoliberal domination and for the full development of peoples

In many countries the principal source of economic wealth is based on the use of natural resources. However, in most countries this wealth has been looted and appropriated in private hands and by transnational powers that enrich themselves at the expense of the peoples. We call on countries to develop the following actions in relation to natural resources:

1. Put ownership of natural resources in the state, to benefit the peoples so they are oriented toward the enjoyment and benefit of all.

2. In all countries that have strategic natural resources, promote the implementation of processes of nationalization, since it is only through such nationalization that we can stop the processes of economic colonialism and ensure the reinforcement of the state with economic resources that in turn promote better basic services for their peoples.

3. Develop processes of industrialization of those natural resources, always bearing in mind the need for protection and respect for the rights of Mother Earth.

6. In relation to food sovereignty:

Know how to feed ourselves in order to live well, promoting the attainment of food sovereignty and the human right to food

The discussion of food security has been carried on world-wide from differing perspectives and approaches, such as food security, food sovereignty and the human right to food. Food is central to the life of individuals and the attainment of Living Well, and that is why states and peoples must promote a set of actions:

1. To progress in the construction of “Knowing How to Feed Oneself in order to Live Well,” recovering the food knowledges and productive technologies of community nutrition, in which foods are medicine and part of our cultural identity.

2. To try to guarantee in each country the basic foods consumed by its population through strengthening the economic, productive, social, cultural, political and ecological systems of rural producers, with an emphasis on community family agriculture.

3. To protect the population from the effects of malnutrition, with an emphasis on controlling the marketing of foods that are harmful to human health.

4. To punish financial speculation based on the production and marketing of food.

7. In respect to integration and international relations:

The alliance of the peoples of the South against interventionism, neoliberalism and colonialism

Our ancestral peoples always lived integrated in cultures, integrated in trade, integrated in solidarity and in networks of collaboration. Today we must construct and strengthen our agreements of integration between peoples and communities, between states and governments, in a framework of support, collaboration and solidarity in order to strengthen life and humanity.

Faced with the diplomacy of death and war, commoditization, privatization, the plunder of natural resources, we must ourselves build the diplomacy of the peoples of the South in order to strengthen ourselves from the South.

The South is not and cannot be an obedient and servile pawn of the powers of the North. We are not the dump for the industrial and nuclear waste of the powers of the North, nor are we their inexhaustible source of raw materials. The South is emerging with the power of the peoples and the patriotic and sovereign governments, and is constructing projects of commercial, productive, cultural, technological, economic, financial and social integration. This is a time in which the peoples of the South, and together with the peoples of the North, must share, support ourselves and strengthen ourselves socially, economically and culturally.

Integration is conditional upon reliance on strong states and peoples, nationalist, patriotic, socialist governments with political will and national control, with projects and strategies for regional alliances to form a South that is building projects for regional power and integration.

The power of the South is its sovereignty, the right to development, the support and solidarity of peoples and states. The South is becoming stronger, becoming harmonized. There can be no strong South without sovereignty, patriotism, nationalism, a desire of peoples and states to break the chains of colonial and neoliberal servitude.

To achieve South-South integration, we must promote the following actions:

1. Form powerful coalitions and alliances to underwrite Agreements of Life and to share knowledges, technology and provision of financial resources, and not Free Trade Agreements, which are treaties of death for the peoples of the South as well as for the peoples of the North.

2. Construct a mechanism for integral development and integration between the states and peoples of the South that includes, among other things, areas of knowledge, technology, energy, food production, financing, health and education.

3. Move ahead in the twinning of the peoples of the South with those of the North, to destroy imperialism and build the civilizing horizon of Living Well in harmony and equilibrium with Mother Earth.

8. In respect to knowledge and technology:

Knowledge and Technology are fundamental tools to achieve integral development and the eradication of poverty and hunger

Knowledge and technology are fundamental to the provision of means of communication, education, basic services and industrial and energy projects, the transformation of raw materials and the production of food; in short, to drive our economies. Today the developed countries blindly protect their technologies through patents and licences and prevent us from accessing them. If we want technology we have to enter their technology markets. There is no solidarity, no technological complementarity possible with the developed countries. The monopoly of technology is an instrument of power to control the developing countries. The transnational powers of the rich developed countries and imperialism do not share technology because they only want to sell it in order to dominate us and create dependency.

That is why, now more than ever, it is fundamental to promote the following actions:

1. Build convergence between the ancestral and community knowledges, wisdom, techniques and technologies and the practices and technologies of modern science in order to help create conditions for Living Well and protection of Mother Earth.

2. Develop our own knowledges and technologies that break the technological dependency on the transnational powers of the North.

3. In opposition to the commoditized egoism of the transnational powers of the North let us build collaboration, solidarity and complementarity of the peoples and countries of the South together with the peoples of the North.

9. In respect to international institutionality:

We must construct a world institutionality of the peoples, of the poor, of Mother Earth. We do not accept or permit interventionism or neoliberalism by the United Nations or the institutionality of the empire of capital

The colonial global institutionality is designed to subject and deceive the peoples. In the name of freedom and democracy organizations like NATO, including the UN through the renowned Security Council, invade countries, destroy peoples, legalize and assist in massacres. We cannot allow or admit the construction of military bases and war industries to dominate the peoples on the pretext of national security. The main thing is the security of the peoples, life and Mother Earth. The arms build-up is the business of death that enriches capitalism and destroys the planet.

The global institutional machinery of the so-called United Nations is designed to destroy the sovereign will of the peoples. That is where a bureaucracy works in the service of capital and imperialism. We, the peoples of the world, do not accept that international organizations should appropriate to themselves the right of invasion and intervention. The UN has no morality to impose. We, the peoples of the world, do not accept this elitist institutionality of the bureaucrats of the empire.

It was in the bowels of the UN that the privatizing green economy originated, which we understand as the black economy of death; from those entrails originate the recipes for privatization and interventionism. The UN seems to be the Organization for the Rich and Powerful Countries; perhaps it should be named the INO, Imperialist Nations Organization. That UN we do not want, we disown it.

That neoliberal bureaucracy, the bureaucracy of the green economy and privatization, the bureaucracy that promotes structural adjustments, those functionaries of capital and ideologists of domination and poverty, act with the patriarchal and colonial conviction that the peoples and developing countries are incapable and stupid and that to emerge from poverty we must faithfully follow their development recipes.

To construct a new institutionality of the peoples of the world, aimed at Living Well, we must develop the following actions:

1. Build the institutional and legal conditions for our peoples and countries to live in dignity and sovereignty without interventionism and without foreign military bases.

2. Free ourselves from the ideological and political bonds of the global financial agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and their satellites and intellectuals of neoliberal domination, and build our own institutions to design and advise on policies aimed at Living Well.

3. Build a World Organization of the Poor, a World Organization of Justice, a World Organization of Sovereignty of the Peoples, a World Organization of Mother Earth, an Organization of the Assembly of the Peoples of the World.

10. In the economics of finance:

Economic development must not be oriented to the market, to capital and to profit; development must be comprehensive and be oriented to human happiness, harmony and equilibrium with Mother Earth

Capitalism only globalizes poverty, hunger, and social injustice, destroys human rights and social, economic and cultural rights, and destroys the environment. Unfettered capitalism creates poverty and hunger. The global capitalist financial system is colonialist and imperialist, it is a weapon of the powerful countries for subjection of the developing countries and peoples, for privatization and commoditization, for subjecting us to the control of the oligarchies and the commoditizing anarchy of capital.

That is why we must disown and dismantle the international financial system and its satellites, the IMF and World Bank.

We call on the peoples and governments of the world to break the chains of this slavery by financial colonialism, because only financial and economic sovereignty can allow us to decide our future in a sovereign way.

To achieve sovereignty in economy and finance, we are challenged to take the following actions:

1. We must configure a new international economic and financial order based on the principles of equity, national sovereignty, common interests, harmony with nature, cooperation and solidarity between states and peoples. This new order must be oriented to changing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, substantially reducing the gap between rich and poor and between the developed and developing countries.

2. We must build a new global, regional and national architecture and financial system that is free of the bonds and tentacles of power of the World Bank and IMF. A new architecture and a new financial order of the peoples and for the peoples.

3. It is essential to build new legal and institutional frameworks at the national and international level and to develop a system of regulation and supervision of the financial sector. States and peoples have to control private finance and not be subject to the colonial servility of financial governance by private interests.

4. We must free ourselves from that colonial bond called the External Debt, which serves only to blackmail us, to oblige us to hand over our assets and privatize our natural resources, and to destroy the sovereignty of peoples and states. The colonial External Debt is the mechanism of exaction and impoverishment that afflicts the developing countries and limits their access to development. We call for cancelling this unjust External Debt. No more inequality. No more poverty. It is time to distribute the wealth.

5. As developing countries, we must create our own financial instruments. We must create the World Bank of the Poor and of the Sovereign Peoples of the World. We cannot depend on the donations and conditional loans of the capitalist colonial financial system. We must unite and integrate, and that means building our own financial, popular, community, state and sovereign financial systems.

6. Build and strengthen regional markets based on solidarity and complementarity, substituting policies of complementarity arising out of the civilizing horizon of Living Well in place of the policies of competitiveness promoted by capitalism.

Our vision of the Communitarian Socialism of Living Well is based on rights and not on the market, it is based on the full realization of human happiness of peoples and populations, through the full complementarity of the rights of peoples, persons, states and Mother Earth in a complementary, inclusive and interdependent way.

The new epoch is that of the power of labour, the power of the communities, the power of solidarity of the peoples and the communion of all living beings so that together we constitute Mother Earth and the Communitarian Socialism of Living Well.

Sisters and brothers: I thank you for your patience in listening to this Manifesto of the Isla del Sol, which expresses ten commandments for Life and for Humanity. It is a Manifesto based on the experience of the Bolivian people, which can support the liberation of all the peoples of the world.

Sisters and brothers, leaders of Abya Yala, of America and the world, as a people and as social forces we have a huge responsibility: to save the planet, to save life and humanity. So we thank you for your presence on this historic day of the Summer Solstice, the beginning of the time of the Pachakuti.

Finally, I want to thank the originary indigenous communities of the Isla del Sol for having allowed us to share our experiences. I thank the social organizations, the Armed Forces, the ministries, our departmental and national leaders for organizing an excellent festival of hope for the peoples of the world.

Join with me in saying:

¡Jallalla, peoples of the world!

¡Kausachun, peoples of the world!

* * *

A critical comment

This is indeed remarkable discourse. It is hard to imagine a government leader anywhere else today — with the notable exception of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, or Cuba’s Fidel Castro in earlier times — who is so forthright in his denunciation of capitalism and so explicit in his internationalist perspective of solidarity with the victims of capitalism. Indignados everywhere can be heartened by its message.

Like so much in Bolivia today, however, one cannot help but be struck by the apparent gap between rhetoric and reality. The harsh (and accurate) denunciation of the United Nations Organization, for example, is hard to reconcile with Bolivia’s participation in the UN’s military occupation of Haiti, which is overwhelmingly rejected by the Haitians themselves. Which is not to say that Bolivia is wrong to use its forum in the UN, as it has so effectively, to mount a strong campaign for radical action against the approaching climate catastrophe.

In another context, Bolivia won a major victory just days ago, on January 10, when it got the UN to amend that body’s 1961 Convention on Narcotic Drugs to allow the chewing of coca leaves under international law, thus readmitting Bolivia to membership in the Convention. (Only 15 countries, including Canada and the United States, voted against Bolivia’s request.) The consumption of coca leaves is a widespread custom in Bolivia, protected in the country’s new constitution; I myself have found it the most effective antidote to altitude sickness when in the Altiplano. The UN decision undermines Washington’s allegation that Bolivia is a “narco-trafficker,” a major pretext for U.S. interference in Bolivia’s affairs.

As to the rest of the Manifesto, journalist Pablo Stefanoni made some telling criticisms in a trenchant commentary: “... if the aim was to increase understanding of the Bolivian process of change — and continue advancing it — the manifesto appears to follow the line that anticapitalism is directly proportional to the number of times that we pronounce that term.” For Stefanoni, such statements as “we are living in the final days of capitalism” were reminiscent of the Stalinized Communist International’s language during its ultraleft Third Period. A harsh analogy, and refuted in real life by Bolivia’s readiness to block in solidarity with workers and peasants around the world in anticapitalist and anti-imperialist struggles.

As well, there are some notable oversights as in the manifesto’s charge that it is the wealthiest and most powerful countries that are withholding advanced technology and knowledge from the poorer countries. Does that include China?, ask Stefanoni, noting that “post-Communist” China heads the World Intellectual Property Organization’s global list of patent applicants. And how does the manifesto’s embrace of traditional knowledges and practices square with the institutionalized homophobia of some “African traditions,” for example, he asks.

More fundamentally, as a number of critics have pointed out, the radical anticapitalist rhetoric contrasts with the relatively modest proposals for greater regulation of the banks and nationalization of natural resources. In places, the manifesto seems more concerned with targeting neoliberalism — “savage” or unfettered capitalism — than with mounting a campaign for general expropriation of capitalist property. But indeed, what more can a small country like Bolivia concretely propose at this point?

More insight into the thinking behind the Isla del Sol manifesto can be gained from a working paper of Bolivia’s ruling party, the MAS-IPSP (Movement Toward Socialism–Political Instrument for the Sovereignty of the Peoples), available in a collection of essays recently published by the Ministry of Cultures.[6] Bolivia, it states, is now going through a “democratic and popular revolution,” in which the pre-eminent tasks can be defined, in historical terms, as “bourgeois-democratic,” that is, “they have not been realized by the bourgeoisie.” It cites, as an example, the adoption in 2009 of the new Constitution, which established the plurinational character of the Bolivian state:

“Between the great democratic, indigenous and popular uprising against neoliberalism, starting in April 2000, and the second political and electoral victory of 2009, Bolivia experienced the richest process in its entire history, because this was the first time we had the possibility to build a society in which one’s skin colour or the nature of one’s name had no effect on whether everyone had substantive rights.”

Although these democratic tasks are pre-eminent “in a capitalist country, in particular a dependent country like ours,” the document explains, they are in no way inconsistent with socialism as a longer-range goal.

“The entire experience of the international revolutionary movement, above all in Latin America, has demonstrated that the socialist revolution cannot be achieved except by deploying the democratic and anti-imperialist banners, but neither can this be done, or the democratic and anti-imperialist tasks ultimately carried out, short of the socialist revolution. [...]

“However, the transition from a capitalist society to another that is socialist, communitarian and plurinational, will take many years, especially when its construction depends not only on what is going on in this country but on the degree of progress at a continental level. The future of our revolution depends not only on the conquests that we are going to achieve within the country, but on what we will conquer as peoples and governments in the continent. Our struggle is accordingly continental and then world-wide.”

Readers of my recent translation of Bolivian vice-president Álvaro García Linera’s essay, Geopolitics of the Amazon,[7] will recognize the parallels here with his explanation of the issues behind some recent social conflicts in Bolivia. I hope to write more on the relation between democratic and socialist revolution, in the Bolivian context, in some future posts.

– Richard Fidler

[1] For an interesting discussion of this concept, see Bob Thomson, “Pachakuti: Indigenous perspectives, degrowth and ecosocialism.”

[2] Indigenous name for the Western Hemisphere.

[3] Manco Kapac (or Cápac) was the legendary first Sapa Inca of the Kingdom of Cusco, often described as a son of the sun god Inti. Mama Ocllo, variously described as the sister and wife of Manco Kapac, was deified in Inca mythology as a mother and fertility goddess.

[4] Willka is an Aymara word meaning “greatness” or “eminence” that was traditionally used by indigenous protest leaders. Pablo Zárate Willka was the leader of the 1899 indigenous uprising.

[5] The Idle No More movement in Canada demonstrated in Ottawa on December 21 (the winter solstice), in opposition to the Harper government and support of Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence’s hunger strike. For photos, click here.

[6] Katu Arkonada (coord.), Transiciones Hacia el Vivir Bien o la construcción de un nuevo proyecto político en el Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia (Ministerio de Culturas, La Paz, no date but apparently published in December 2012). The document in question, entitled “Our emancipatory project: Communitarian Socialism moving toward Vivir Bien,” was presented to the VIIIth Congress of the MAS-IPSP, held in Cochabamba in March 2012. Quotations here are from the chapter “The Strategic Perspective: A socialist, communitarian and plurinational Bolivia moving toward Vivir Bien.”

[7] See Life on the Left, December 2012 posts.

Bolivia’s ‘process of change’: the balance sheet for 2012, and challenges to come

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 23:30:00 +0000

Katu Arkonada

La Epoca, December 18, 2012

[Translation and notes by Richard Fidler]

2012 has been a year of transition for the process of change in the Plurinational State of Bolivia, notwithstanding the many events, problems and contradictions encountered by the executive branch during the last 12 months of its administration. A year of transition because we have left behind the 2010-2011 biennial of consolidation following the 64% victory of President Morales in the December 2009 election and are now entering a new biennial, 2013-2014, which will take us very rapidly to the presidential elections of December 2014.

By way of a balance sheet

2012 was without a doubt the year of the consulta [consultation] in the TIPNIS [Territorio Indígena and Parque Nacional Isiboro-Secure], the year when the government probably lost an international battle against a major marketing strategy designed in the offices of a certain opposition and some NGOs, but won the war for legitimacy in Bolivia. The result is overwhelming, leaving no room for doubt: of the 58 communities consulted (84% of them, since 11 refused to participate in the consulta), 55 (79%) approved the construction of the highway.[1] This result dismantles the postmodern and Rousseauist analyses that knew little of the history and actors of the TIPNIS, classifying them as good savages living in the woods without needing anything more, and demonstrated to us that the majority of the communities of the TIPNIS want a greater state presence for access to health and education primarily. In any case the conflict has not ended and no doubt during the next two years the opposition will campaign against the construction of a highway in a country so colonized and plundered that it still has no road connecting two of its nine departments.

But 2012 has also been the year of the economy. Bolivia continued to grow at an annual rate of 5.2% (above the rate in Brazil, Mexico or Uruguay, to cite three examples), and the per capita share of GDP increased in 2012 to $2,238, double what it was in 2006 ($1,182). As for foreign trade, exports in the first quarter of 2012 exceeded the total of all exports in 2007: $5.068 billion compared with $4.822 billion, and the international reserves reached $14 billion — almost 50% of the Bolivian GDP, giving the country the highest level of reserves as a percentage of GDP in all of Latin America.

Similarly, public investment in 2012 will exceed $2 billion, as opposed to $879 million in 2006, and the public external debt totals $3.704 billion, down from $4.947 billion in 2005. By June 2012 three out of every 10 Bolivians were receiving conditional direct transfer payments (bonos), producing a redistribution of wealth that has reduced poverty by almost 12 percentage points in five years (48.5% in 2011) and extreme poverty by 13 percentage points during the same period (24.3%). Another factor in poverty reduction was the rise of the minimum wage in 2012 to 1,000 bolivianos [USD$1 = 7 BOB], compared with 815 BOBs in 2011 or the 440 BOB in 2005 when the MAS was first elected.

Another important factor to mention, when analyzing the past year, is the accomplishments in foreign policy, particularly the actions carried out in the negotiations with Chile for sovereign access to the sea, and the legal demand that Bolivia is going to make in The Hague [2], as well as the recent application to become a full member of Mercosur, the fifth largest economic entity in the world. And we should also note Bolivia’s leadership within ALBA [3] and the G77+China in such multilateral negotiations as the UN Conference on Sustainable Development Rio+20 or the COP [Conference of Parties] on Climate Change. Never before has

Bolivia

had a sovereign foreign policy, changing the paradigm from neoliberal diplomatic conduct to one of Diplomacy of the Peoples.

Lastly, we cannot complete this brief end-of-year balance sheet without mentioning the recently uncovered case of corruption in the Ministry of Government [the Interior ministry], a ministry that correctly confronted a political mutiny in June and that has now done what a government leading a democratic and cultural revolution had to do, acting forcefully to detain all of those involved and pursuing the matter irrespective of who it might bring down.[4] It is probable that we don’t (yet) know all of the ramifications of this case, but for the good of the process they must be brought to light and the harshest punishment meted out to anyone involved, and if they are a member of the government the penalty should be even greater, to demonstrate the latter’s integrity and coherency.

Challenges for 2013-2014

Notwithstanding the recent events in Venezuela, Chávez’s victory in winning election for six more years and the more than probable victory of Correa in Ecuador in February (almost certainly without the need for a second round), means that the process that is going forward in Bolivia will be menaced even more by those who feel threatened by the anti-imperialist and anticolonial policies being advanced by President Evo Morales. No doubt great efforts (and much money) will be spent in striking at one of the weakest links in the ALBA and the processes of change in the continent, and in attempting to consolidate an opposition alternative to the MAS government.

An initial step in the continued deepening of the process of change should be the victory in January of Jessica Jordán, the MAS candidate for Governor in Beni. A victory in this Amazon department on January 20 would be a definitive blow to the Media Luna and the hopes of repeating in

Bolivia

the Venezuelan scheme of the Mesa de Unidad.[5] Obviously this will not be an easy victory in one of the most conservative regions of Bolivia, in which the hacendadopower still has a great capacity for action and mobilization, but the very fact that first place is in dispute is already a victory in itself and a palpable demonstration that things are changing.

Not to be overlooked, as well, are the middle classes that the MSM [6] is attempting to woo with a moderate management-oriented discourse. However, in October 2012 it was revealed that the Municipality of La Paz was spending only 26% of its budget [dedicated to public investment – RF], far below the 50% average across the ministries. We can conclude that if the MSM is not capable of managing a city hall, it will have a hard time managing a state. But within that middle class layer, and in expectation of the results of the 2012 Population Census, we are going to have hundreds of thousands of new voters who in 2009 were too young to vote and now need to be won over with a discourse that must go beyond the proposals for change and be accompanied by a political program that involves them in the construction of this country’s politics.

Finally, the bases that have been built and consolidated in the process of change cannot be overlooked. It may be that those bases that are closest are not at risk, but it is necessary to strengthen them, to continue expanding the hard core, the popular and subaltern sectors that are the soul [ajayu] of this revolution, because without them the revolution would collapse piece by piece, but with them we will be able to begin thinking of the Patriotic Agenda 2025,[7] converting the political and decolonizing revolution into a post-capitalist economic revolution.

The author, who describes himself here as a “militant in the process of change,” is a researcher at the Universidad de la Cordillera, a frequent contributor to the Bolivian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique, and works with the Ministry of Foreign Relations of the Plurinational State of Bolivia. He is of Basque origin.

[1] The lawfully mandated consulta (consultation) of the communities directly affected by the proposed highway project, which was the subject of much controversy and two recent marches by dissident indigenous activists, concluded its proceedings on December 7. The overwhelming majority of the communities that participated in the consultaapproved the construction of the highway between Villa Tunari and San Ignacio de Moxos. See: http://www.la-razon.com/nacional/Consulta-cierra-promesa-fondos-ecologica_0_1738626180.html. For a discussion of the issues involved, see my translation of a book by Bolivian Vice-President Álvaro García Linera, Geopolitics of the Amazon, published in five parts at Life on the Left, and on several other sites. -- RF

[2] See Bolivia's Morales to take Chile sea dispute to court. See also http://www.elcaribe.com.do/2012/11/17/bolivia-chile-debaten-salida-mar-cadiz.

[3] The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America [Spanish: Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América] is an international cooperation organization based on the idea of the social, political and economic integration of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean.

[4] In November several senior counsel in the Ministry were implicated in an attempt to extort money from a U.S. citizen, Jacob Ostreicher, who came to Bolivia four years ago and invested in rice production in Santa Cruz. He was indicted for money-laundering in June. The Bolivian suspects are alleged to have offered his release in return for his payment to them of $50,000. See Desbaratan red de corrupción y extorsión en la que operaban dos asesores del Ministerio de Gobierno, and Morales asegura que hay “infiltrados” que buscan desprestigiar al Gobierno.

[5] The four departments of the so-called Media Luna (literally, “half moon”) comprising the eastern portion of Bolivia have been centers of conservative resistance to the Morales government, their governors often collaborating in opposition to La Paz. In Venezuelathe rightist opposition to Hugo Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution coalesced behind a single presidential candidate in the recent national election, when he was defeated by Chávez.

[6] MSM, the Movimiento Sin Miedo [Fearless Movement], a center-left opposition party that currently controls the mayoralty in La Paz.

[7] 2025 will be the bicentennial of Bolivia’s independence from Spain.

Bolivia Nationalizes Two Spanish Electricity Distribution Companies

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 01:47:00 +0000

Countercurrents.org

In an effort to assert control over national resources Bolivia has nationalized two Spanish electricity distribution companies. The measure on the eve of New Year – 2013 – comes up as an example of initiatives to secure interest of people.

Carlos Quiroga, Sonya Dowsett, Blanca Rodriguez and Hugh Bronstein reported [1]:

Bolivia nationalized two electricity distribution companies owned by Spanish utility Iberdrola on December 29, 2012, the latest move by leftist President Evo Morales to assert control over the country's resources.

Iberdrola will be compensated according to a valuation to be drawn up by an independent arbiter, Morales said, adding that the measure was aimed at enhancing rural energy services.

"We considered this measure necessary to ensure equitable energy tariffs ... and to see to it that the quality of electricity service is uniform in rural as well as urban areas," Morales said.

Morales has nationalized oil, telecommunications, mining and electrical generation companies.

In June, Morales took control of global commodities giant Glencore's tin and zinc mine in Bolivia and more nationalizations of mining companies could be ahead in the Andean country.

Iberdrola, whose office in capital city La Paz was being guarded by police on December 29, has operated in Bolivia since the late 1990s. An Iberdrola spokesman said the company was studying the situation and declined to comment further.

Spain regretted Bolivia's actions, the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement, adding the government hoped the shareholders of the companies involved would be fairly compensated.

"This decision by the Bolivian government involves companies that carried out the public service of distributing electricity that have never belonged to the Bolivian state," the statement said.

The Iberdrola units are Electropaz, which supplies around 470,000 customers in the cities of La Paz and El Alto; and Elfeo, which supplies over 80,000 customers in the city of Oruro.

The nationalization also includes two small suppliers owned by Iberdrola, which provide services to the distributors.

In 2006, Morales announced the takeover of petroleum companies operating in Bolivia. He later nationalized oil and gas reserves to redistribute wealth to the landlocked country's indigenous majority.

Iberdrola is not the first Spanish company to have its assets seized in Latin America.

Bolivia decided to nationalize a power transmission unit of power grid operator Red Electrica in May, just weeks after Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez seized YPF , the country's biggest energy company, accusing oil major Repsol of underinvesting at the unit.

The World Bank's arbitration body has agreed to begin an arbitration process on the Repsol case.

Another report [2] from La Paz, Bolivia said:

In a public ceremony, Morales issued a decree allowing the takeover of shares in Empresa de Electricidad de La Paz (Electropaz) and Empresa de Luz y Fuerza de Oruro (Elfeo), which supply energy in this Andean nation.

Soldiers guarded the installations of the electricity distribution companies, marked with signs reading: “Nationalized.”

In the ceremony at Bolivia’s government palace, Morales also announced the expropriation of an investment management company and a service provider belonging to the Spanish energy giant.

Morales said he had “been forced to take this step” to ensure that electric service rates remain “equitable” in the regions of La Paz and Oruro.

Spain said it hoped “the process of assessing the value of the nationalized company is done with high standards of objectivity that would establish the just compensation to which shareholders are entitled.”

Telephone calls and emails seeking comment from Iberdrola in Spain were not immediately answered.

The decree read by Morales calls for Iberdrola to receive indemnification after an independent firm is hired within 180 days to determine the value of the nationalized shares.

In 2009 Morales transferred to state control the country’s largest telephone operator, which had been controlled by Italy’s ETI, and in 2010 he did the same with the four largest power generators, which had belonged to French-owned Suez, Rurelec of Britain and Bolivian shareholders.

Source:

[1] Reuters, “UPDATE 3-Bolivia nationalises Iberdrola electricity companies”, Dec 29, 2012,

[2] The Washington Post/ AP, “Bolivian president expropriates electricity distribution subsidiaries of Spain’s Iberdrola”, Dec 29, 2012,

Alvaro Garcia Linera: Geopolitics of the Amazon - Part V (and final): On so-called "extractivism"

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 04:17:00 +0000

[To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here. Translation by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left]

Once again on so-called “extractivism”

Since Marx, we know that what characterizes and differentiates societies is the way in which they organize the production, distribution and use of the material and symbolic resources they possess. In other words, the mode of production[1] is what defines the material content of the social life of the distinct human territorial collectivities (nations, peoples, communities), within which there can be differentiated the historically specific form in which each of their components develop, and the manner in which various existing modes of production interrelate within the same society.

A mode of production is a web of social relations that involves specific forms of material relationships between the means of labour (tools), the objects of labour (“raw materials”), the labour force (the worker), the product of labour (result), the ownership of each of those components, the mutual relations of control or dependency, the technical organization of labour processes, the social use of the product of the work, etc. In each of these relations, which are part of the mode of social production, human beings are linked with each other and with nature through material means that are nothing but nature modified by social labour.

This means that there is a natural dimension in any productive social activity, and a social dimension in any creative natural activity; or if you prefer, the social is a component of the natural metabolism. In that sense, the way in which we human beings relate to nature forms part of the characteristics of a specific mode of social production.[2] In any case, human activity is possible solely through the transformation of nature, whether in the form of a hut or a city, a sown field or some sidewalks, a dam or a turbine, an axe or a dump truck; everything, absolutely everything, since life has existed on this planet. Natural and social life necessitates processing nature to extract the biological components of its reproduction and the material components of its tools. The human being by nature transforms and affects the surrounding nature; that is the invariable and trans-historical natural condition of any mode of production. However, what socially differentiates one mode of production from another is the way in which the human being relates to nature. All rural-based modes of production, prior to capitalism, without exception, have drastically affected and modified the natural environment. It is sufficient to see in our country the very large number of terraces in the Andes that guarantee the nourishment of millions of inhabitants in the Altiplano and the valleys,[3] the monumental system of ridges[4] or the artificial lakes of the Amazon that even now characterize the panorama of the plains of Beni. The major concentrations of humans have radically modified the environment in order to reproduce themselves. But the big difference that separates these environmental transformations from those that capitalism introduces to nature today is that the non-capitalist societies provided for the re-productive capacity of the modified environment and the continuity of what existed as a reservoir of goods of use (use values) for future generations. The organic and living conceptualization of nature that characterized these societies is derived from this manner of transforming it for collective purposes.

Capitalism, in contrast, reverses the reference coordinates of the environment with society. Nature is now a reservoir of material vehicles of exchange value, of profit. While in the other modes of production it is the great source of the means of life, of the use values that are sought after, under capitalism it is simply the material pretext for the exchange values (profits) that direct production. And destroying, protecting, pillaging, conserving are simply collateral, interchangeable components within a single social purpose: profit, the uninterrupted and infinite valorization of capital. And this logic is the founding objective that runs through everything: societies, persons and nature. Ultimately, with that objective capitalism is presented as a primary destructive force of human nature, and then of nature in general.

One component of the modes of production is the technical form of the relation of the human being with nature. This includes, firstly, the tools, the machine-tools that mediate labour with the raw material, and also thecomplexity of the transformation of that raw material, of the given or previously transformed nature. In this first component of the technical formwe are talking about the characteristics and type of the productive forces (simple or complex; technical, organized, symbolic, etc.; collective or personal; artisanal, mechanical or industrial; intellectual; domestic, regional or universal, product of the social-world intellect, etc.). To some extent, this is the substantial technically evolving nucleus that differentiates the distinct social modes of production.[5]

In the case of the complexity of the transformation of nature, this can range from the extraction of the natural raw material (renewable like foodstuffs, wood, rubber, or non-renewable like minerals, hydrocarbons, etc.) to the manual, artisanal or industrial processing of that raw material or, at a higher level, when the “raw materials” are symbols and ideas and they are processed through the production of new, more complex ideas and symbols.

All societies and modes of production have in their own way those distinct levels of “raw materials” processing. If we conceptualize “extractivism” as the activity that simply extracts raw materials (renewables or non-renewables), without introducing greater transformation in the work performed, then all societies in the world, capitalist or non-capitalist, are also to a greater or lesser degree extractivist. The agrarian non-capitalist societies that processed iron, copper, gold or bronze on a greater or lesser scale had some type of specialized extractivist activity, complemented in some cases by the simple or complex processing of that raw material. And even societies that lived or are living from the extraction of wood and chestnuts in combination with hunting and fishing maintain a type of extractivist activity in relation to renewable natural resources.

Capitalist societies themselves have distinct levels of extractivist activity[6]which with the passage of time have given rise to activities of industrial processing. In certain cases, some societies have quickly passed to the production of ideas and symbols as their main productive activity. That implies an appropriation of the intellectual productive forces for processes of capitalist valorization (profit). But also, the non-capitalist ancient societies used modalities of this form of production of collective goods. Mathematics, astronomy, irrigation engineering[7] or religious ritual itself, which the Andean-Amazonian, Mayan or other civilizations developed, are social factories of ideas that worked on ideas and symbols.

What establishes differences in the historical epochs, and between the societies that have a similar general mode of production, is the specialization in their productive activities; that is, how they participate in the mode of territorially organizing the international division of labour.

There are countries that began as producers of raw materials, then moved to the phase of industrializing the production of raw materials and now tend to concentrate in scientific-technological production and services. A good many European countries, and North America, have gone that route. Other societies, from being producers of raw materials for the world market (primarily exporting “extractivist” economies), to the degree that the countries in the first group have displaced their industrial production to the periphery, have moved to activities complementary to their extractivism, to selective industrial processing, becoming the workshops of the world. Examples are Mexico, the Philippines, Brazil, India and, in part, China.

But there are also societies, such as most of those in Latin America and Africa, that have remained in the primary-exporting sphere — fundamentally extractivist, or extractivist and agricultural. The capitalist world system is dynamic and continually reconfiguring in a conflictual way the geographical distribution of the distinct productive processes in terms of profit rates, access to markets, availability of a labour force and natural resources. Generally speaking, the colonial or post-colonial societies tend to be located in the primary-export area, but there are also numerous examples of colonial societies that have transitioned to the area of industrial processing (Brazil, Mexico, etc.), including the production of knowledge (South Africa, and in part China), although that does not mean they are no longer capitalist. This means that even when ceasing to be extractivist, capitalism does not end, as it can be extractivist or non-extractivist. So the central debate for the revolutionary transformation of society is not whether or not we are extractivist, but to what degree we are going beyond capitalism as a mode of production — whether in its extractivist or non-extractivist variant.

Within capitalism as a world-wide mode of production, each of these labour specializations of the countries and regions forms part of a similar scheme of predominance of the world capitalist system. And the revolutionary socialist processes that developed over the last 150 years have inherited as a condition of possibility and limitation — during the time they existed — this location in the international division of global labour. The Paris Commune, the Soviet Republic in the time of Lenin, or Mao’s China, did not break with this world-wide material base. They could not do that. Instead, what they did was to take as their point of departure their location in the division of labour and the level of their productive forces, so that from there they could begin to revolutionize the internal economic structures through a long process of socialization of the conditions of production, and to promote an even greater and longer process of revolutionary transformation of international economic relations. Lenin’s extraordinary reflections about the predominance of capitalism — in the midst of the Russian socialist revolution — and the implacable international division of labour, notwithstanding the presence of Soviet Russia,[8] are of the necessary scope and depth to understand the relevance of the contemporary revolution from the standpoint of socialism, but also the difficulties and limitations that any emancipatory process must confront in any part of the world, including that of the Bolivian Democratic-Cultural Revolution.

In contrast to a naïve ultraleftism that thinks a society can escape world domination by itself, Lenin and Marx remind us that capitalism operates on a world scale, and can only be overcome on a world scale.[9] So struggles and efforts for the socialization of production in a single country are simply that: efforts, battles and dispersed skirmishes that convey an historical intent but can triumph only if they expand to become struggles on a world scale. Communism either is world-wide or it will never be. And while there is a general predominance of capitalism, within it there are glimmers and tendencies of struggles of a potential new mode of production that cannotexist locally, and can only be present as just that: a tendency, a struggle, a possibility, for its existence is conceivable only on a worldwide geopolitical scale. The illusion of “communism in a single country” was just that: an illusion that brought disastrous consequences for the workers of that country and for the expectations of revolution in the 20^th century.

Socialism is not a new mode of production that would coexist alongside capitalism, territorially contesting the world or one country. Socialism is abattlefield between capitalism in crisis and the tendencies, potentialities and efforts to bring production under community ownership and control.[10] In other words, it is the historical period of struggle between the dominant established capitalist mode of production and another potentially new mode of production. The only mode of production that will overcome capitalism is communism, the assumption of community ownership and control of production of the material life of society. And that mode of production does not exist piecemeal, it can only exist on a world scale. But until that happens the only thing that is left is the struggle.

This brief basic reminder of the logic of revolutionary processes is important because there are some who criticize us for submitting to the international division of labour, as if we could break from that division in a single country (Stalin’s illusion) and simply by wishing it. No contemporary revolution has been able to break the world division of labour, nor can it do so as long as there is no social mass politically mobilized and sufficiently extended territorially (at a global level) and technically sustainable to modify the correlation of the world’s geopolitical forces. So before we start tearing our hair out over the actual operation of the “capitalist division of labour,” the most important thing is to erode that division of labour through the territorial expansion of the world’s revolutionary and progressive processes.

Similarly, the Bolivian revolutionary process is criticized for remaining at the “extractivist” stage of the economy, which is said to maintain activity harmful to nature and to seal its dependency on world capitalist domination.

There is no historical evidence that certifies that the industrialized capitalist societies are less harmful to Mother Earth than those that devote themselves to the extraction of raw materials, whether renewable or non-renewable. Moreover, the information on global warming fundamentally refers to greenhouse gas emissions by the highly industrialized countries.[11] And as to the possibilities of regions that could exist in autarchy from the capitalist order, Marx more than 100 years ago made fun of some utopians who thought they could create social “islands” that would be immune from relations of capitalist domination. He ironically pointed out that perhaps some recently formed coral island in the South Seas[12] could fulfill this utopian requisite, but the rest of society was in one way or another already subject to the dominant economic relations.

Just as the extractivism of our societies is an integral part of the networks of the international division of labour, the industrial processing of raw materials or the knowledge economy are part of the same world capitalist division of labour. Neither extractivism nor non-extractivism is a solution to this worldwide domination. It is in fact conceivable that in the future construction of a communitarian mode of production, in which the whole of the common resources, material and immaterial, are produced and administered by the producers themselves, there will exist some countries and regions that are extractivist.

Therefore, it is naïve to think that extractivism, non-extractivism or industrialism are a vaccination against injustice, exploitation and inequality, because in themselves they are neither modes of producing nor modes of managing wealth. They are technical systems of processing nature through labour, and can be present in pre-capitalist, capitalist or communitarian societies. Economic systems with greater or lesser justice, with or without exploitation of labour, will only be possible depending on how those technical systems are used, how the wealth thereby produced is managed.

The critics of extractivism confuse technical system with mode of production, and from this confusion they go on to associate extractivism with capitalism, forgetting that there are non-extractivist, industrial, societies that are completely capitalist!

We can have extractivist societies that are capitalist, non-capitalist, pre-capitalist or post-capitalist. And similarly, we can have non-extractivist societies that are capitalist, non-capitalist or post-capitalist. Extractivism is not a goal in itself, but it can be the starting point for overcoming it. To be sure, condensed within it is the entire territorial distribution of the world division of labour — a distribution that is often colonial. And to break that colonial subordination it is not sufficient to sound off with insults against that extractivism, to stop producing and drive the people into greater misery, so later the Right returns and without modifying extractivism partially satisfies the basic needs of the population. That is precisely the trap of the unthinking critics who call for non-extractivism, who in their political liturgy mutilate the revolutionary forces and governments of the material means to satisfy the needs of the population, generate wealth and distribute it fairly, and thereby to create a new material non-extractivist base that preserves and amplifies the benefits of the labouring population.

Like any emancipation, to escape extractivism we have to start from it, from what, as a technical form, it has done to the society. At present, for us as a country, this is the only technical means we have to distribute the material wealth generated through extractivism (but in a way that differs from the preceding), and in addition to allow us to have the material, technical and cognitive conditions to transform its technical and productive base. Because if not, how will extractivism be overcome? By stopping production, closing the tin mines and gas wells, and retreating from satisfying the basic material means of existence, as its critics suggest? Isn’t that rather the route toward increasing poverty and the direct road to the restoration of the neoliberals? Isn’t that what the conservative forces most desire — tying our hands in the revolutionary process by rejecting extractivism — in order to strangle that process?

By overcoming extractivism we are not going to overcome capitalism. If only things were so easy! If that were the case — as some of our critics childishly believe — the United States would be the first communist country in the world! But be careful, that does not mean that overcoming extractivism cannot help the ongoing revolutionary processes. It can help, firstly, because the phases of industrialization or production of knowledge help to create a greater economic surplus that can be redistributed in order to satisfy the needs of society; secondly, because it can help to reduce the harmful environmental impacts; and thirdly, because it equips society with greater technical-productive capacity to control the overall production processes.

But in any event extractivism does not condemn us to capitalism nor does non-extractivism deliver us directly by the hand to socialism. It all depends on the political power, on the social mobilization capable of guiding the productive processes — extractivist or non-extractivist — toward increasing communal ownership and control over their operation and the social distribution of the resulting wealth.

And in this task, in an initial stage, isn’t it possible to use the resources produced by the state-controlled raw materials export activity to generate the surpluses that can be used to satisfy the minimum living conditions of Bolivians, and guarantee an intercultural, scientific education that generates a critical intellectual mass capable of taking over and leading the emerging processes of industrialization and the knowledge economy? Will socialism be knocking at the door if Bolivia stops producing raw materials? By dropping “extractivism” prematurely, would Bolivians have the material and intellectual resources to proceed immediately to the industrial and cognitive stages of production? Isn’t the uncritical condemnation of so-called extractivism in fact seeking to leave the Plurinational State poor and defenceless so it is unable to respond to the expansion of social rights that has arisen in the revolutionary process initiated in 2000?

It is necessary to go beyond the stage of being mere raw materials producers. That is clear. But that will not be achieved by regressing to the situation of state begging that characterized Bolivia until 2005, when the wealth we generated was in the hands of the foreign corporations. It will not be achieved by paralyzing the productive apparatus, opposing the surplus that comes from raw materials and regressing to an economy of self-subsistence that not only leaves us at a level of greater defencelessness than before, delivering us to the total abdication of any inkling of sovereignty (which requires as a material base that the country can live and eat from its labour), but in addition will open the doors to the employer-neoliberal restoration that will be presented as what can indeed satisfy the basic material demands of society.

Behind the recently constructed “extractivist” criticism of the revolutionary and progressive governments, then, lies the shadow of the conservative restoration. It is our view, however, that this criticism is best countered, in the first place, by meeting the urgent needs of the people, increasing the essential social benefits of the labouring classes and, on this basis, creating the cultural, educational and material conditions to democratize control of the common wealth, even to the point of going beyond the state institutions by establishing community ownership and control of property and social production itself within a perspective of deepening social mobilization and gradually overcoming extractivism. In the process, it is necessary at the same time to build a new technological base for production of wealth that will help to overcome extractivism.

And that is precisely what we are doing as a government: generating wealth[13] and redistributing it amongst the population[14]; reducing poverty and extreme poverty[15]; improving the educational status of the population.[16] And parallel to all that, we are beginning industrialization. In the case of hydrocarbons, through investment in two separate natural gas liquids plants: one in Gran Chaco, which will go into production in 2014, and the other in Río Grande, to begin in 2013. Furthermore, we have the Urea y Amoniaco [urea and ammonia] plant, costing $843 million, which will begin operating in 2015; an ethylene and polyethylene plant to begin production in 2016, and another for conversion of gas to liquid which is to begin functioning in 2014.[17] And we have taken major steps in relation to the industrialization of lithium. With Bolivian scientists and technology, the semi-industrial production of potassium chloride was begun in August this year, and before the end of the year the same will occur with lithium carbonate. By 2014 we are planning to have huge industrial production of potassium and lithium, as well as cathode and battery plants.[18]

The objective the President has recently put before all Bolivians is that by the bicentenary of Independence (i.e. by 2025), no materials produced in this country will be sold without some type of industrial processing, without some added value. This will require a profound scientific and technical transformation of the country and an unprecedented investment in knowledge. And we will do this, of course.

Obviously, this is not a simple process. It will take years, perhaps decades. The important thing is to reorient the direction of production, without overlooking the fact that today it is necessary to satisfy as well the pressing basic needs, those which were precisely what led the population to undertake the construction of state power. And that is what we are doing in Bolivia.

[1] Karl Marx, Capital, Book I, The Process of Production of Capital, Vintage, New York 1977.

[2] Karl Marx, “Forms which precede capitalist production,” in Grundrisse, Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy, Section Two, Vintage, New York 1973.

[3] John V. Murra, El Mundo Andino. Población, Medio Ambiente y Economía, Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, Peru, 2002.

[4] Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Knopf, 2005.

[5] Álvaro García Linera, Forma Valor y Forma Comunidad, aproximación teórico-abstracta a los fundamentos civilizatorios que preceden al ayllu universal, CLACSO/COMUNA, La Paz, 2009.

[6] Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (New York, 2008). Also, David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998).

[7] Hans Horkheimer, Alimentación y obtención de alimentos en los Andes Prehispánicos, Hisbol, La Paz, 1990.

[8] Lenin, “Eleventh Congress Of The R.C.P.(B.), March 27-April 2, 1922,” inCollected Works, 2^nd English Edition, Moscow 1965, vol. 33, pages 237-242. See also the exhaustive analysis of the Soviet economy in the Leninist phase, in Charles Bettelheim, Class Struggles in the USSR, First Period: 1917-1923, Monthly Review Press, New York 1976 (Translation by Brian Pearce).

[9] K. Marx, F. Engels, The German Ideology, Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 5.

[10] Etienne Balibar, On the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, New Left Books, 1977.

[11] “El Cambio Climático en América Latina y el Caribe”. Secretaría de Medio Ambiente y Recursos Naturales Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Medio Ambiente, 2006.

[12] Marx, Capital, op. cit.

[13] In the last six years of President Morales’ administration, the GDP has increased from $9.5 billion to $23.7 billion, and the average income of Bolivians from $1,000 in 2005 to $2,238 in 2011. UDAPE, Informe 2012.

[14] In the last six years, the percentage of GDP directly transferred in cash transfers to the population has reached 1.1% on average (UDAPE). And if we compare the figures for 2010 with those for Latin America, Bolivia’s percentage (1.57%) ranks first, ahead of Ecuador’s (1.17%), Mexico’s (0.51%) and Brazil’s (0.47%), among others.

[15] In six years, the proportion of the population living in poverty has declined from 60% to 48%, and extreme poverty from 38% to 24.3%. Extreme poverty in the urban areas has declined from 24% to 14%, and in rural areas from 62% in 2005 to 43% in 2011. UDAPE, Informe 2012.

[16] We defeated the age-old illiteracy in 2008. The percentage of GDP devoted to education this year is 8.21%. In 2005, the universities were receiving $164 million in transfers from the state. In contrast, in 2011 the public universities received $385 million. Ministry of Economy and Finance,Informe 2012.

[17] Ministry of Hydrocarbons and Energy, Informe 2012.

[18] Ministry of Mining and Metallurgy, Informe 2012.

Alvaro Garcia Linera: Geopolitics of the Amazon - Part IV: Three colonialist fallacies of opponents of the proposed TIPNIS roadway

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 22:23:00 +0000

[To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here. Translated by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left]

Colonialist fallacies

The first fallacy is the argument that with the highway the coca leaf producers will invade the TIPNIS. There is at this point no type of coercive measure that prevents them entering the Park using the roads that already exist within it; however, they are not doing so. Moreover, the unions of coca producers were the very ones that in 1990 defined with the government a “red line” within the TIPNIS that they voluntarily agreed not to cross. Since then, any compañero who crosses that line, instead of counting on the support of his union and federation, is liable to be removed from where he is living by the law enforcement agencies, as has happened in recent months. Compliance with this demarcation is now the responsibility of the coca leaf producers themselves, and not the result of any public force or law that prevents them from approaching.

The highway is not going to be the launching point for any supposed “cocalero invasion”; nor has any such “invasion” occurred even with the existing sections, because this is a Park and a territory of indigenous collective ownership, and it is the coca leaf producers themselves who as an organization have decided to respect this collective property. But in addition, the illegal production of coca leaf — regardless of the agreements of the producer federations with the Morales government — is not located along the edges of the highways, for then it would be eradicated immediately. The illegal cultivation occurs precisely beyond the reach of control by the state and the federations, in areas where there are no roads or pathways. It is precisely because of the illegal nature of this production (outside the areas defined by agreement between the peasant federations and the government) that it occurs where law enforcement — by the state or the unions — cannot go, that is, precisely where there are no roads, paths or public control. If there is anything that the presence of a highway in the Park will promote, it is the departure of the illegal crops, including the production of coca paste, the base for cocaine, which throughout these years has been detected in areas of the TIPNIS in which there are no roads or a state presence.[1] Furthermore, in his recent message to the people of Bolivia on August 6, 2012, President Evo Morales announced the creation of a Regimiento Ecológico [Ecological Regiment (of the Armed Forces)], whose mission will be to protect the national parks and prevent any type of illegal occupation by peasants in the TIPNIS.[2]

The second fallacy, with even more reactionary implications than the first, is the one that seeks to artificially oppose “lowlands indigenous peoples” to “lowlands and highlands campesinos.” The first, remote from markets, are good people who contemplate nature, while the second are illegal predators, bad people, merchants and destroyers of nature. This cartoon dualism was for decades used by the Amazon and eastern hacendados to erect a barrier wall around their latifundios against the presence and migration of the indigenous peasants from the highlands. At its height, this anti-peasant xenophobia went so far as to consider instituting a passport requirement for Aymara and Quechua seeking to enter Santa Cruz.[3] This regionalist landlord ideology has been taken up again by the environmentalists in the debate over the TIPNIS, to create a hostile atmosphere toward the highlands indigenous-peasant movement and in particular in opposition to the coca leaf producers. This xenophobia goes to such limits that it unashamedly defends a type of ethnic inbreeding, considering it a “crime” if Yuracarés marry Quechuas or Aymaras. Basically, this is the colonial fallacy of the construction of “pure races,” now put in postmodern language.

But this second colonial fallacy, moreover, is woven around the separation of “good” indigenous living in a Tierra Comunitaria from “bad” peasants who hold individual family property. Let us look at this.

Colonial domination involved the looting of lands, control of labour itself, but above all control of the collective identities of the dominated society, which are the subjective forces that ultimately unite people around common objectives and shared forces of technical and associated production. To name is to unite and to separate; it is to define, map, territorialize and control. Naming from outside or self-naming are part of the basic scheme of the method of domination and emancipation in general. And when the naming territorializes the territorialized subject from outside, we are confronted with the most devastating method of domination, which is precisely colonial domination.

The first thing Spanish colonialism did was to re-signify and re-locate the world of people and things: territorially, “the West Indies,” cities; administratively, the viceroyalties, governorships, etc.; economically, the distribution of powers, the encomiendas, the mita; in religion, the churches, the new faith, the new moral prohibitions, the new spiritual balms; in language, the dominant language and the new general language. And as a legitimation of this material reconfiguration of life, the soul and the collective I, was to appear Indianness: “the Indians” as a new colonizing identity intended to sweep away the collective I of the many original nations, their roots and their memory. To designate is to dominate, and colonialism de-nominated everything, dismantling stone by stone the ancient societal structure, and where it could not do so, it superimposed on it in order to subsume it, like the temples that were erected on top of the Waka’s[4] or the colonial institutions that were superimposed on the remaining local communal structures.

The colonial re-categorization of domination was not substantially affected by the passage from colony to republic. The originarios, yanaconas, forasterosand mestizos of colonial times[5] were now indios, blancos and mestizos of republican times.[6] These were tributary categories, imposing delegated identities on the social reality. In both cases, the intention was to classify the dominated, to identity them as such and thereby impose on them the image the dominator himself had of them; and thereby to reaffirm the domination. No objective or scientific classifications exist. Any identitarian classification is political, and the tributary, numerical, territorial justification is simply an artefact of legitimation of that political decision, whether of domination or of emancipation.

Revolutionary nationalism, in its renewed colonial obsession to homogenize the dominated, was not to alter the expropriated nature of the identities inherited from the Colony: indios and forasteros became “campesinos,” a subject of subjugation characterized by its labour activity, which sought to bury the vigorous culture, social roots and self-identification of the original peoples in a new profusion of categories.

The emancipating and self-identifying impulse of the peoples came years later, at the hands of the cultural productive forces, memory, language, history and skin. In the beginning the appeal was to an oppressor category, that of the Indian, as a means of self-identification. “They have dominated us with the name of Indian. With the name of Indian we will free ourselves,” said the emerging intellectuality motivating indigenous national self-identification. This was not a retreat to the old names, but precisely a radicalization of them, to convert them into their opposite: from nomination of domination to denomination of emancipation. The point of rupture was the political will to self-identify, to superimpose on the Collective I constructed by others (by the dominant) the Collective I constructed by oneself (by the dominated); thereby dismantling at that very point the domination itself.

Indianness as identity was a cry of emancipation that revolutionized the Bolivian ideological-political panorama from the 1970s on. Indigenous identity was the discursive repertoire that reorganized the meaning of the Bolivian revolution, and came to refer to the political and cultural, that is historic, appeal by the immense majority of the people — not only of the farm workers but of the labourers, shopkeepers, transportistas [bus and truck operators], students and professionals, subalternized by their condition of work and their skin, by their name, language and place where they lived. In the emancipatory re-invention of the Katarista-indianista Indianness a long process was initiated of constructing an historic bloc and a discourse of social and general mobilization that would modify the content of the revolution in Bolivia as an anti-colonial, anti-neoliberal and democratic revolution with a socialist-communitarian horizon.

Years later, the indianista identity would mature, clarifying the territorial and historical composition of Indianness as identity of indigenous-First Nations with names and roots: the Aymara nation, Quechua nation, Guaraní nation, Chimán nation, Leco nation, Mosetén nation, Pacawara nation, Sirionó nation, etc. It moved from a generic identity of Indianness to an historic identity of indigenous nations that did not stop in the highlands and valleys but extended to the plains, the Amazon and the Chaco, creating in the last two decades a web of political forces mobilized around the indigenous national identities, the material foundation of the present Plurinational State.

The transition was not easy. From the emancipatory discursive construction of the Seventies, it moved to the indigenous self-organizing materialization of the originary indigenous campesino federations and confederations of the Eighties. And from there to the construction of the political will to take powerby means of the transformation of the union-communal organic structure into an electoral political instrument in the Nineties, to advance to the taking of power by the social movements in 2006.

This construction of this emancipatory identity with a will for power needed two decisive ethical-political moments. The first was the construction of the indigenous national identity as the national demographic majority with political visibility. In this the contribution of the Tupak-Katarismo of the Ayllus Rojos of the Nineties was decisive, because it began to appeal politically to the indigenous subject in an inter-class manner, that is, as a nation in whose interior cohabited various urban and rural social classes: campesinos,transportistas, intellectuals, professionals, owners, artisans, etc., but united and inter-acting on the cultural-historical basis of identity as Aymaras, Quechuas, Guaranis, etc. The numerical validation of this socially visible indigenous majority population came about through the huge urban and rural indigenous peoples mobilizations of 2000, 2001, 2003 and the results of the Population Census of 2001, which established that 62% of Bolivians are indigenous.

The second decisive ethical-political moment for the taking of power by the indigenous-popular movement was the candidacy of Evo Morales at that precise historical moment with the ability to tap into the existing sentiment at the appropriate point, which allowed the socially visible demographic majority to become a political majority in the leadership of the state. The indigenous identity that had decolonized and raised to power the popular subject in Bolivia was now an urban-rural and transclass identity united around an indigenous nucleus as the expression of the material certainty of its majority and its hegemony. But this has produced an attempt by pseudo-environmentalism and a handful of abdicating ultraleftists to return to the method of identitarian colonization through the numerical inferiorization of the indigenous peoples. In a desperate and inelegant ideological somersault, they reduce “the indigenous peoples” to those who live in communitarian lands [Tierras Comunitarias], leaving the rest of the population as “non-indigenous.”

In a reactionary attempt to separate “good indigenous peoples” from “bad peasants,” they argue that only those who live in the communitarian lands are indigenous peoples, in as much as those who own family lands are nowcampesinos[7] — not to speak of those who live in the city. Thus, as if by some cheap magic, the indigenous majority conquering in the name of emancipation and a national-general revolutionary political project, dissolves into some tiny population centres dispersed in the lowlands that barely amount to 3.7% of the Bolivian population over the age of 15 (2001), and in the highlands, 4.5%.

Attempting to justify the unjustifiable, the pseudo-environmentalists regress 400 years in the political history of the indigenous nations, turning them into minority subjects susceptible to wardship and vassalage. There are two errors behind this gimmicky inferiorization of the indigenous nations. The first is the shyster blindness that reduces the identitarian force of the indigenous peoples to the legal classification of Tierra Comunitaria de Origin (TCO). The TCO is a legal category, not a social structure or an identity.

We all know that in the agrarian world (in both lowlands and highlands), even in areas of greater parcelization of land and individual titles, there are areas of collective use (pasture lands, community lands) and likewise common resources (watersheds, rivers, lakes, etc.) over which no type of private ownership is exercised.[8] Similarly, there is a system of legally protected communal authority over many aspects of life, individual property, and a labour system involving mutual assistance (roads, schools, ayni, minka, etc.). The agrarian unions in the Chapare are an example of this social system.

In like manner, although the land in the TCO is legally the common property of all those living in the community or communities, the labour system is similar to that in any community of individual property owners: production is based strictly on family and individual labour. Agriculture, hunting, fishing and gathering, which provide the day-to-day means of life, are carried on through the family and not the community. And in the lowlands, the systems of joint work for public necessities such as schools or roads, or for swapping labour, are not strongly established.

Generally speaking, in neither the lands under family ownership nor thoseowned by the community are there permanent communitarian production processes. The majority of the work activities required for the satisfaction of the basic needs of the community members are conducted on the basis of the individual family. As for the few activities of public utility that do employ collective labour systems, these are primarily in the highlands, the valleys and the Chapare, whether on TCOs or on lands that are individually owned.

The belief that the TCOs are the only spaces of communitarianism is a legalistic illusion typical of those who confuse the reality of things with a literal reading of the words. Common legal ownership does not define what is peculiar to the community. Individual ownership of land co-exists with common possession of lands, and with communitarian systems of authority and communitarian labour techniques. That is what occurs, for example, in most of the highlands regions, the nucleus of the Aymara indigenous identity. Thus to classify a community as “indigenous” by virtue of common ownership of property, and as “campesino” because they do not have that, is merely intellectual scribbling with disastrous counterrevolutionary implications. To convert the indigenous peoples into a dispersed minority living in TCOs is to eliminate this country’s major political achievement of state-effected decolonization: the construction of the indigenous political force as a majority urban-rural force; but it is also to substitute the bare legal category for the productive and social reality, ignoring the real objectivity of the revolutionary communitarian-communist tendencies present in the distinct socio-productive organizations of the urban and rural labouring classes.

Lastly, to reduce the category of indigenous peoples to relevance to a TCO is to remain imprisoned in the illusion of a lawyer who dreams of substituting one’s linguistic devices for the reality of things; and in this case to make a legal category, the TCO, the nucleus of a social identity.

Social, and even more so national identities are political artefacts of mobilization with a state projection that can find support in specific social practices such as language, common history, memory, territory, economy, etc., but have the virtue of articulating a cross-class collective will around objectives of self-determination.

What can those pseudo-environmentalists tell the Aymara of Omasuyus or Villa Ingenio in El Alto — the backbone of the social mobilizations of October 2003 — who rose up, died and won waving whipalas and celebrating their indigenous identity? That they are not indigenous peoples because they do not have a TCO? That is ridiculous. But what is not ridiculous is the reactionary implication of this conservative metaphysics: the fragmentation of the indigenous movement, the minimization and isolation of the indigenous peoples, the ideological and political disarmament of the indigenous peoples, and the judicialization of the indigenous peoples. In short, this entire conservative narrative leads inexorably to the impotence and death of the indigenous political subject. That is the big dream of the hacendado right wing that is being implemented in words and action by the former leftists who have developed into organic intellectuals of the restoration of colonialism.

Finally, the third fallacy: environmentalism vs. capitalism.

As is well known, any human activity — from building a house to growing food, hunting and even walking and breathing — affects nature. No one lives solely in contemplation of nature, as naïve environmentalism argues, because those who did would not live long. Life is a process of metabolic transformation of nature that affects the environment, and in the process the living being transforms itself. In general, nature too is affected, which can result in catastrophes that in turn end in further change. Over time, human beings have formed societies that differ from each other according to how they produce and use the collective wealth resulting from their particular relationship with nature. To each material mode of production corresponds an organic relationship with nature. Some societies have created modes of life-sustaining relationships with their surrounding nature, such as thecommunal forms studied by Marx under the name of Rural Community and Agrarian Community.[9] In those cases, nature is presented as an organic extension of society itself, as a living being in the presence of which the exchange of advances in labour and reception of productive processes takes the form of dialogues and rituals of mutual re-production in time.

But within these distinct communal forms of society, civilization and production, there also exist variants that may produce a greater or lesser impact on the natural environment. Agrarian societies, a form of social community, have an economic system that in the framework of that mutually life-sustaining relationship with nature produces a greater impact on the environment than the gatherer societies (another communal form of society).

To the degree that they introduce agriculture combined with domestic industry, agrarian societies — as in the case of the Aymara and Quechua communities — have to partially reduce the forests in order to obtain foodstuffs, while the gatherer societies, for example the Yuracarés or Chimanes of the lowlands, supply themselves with what the forest offers them, and while they sometimes resort to agriculture it is on a minor scale, and they maintain their nomadism. So the effects of deforestation they generate are also reduced. Clearly, at bottom both productive systems maintain a similar pattern of organic and life-sustaining exchange with nature, which prevents us from differentiating them between those who “pillage” and those who live in “harmony” with nature, as the pseudo-environmentalists do, echoing thehacendados’ anti-campesino ideology. The demographic expansion of both societies will also have a decisive influence on the pattern of relationships to the environment. The immense lakes constructed in their hundreds by the ancient Amazon nations of pre-colonial times, between Ascensión de Guarayos and Rio Madre de Dios in Pando — and which surely helped to feed and protect them from the continual flooding of the rivers on the Amazonian plain — are monumental human works whose presence and modification of the environment is still visible today.

But there also are societies in which nature is presented as a mere reservoir of things to be exploited as usufruct by human beings, that is, as an inert object that can be transformed by labour but in relation to which one has no ethical or material responsibility of continuity. And if we add to this that the guiding purpose of the productive processes is not the satisfaction of material needs but the unlimited accumulation of monetary profit (valorization), we are confronted with the capitalist mode of production. In that case, nature is presented only as inert raw material for the purpose of profit; which means that if the destruction of nature or of life itself (in wars, for example) generates monetary benefits, then it is useful for capitalism.

However, it is not by definition that capitalism destroys nature — as right-wing environmentalism holds. What capitalism does by definition is to generate profits in a few private hands: “valorizing value,” as Marx put it.[10] And if in order to fulfil this objective it is necessary to kill living beings, crush societies, annihilate and destroy the nature that lies in its path, capitalism will no doubt do this. And if, to generate capital (profit) in a few hands, it is necessary to preserve nature or protect the life of the workers, capitalism will also do this for the purpose of continuing to accumulate surplus value. It is very important to specify the founding logic of this system: profit (value which self-valorizes incessantly), because if indeed whenever its productive forces are becoming forces of destruction of life and the planet, the irresistible drive for profit can lead it to “preserve” nature, if that is what guarantees the necessary rate of profit. Only in this way is it possible to understand that while in some parts of the world there arise technical forces destructive of nature (hence the greenhouse effect), in others it can encourage a hypocritical “defence” of the environment through its market policies: “carbon credits,” “green economy,” exchanging debt for protection of forests, etc., which basically are nothing more than various methods of commoditization and capitalist subsumption of the temporary conservation of forests in the countries of the South, in order to produce profits for the big transnational corporations of the North through the purchase of certificates of carbon emissions reduction in order to obtain tax reductions, credit approvals and increased rates of profit.

These pseudo-environmentalist policies are not contradictory to capitalism; on the contrary, they are inherent to it, and this environmentalism for the poor is profitable for it and therefore useful to promote. If destroying the environment in the North and protecting some forest in the South — but accepting this as clean, as part of its corporate activities — generates profits, this pseudo-environmentalism forms part of the capitalist machinery. The tragic thing in all this is that this planetary farce of a capitalism that is strategically destructive of nature, but tactically a preserver of environmental niches, has as its executors in its scheme of capitalist profit an army of well-intentioned environmentalists — their salaries paid by multinational corporations — who “preserve” the forests in the poor countries and at the end of the day deliverextraterritorial environmental surplus value to the mega-business that will raise the price of its shares even higher on the stock market. Thus, while the major share of the tax exemptions of the big company in the North raise its rate of profit, a tiny portion goes to the environmentalists who go out of their way to ensure that the inhabitants of the forest in some country of the South, like the TIPNIS, continue to live in absolute marginality, avoiding the state so it won’t disturb their “harmonious” poverty, finishing off a sinister planetary mechanism of “environmental” capitalist accumulation.

Who has the power in the Amazon?

Throughout this brief analysis we have seen the convergence of the four distinct forces that have interacted in connection with the domination of the Amazon. Let us list them, not in order of historical presence, as we did in the text, but in order of predominance and geopolitical power in the region.

1. Foreign corporations, which have created a novel category of surplus value: environmental surplus value, in connection with the extraterritorial appropriation of the Amazon’s biodiversity, which allows them to raise their rates of profit in their countries of origin without having to modify the destructive technical-productive pattern of the biodiversity, which would require spending millions and millions of dollars on a new world-wide technical basis. These firms continue to maintain in place the same destructive technical forces and they get substantial tax reductions and elimination of penalties whenever they hold “carbon credits” in their name. Thus, by “protecting” this or that area of the Amazon jungle, they reduce their corporate production costs, raise the rate of profit for the shareholders, and escape the need for a radical switch in the contemporary technical and productive base, characterized by the destructiveness of the natural basis of social production.

Similarly, many foreign corporations that control “their forests” extraterritorially get the advantage of having a gigantic laboratory free of charge for obtaining genetic material for the biotechnology industry, without having to pay any taxes, patent fees or royalties whatsoever or to make any prior investment. The “protection of forests” under the aegis of foreign corporate conglomerates has become an “environmental” mode of capitalist accumulation.

2. Governments of the more developed capitalist countries, who through this corporate environmentalism are managing to establish cordons of control over numerous areas of enormous wealth in existing natural, biological, mineral and hydrocarbon resources precisely in these areas of high biodiversity. The presence of foreign military bases near these regions forms a part of the extraterritorial rings of protection that the U.S. government in particular is deploying in Latin America.[11]

In the case of the Bolivian Amazon, we have not only the largest reserves of fresh water in the entire country, but also the largest concentration of biological diversity, petroleum reserves and a large part of the so-called Precambrian shield[12] with extensive deposits of gold, nickel, iron, uranium, etc.

3. The hacendado-business bloc that is processing Amazon raw materials. This is a business elite simultaneously linked to landed property, the old political parties of the hereditary right wing, the purchase and processing of cattle and the processing of Amazon raw materials such as wood, chestnuts, rubber, alligator skins, etc. It is a regional bourgeoisie that over the years has created a kind of captive regional market for its raw materials supply business. The Beni cattle industry is monopolized by the processing and price-fixing of the slaughterhouses in Santa Cruz. Likewise, in the harvesting of other Amazon products such as wood or chestnuts, this bourgeoisie operates as a monopoly purchaser which, at the time when the TCOs were being revived as spaces for negotiated provision of raw materials by the indigenous leaders, was able to monopolize — through this brokerage function — the ground rent resulting from the extraction activity; and in some cases, through the extra-economic coercion exercised over the indigenous inhabitants, to obtain as well a further surplus value because the payment for the work of the indigenous labourer was below his subsistence level, his living conditions generally being the responsibility of the work of his family as a whole. So we have a combination of mechanisms of appropriation of land rents, surplus value generated by the worker and a share of the wage of this indigenous labourer, which produces an extraordinary profit in the hands of this corporate-landowner group.

That is why defence of this captive Amazon regional market, preservation of extra-economic bargaining mechanisms for raw materials supplies, and the reproduction of the despotic-landowner relations, are the geopolitical priorities in those matters that involve its class interests.

4. The Amazonian Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as a group, some of which have created over the last two decades a clientelistic network of indigenous leaders through which they express the corporate environmentalist discourse in the various communities. Possessing fine humanitarian intentions — and good salaries for such missions — they form a small army that is ideologically the disseminator of the right-wing environmentalist discourse, and economically the material expression of an environmental capitalist accumulation.

Educated in opposition to any type of state presence in the Amazon forests and plains, and adversaries of any autonomy of the indigenous movement that would erode the networks of cooptation of the leaders, some NGOs have launched a kind of local environmentalist crusade the actual effect of which worldwide is the consolidation of the lucrative business of reducing taxes on the transnational corporations in exchange for protection of forests.

The combination of these four forces makes up what we can call the arch of Amazon power and domination.

In resistance and opposition to these forces of domination, the sectors that have taken distinct initiatives in struggle form part of the bloc of the indigenous-campesino and popular movement:

The indigenous peoples, fundamentally through the great mutual efforts toward unification of their regional struggles and demands, which help to overcome their territorial dispersion and low demographic density;

The campesino movement, through the struggle for democratization of access to the land and political autonomy from the bosses, this in turn generating an immediate response by the landowner power in the massacre of campesino leaders in El Porvenir in September 2008; notwithstanding that, the movement has persevered in its self-organization;

And finally, the popular movement, through the free-flowing micro-business, cooperative and transport activity, which complicates the regional scenario of class struggles, cracking the old traditional order of things.

Accompanying this social upheaval in the Amazon the revolutionary state, which from day one has sought to further strengthen these social struggles, not only has dismantled the hereditary state (having separated possession of land from the administration of the state), but with the new Constitution has proceeded to expropriate latifundios[13] and redistribute lands. Today, for the first time, we have national and departmental assemblies in Beni, Pando and Santa Cruz, with representatives of campesinos, indigenous peoples, merchants, transportistas, and of the people in general. Political representation has ceased to be an attribute of big property or business activity.[14] And parallel to this, the state presence has been extended, in the sense of laws and the monopoly of coercion. Social programs have been created, like the Bono Juancito Pinto, the Renta Dignidad and the Bono Juana Azurduy, and there are now hospital boats on the Amazon rivers. Thousands of people who since birth lacked the necessary documentation now have it, free of charge. Indigenous-peasant communities have received direct transfers and free dental care for children in places devoid in the past of state authority or law. But in addition, one of the most important processes of relocation of regiments and troops in the country’s military history has been carried out. Military units have been created in the Amazon. In Pando, in the last four years, the military presence along the border has been tripled; the Bruno Racua Regiment and Conjunto Amazónico Command have been created; and the personnel of the Company in San Joaquín, the naval base in Magdalena, and the naval headquarters in Ramón Darío have been increased significantly, in addition to the formation of the engineers’ battalion in Roboré. Likewise, the military posts have been reinforced in Cocos Lanza, San Fermín and General Camacho in northern La Paz, and a military garrison has been built in Ixiamas. And a unit of governmental management has been formed: ADEMAF, which has united military and civilian efforts and been deployed throughout the Amazon, consolidating the application of laws and sanctions in places where hitherto the only law was the personal fiat of some landowners.

The Rurrenabaque-Riberalta highway, now in adjudication, and the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway, are objective expressions of this territorial enlargement of the state presence. They fall within the framework of a set of broader state policies for recovery of state sovereignty, understood as the full exercise of state laws and benefits in places where until recently forest companies, hacendados or narcotraffickers were the major authority in a kind of micro-republics of illegality.

The highway stitches together a national geography split between two major geographical blocs, the Altiplano and the Amazon. It will allow the face to face encounter of two regions of the country that up to now have been living back to back. The highway will nationalize a fundamental territorial space in Bolivia, in which foreign governments and companies, foreign citizens and landlords, have held more authority, knowledge and power than the Bolivian state itself. With the highway, the real geography and the ideal geography of the state (present in maps and agreements) will tend to coincide.

When we talk about real geography of the state we are referring to verification that its authority is one of public order with effective compliance and social legitimation. The highway then presents itself as a material force of territorial sovereignty of the state and, with that, as a technical mediation of the enlargement and defence of the laws of the population of the Amazon in general and the TIPNIS in particular.

To some extent, of course, the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway creates a new geopolitical state axis running from north to south, conjoining the extensive geography and Amazon society. The capitalist adversary of this nationalization of the Amazon is huge and brings to bear its enormous private material interests. Accordingly, at stake for the revolutionary state is its territorially verifiable sovereignty, and for the opposing powers their money, their personal revenues, their businesses and their domination. Hence the obvious virulence of the attack by the conservative internal and external forces against that nationalized state presence in the Amazon territory. It will be a long struggle with numerous battles along the way.

[To be continued in Part V, the final section]

[1] See the newspaper El Día, “Coca y cocaína en el Tipnis,” 13 January 2012.

[2] See the newspaper Los Tiempos, “Gobierno anuncia creación de regimiento ecológico de las FFAA,” 7 August 2012.

[3] See the newspaper El Diario, “Senadores cruceños plantean uso de pasaportes para ingresar a SantaCruz,” 16 March 2006.

[4] Apparently a reference to the ancient Maya center, known from Mayan inscriptions as Waka', and known today as El Perú, which was once an important economic and political center of the Mayan world and formed one corner of a triangle of major sites that also included Calakmul (Mexico) to the north, and Tikal to the west. – Tr.

[5] Eraclio Bonilla Editor, La Cuestión Colonial, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá, 2011. See also “Consolidación del Orden Colonial,” inHistoria general de América Latina, III, 2, Unesco/Editorial TROTTA, España, 2001 and M. Carmagnani; A.Hernandez; R. Romano (Coordinadores), Para una Historia de América I: Las Estructuras, Colegio de México/FCE, Mexico City, 1999.

[6] Rossana Barragán, Espacio Urbano y Dinámica Étnica. La Paz en el siglo XIX, Hisbol, La Paz, 1990.

[7] As is seen, for example, in this quotation from Raúl Prada (in the article “En torno al TIPNIS”):

“The TIPNIS conflict has illustrated the new political, social, economic and cultural fronts that have emerged in the critical context of the process: on the one hand, defending the rights of Mother Earth, are the originary indigenous nations and peoples, especially the movements and organizations of the indigenous peoples as such, with their own forms of organizations, forms of representation, rotating leaderships, their own norms and procedures, ancestral institutions and native cosmovisions, supported by new adolescent and urban movements and by historic movements such as the regantes, the water and gas warriors; on the other hand, supporting the section of the highway through the TIPNIS, are the campesino organizations, those organized in unions (CSUTCB, CNMCIOB “BS”, CSCIB); the entire compesinoconglomerate, led to some extent by the cocalero federations. This entire ensemble, more or less unified, but differentiated and plural, motley as it is, which was part of the so-called “popular bloc,” and that now finds itself rising in the runaway ascent of a new emerging bourgeoisie, nouveaux riches and new intermediaries in the circuits of capital, the merchants, genetic modifiers, smugglers, traffickers, including those involved in narcotrafficking, in constant displacements toward unexpected alliances with the agro-industrial interests of Santa Cruz, the intermediary bourgeoisie, the banks, the transnational enterprises in hydrocarbon and mining, the Brazilian construction firms and the Brazilian government….”

[8] Hans van den Berg, La tierra no da así nomas. Hisbol, La Paz, 1993.

[9] Karl Marx, El Porvenir de la Comuna Rural Rusa, Pasado y Presente, México 1980; Karl Marx, Cuaderno Kovalevsky (newly published in Spanish), Ediciones Ofensiva Roja, La Paz, 1989; Los Apuntes Etnológicos de Karl Marx, Siglo XXI/ Editorial Pablo Iglesias; Spain, 1988. [In English, see Teodor Shanin, Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and ‘The Peripheries of Capitalism’, New York, Monthly Review Press, 1983, and Lawrence Krader (ed.), The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Assen, The Netherlands, Van Gorcum & Comp. B.V., 1974. – Tr.]

[10] Karl Marx, Capital, Book I: The Process of Production of Capital, Vintage, New York 1977.

[11] Ana Esther Ceceña, Hegemonía, Emancipaciones y Políticas de Seguridad en América, Programa Democracia y Transformación Global, Lima, 2008.

[12] See Salomón Rivas Valenzuela, “Las maravillas del precámbrico,” publisher unknown, Santa Cruz, 2007. And check out Jevan Berrangé, “The eastern Bolivian mineral exploration project. Proyecto Precámbrico,” in Episodes, Vol. 1982, N°4.

[13] Through the reversion and expropriation of lands, the state has recovered around 2 million hectares. And through the restructuring of lands, about 10 million hectares in the lowlands have been recovered for the indigenous peoples and peasant communities.

[14] In those three departments, 45% of the representatives in the Plurinational Legislative Assembly come from social movements. Similarly, in the departments 21.4% of the departmental assembly members are from social movements.

Alvaro Garcia Linera: Geopolitics of the Amazon - Part III: The historic demand for construction of a road to unite the Amazon valleys and plains

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 04:52:00 +0000

[To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here.Translation by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left]

The historic demand for construction of a road to unite the Amazon valleys and plains

But first let us analyze the history of the demand for construction of this highway that would have to pass through the TIPNIS. Is it true that it is part of a sinister plan for “inter-oceanic corridors that would pillage the forests and suck us into the vortex of the Brazilian empire,” as the recipe of some NGOs would have it?[1]

The historical need for a road connecting the Andean zone with the Amazon region, through what used to be called the “Mountains of the Yuracarees,” now the Isiboro-Sécure park, dates back more than 300 years.

In 1763, the Royal Court of Charcas, with the intention of expelling the Portuguese who were repeatedly invading the left bank of the Iténez river, ordered that a route directly connecting Cochabamba with Moxos be explored. The objective was initially military in nature, to put an end to the already expansionist attitude of the Portuguese who were trying to occupy the province of Moxos. The route between Cochabamba and Moxos (Beni), without passing through Santa Cruz, would allow rapid movement of troops against the Portuguese advances.

The Jesuits report that in the early 1700s there had been a road that went from Colomi, the Ajial, descending to the Mission of Santa Rosa and the Mission of Loreto (in the province of Moxos). They assert that it took about six days to travel along the road bringing in “a load of flour, wine, baskets of biscuits and other things for the Mojos.”[2] Beginning in 1766, a number of expeditions taking this route as a reference were carried out from Tarata, Colomi in the lowlands and from San Ignacio in the plains of Moxos. In 1781 a secure and stable transit route was established between the regions, which functioned for a little less than a decade until it was gradually abandoned on the ground that it lessened trade between Santa Cruz and Moxos and reduced the spiritual attention provided to Moxos by the Bishop of Santa Cruz.[3]

The strictly geopolitical arguments both for the construction of this road and for its rejection call for the closest attention. On the one hand there were those who favoured a road to join the central Andean region with the immense and unreachable Amazon region (and precisely for that reason the object of external ambition); and on the other hand there were those who opposed the road in order to defend the economic and political-spiritual power that the established elites in Santa Cruz exercised over Moxos. These two counterposed readings have returned 250 years later in the debate over the highway through the TIPNIS, but with new actors.

Between 1790 and 1825, when the independent Republic was established, there were various attempts to find new lines of communication between the two regions, although none were successful in obtaining the necessary funds. In 1825 the Liberator [Antonio José de] Sucre ordered that the settlers in Cochabamba be consulted about the most important measures that the Liberator [Simón] Bolívar could implement in the region’s interest. The response was the linking of Cochabamba with Moxos.[4] The result of these decisions is not known, but all indications are that lack of resources and political instability stifled the strategic outlook for the territorial cohesion of Bolivia. Years later, Bolivia lost about 191,000 km² of the Amazon (War of Acre) from what had been initially part of the independent Republic.

In 1832, the French explorer Alcide D’Orbigny returned to travel these routes from Moxos, passing between the Isiboro and Sécure rivers, that is, the present National Park in the lands of the Yuracarés, to arrive at Cochabamba, leaving some detailed accounts of the geography and inhabitants of the region.[5] In 1915, settlers in Beni, in a letter to the President of the Republic with an extensive argument against the abandonment of the region, again posed the need for construction of the road between Cochabamba and Trinidad. Starting in Colomi, they argued, “there is an old road from there to the confluence of Sesarsisama with the Isiboro, port Sucre, 160 km approximately, or 210 km from Cochabamba. In Moleto a wide path has been opened for 25 to 30 km [and] from there to San Lorenzo, a mission town on the Sécure, there is no road or path, for a distance of about 125 km, and from Sécure to Trinidad [there is] meadowland with a road that is passable in the dry season.”[6]

In 1920, under Decreto Supremo of 2 October 1920, Bautista Saavedra announced the opening of the “Cochabamba to Moxos” road under the Regiment of Zapadores.[7] This regiment was under the command of the then Colonel Federico Román, and at the end of 1920 left Todos Santos in the Chapare, heading for Moleto. Initially they were to cruise along the Eteremasama river, later the Isiboro river, and then, 35 kms north of the river, arrive at Moleto. This part of the journey was not difficult because “there was a path” that was widened. From there they had to travel along the Ichoa river and later walk “approximately 14 leagues through the midst of the forest” to arrive at the Sécure river, in a journey that took 49 days. Later they set off toward the north-east and after 20 days “it was as if a large window had suddenly opened to let the light come pouring in on the tired soldiers”; they had arrived at the meadowlands of Moxos. From there they headed to San Lorenzo and later to Trinidad.[8] Notwithstanding the efforts made, the route did not go further and Román and his Zapadores were later assigned to work on the route that would unite Cochabamba with Santa Cruz.

In 1928, a member of parliament from Beni, in a memorable speech, stated: “Bolivia has been given the harshest lesson with the lack of attention to the eastern region…. The disaster of Acre, this loss of 191,000 km², is a severe blow to Bolivia, and the greatest offense to the invitations to create works that would bind the nation….” The deputy then raised the need not only for a road between Cochabamba and Beni, but also that the railroad that was to connect Cochabamba with Santa Cruz should also follow a route from the Chapare to Beni.[9]

When the Chaco War erupted, the country as a whole was called on to defend this territory. In one of the most self-sacrificing mobilizations, troops of young soldiers recruited in Guayaramerín, Riberalta, Cobija and Rurrenabaque were initially deployed to Trinidad and from there, going up the Ichilo river, they reached the Chapare, in the port of Gretel, and later Yapacaní and Santa Cruz. This column of about 7,000 Beni soldiers, under the command of the then general Federico Román, which was to defend the country in late 1933 and early 1934, used rivers and routes previously travelled between Beni and the Chapare to reach San Carlos, Santa Cruz and later the Chaco.[10] Years later, in 1998, the Yucumo-San Borja-San Ignacio-Trinidad section was declared fundamental route 602 (D.S. 25134); in 2003, the National Highway Service incorporated the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway as a route complementary to the Fundamental System of highways (D.S. 26996); and on 24 October 2003 President Mesa enacted Law No. 2530, which established authorization for the Executive Power to seek funding for the construction and paving of the Cochabamba-Trinidad highway. Finally, in 2006, a Law of the Republic again established the construction of this road as a priority.[11]

IIRSA: The farce of empty chatter

I have mentioned some of the numerous antecedents of this highway in order to refute the fallacy that its construction is intended as part of the IIRSA plan to “subject our peoples.” This highway was proposed as a strategic necessity to unite the altiplano and the Amazon centuries before the existence of the “geopolitics of the IIRSA”; and if one has the courage and intellectual honesty to take a careful look at a map of Bolivia, he or she will realize that if indeed there is some measure that disrupts the present geopolitics of foreign occupation of the Amazon, it is precisely the construction of this road.

The IIRSA Plan was designed to create inter-oceanic corridors linking eastern Brazil with the Pacific Ocean and the markets of Asia. The Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway does NOT link the main trunk road of the country (La Paz-Cochabamba-Santa Cruz) with any Brazilian highway or motorway. Trinidad is 338.6 km from the Brazilian border — yes, 338.6 kms from the highway closest to Brazil! No shipment of Brazilian soy or lumber will reach any port with this highway, the only things that will reach Trinidad or Cochabamba are Bolivian persons and products, which at present take two or three days to go from one place to the other, but with the new road will do this in four hours.

It has been said that the IIRSA Plan subjects entire regions to the expansionist plans of the Brazilian economy. What the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway will do is establish the presence of the Bolivian state in the Amazon where, in its absence, what predominates are the existing powers, the landlords and lumber companies (many of them foreigners). Up to now, in fact, in the Amazon border regions the children attend classes and listen to the radio in the Portuguese language.

The highway will be like a staple force uniting two regions of the country separated from each other for centuries; their dissociation allowed the loss of territories a century ago and more recently the substitution for the state of illegal actors, hacendados and foreigners. So it involves a mechanism for achieving territorial control of the geography by the state and the establishment of sovereignty.

If there is any danger of submission to external powers, it is precisely the absence of a state in the Amazon. In the highlands, the substitute for this absence was the communal-state or trade union-state; that is, by the communal self-organization of society that took on the management of local community issues, internal political affairs and the social protection of their members. But in the lowlands, in general, and in the Amazon region in particular, this absence of the state in terms of rights and protection has resulted in the formation of the landowner-despotic power over the communities and the indigenous peoples and the subsequent penetration of foreign powers which, on the pretext of “protecting the Amazon,” the “lungs of the world,” etc., have extended an extraterritorial control — via some environmentalist NGOs — over the continental Amazon, considered the largest reservoir of water and biodiversity in the world.

The major enemy of the presence of the protector state in the Amazon region at present is the international imperial-corporate structure, which has converted environmental management in the world into the most lucrative deal in favour of the industrialized countries of the North and the biotechnology companies. Today not even the Latin American states have as great a presence in the Amazon as these companies, research institutes of European and North American universities, and NGOs funded by other governments and by those same foreign enterprises.[12]

What is paradoxical and shameful is that some “environmentalist leftists” mouth off about the famous IIRSA Plan without understanding that behind their furious rejection of the state presence they cover for the now unobjectionable presence of foreign governments and companies in control of the Amazon. In fact, the real danger in the Bolivian Amazon regions is not the IIRSA — that exists only in the fevered imagination of the environmentalists — but the actually existing rule of the industrialized capitalist countries over the Amazon resources as an environmental reserve purchased to compensate for the destruction of the environment in the North. The camouflaged threat is that USAID and the U.S. State Department will make us think that the Amazon belongs to “everyone,” when in reality what they are saying is that it belongs to their government and their companies. The danger is that state sovereignty will be replaced by the foreign alienation of territorial control in the Amazon, and that the right-wing environmentalist discourse will legitimate the absence of the state using the argument of environmental protection.

The accusations that the famous Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway is supposedly part of the IIRSA Plan are ridiculous and intellectually decadent. It was not and never will be! The existing official documentation for this Integration Plan, published from 2005 to 2010, makes no reference to this highway.[13] It refers to sections to complete the highway from Puerto Suárez to La Paz, but in no document is there any mention of entry to Moxos. The map available from the IIRSA is really quite eloquent about the highways that are of interest to the organizers of that project, and one will not find there any route from Villa Tunari to Moxos.

Where is the famous highway that is going to subject us to the geopolitics of the IIRSA? Where is the highway that “is intended to hand over the Amazon to foreign agro-export businesses”? The Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos route is not in the IIRSA Plan. Those who disparage this revolutionary government, as well as the officials of the NGOs opposed to its construction, are well aware of this. They are all equipped with offices with internet connections, they know how to read and to interpret maps. However, they all yell in unison, on all sides, “IIRSA,” “IIRSA,” “IIRSA.”[14]

Why are they lying to the people? Why are they misleading society with their insults and falsehoods? Why are they resorting to such deceptive means to make their case? What class of writers are these people, who for months have been sounding off and spilling so much ink with the phantom of the “geopolitics of the IIRSA”[15] or of the “IIRSA highway,” when they know that it has never been incorporated in that project? What lies behind this hysterical discourse based on a lie? At what point does reason go missing and give way to insults and deliberately misleading statements?

A farce of empty chatter. That is the naked truth about the infamous campaign that seeks to associate the Villa Tunari-Moxos highway with the IIRSA. And falling for it are many gullible people in various parts of the world who, more on the alert for the disqualifying adjective than for the truth, have been caught up in a dark scheme of tricks and camouflage. Sun Tzu[16] recommended that we “beat the drums to the left” in order to “attack on the right”; and here, concerning the highway to Moxos, a whole rightist coalition has accused the Government of “submitting” to corporate and foreign requirements when in reality they are the ones who, with their lies, end up being the most servile defenders of the business, hacendado and imperial interests — precisely the ones opposed to nationalization of the Amazon territory.

Very well, but does that mean we do not need to protect the environment? Of course we need to do that! Our Constitution says so and we have enacted extraordinarily advanced laws along those lines. The Government as a whole is concerned with balancing the need for generation of wealth in order to redistribute it, with the obligation to preserve the procreative nucleus of the natural basis of the planet. But that is a decision and a task of OUR state, of our legislation, of our Government and of our public state policies. The Amazon is ours, it belongs to Bolivians, not to North Americans or Europeans, nor to the companies or NGOs that claim to be “teaching us to protect it.” If they want to protect the environment, let them do so with THEIR forests, rivers and hills, and not meddle in how we decide to care for our own natural surroundings.

After all, if the European companies and the U.S. government are so concerned about the environment and the conservation of the world’s forests, why do they not stop consuming wood and drastically reduce their auto industry and all types of production that emit CO₂into the environment? Why not stop importing minerals whose production contaminates the natural environment? Why not stop importing foods whose production promotes deforestation of millions of hectares of jungle? If they were to close those markets we would drastically reduce deforestation and global warming, and there would be no need to blame the poor countries, as they are now doing, to make them shoulder the burden.

Are we Bolivians having problems with the protection of Mother Earth? Probably. But those are difficulties that we ourselves will know how to resolve; we will never accept the principle of shared sovereignty in any piece of Bolivian territory. Whoever at this point is opposed to the presence of the state in the Amazon is in fact defending the presence in it of the United States. There is no in-between position: that is the dilemma in which the fate of control over the Amazon region is being played out in Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil.

Characteristics of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway

Now let us look at the characteristics of this highway. First, it is 306 km long, and will allow the area’s inhabitants to reduce the travel time from the plains to the Andean valleys by 90%. The existing southern end, 103 km, is unpaved. The existing northern section, 143 km, is also unpaved. This means that only 60 of the 306 km, less than 19% of the total, does not yet exist as a highway section.

But we should add that 116 km of the highway would have to cross through the Isiboro Sécure park,[17] 56.6 km of which now exist as a passable road, and 42.6 km as a passage for cattle; that is, within the TIPNIS there now exists as an unpaved road 85% of the total length that is to be constructed. So we are talking about an extension through the forest that requires opening barely 16.7 km to unite the Amazon with the valley.

As the reader will appreciate, the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos highway is not going to destroy a “virgin forest,” because within the Parque Nacional 85% of this stretch of highway already exists; and if we take into account the width of the highway, the total number of hectares of forest that would be affected is 200. Also, in order not to affect the core of the Park and the mobility of the living creatures within it, the plan is to build an ecological highway in this 16.7 km section (the gradient could be raised or in some cases the highway could run underground).

In President Evo’s recent trips with reporters from various media, they have verified that to go from the Chapare to Moxos the only viable route is the one that goes through the centre of the Parque Isiboro-Sécure, since on the right side and beyond it we have countless lakes, bogs, permanently flooded areas, ravines and rivers that continually change their course, which makes a stable route for travel technically impossible. And on the left side, there is a steep mountainous area, equally or more unstable than what there is in the stony area in the present Cochabamba-Santa Cruz highway.[18] The natural setting is such that the only viable and natural route for travel between the valleys and the Amazon plains is the one that crosses through the TIPNIS. And in fact that is the route that was used by the Yuracaré indigenous nation, the Jesuits and all the settlers who over the last 400 years sought to unite the two regions.

Of course we all want to protect the environment, and there are numerous examples in the world of highways that cross through natural parks without destroying the habitat: the Parque Braulio Carrillo in Costa Rica, the Parque de Protección Alto Mayo in Peru, the Parque Nacional Los Cuchumatanes in Guatemala, Tahoe National Forest and Yellowstone National Park in the United States, the Naturpark Homert in Germany, the Parque Naturel Régional du Vercors in France, and many more.

Some people, resorting to the classic racist and criminalizing arguments, point out that the damage to the TIPNIS is not the physical construction itself, but the use that the highlands Quechua-Aymara indigenous-peasants are going to make of the highway. They argue that the park will be invaded by peasants who “will clear the forest and grow coca for narcotrafficking.” We have been hearing those prejudices voiced by the U.S. government and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration], in order to expel peasants in years gone by, as well as by the landholding elites of the lowlands as a means of discourse of cohesion and conservative regional legitimation in opposition to the presence of indigenous peoples from the highlands. But that the same arguments are used by some environmentalists or pseudo-leftists denotes an irreparable intellectual poverty. Three linked fallacies can be distinguished in this prejudice, and we will now list them.

[To be continued]

[1] This can be gathered, for example, in the following quotations:
“Since 2003, the highway has been part of the IIRSA corridor from sea to sea linking Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Peru, parallel to the Secure Petroleum Bloc, on which the petroleum firm Repsol signed a contract with the government of Bolivia in 1994, purchasing the rights of exploitation for 30 years. Awarding continuity to the IIRSA plan, the Morales government enacted Law No. 34777 of 22 September 2006, which provided: ‘A national and departmental priority is declared to be the development, from the Study to the Final Design and construction, of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos section, accompanying the Cochabamba-Beni highway of the Fundamental Road System….’; “Costos sociales y ambientales de la Carretera Villa Tunari - San Ignacio de Moxos,” Anuario del Servicio de Noticias Ambientales SENA-Fobomade, 2010.
“Inasmuch as the mega-initiative of the IIRSA has been clearly and repeatedly rejected by the Indigenous peoples and social organizations in both its spirit and the form in which it is being developed, the ABC [Administradora Boliviana de Carretereas, the highways department] and the Ministry of Public Works continue to promote the inter-ocean corridors with few or no measures of social and environmental protection…. Among the highways packages is the construction of the San Ignacio de Moxos-Villa Tunari highway, which crosses the Parque Nacional y TCO Isiboro Secure (TIPNIS), which is the subject of a recently enacted law endorsing the contract for the completion of its construction by OAS, a Brazilian company….”; Marco Octavio Ribera Arismendi, “Crónica ambiental 2007-2011: Retrospectiva y actualización de problemáticas priorizadas”. LIDEMA, La Paz, 2011, pp. 141-142.

[2] Testimony of Father Felipe de Rojas, Cochabamba, 14 April 1765, in Hans van den Berg, En Busca de una Senda Segura. La Comunicación Terrestre y Fluvial entre Cochabamba y Mojos (1765-1825), PLURAL/Universidad Católica de Bolivia, La Paz, 2008.

[3] “En busca de una senda segura...”, op. cit.

[4] “In July, Sucre made the same request to the commune of Cochabamba, seeking information on the measures that Bolívar could implement to the benefit of the region, especially the steps to be taken to remove the obstacles to the progress of agriculture, industry, trade and the arts. Three days later, the cabildo replied with a petition asking that the system of potable water be improved, that taxes on urban and rural property be lowered, and that the businessmen in the city be allowed to deal directly with the region of Moxos instead of channelling all legal trade through the city of Santa Cruz” – William Lee Lofstrom, La Presidencia de Sucre en Bolivia, Caracas, 1987. Also, in 1826, the Liberator Sucre approved the Law of 13 October, which word for word established, in its first article, that it authorized “the executive power, through adjudication of lands, concession of privileges to the settlers now under its protection, and other appropriate means, to promote the opening of the road from Cochabamba to Yuracarés and Mojos.”

[5] “Viaje a la América Meridional,” op. cit.

[6] Propuesta para Apertura, Arreglo y Conservación del Camino de Cochabamba a Trinidad por Corina, Isiboro, Moleto, Sécure y San Lorenzo: El Heraldo, Cochabamba 1915.

[7] The Supreme Decree of 2 October 1920, of the Bautista Saavedra government, establishes in article 1 that “all the Yuracaréz families living in the forests of the region of that name and those who, having fled the missions and industrialists, remain in the forests, should form village nuclei on the road that the Zapadores Regiment is opening from Mojos to Cochabamba.”

[8] Rodolfo Pinto Parada, Rumbo al Beni, Proyecto de Pavimentación Carretera Santa Cruz Trinidad [Proposed paving of a road from Santa Cruz to Trinidad], La Paz, 2001.

[9] M.E. Saucedo Sevilla, member of parliament for Trinidad, Cercado e Iténez, La Vialidad Chapare-Beni, Páginas parlamentarias [parliamentary record], La Paz, Bolivia, 1928.

[10] Rumbo al Beni…, op. cit.

[11] Law No. 3477, of 22 September 2006. Art. 1, “The development of the study and final design and construction of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos section, accompanying the Cochabamba-Beni highway, is declared a national and departmental priority of the Fundamental Road System.” Gaceta de Bolivia.

[12] Thus, some NGOs have become the means for the developed capitalist countries to attain territories and resources which otherwise could not be attained without negotiations or agreements with other national states. Those resources are biodiversity, genetic matter, minerals, oil, gas and strategic territories. It is easier to negotiate with an indigenous people through a local NGO, funded by another country, than to establish a state-to-state relationship. That is why the NGOs finance projects. Or does anyone think that cooperation by Europeans or, worse, USAID, is intended to provide resources for a “civilizing alternative to capital,” for “another possible world,” for “post-capitalism” or the specter of “communism”? Of course not! On the contrary, those capitalist countries and their agencies reveal an imperialist attitude; suffice it to look at the focus of the projects of USAID and the U.S. State Department in reference to the indigenous peoples. Their documents show the intention of purchasing the loyalty and defence of the latter in the news media. Also manifest is their objective of turning the indigenous peoples against the Revolutionary Government of Evo Morales: “La Embajada de los Estados Unidos: Canapés y Territorios Indígenas,” Periódico Plurinacional Nº 6, Vicepresidencia del Estado, La Paz, August, 2011.

[13] http://www.iirsa.org/index.asp?CodIdioma=ESP.

[14] As can be appreciated in the following quotations:
“The history of the highway has to do with the project of the South American Regional Initiative (IIRSA); the IIRSA has its origin in the first summit of the Presidents of South America held August 30-September 1, 2000 in Brasilia…. The IIRSA contemplates inter-oceanic corridors linking the Atlantic with the Pacific, making possible the transportation of merchandise between the two oceans. While the argumentation explaining the IIRSA project speaks of integration between the countries involved, voices have been heard from the beginning charging that the project is part of the strategy for domination by the United States of America, and there have also been criticisms of the project as part of the expansion of the emerging power of Brazil. The highway that crosses the TIPNIS forms part of the inter-oceanic corridors, and accordingly of the IIRSA project as well….” (Raúl Prada, “La defensa de los derechos de la Madre Tierra en el TIPNIS”. 15/08/2011.)

“This megaproject is beneficial above all to the big Chinese, U.S. and now Brazilian companies, so this highway is part of the IIRSA. There are other things too that are being violated, in relation to the environmental issues and biodiversity, now that we know there is an exquisite biodiversity in this sector, but it is important that citizens begin to realize that we have to defend places like that.” (Ajax Sangüeza, President of Fobomade, in an article, “Fobomade se une a defensa del Tipnis y rechaza la construcción de la carretera”, published in La Patria, 9 August 2011.

[15] Phrase of Pablo Dávalos in the comments on “Debates que tejen emancipaciones”, by Ana Esther Ceceña, published in Rebelión (26/05/2012). Available at: www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=150260.

[16] Referring to the Chinese general and philosopher Sun Tsu, who wrote “The art of war.”

[17] The Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (PNIS) was created under Decreto Ley (DL) No. 07401 of 22 November 1965. Later, under Decreto Supremo 22610 of 24 September 1990, the PNIS was recognized “as indigenous territory of the Moxeño, Yuracaré and Chimán peoples, who have inhabited it since ancient times, constituting the necessary socio-economic space for its development” and from then on its name changed to that of Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS).

[18] Informe Técnico; reconnaissance of the area of construction of Section II of the Villa Tunari-San Ignacio de Moxos Highway, by Gabriel Durán, Eng., 2012.

Alvaro Garcia Linera: Geopolitics of the Amazon - Part II: Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 23:26:00 +0000

[To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here. Translation by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left]

Capitalist subsumption of the Amazon indigenous economy

Finally, in addition to the vertical nature of this despotic power there is a territorial dependency of the regional power structure itself. The major part of the Bolivian Amazon lies in the department of Beni, and the major productive activities in the region today are ranching, timber extraction and chestnut harvesting.

It is estimated that there are 3.5 million head of cattle in Beni, 41% of the national total. The historic markets for this production, which powers the activity of small and medium ranchers and farming communities, are the highlands of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí, and the Cochabamba and Chuquisaca valleys. However, the meat processing chain is not situated in the area where most of the production occurs. Although the cattle are raised in Beni, the final sale and processing are carried out in Santa Cruz. So while a three-year-old calf costs 2,315 Bolivianos (Bs.)[1] in Beni, the same animal is worth Bs. 2,790 in Santa Cruz, and that is where more than 90% of the Beni cattle are processed. Thus the producers in Beni are subordinated to intermediaries who deliver the cattle to Santa Cruz, and in addition to the price of the processed meat, which regulates the market price of the chain of cattle production both downward (to the rancher in Beni) and upward (to the final consumer), they are in the hands of a business stronghold well-known for its right-wing political trajectory. The three largest slaughterhouses in Bolivia are in Santa Cruz: Fridosa, owned by Beltrán de Lazo; Frigor, owned by Monasterio; and the Chiquitano abattoir. These slaughterhouses regulate the price of meat nationally. Thus the major economic activity in the Amazon region, which depends almost exclusively on meat processing, is dependent on a small group of businessmen who not only hold this Beni regional production captive but also fix the prices of cattle on the hoof and of meat for mass consumption by families.

Something similar occurs with the other extractive activities in the Amazon. If you take a close look at the origin of the businessmen, warehousemen or marketing companies in the country, a large number come from Santa Cruz;[2] and the transportation and processing of the products of these activities, and with them the generation of major volumes of added value, are carried on outside of Beni.

On the whole, we are dealing with a business bloc that emerges from big hacienda property and has begun to diversify its productive activities, consolidating itself in the semi-industrial processing of raw materials and livestock from the Amazon. This bourgeoisie, a participant in the despotic-hereditary rationality of the old Amazon power structure, has inherited all of the habits of the landlord class: the abusive relationship with the peasants and indigenous peoples, a violent local authoritarianism, the hereditary link with the state power, and the conservative mentality. In some ways it reminds one of Marx’s comment, in reference to the feudal landlords who became businessmen in 19^th century Germany, that “The mode of living, production and income of these gentlemen [...] gives the lie to their traditional pompous notions.”[3] Irremediably reactionary thanks to their ownership of land, their mode of living and political action, but completely bourgeois in their entrepreneurial economic activity.

This has enabled them to divide their conduct toward the indigenous peoples. When it is matters of land occupancy or the organization of local political life, the landowner despotism is what prevails; the indigenous peoples and peasants are treated as one more accessory of their property, and they unscrupulously impose their opinions on them with no negotiation whatsoever. But when it involves business, as in the purchase of timber, chestnuts, alligator skins or livestock, this bourgeoisie is capable of subordinating its racist prejudices to market logic and establishing mechanisms of market domination through which it has always considered the indigenous peoples as its vassals or inferiors. This mercantile “generosity” has meant that the relations of domination over the indigenous peoples have been reworked and formally subsumed under capitalist development.[4]

The relation between hacienda land ownership and capitalist production in the east and the Bolivian Amazon has led to a specific way of formally subsuming the non-capitalist work of the small peasants and indigenous producers to capitalist relations through the imposition of a specific type of land rent.

The agro-industrial–agrochemical-merchant capitalist nucleus subordinates the non-capitalist agrarian modes of production through the imposition of prices at the time of sowing, harvesting and marketing of the cultivated or harvested products, and through the monopoly of processing (timber, chestnuts) and credit. This applies to soy, sugar, cattle, sunflowers, sorghum, corn, and to timber, chestnuts and alligator hides. To some extent the actual development of Beni, sustained by cattle raising, is limited by the huge transfer of regional rent to the elite that monopolizes the processing of the meat and the fixing of its sale prices on a national level. This is an elite that derives rent from distribution (but not in production) and is thus a landholding class in itself.

Hence it is no surprise that the major separatists have been the agro-industrialists Marinkovic, Monasterios, Matkovic, Costas, Nayar, etc., who still possess huge expanses of land, their wealth derived primarily from this appropriation of the rent of the land, and not so much from the possession of the land — which in reality is unproductive — which is why it was subject to reversion. Generally speaking, there are very few production units of more than 5,000 hectares devoted to agriculture and major cattle-raising lands are scarce as well, given the 5 hectares per head of cattle required by law. The lands are usually for fattening the herds, and their ownership is maintained until roads are built, improved or projected (as in the case of the Lowlands project), after which they are sold parcel by parcel both to small and medium producers and to Mennonites, Brazilians and Russians. That is the process, for example, in the impressive parcelling out of land (50-200 hectares) in the north and east of Santa Cruz (San Julián, Cuatro Cañadas, Montero, etc.).

On the other hand, making the most of the relations and hierarchies of class and nationality, the business-landowner class has integrated the management of the indigenous TCOs into the supplying of raw materials for their industrial activities. A large number of the TCOs in the lowlands sell wood illegally to the lumber companies and the infinite number of sawmills that exist in their interior, generating a market subsumption of these Community Lands to extractivist business activity through the application of various mechanisms of extra-economic coercion that reduce purchase costs and raise business revenues. A significant number of the leaders of the indigenous marches of 2011 and 2012, such as [Fernando] Vargas and [Youci] Fabricano, hold formal indictments for the illegal sale of wood going back years, including the sale of wood from the TIPNIS itself,[5] considered until recently as the “lungs of the world”; lungs now perforated by the illegal extraction of wood and leather, as if by nicotine-induced cancer.

And insofar as the indigenous peoples have not invaded the processes of transformation of raw materials that exist in the large new indigenous territories, the timber, alligators, chestnuts, rubber or fish products continue to be purchased by the lumber mills and landholding businesses at ridiculous prices and under the same “enabling”[6] modalities of the traditional economic and social dependency of the past. The same thing is happening in the growing provision of other means of existence (sugar, salt, flour, clothing, steel tools, gasoline, etc.), that the enabler, hacendado, businessman or merchant provides to them; and, holding the monopoly for the transfer of these products, delivers them to the indigenous peoples for 5 to 10 times more than the market price.

In a short period of time, millions of hectares of the TCOs that are located in a large part of the Amazon are being newly integrated within the mechanisms of seigniorial and hereditary domination by the businessmen-hacendados who use the leaders as intermediaries for the depredation and economic dependency of their communities. We have termed this formal subordination of the TCOs and the parks to the generation of profits for businessmen-hacendados the subsumption of indigenous territories and natural resources to internal capitalist accumulation. And when the TCOs and national parks are subject to the circuits of capitalist accumulation (profit) of foreign companies, we speak of a subsumption of indigenous territoriality and nature to external capitalist accumulation. The Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure is no exception to this situation of formal subsumption of the indigenous economy and of nature to capital accumulation.

The Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure (TIPNIS)

The TIPNIS is an area of the Amazon located on the border between two departments: southern Beni (an entirely Amazon department) and northern Cochabamba (region of valleys). It contains a diversity of ecosystems thanks to its widely varied altitudes, the outstanding ones being the rain forests known as the Bosque Nublado de Ceja, the Bosque Húmedo, the Bosque Pluvial Subandino, the Bosque Húmedo Pedemontano, and the Bosque Húmedo Estacional, and the marshy palm groves, flood plains, and bogs of Cyperáceas as well as a large number of lakes.[7]

For more than a hundred years the determination of the limits between the two departments was the source of numerous regional conflicts, and one of the reasons why Barrientos, the military dictator, issued a Decree (No. 07401, 22 November 1965) declaring a zone situated between the Isiboro and Sécure rivers a National Park (PNIS).[8]

In 1990, in the wake of the indigenous peoples’ march of many lowlands peoples, another decree[9] was issued creating the Territorio Indígena, which was to include the entirety of the national park. Seven years later, on April 25, 1997, the Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA, the agrarian reform institute) issued resolution 000002, which created the legal entity known as the Tierra Comunitaria de Origen (TCO).[10] But because indigenous peasants of the valleys as well as ranchers were present within it, an executive order, the Título Ejecutorial TCO-NAL 000229, was issued in June 2009, during the seneamiento process that recognized 1,091,656 hectares as belonging to the TIPNIS TCO.[11]

The principal inhabitants of the Parque Nacional Territorio Indígena Isiboro-Sécure are the following three indigenous nations:

1. The Moxeña-Trinitaria nation.

It is said that the Moxeño people originate from the Arawak people, who are thought to have developed the great hydraulic culture of the Amazon plains. They are the major population within the TIPNIS, and they engage in agriculture and cattle-raising, in addition to hunting, fishing and gathering. They maintain some links with the market, especially in Trinidad, that are now part of their basic strategy of economic reproduction. They are organized on the basis of the nuclear family.[12]

2. The Tsimán (or Chimán) nation.

This is a people who rebelled against the Jesuit reservations; their present economic structure is based on agriculture, hunting, fishing, gathering and the sale of calves. They also work as labourers for the cattle ranches and the forestry companies.

3. The Yuracaré nation.

This is the oldest nation in the southern Amazon region. The Spanish Jesuits encountered them initially when they ventured into this zone in the late 16^thcentury.[13] Their present economic activity is centered on agriculture and fishing with regular links to the market. Their organization is centered on the nuclear family.

While all the communities are engaged in agriculture, there are some that apply a pattern of special occupation that involves the settlement, relocation and formation of new communities.[14] According to reports in the 1990s, about 40% of the communities assessed in 1992 had disappeared a decade later. However, in recent years there has been a major consolidation of large communities owing to the dynamic growth of agriculture partially linked to the market. The major products of the indigenous economy are rice, cassava, corn, bananas, cacao and fruit trees.[15]

According to the data in the 1993 First Indigenous Census, Isiboro-Sécure Pilot Area, of the 4,563 inhabitants of the Park 68% were Mojeño, 26% Yuracaré, 4% Tsimán and the remaining 2% of other ethnic origin.[16] The results of the 2001 Population and Housing Census showed a reduction in the indigenous population of the TIPNIS lowlands to 3,991 persons as of that date.[17]

As regards the system of internal organization — on the basis of the nuclear family — of these peoples, the cabildo (a type of community assembly) is the organizational form among the Mojeños; in the case of the Yuracarés and Tsimánes, however, the organization is more flexible, and is oriented around the leaders of the family and communal clans.[18] It was not until 1987 that a supra-communal organization arose, the TIPNIS Subcentral, followed later by another in the southern zone of the Park, the CONISUR. These were the bodies that were most representative of the lowlands indigenous peoples within the TIPNIS.[19]

Apart from these indigenous nations that inhabit the National Park, there are two populations that also live in its interior (one of them is also of indigenous origin, but from the highlands):

4. Aymara-Quechua Andean migrant population.

The presence of Andean indigenous peoples in what is now the southern region of the TIPNIS goes back to pre-colonial times, but it was in the early 20^th century, and particularly from the 1960s on that this increased. Beginning in the 1970s a road was built that extended to the Yuracaré community of Moleto within the National Park.[20] The majority of the inhabitants of Aymara-Quechua origin are organized in community agrarian unions affiliated in turn to centrals and the peasants’ federation. They are agricultural and occupy about 92,000 hectares, or 7% of the total area of the TIPNIS.

5. “Creole” population of Beni.

Within the Park as well there are approximately 25 cattle ranches in a 32,000 hectare area located at the confluence of the Isiboro and Sécure rivers.[21]The local indigenous population is hired from time to time by the hacendados, who control the major flow of business in the local economy.

Along with all the traditional activities that the indigenous communities carry on in the TIPNIS, in recent decades they have expanded into other kinds of intensive economic activities directly linked to the industrial processing market: lumbering and gathering alligator hides.

In the case of the wood industry, the ones involved are the indigenous peoples with rights to the regulated use of the distinct varieties of trees that grow in the TCO, although because this is also a National Park there are legal restrictions on its indiscriminate use; obviously, in the absence of the state these cannot be enforced. According to the reports by the leaders themselves, it is clear that the major portion of the high volumes of the cutting and processing of wood in the TIPNIS is illegal and affects the entire territory.[22]In the recent trips we made there, we could make out roads, tractors, trucks and mobile sawmills within the so-called “nucleus zone” or “virgin zone.” Until a few months ago, there were various forest concessions in the interior. For example, the company ISIGO SRL had a concession of 34,307 hectares near the community of Asunta, and 34,937 hectares in Oromomo. The Huanca Rodríguez company held 24,869 hectares in concessions in the south of the TIPNIS, while another lumber company, SURI SRL, had 40,762 hectares in the same “virgin” nucleus of the National Park.[23]

As if that were not enough, there are various other forest concessions to companies like Cimagro, Hervel, Fátima B, Fátima A and PROINSA,[24]which safely and systematically induce these lowlands indigenous peoples themselves to pillage the forest within the TIPNIS, to supply themselves with wood, so that subsequently they can process and market the developed products in the local and international markets.

Likewise, the hunting of alligators is an activity carried on by the indigenous peoples, but one that is directly linked to business interests. It is estimated that each year 1,500 alligator hides,[25] after being processed, are converted into luxury articles for sale in European markets.

In the north-eastern TIPNIS, at the confluence of the Isiboro and Sécure rivers, three companies — Bolivian Leather, Bolivian Croco, and Sicuana Indígena SRL, responsible for purchasing the alligators captured by the indigenous peoples — process them for later sale.[26] Since there is no state presence in the Park, it is safe to asume that the number of alligator hides exceeds the number officially reported by these companies, making this activity a transaction that is negotiated between indigenous leaders and companies.

Also within the TIPNIS there is an airport for the exclusive use of wealthy foreign tourists, who for $7,600 can enjoy the use of a luxurious private hotel,[27] engage in private fishing and purchase the native handicrafts. Paradoxically, the indigenous peoples never use this airport, and the river has become their sole means of transport, along which it takes seven to ten days to reach a populated centre in which to make their own purchases.

Similarly, within the National Park, aerial photography has detected other clandestine landing strips, possibly linked to various illegal activities, mainly narco-trafficking.

As one can appreciate, while the TCO has allowed the ownership of the land and the use of its resources by the Amazon indigenous peoples, the major resources of the TIPNIS — alligators, forests, cacao — form the lowest and worst paid link in a chain of business procurement, processing and marketing. As in other regions of the Amazon, the work of the indigenous peoples (as providers of raw materials) and the natural wealth of the TIPNIS have beenformally subsumed in processes of capitalist production heavily integrated with international markets. Thus the community ownership of the land has also become the lowest link in the corporate chain of value production and capitalist accumulation.

Plurinational State and dismantling of the Business-Patrimonial power

This system of ultra-conservative regional power in the Amazon, constructed over more than a century, has only recently, since 2006, broken down. When the old ruling classes lost control of the national state to the popular indigenous-campesino social movements, the system based on landed estates suffered a mortal blow. The alliance of political power with hacendadolandlord and extractivist corporate interests, the material basis of the despotic regime in the Amazon region, was broken, creating a possibility of regional “dual power”: on the one hand the hacendado-business classes, on the other the government structure with power of decision over economic resources and lands, triggering increasing conflict and social struggle throughout the lowlands.

The revolutionary state put an end to the delivery of lands to the property-owning classes, took land away from the latifundistas and turned over a large share of this land to the ownership of indigenous communities and nations. From 1996 to 2005, 5 million hectares were granted to the indigenous peoples of the lowlands; but between 2006 and 2011, these grants amounted to 7.6 million hectares and an additional 1.4 million hectares were expropriated from the hacendados, radically transforming the structure of ownership in the Amazon region. While 20 years ago the medium-sized private companies possessed 39 million hectares, they now have only 4.1 million hectares.[28]However, this structural modification in property relations on the land has not been sufficient to dismantle the despotic hacendado-business power, since there is a need to dismantle the supply and corporate processing mechanisms that are strangling the indigenous peoples’ economy.

Hence the revolutionary government, in addition to modifying the structure of land-holding, which dissociated the routine of the hacienda from state action, has promoted state mechanisms of regional governance that operate independently of the dominant bloc in the territories, facilitating resources to the municipalities, credit to the campesinos and investment funds to the indigenous peoples, and establishing supply firms that regulate the prices previously monopolized by the local employers, providing means of water transportation for peoples living along the rivers, building public roads (previously the property of hacendados), etc. And since the state in the last five years has tripled its investments and social expenditures, its presence has begun to be felt independently, in the form of rights, cash transfers and redistribution of wealth, whereas in past times the little that the people had was thanks to the “favours” of the local bosses, the political machine, or the NGOs.

The state has operated independently of the land-owning classes and that has initiated a process of collapse of the old conservative managerial order in the Amazon. An intense class struggle has begun to unfold, and little by little it is reconfiguring the new regional power relationships. The presence of a state detached from the land-holding classes, expressed in social rights and with the function of redistributing the expanding common resources, has dealt a mortal blow to the hacendado-patrimonial structure in the Amazon, triggering an intense struggle for reconfiguration of territorial power in the region. To a certain extent it can be said that since 2006, with theGovernment of social movements and President Evo Morales, a kind of democratic revolution has occurred from “below,” based on the initiatives of the campesinos, indigenous peoples and popular urban sectors, and from “above,” from the state, that is now helping to unfetter and deploy the vital energy of the peoples and popular social classes in a region characterized until quite recently as being the most conservative in the country, dominated by a regime of despotic hacendado power.

As in any revolutionary process, the state not only condenses the new correlation of political and economic forces of the emerging society, of the successful social struggles, but in addition becomes a material and institutional subject that helps to promote new social mobilizations that transform the structures of domination still present in certain regions and spheres of the society. The present role of the Government of social movements in the Amazon, Chiquitanía and Chaco, in which previously there existed modes of hereditary domination based on ownership of the land, is precisely that: to help clear the road for the local popular and indigenous forces to deploy their emancipatory capacities in opposition to the prevailing regional powers.

This rising revolution in the regional power relations in the Amazon, Chiquitanía and the Chaco, has unleashed a violent and aggressive counter-revolutionary reaction. In the case of Chiquitanía and the Chaco, landlords like Anderson or Monasterios participated directly in the attempted coup d’état of September 2008, when they tried to create a parallel government in the four lowlands departments: Pando, Beni (both of them in the Amazon), Santa Cruz and Tarija. And in fact these same actors, in complicity with outside powers that do not want to lose extraterritorial power in the Amazon, are the ones that were behind the recent TIPNIS marches.

[1] The Boliviano (BOB), or Bs, currently trades at approximately 7 to 1 U.S. dollar. – Tr.

[2] For a history of the rubber hacendados-businessmen in the early and mid-20^th century, including Añez Romero, Suárez Arana, Soruco, Franco, Zambrana, Velasco, Justiniano, Landivar Roca, Toledo Suárez, Kreidler, Amelunge, Elsner, El Hage, Durán Ortíz, Roca Ayala, Vaca Diez, Monasterio Da Silva, Bowles Darío Gutiérrez, etc., see Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Caucho Ignorado, Editorial El País, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 2010. According to the author, a major share of these families who settled in the Amazon north to engage in rubber production are native to Santa Cruz.

[3] Karl Marx, “The Trial of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats,” February 8, 1849, in Marx & Engels Collected Works, Vol. 8, p. 323.

[4] On the concept of formal subsumption and actual subsumption of the work process and production process under capitalism, see Karl Marx,Capital, Book I, Chapter 6. [In English, see also Marx, Capital Vol. I (Vintage edition, 1977), Appendix: “Results of the Immediate Process of Production.” – Tr.]

[5] Qué se esconde detrás del TIPNIS. La Paz, 2012.

[6] “Enabling” (habilito) has to do with the advance in money and cash to initiate an undertaking that, in the case of the lowlands peoples, is converted into an advance on future production or ownership of raw materials that are found in the TCO (wood, chestnuts, rubber, etc.).

[7] Vargas, Cynthya; Molina, Wilder; Molina, Miguel, “El territorio indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure (TIPNIS) en un escenario con la carretera San Ignacio de Moxos-Villa Tunari. Análisis de los posibles efectos sociales, ambientales y políticos de la carretera en el TIPNIS.” Project MAPZA-GTZ, 2003.

[8] Decreto-Ley Número 07401, Gaceta de Bolivia.

[9] Decreto Supremo Número 22610, 24 September 1990, Gaceta de Bolivia.

[10] Variously translated in English as “Original Community Land,” “Native Communal Land,” “Traditional Communal Land,” or some other combination of these terms. Often just “TCO” in English. – Tr.

[11] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica para el Desarrollo Integral y Sustentable del Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure. TIPNIS, Ministerio de Medio Ambiente y Agua, Servicio Nacional de Áreas Protegidas, Cochabamba, July 2011.

[12] Ibid., p. 23.

[13] Hans Van den Berg, En Busca de una Senda Segura. La Comunicación Terrestre y Fluvial entre Cochabamba y Mojos (1765-1825), PLURAL/Universidad Católica de Bolivia, La Paz, 2008.

[14] “Dos concepciones del territorio: indígenas y colonizadores en la zona de colonización del TIPNIS”, in Orozco, Shirley; García Linera, Álvaro; Stefanoni, Pablo. “No somos Juguete de Nadie”. Análisis de la relación de movimientos sociales, recursos naturales, Estado y descentralización. Agruco/COSUDE/NCCR Norte-Sur/Plural, La Paz, 2006.

[15] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica, op. cit.

[16] Quiroga, María Soledad; Salinas, Elvira, “Áreas protegidas y territorios indígenas en la Amazonía boliviana”, Grupo de Reflexión y Acción sobre el Medio Ambiente, mimeo, La Paz, 1996.

[17] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica, op. cit.

[18] “Dos concepciones del territorio: indígenas y colonizadores...” op. cit.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica... op. cit.

[21] Ibid., p. 29.

[22] Attached to the official web page of the CIDOB, until June of this year, was a denunciation of the illegal sale of a substantial amount of wood in the TIPNIS to logging companies by the leader Marcial Fabricano between 2000 and 2003.

[23] Qué se esconde detrás del TIPNIS, op. cit.

[24] Evaluación Ambiental Estratégica… op. cit. p. 173.

[25] Ibid., p. 170.

[26] Qué se esconde detrás del TIPNIS, op. cit.

[27] Ibid.

[28] INRA, Informe 2012.

Alvaro Garcia Linera: Geopolitics of the Amazon - Part I: Revolution and counterrevolution in Bolivia

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 02:09:00 +0000

Bolivian leader replies to critics of the Morales government’s development strategy

Introduction and translation by Richard Fidler, Life on the Left

Álvaro García Linera is one of Latin America’s leading Marxist intellectuals. He is also the Vice-President of Bolivia — the “co-pilot,” as he says, to President Evo Morales, and an articulate exponent of the government’s policies and strategic orientation.

In a recent book-length essay, Geopolitics of the Amazon: Patrimonial-Hacendado Power and Capitalist Accumulation, published in September 2012, García Linera discusses a controversial issue of central importance to the development process in Latin America, and explains how Bolivia is attempting to address the intersection between economic development and environmental protection.

The issues he addresses are of great importance not only in Bolivia but throughout Latin America, and in fact in most of the countries of the imperialist periphery. They are especially important to understand in the “First World,” where there is an increasing campaign in parts of the left to turn against the progressive and anticapitalist governments in Latin America on the ground of their alleged “extractivism.”

García Linera examines the classic Marxist criteria on the forms of appropriation of nature by humanity. “Extractivism,” he shows, is not synonymous with underdevelopment. Rather, it is necessary to use the resources gained from primary or export activity controlled by the state to generate the surpluses that can satisfy the minimal conditions of life of Bolivians and to guarantee an intercultural and scientific education that generates a critical mass capable of assuming and leading the emerging processes of industrialization and economic development.

A major theme of the book is to refute the allegations in the opposition media that the TIPNIS highway between Cochabamba and Beni is intended for the export of Brazilian products to the Pacific via Bolivian territory. The book clearly demonstrates that the route is intended as part of the national unification of the country.

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted wide attention throughout Latin America. In a recent review, the eminent Brazilian sociologist Emir Sader says “it refutes each and every one of the allegations of the opposition in his country and their international spokespersons.” He describes it as “an essential book, without which it is not possible to understand the present phase of the Bolivian process and the root of the conflicts affecting it.”

The book has sparked fierce debate in Bolivia itself, including a lengthy response by Raúl Prada Alcoreza, a former comrade of García Linera in the Comuna collective.

There is an extensive literature on these issues now being produced in Latin America. Another example is a book, El desarrollo en cuestión: reflexiones desde América Latina. It includes articles by some of the authors cited in the debate between García Linera and Prada.

Geopolitics of the Amazon has attracted commentary in Quebec, including a favourable review by André Maltais in the widely-read L’aut’journal. A compendium of articles by the legendary Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui recently published in Quebec also includes writings by Álvaro García Linera. More of his texts may be found on-line (Spanish only) on his web site.

Starting in today’s post, I am publishing my translation of the full text of Geopolitics of the Amazon. Because of its length (more than 25,000 words), I will publish it in five consecutive posts in coming days. To see the Table of Contents, click here. A glossary of terms and acronyms appearing in the text will be found here.

García Linera’s footnotes are included as well as a few of my own, the latter signed “Tr.” I have substituted English-language references, where available, for texts cited in the notes.

Muchas gracias to Federico Fuentes and Cristina Rojas for their diligent and critical reviews of my draft translation. I am of course solely responsible for the final text, published here.

– Richard Fidler

* * *

Geopolitics of the Amazon

**Patrimonial-Hacendado power and capitalist accumulation**

The whole course of the ... revolution ... strikingly confirmed one of Marx’s profound propositions: revolution progresses by giving rise to a strong and united counter-revolution, i.e., it compels the enemy to resort to more and more extreme measures of defence and in this way devises ever more powerful means of attack.

V.I. Lenin[1]

I want to welcome the initiative taken by Ana Esther Ceceña, and all the comrades who have commented on her article,[2] in opening the debate around the present political situation in Bolivia. The thoughts of each of the participants not only demonstrate the interest and greater or lesser revolutionary engagement with the events, but also help to shed light on the complexity of the political processes and possible ways to advance them.

Revolution and counterrevolution

It was Lenin who pointed out that any real revolutionary process will generate an even greater counterrevolution. This means that any revolution must advance in order to consolidate itself, but in doing so it arouses forces opposed to its advance that block the revolution, which in turn, in order to defend and consolidate itself, will have to advance further, arousing even greater reactions from the conservative forces, and so on indefinitely. In Bolivia, in the last 12 years, we have experienced an ascending revolutionary process which, emerging from organized civil society as a social movement, has affected and traversed the state structure itself, modifying the very nature of civil society.

This is a revolution that is political, cultural and economic. Political, because it has revolutionized the social nature of the state, having enshrined the rights of the indigenous peoples and given concrete expression to those rights through the actual occupation by the indigenous peoples of the state administration. We are talking about an act of social sovereignty that has made possible the conversion of the indigenous demographic majority into a state political majority; a modification of the social and class nature of control and hegemony in the state. This is in fact the most important and significant transformation in the country since its birth, a country characterized until very recently by the exclusion of the indigenous citizenry from absolutely all of the decision-making structures of the state. But it is also a radical political and cultural revolution, because this indigenous imprint on public decision-making as a state power has been the work of social movements and organizational methods derived from the trade-union, communal and plebeian nature of the indigenous-popular world. That is, the presence of the indigenous-popular world in the conduct of the state since 2006 has been concretely expressed not as a mere individual occupation by indigenous and popular representatives within the state but as an organic transformation of the state institutionality itself through the presence of organizational structures of the indigenous-popular community in the decision-making and deliberative structures of the state. Whereas during the last 100 years the masses built the citizenship of rights through their trade unions (and thus we used to speak of a trade-union citizenship),[3] now the takeover of state power by the social movements is a takeover of the state power by the union. And that is why the election today of authorities of the executive, legislative or judicial organs in fact proceeds fundamentally through processes of deliberation and the assembly-like structures of the agrarian unions, the rural communities and guild, popular and neighbourhood organizations of the society.

And we say economic revolution, because within a short historical period the structure of ownership of social resources and of their uses has been radically modified. Until seven years ago, Brazil, along with three oil companies, controlled 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbons and 30% of the GDP, while the state controlled only 16%.[4] But today, the Bolivian state controls 34%[5] of the GDP and 100% of the ownership of hydrocarbons throughout the chain of production. More than 10 million hectares in the hands of latifundistas, politicians and foreigners have been recovered by the state and handed over to indigenous peoples and peasant communities, putting an end to the latifundist nature of the lowlands agrarian system. Now that the hydrocarbon, electrical, telecommunications and in part the mining and metallurgical industries have been nationalized, the economic surplus, previously concentrated in a handful of foreign and private firms, goes directly to society through rents, cash transfers, services and productive state investment. In 2011, 1.2% of the GDP[6] was transferred directly to the most vulnerable sectors of the country (children, seniors and pregnant women) through this system of social protection. While in 2005 only 629 million dollars annually were invested because the economic surplus went abroad, today the state governed by the social movements invests just over 5 billion dollars, and with that we have beaten illiteracy;[7] in the rural diaspora, the difference between rich and poor has been reduced by exactly one half,[8] while the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty has fallen from 38.2% (2005) to 24.3% (2011).[9]

But, you will say, “obviously the structure of ownership of the means of production and public assets has changed, and the distributional structure of the economic surplus has been transformed, but the mode of production has not been altered.” And of course, fundamentally it has not been altered. How can we expect that a small country that defends itself day after day from the counterrevolution, organizes the unification of a profoundly fragmented and corporate-dominated society, carries out the most important political revolution in its history, alters the structure of ownership and economic distribution, all within six years — yes, within six years — can, in isolation, change a mode of production that took more than 500 years to establish itself and continues to expand even today? Isn’t it intellectually nonsensical to demand this, in this space of time? And does it not demonstrate a mistake of basic historical location? Isn’t it more sensible to discuss what type of tendencies are being driven forward in Bolivia to promote a transformation in the mode of production, in tune with the changes that each of us is making in other countries with the same objective? We will return to this question at the end.

Each of the political and economic changes that have been achieved within the country’s revolutionary process has directly affected the foreign governments and corporations, capitalists, business people, elites and privileged social classes that have been monopolizing the material assets of the society, the political resources of the state, and the symbolic assets of social power. The dismantling of racial whiteness as capital, as a material component (or “asset”) of the class structure and class domination (so characteristic of all colonial societies) has smashed not only a centuries-old racialized imaginary of command over the indigenous peoples, but has also eroded a property, an “asset” that for centuries allowed a small caste to acquire power and legitimacy in the systems of political-cultural command and economic ownership.[10] This classist decolonization of society, anchored in the deeper habitus of all social classes, has radically modified the structure of political power and has unambiguously displaced the constituent dominant classes of the old state. This has led to the enraged reaction of the old ruling elites seeking to weaken and overthrow the government of President Evo Morales by every means: economic (freeze on bank deposits, 2006; sabotage of production, 2007-09, food boycott, 2007-08), political (sabotage in the Constituent Assembly, 2006-08; referendums in the autonomous regions, 2008; presidential recall vote, 2008), and armed (attempted coup, 2008; separatism, 2009).

There has not been any governmental measure in favour of equality, national sovereignty or redistribution of wealth that has not had a counter-action from the conservative forces. And in this inevitable reaction to the revolutionary measures it is possible to single out two forms:

First, the one in which the forces displaced from economic and political power act as an organized class body with its own spokesmen, slogans and organizational forms. Examples are the energy and food boycotts launched by factions of the foreign and national business community, acting as an organized political force through its federations or confederations, in opposition to the government measures. In this case it is relatively easy for the social movements to figure out the difference between popular and anti-popular objectives and to polarize the conflict; accordingly the key to confronting the counterrevolution lies in the reaffirmation of popular unity against their class enemies and the use of democratic and revolutionary methods to achieve victory.

Secondly, there is the type of measures in which the reactionary forces act in a diffused way, indirectly, and through popular or middle-class social sectors. In this case, the contradiction does not assume a polarity between popular and anti-popular forces but is contained within the popular movement itself, that is, it occurs “among the people” as Mao Tse-tung would say,[11] and the counterrevolutionary forces are in control, complicating the correct handling of the contradictions.
In that case, the reactionary action does not have a conservative class subject, but it channels its expectations and needs, taking advantage of the mobilization of the segment of the popular camp itself that, in its attachment to corporatist or individualistic perspectives — often without realizing it — serves the interests of its own enemies who by and large will end up turning against them. To some extent it is a strategy of colonial mobilization and domination: using the contradictions within the popular bloc to set two factions of the popular forces against each other from within and materially and symbolically establish the domination of the “dominant third party” upon the exhaustion and defeat of one or both of them. This is what happened in the colonial invasion of the continent. That is how colonial domination was consolidated, and how the republican peace was imposed on the emerging neocolonial states. A less euphemistic variant of this logic of intra-popular confrontation is the one used by the news media, portraying conflicts with great drama and media hysteria in order to mobilize “public opinion” against popular governments.

The tragic course of history so unfolds that the counterrevolution can come hand in hand with a faction of its own builders which, without necessarily advocating it, may as a consequence of the exacerbation of its corporatist, regional or sectoral particularism, and without taking into account the general configuration of overall social forces nationally and internationally, end up defending the interests of the conservative forces of the right and undermining its own revolutionary process. That is precisely what came to happen with the so-called “TIPNIS march.”

The Amazon and patrimonial despotic power

When one observes Bolivia’s geography, four regions can be clearly distinguished: the altiplanicie [high plateau], which comprises the departments of La Paz, Oruro, and Potosí; the valleys, in Cochabamba, Tarija, and Chuquisaca; the Chaco, south of Santa Cruz and east of Tarija and Chuquisaca; and the immense Amazon, which includes the departments of Pando, Beni, the north of La Paz and Santa Cruz.

One third of Bolivia is Amazon, and it is by far the most isolated region of the country. Whether through wars or unjust treaties, Bolivia has lost some 750,000 km²of its Amazon,[12] an area equivalent to more than three times that of the department of Beni (213,564 km²). The highest number of indigenous nations in Bolivia live in the Amazon region, but the population density is low; according to the latest Population and Housing Census (2001), less then 4% of the total indigenous population of Bolivia lives in the lowlands, and in particular in the Amazon.

The heirs of great hydraulic cultures, the indigenous nations of this region were not central to the organization of domination during the Colonial period, and can be said to be part of the vague colonial frontier; thus the institutions of colonial domination of both lands and labour force, which transformed the economy and society in the lowlands and the altiplano, had only a marginal presence in the Amazon, which was considered a “frontier.” However, the institution that did take on the job of recruitment and elusive discontinuous domination over the Amazon indigenous nations was the Catholic Church, through the “reducciones” [confined reservations] of the Jesuits and later the Recollets and Franciscans.[13] The Jesuits managed to capture peoples throughout Chiquitanía (Chiquitanos), Moxos (Moxeños, Trinitarios, Yuracarés, etc.), and also in the Chaco, but intermittently between what is now Bolivia and Paraguay. In 1767, the Spanish Crown expelled the Jesuit missions; by 1830 they were partially replaced by the Franciscans in their presence on the Amazon frontier. The reservations were authentic artisanal fortresses built to assemble the indigenous population who were hunted down in the jungles, “tied up and then taken to the missions, often to Concepción or Santiago de Chuiquitos,”[14] and it was there that the indigenous souls were moulded and their productive habits modified. While the missions were unable to control the Amazon territory, its natural resources or social organization, they did manage to permanently alter the political, spiritual and economic organization of a great many nomadic indigenous nations. The missions were precisely the point of departure for the annulment of the traditional religious authorities, the institution of the cabildo, and the gradual transition to a sedentary lifestyle of the Amazon peoples. For example, the Jesuit production schemes favoured approaches that were almost ascetically capitalist (they incorporated accounting, registries, reinvestment, dimensions, schedules, days, proportions, in various industries such as agriculture, tile and brick making, ceramics, weaving, cattle raising, etc.). Nor should we forget that the Jesuit reservations were to a large degree self-sufficient and sold their surpluses.

After the abandonment of the Jesuit missions and the decline of the other missions in the 19^th century, the republican state presence in the Amazon was weak. For example, it was not until the early 20^th century that the Sirionó were permanently contacted; the Ayoreos continued to be nomads to a large degree until the Seventies; and it was not until the battle of Kuruyuki (1892) that the colonial-republican state finally managed to “defeat” the Guarani, notwithstanding that relations with them date back to very early in the Colony. Even after the founding of the Republic, the Brazilians were crossing the border to capture Indians as slaves, without the state being able to prevent this activity.

In reality, it was at the end of the 19^th century, in the republican stage (when, through the institution of the hacienda, enclave economies were established for the harvesting of rubber, quinine, chestnuts and wood), that a generalized offensive was launched against the indigenous peoples of the Amazon through the expropriation of their territories, their forced recruitment as labourers and the definitive subjugation of their political and cultural structures. It is estimated that in the case of rubber alone — in the first peak period (1870-1917), the second (1940-47) and the third (1960-70) — some 6,000 persons with their families[15] were employed in rubber tapping. In the course of all those years, about 80,000 persons were displaced throughout the Amazon region, from Santa Cruz to Beni and Pando especially.
In the early 20^th century, rubber accounted for up to 15% of state income.[16] All of this wealth generated through the harvesting of rubber was the product of the rubber tappers, the majority of them indigenous peoples who were forcibly recruited and trafficked by dozens of businessmen — both Bolivians and others of German, Portuguese, English and Japanese origin:

“It is common knowledge that the indigenous peoples were forced to work for meagre pay which in many cases simply went to the sustenance of the rubber tapper but not his family if he had one. Especially given the exorbitant prices of the products they received in return. In other cases, as frequently happens , they were baited with alcohol to take other advances and articles from the company store, false pretences being used to bind them to a lifetime of exploitation. With the rising debts, the lying pretences would stretch like bubble gum.... And even worse, when the rubber tapper died, his debts were passed on to his wife or children as an abusive inheritance imposed by the bosses and contractors under the applicable Debt Law.... In 1914, the newspaper La Voz del Pueblo, commenting on this malicious pettifogging, reported: ‘There have been cases in which indigenous peoples have left for the rubber regions and when one died the boss went back to the deceased’s home village to present the widow with the imaginary debt, violently taking away the sons of majority age and, if there was no family, throwing her out of her miserable hovel in payment of what she was alleged to owe.’...”[17]

From the second half of the 19^th century to 1938, there was a kind of political trial of strength between the ranchers, rubber producers and government authorities, on the one hand, and the Franciscans on the other, to get the latter to “lend” indigenous peoples for production (of rubber in the north, and for harvest and seeding in the south) and to work in public works. Finally, in 1939 the missions were secularized, supposedly because of the death of an engineer at the hands of the Siriono. The description of this people in Holmberg’s classic book[18] dates from the second decade of the 20^th century, when they were still nomadic. The Ayoreos engaged in major migrations during the Chaco War, fleeing to the north as a result of the pressures on them in the war.

While the huge territorial expanses subject to the semi-nomadic wanderings of some of the Amazon indigenous nations allowed the existence of family systems of production and autonomous authority, they could not prevent the consolidation of the territorial power of the landowners, ranchers and private resource extraction firms which over the last century became established as a real power in the Amazon. The consolidation of this estate-based land ownership in the Amazon regional power structure occurred at a time when the governing mining and latifundista elites of the highlands were founding — so to speak — the extractivist latifundist, and later Amazon ranching, enclaves along with the state structure. The republican state thereby became a latifundist state and the private latifundio became a regional power of the state, giving rise to the hereditary nature of the state power in the lowlands. Strictly speaking, the state abdicated its class “autonomy” and became an extension of the family legacy of the businessmen and latifundistas. Thus, through ranching and the extraction of rubber and quinine, now chestnuts, lumber, or simple possession of lands, big landowners and businessmen have over the last 150 years consolidated a landholding and hereditary territorial power structure over all the urban and rural inhabitants of the region. The state would delegate regional political power to the landowners, for whom the ownership of political life would be yet another of “the assets” of the estate or company; and the state would receive a portion of the rent of the land from the extractivist activity in the Amazon. In the early 20^th century, this rent accounted for 5 to 15% of the state income.

The agrarian structure of Santa Cruz prior to 1952, described by Nicolás Laguna,[19] is a mould that with slight variations recurs in the Amazon regions of Beni and Pando, including since 1952:

“The big landowners (between 20 and 50,000 hectares or more, only small portions of which were cultivated and on which they generally had no title) were the hacendados, who preferred to call themselves finqueros. Their haciendas were not commercial plantations but instead nearly autonomous and self-sufficient productive units, relatively isolated, in which the use of machinery and improvement of the land were almost non-existent. The hacendado and his family lived on them with their workers who remained there throughout the year. The self-sufficiency of the finca enabled the finquero to live well and obtain whatever he did not produce with the small income he got in exchange for selling his surpluses in the local market. Those living and working in the finca were the jornaleros [labourers] who, in exchange for a house and meals, and in some cases a wage, were to cultivate the employer’s lands; in addition, they might work small parcels (no more than a hectare) for themselves. There were also pequeños propietarios [small proprietors] (no more than 20 hectares, generally 8 to 10, of which no more than 5 were cultivated), who were few in number and cultivated the land with their families, seeking self-sufficiency and independence, although normally they performed odd jobs during harvest and seeding. The inquilinos [tenants] rented lands (one to three hectares) from the finqueros in exchange for 10 to 20% of their production, cultivating lands that the finquero was not using in order to bring in some extra income without too much effort or loss. The tolerados [“tolerated ones,” or colonizers], the true pioneers of the east according to Heath, occupied lands in the unoccupied strips of the fincas and cultivated them until they were evicted. The finqueros allowed these occupations for a time since the tolerados cleared the forest, planted fruit trees, improved the area and were hired as jornaleros at harvest and seeding times. Conditions had hardly changed since the time of the prospectors of El Dorado or Gran Paitití; the security and prestige of the finqueros, whose wealth counted for little in any other part of the country, based themselves on ownership of the land and servitude, spending practically their entire income to maintain the traditional form of life to which they were accustomed. The land had no value in commercial terms (which is why no one took the trouble to acquire legal title) and was non-negotiable in terms of status, security and self-sufficiency.”

In the Amazon, until fairly recently, the employer or hacendado was the lord of everything within his purview, using the violence of paramilitary forces to occupy lands and impose his law over the surrounding peons, indigenous peoples and poor peasants.[20] To the degree that power was structured around the land and its violent occupation, a conservative employer logic — the most conservative in the country — prevailed in the Amazon region. And consistent with this the hacendados, lumbermen, landlords and their intermediaries had established, since the beginning of the republican state, a sort of pact with the rulers to exercise, through their family and local networks, a limited state presence in the area; lands, state resources and impunity had become to a large degree the hereditary form of the state in the Amazon. As such the state appeared as an extension of the family influences of a small hacendado, rubber, rancher and lumber elite, wielding state violence to legitimize and impose their ownership as employers over the population.

This patrimonial-hacendado power in the Amazon is even now the most conservative and reactionary form of regional domination existing in the country as a whole. In a certain form, the figure of the landlord personifies the most despotic powers in existence: not only is he the owner of the land, he is also the one who hires workers and purchases wood from the forest, the provider of market goods to the remote populations, and the influential politician whose family monopolizes public responsibilities and as such is the provider of public lands and public favours to a population that is lacking in everything: lands, property, public authority and the state. So the landlord is not infrequently as well the axis of popular rituals such as the celebration of festivals and weddings or the one who determines whether and where your children will be educated. The entire warp and woof of hereditary colonial power converges in the figure of the hacendado and his ubiquitous and paternal command. And while the dispersed indigenous organization has maintained its local autonomy at the level of its small towns, councils, union centrals and subcentrals, it has not managed to convert itself into a leading force at the local or regional level, much less challenge the hereditary-landowner authority and command structure.

In fact, faced with the ongoing hacendado-corporate encroachment, the indigenous communities, in order to be able to preserve some part of their territorial occupation, have had to come to terms with the structure of dominant landowner power in a subordinate and vertical manner, as do the other popular classes. Hence the very discourse of legitimation and regional identification has been until recently that issuing from the nucleus of the regional employers’ power.

In the Amazon, then, it is not the indigenous peoples who have taken control of the territorial power, as occurred years ago in the highlands and valleys, where the peasant unions and communities have performed the role of indigenous micro-states with a territorial presence, and in reality were the material foundation for the construction of the present Plurinational State. In the Amazon region, things occurred in a very different way. The despotic landowner order predominates and neither the indigenous organizations nor the peasants or the workers of recent creation have managed to create an organizational or discursive counter-power that begins to crack this hereditary-landowner system.

A partial modification of this system of despotic landowner domination has been produced by the NGOs, which have managed to create a clientelist relationship with the indigenous leadership, promoting levels of interregional organization like the Regionales Indígenas or the CIDOB itself.[21] But to the extent that those levels of organization, with little contact with the Amazon indigenous bases, function exclusively with external (NGO) funding, which pays the salaries of the leaders, in reality they actually develop as NGOs, reproducing mechanisms of clientelist cooptation and ideological and political subordination to the funding agencies, most of them European and North American, as in the case of USAID.[22]

While in the first world countries NGOs exist as part of civil society — in most cases funded by transnational enterprises — in the third world, as in the case of Bolivia, various NGOs are not really NON Governmental Organizations but Organizations of Other Governments on Bolivian territory; they are a replacement for the state in the areas in which the neoliberalism of the past initiated its exit, encompassing such sectors as education (through the attempts at privatization or through the convent colleges) and health (for example, Prosalud of USAID). The NGO, as an organization of another government and possessor of financial resources, defines the subject matter, the focus, the line of funding, etc. based on the priorities of this other government, constituting itself as a foreign power within the national territory. It could be said that the neoliberal system in the periphery has been shaped between a state that is reduced in its capacities and its power of economic and cultural intervention (through privatization and downsizing), NGOs that have replaced it in specific areas (social, cultural, struggle against poverty, indigenous peoples, environment, etc.) and a private foreign economic sector that has been appropriating public resources.[23]

In fact, some NGOs in the country have been the vehicle for introducing a type of colonial environmentalism that relegates the indigenous peoples to the role of caretakers of the Amazon jungle (considered extraterritorial property of foreign governments and corporations[24]), creating de facto a new relationship of privatization and alienation of the national parks and Communitarian Lands (TCOs) over which the state itself has lost custody and control.[25] In this form, whether by means of the hard power of the property-owning despotism that controls the processes of intermediation and semi-industrialization of Amazon products (lumber, alligators, chestnuts, rubber, etc.) or through the soft power of the NGOs, the indigenous nations of the Amazon are being economically dispossessed of the territory and politically subordinated to external discourses and powers. In short, economic and political power in the Amazon is not in the hands of the indigenous peoples or the state. Power in the Amazon is in the hands, in part, of a landowner-business elite, and in part, of foreign businesses and governments that negotiate the care of the Amazon jungles in exchange for a reduction in taxes and control of biodiversity through their biotechnology.

[1] “Lessons of the Moscow Uprising,” Complete Works, Volume 11, p. 172. [Note by editor: “Lenin cites the proposition put forward by Marx in his Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I, Moscow, 1958, p. 139).”] – Tr.

[2] “Debates que tejen emancipaciones,” by Ana Esther Ceceña, published in Rebelión (26/05/2012). Available at: www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=150260.

[3] “For the workers, mainly miners and industrial workers, for at least 50 years (1940-1990) the union was the organizing network of class identity and accumulation of experience as a class... the assimilation of class experience came exclusively through the union, and that, in the last analysis, was all the workers had with which to confront life, repression and death. The union was the sole enduring place in which to experience the ups and downs of collective existence; it was the sole ongoing network of support, friendship and solidarity, and the authentic place in which to assert themselves as a collective body. What the workers did in history from 1940 to 1990 was done as trade unionists; the union was the instrument of their struggle, in which they made a revolution (and that is no small thing), they won rights, they won healthcare and housing, they protected their families, they buried their dead. Hence its durability and pre-eminence in the construction of working-class memory....” – Álvaro García Linera, “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad. Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia,” in Tiempos de rebelión, Comuna y Muela del Diablo, La Paz, 2001.

[4] Public enterprises 1% and Public administration 15%. (UDAPE)

[5] Public enterprises 19% and Public administration 15%. (UDAPE)

[6] UDAPE, Informe 2011.

[7] In 2006, 823,256 of the country’s inhabitants were illiterate, but by 2008, thanks to the “Yo, sí puedo” Literacy Program, 824,101 people had been taught to read and write, and Bolivia was that year named a “Territory Free of Illiteracy.” In 2009 it started up the National Post-Literacy Program.

[8] In 2005, the richest 10% of the population earned 30 times more than the poorest 10%, while in 2009, the richest 10% earned only 15 times more than the poorest 10%. (UDAPE and INE)

[9] UDAPE, Informe 2011.

[10] On the concept of ethnicity, in this case “racial whiteness” as a form of capital and of the material components of the class structure in colonial societies, see Álvaro García Linera, “Espacio social y estructuras simbólicas. Clase, etnicidad y estructuras simbólicas en la obra de P. Bourdieu,” in Bourdieu Leído desde el Sur, Alianza Francesa/Instituto Goethe/Universidad de la Cordillera/Plural editores, La Paz, 2000.

[11] “Two types of social contradictions — those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people themselves — confront us. The two are totally different in their nature.... In the conditions prevailing in China today, the contradictions among the people comprise the contradictions within the working class, the contradictions within the peasantry, the contradictions within the intelligentsia, the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry, the contradictions between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the intellectuals on the other, the contradictions between the working class and other sections of the working people on the one hand and the national bourgeoisie on the other, the contradictions within the national bourgeoisie, and so on.... The contradictions between the enemy and us are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic...” On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, Speech delivered by Mao Tse-tung, February 27, 1957.

[12] To Brazil, by treaties (1867) and by the Acre War (1903), 490,430 km²; and to Peru, by diplomatic treaties (1909), 250,000 km².

[13] The purpose of the missions was to shield the indigenous peoples from “the dangers of turning into beasts” and to “improve them, that is, to humanize them through education as a first step toward their Christianization”: José de Acosta, “De procuranda indorum salute I”, quoted in Fran Helm, La Misión Católica durante los siglos XVI-XVII: contexto y texto; UCB/Verbo Divino/Editorial Guadalupe, Bolivia, 2002. In the case of the Jesuit missions, the objective of having control of the spiritual authority was combined with guaranteeing a stable economic base that would secure the maintenance of the catechumen [religious pupils] and avoid their dispersion. See F. Armas Asin, Editor; La invención del Catolicismo en América. Los procesos de evangelización, siglos XVI-XVIII, Universidad Mayor de San Marcos, Perú, 2009. Also, Jonathan Wright, Los jesuitas.Una historia de los soldados de Dios, Debate, España, 2005. On the presence of the Jesuits in Chiquitos and Moxos, see Javier Baptista, “Las Misiones de los Jesuitas en Bolivia: Mojos y Chiquitos,” in Manuel Marzal and Luis Bacigalupo Editores, Los Jesuitas y la Modernidad en Iberoamérica. 1549-1773, IFEA/Universidad del Pacífico/Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru, 2007. On the Franciscans, see Padre Fray Bernardino Izaguirre, Historia de las misiones franciscanas, 12 volumes, 1619-1921, Lima, 1922.

[14] Alcide D’Orbigny, “Viaje a la América Meridional”, Volume IV, PLURAL/IFEA/IRD/Embassy of France in Bolivia, La Paz, 2002.

[15] Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Caucho Ignorado, Premio Nacional “Serrano” 2009 de Investigación en Historia, Editorial El País, Santa Cruz de la Sierra, 2010.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Ibid., p. 112.

[18] Allan R. Holmberg, Nomads Of The Long Bow: The Siriono Of Eastern Bolivia, American Museum, 1969.

[19] “La burguesía cruceña. Concentración y centralización de capital y organización corporativa empresarial en el departamento de Santa Cruz (1988-2005)”. Draft thesis of Nicolás Laguna, Sociology, Universidad Mayor de San Andrés (UMSA), pp. 47-48.

[20] The borders of the haciendas were often defined in gunfights using hired thugs.

[21] CIDOB since its birth has depended on direct funding from international cooperation through NGOs. Thus the NGO APCOB (Apoyo para el Campesino Indígena del Oriente Boliviano) received money from USAID and the Ford Foundation through the NGO Culture Survival in the 1980s for the creation of the CIDOB, as did other indigenous organizations in Peru and Ecuador: Cultural Survival, Final Report, “Strengthening pluralism: a combined human rights/grass roots development program for Indians of Latin America and the Caribbean Basin,” 1987. In the 1990s, the director of IBIS-DINAMARCA said they supported the creation of CONAMAQ under the ethnic model of the CIDOB because they needed an organization of that type in order to be able to work cooperatively. Likewise, the CSUTCB was identified as a class organization with a discourse from the Seventies, with which they could not work. And in an OXFAM document we can read: “The ayllu is a form of Andean organisation [that maintains] principles... opposed to the peasant unions, which are organisational forms imposed on the ayllus [...].” Quoted in Andolina, Robert; Radcliffe, Sarah; Laurie, Nina, Development and culture: Transnational identity making in Bolivia, Political Geography 24 (2005) 678, at p. 695.

[22] The process of delimitation of TCOs and “social control” of the subsequent saneamiento process after 1996 was for the most part financed by the Danish bilateral cooperation organization DANIDA. From 2005 to 2009 this agency invested more than $13.36 million, of which $2.4 million was assigned to a technical project of the CIDOB, the Centro de Planificación Territorial Indígena (CPTI). In the highlands, the same scheme was applied with the NGO ISALP, which received $700,000 during the same period. Other NGOs like CEJIS and AVSF receive similar funding in the framework of other components of European assistance. U.S. funding did not participate directly in supporting the TCO but did in many wooded areas in the context of the BOLFOR project and the individualized pruning in areas of coca leaf cultivation, in collaboration with the European Union. (Source: Ministry of Foreign Relations, DANIDA 2004, Component 2: Saneamiento y titulación de tierras comunitarias de origen, Document Ref. No. 104, Bol.808.200, DANIDA).

[23] That is the project promoted for the poorest countries of the world by the World Bank and the IMF, supported by the United States and the European Union. It ensures that dependency is sustained, sovereignty is minimized or nullified and the transnationals appropriate the wealth of the world.

[24] This relationship between some environmental NGOs, the protection of parks, and the mechanisms of transnationalized capitalist accumulation, we will see a bit later.

[25] The process of saneamiento performed by the INRA was financed almost exclusively with foreign funds until 2008. The European cooperation agencies (of Denmark, Holland and the EU) undertook to pay 36% and USAID 23% of the costs in the planned areas (2008). The rest was distributed among agencies of the UN, multilateral funds, private interests and the Bolivian state. These proportions began to change in 2009, with the access of the applicants in communitarian lands to the resources of the IDH and an increase of funding from the TGN beginning in 2008, which among other things allowed the securitization of various applications by highland TCOs that had been rejected by external funding sources notwithstanding a formal application. (Sources: SIG database of the Deputy Ministry of Lands concerning INRA planning, 2008. Unidad de Planificación del INRA, 2011

Bolivia's address to UN climate talks: Our climate is not for sale

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Sun, 09 Dec 2012 03:53:00 +0000

The following statement was made Wednesday by Jose Antonia Zamora Gutierrez, Minister of Environment and Water for the Plurinational State of Bolivia, at the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP18).

DOHA, Qatar -- Mr. President of the COP, distinguished Heads of State of countries of the world, Ministers, Officials, delegates and representatives of social organizations, indigenous peoples and communities and farmers of the world, receive a greeting from the Plurinational State of Bolivia and our President Evo Morales Ayma.

The planet and humanity are in serious danger of extinction. The forests are in danger, biodiversity is in danger, the rivers and the oceans are in danger, the earth is in danger. This beautiful human community inhabiting our Mother Earth is in danger due to the climate crisis.

The causes of the climate crisis are directly related to the accumulation and concentration of wealth in few countries and in small social groups, excessive and wasteful mass consumption, under the belief that having more is living better, polluting production and disposable goods to enrich wealth increasing the ecological footprint, as well as the excessive and unsustainable use of renewable and non-renewable natural resources at a high environmental cost for extractive activities for production.

A wasteful, consumerist, exclusionary, greedy civilization generating wealth in some hands and poverty everywhere, has produced pollution and climate crisis. We did not come here to negotiate climate. We did not come here to turn the climate into a business, or to protect businesses of them who want to continue aggravating the climate crisis, destroying Mother Earth. We have come with concrete solutions.

The climate is not for sale, ladies and gentlemen.

Mr. President, the withdrawal of some developed countries of the Kyoto protocol and avoiding of their commitments is an attack on the Mother Earth and to life. The problem of climate crisis will not be solved with political declarations, but with specific commitments.

We will not pay the climate debt of developed countries to developing countries. They, developed countries, must fulfill their responsibility. While some developed countries do their best to avoid their commitments to solve the climate crisis, developing countries are making greater efforts to reduce emissions, and paying the price of a climate crisis and that everyday leaves droughts, floods, hurricanes, typhoons, etc.

The climate crisis leaves us poorer, deprives us of food, destroys our economy, creates insecurity, and createsmigration. Climate change will make the poor poorer. Poorand developing countries have a great challenge: the eradication of poverty. And we’ll have to face a climate crisis for which we are not guilty.

In addition to adapting to climate change we must ensure security, education, health, energy for the population, provision of water and sanitation services, delivery communication and infrastructure services, job creation, provision of housing, reconstruction due to loss and damage caused by extreme weather events, adaptation actions, among others.

Mr. President, We denounce to the whole world the pressure from some countries for the approval of new carbon market mechanisms, although these have shown to be ineffective in the fight against climate change, and that only represent business opportunities. This is a climate change conference, not a conference for carbon business. We did not come here to do business with the death of Mother Earth betting on the power of markets as a solution. We are here to protect our Mother Earth, we came here to protect the future of humanity.

Yesterday forests were turned into carbon markets businesses, and the samewas done with the land, they tried to oceans and, worse, to agriculture. Agriculture is food security, employment, life, and culture. Agriculture is along with the land, mountains and forests, the house and the food of our indigenous and peasant communities.

We will not allow the replacement of the obligations of developed countries with carbon markets. The planet is not for sale, nor our life.

It is essential that developed countries take the lead with mitigation actions with concrete results and high ambitions and that developing countries do their part within their respective capabilities, and according to financial and technological transfers, solving problems of poverty.

Mr. President, In Bolivia we have the vision of Living Well as a new approach for civilization and cultural alternative to capitalism, and in this context we focus our efforts to create a balance and harmony between society and nature.
Bolivia, presented here concrete proposals to strengthen the global climate system. We have proposed the creation of the Joint Mechanism for Mitigation and Adaptation for integrated and sustainable management of forests, not based on markets, to strengthen community, indigenous and peasant management of our forests, which can promote climate mitigation actions without transferring the responsibilities of developed countries to developing countries.

Also, we promote consistently the creation of an international mechanism to address loss and damage resulting from natural causes and impacts of climate change in developing countries. Our country will not promote carbon market mechanisms such as REDD, and will respect and strengthen community management of forests.

Mr. President, We will not allow the people of the world to pay the bill for the irresponsibility and greed. It's time to give concrete answers to humanity and Mother Earth. Let's be careful of the intentions of some developed parties to make us feel resigned in front of this terrible reality, and admit the inertia and inaction of those countries that are historically responsible of global warming, sending us a message that is better to have a "pragmatic" attitude, which of course will condemn to cook planet and the extinction of the humanity.

Mr. President, brothers and sisters of the world, take these words as a commitment to life and Mother Earth. With this conviction we will be guided to meet the challenge we have in this conference, the challenge of saving the planet, and not to negotiate our climate. Thank you Mr. President.

Mr. President, brothers and sisters of the world, take these words as a commitment to life and Mother Earth. With this conviction we will be guided to meet the challenge we have in this conference, the challenge of saving the planet, and not to negotiate our climate. Thank you Mr. President.

Bolivian delegation in Doha: “this is a COP of climate change not a COP of carbon trade”

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 04:07:00 +0000

Bolivian delegation in Doha

The day of the COP inauguration, a conference about CARBON TRADE took place facilitated by Nicholas Stern. The event had the presence of ministers and other authorities of different countries. Surprisingly the center of the discussion was how to allow developed countries that are not going to be part of the second commitment period of KP to have access to market mechanisms of the same KP that they deny to be applicable to them. Another central issue was how to solve the crisis of the carbon market.

Half of the 100 billion dollars to be provided for climate change by 2020 would come from carbon credits, commented Mr. Stern. The collapse of prices in carbon market is a menace to financial provision for climate change, expressed Stern.

A dynamic debate took place in the event in order to bring solutions to the carbon crisis. This debate is turning to dominate the agenda of discussion in COP18, pushed by developed countries. Are we going to allow this COP about climate change to become a COP of carbon trade? That was a question raised by Juan Carlos Alurralde the Vice Chancellor of Bolivia, who was present in the conference. When he took the floor he expressed the following words: “…

Carbon markets are not a solution to the climate change crisis… Instead of discussing one of the instruments for supporting mitigation actions, which is carbon markets.; I repeat: ONE of the instruments which effectiveness is still pending of analysis, but from our view is a complete mistake, instead of that, we should discuss the structural elements of a comprehensive response to Climate Change Crisis.

It seems that developed countries are more interested in the carbon markets business that in the ultimate goal of this conference which is the structural solutions for this planet and future generations.

Carbon markets are just business for some but a bad solution for Mother Earth, facilitating developed countries not to make real domestic reductions.

We have to say that at least four realistic predictable risks are linked to the application and generalization of carbon markets:

1. Double counting implying an additional 1,6 Gigatones (GT) to the atmosphere.

2. Non aditionalities with an increase of 0,4 GT Gigatones

3. The use of the carry over which implies 11 GT

4. The opening of opportunities for creating bilateral trading carbon agreements without accounting rules, monitoring and regulation.

We came from very far to try to find solutions and alternatives to bring the opportunity to future generations to live with dignity in this planet, and definitely the Carbon market mechanisms are not the solution…”

Doha, December 4th

Unidad Madre Tierra y Agua / Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia

First were forests, now they want the oceans and agriculture in the carbon market

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 04:05:00 +0000

Bolivian delegation in Doha

In the plenary session of the subsidiary body for scientific and technological advice (SBSTA), was intended to include agriculture as an activity related to the mitigation and the capture of carbon with the evident intention then convert agricultural removals of carbon in carbon to carbon market credits. This position promoted by some developed countries is unknown the role of agriculture in food security, the provision of sources of work and life to the indigenous and peasant communities and small farmers.

In these circumstances, the head of the Bolivian delegation requested the floor in the plenary session of SBSTA, to denounce that it is an attack on nature and common sense that is pushing countries to commodifying agriculture with carbon credits as it did with the forests through REDD +, as it intends to do with the oceans and the Earth.

"Mr President - express the Bolivian delegation-, in Bolivia the 37% of the population produces food that are the basis of food security peasant and indigenous and the remaining 63% of the population." Agriculture provides food, give us jobs, gives us life, is the cultural, economic and social basis of our communities, our villages, our producers. Agriculture affected by climate change, natural disasters caused by extreme weather events... cannot assume agriculture only as an element of climate mitigation (i.e., of emission and absorption of carbon)! We must mainly focus on agriculture within the framework of the climate adaptation, of the eradication of poverty and hunger... not intend mitigate our sources of life! ", expressed."

A hard debate was generated in the room and many countries have expressed the same opinion, including India, Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba. Position critical of many developing countries caused this issue was postponed and will be discussed during 2013 in several sessions for consideration at the next COP19.

(Doha 2 de diciembre 2012)

Unidad Madre Tierra y Agua / Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia

Bolivian delegation to UNCCC - Analysis of the State of Climate Change Negotiations in 2012: Challenges and Tasks for the Coming Years

noreply@blogger.com (Bolivia Rising) — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 21:37:00 +0000

The goal of the climate change negotiations in the short term should be to effectively respond to the climate crisis with drastic reductions of greenhouse gases to avoid a catastrophe that appears certain if emissions continue on an upward trajectory.It is urgently required that in the coming months, in the context of the UN Conference on Climate Change, to be held in Qatar, and the subsequent and related events, thatrigorous decisions are taken, including but not limited to the following:…

* Complete PDF document.

- René Orellana is Academic Coordinator of Environment of the University and Foundation of la Cordillera. Head of Delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in the United Nations Conference on Climate Change and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.http://reneorellanahalkyer.blogspot.com/

- Diego Pacheco is Rector of the University of the Cordillera. Second Head of Delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia in the United Nations Conference on Climate Change and Head of Delegation ofthe Plurinational State of Bolivia to the Convention on Biological Diversity.