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A Rebel in the Palace? Callum Mccormick

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A Rebel in the Palace? Callum Mccormick A Rebel in the Palace? Callum McCormick A Rebel in the Palace? The Unlikely Presidency of Evo Morales This paper offers a critical assessment of the economic and social policy conducted by Evo Morales since assumed the Presidency of Bolivia. I argue that Morales has largely preserved the basic features of the economy he inherited from his neoliberal predecessors, deepening Bolivia’s reliance on primary exports and the extractive industries, despite the increasing social and environmental costs. The government is attempting to use the resources raised from these to policies to overcome the historic weakness of the Bolivian state and improve its capacity to regulate the development process. This bolstered state is increasingly coming into conflict with other actors in the development process, particularly civil society groups and affected populations. Bolivian social movements, the political backbone of the government, are in a period of crisis, as government co-option and interference have undermined organizational coherence and engendered internal divisions. What this suggests is that rather than representing any radical break with the past, Evo Morales ought to be understood as a conventional nationalist leader keen on extending and preserving the sovereignty of the Bolivian state. This has consequences for how think about the realities of the ‘new Latin American left’ in power. Callum McCormick PhD Candidate Birkbeck College, University of London1 At a time when other governments of the new left in Latin America are experiencing various degrees of economic atrophy or political instability, most notably in Venezuela and Argentina, Bolivia under Evo Morales increasingly resembles a vision of relative calm and stability. Since his ascension to the Presidency in 2006, Morales has overseen a period of strong and sustained economic growth – a small contraction after the crisis of 2008 apart - and a relatively benign internal political climate that has made him one of the most domestically popular leaders in Latin America, destined to be elected to a third term in office in elections due later this year. Rising real incomes and new anti-poverty measures, including old age pensions and payments to mothers of young children, have solidified support amongst Morales’ poor and indigenous supporters.2 The Bolivian conservative opposition remains 1 [email protected] 2 Molina, Fernando, Por Que Evo Morales sigue siendo popular?, Nueva Sociedad, 245, May-June 2013 1 A Rebel in the Palace? Callum McCormick divided and weak, more focussed on preserving its increasingly fragile hold on local government in the eastern lowlands of the country than offering any real challenge at a national level. The small and fragmented opposition to the government drawn from former allies in the Bolivian social movements has so far failed to coagulate into any meaningful political alternative on the left. The relative success of Morales’ time in office, and the apparently judicious administration of Bolivia’s economy and state institutions that it is built upon, nonetheless poses its own dilemmas. Elected amidst a wave of popular revolt against the technocratic neoliberal political class which had governed the country after the return to civilian rule in 1982, Morales was quickly bracketed with the other radical governments that took power in Latin America. Alongside Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, he became the leading regional and international representative of 21st Century Socialism, his indigenous origins adding symbolic weight to the narrative of a revivified left on a continent with stubbornly high levels of poverty and income and wealth inequality.3 Both the new government and well-disposed commentators proclaimed that the ascension of ‘Brother Evo’ to the highest office reflected the conquest of the Bolivian state by social movements, and that a real transformation of Bolivian state and society was in the offing. Morales’ impassioned and poetic denunciations of global capitalism before global and regional audiences gave sustenance to the hopes for a radical shift in direction.4 After 8 years of government, the weight of accumulated evidence about the actual economic and social policy pursued by the Morales government suggests a far more contradictory picture. While the government continues to insist on the revolutionary nature of el proceso de cambio that Bolivia is undertaking, the continuities between Morales and his predecessors are striking. In this paper, I want to examine the way in which Morales has preserved, and in some sense deepened, the basic structures of the economy he inherited and its relationship to the world market. I look at the government’s attempts to integrate previously excluded indigenous populations into Bolivian political institutions, and analyse the effects of these efforts on the social movements, on whose behalf the government claims to act. 3 In his influential critique, the Mexican economist Jorge Castaneda included Morales among the ‘bad left’ grouping of the new Latin American left governments, see Castaneda, Jorge, Latin America’s Left Turn, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2006 4 See for instance Morales’ address to the UNFCCC meeting at Copenhagen calling on delegates to ‘save the world from capitalism’, available at http://www.rebelion.org/noticias/2008/12/76883.pdf 2 A Rebel in the Palace? Callum McCormick Reflected in this analysis are the deep constraints and limiting factors placed on any ‘radical’ government in a country like Bolivia, so precariously located in the global division of labour, and where the inheritances of geography, culture and history bear a particularly hefty weight. There has been no fundamental rupture either with capitalism, nor has the institutional structure of the Bolivian state been dramatically overhauled. A sober analysis of the record rather than the rhetoric of the socialist government in Bolivia can help illuminate the obstacles facing radical politics on the continent today. The “Crisis of Neoliberalism” and National Development under Evo Morales The period immediately prior to Morales’ victory in the Presidential elections in December 2005 was one of escalating crisis in Bolivian society. In October 2003, a proposal to export Bolivian natural gas to the United States through a Chilean seaport, at favourable terms to the foreign-owned energy firms, was met by widespread protest. A coalition of social movements including indigenous groups representing the mainly Aymara and Quechua populations on the western altiplano and the once powerful trade union confederation COB fought a protracted campaign to block the proposal. As a wave of general strikes and roadblocks of major cities threatened to herald a new social revolution, the chief architect of the neoliberal restructuring in the 1990s and early 2000s, President Gonzalez Sanchez de Lozada, resigned and fled to the United States. The principal political opposition force MAS – led by Evo Morales, a former leader of the coca growers trade union– initially adopted a conciliatory approach to the incoming President, former journalist Carlos Mesa, supporting his call for a referendum on the terms of export.5 The social movements, on the other hand, called for the boycott of the referendum. They instead favoured immediate cancellation of contracts signed under a 1996 Hydrocarbons Law passed by Sanchez de Lozada, which had handed almost complete control over the petroleum and gas industry to foreign firms in a clear violation of the Bolivian constitution.6 Morales, who had come a close second in the previous Presidential election, won the Presidency in December 2005 on a programme of renegotiating the contracts with foreign firms – a proposal packaged politically as nationalization – gaining over half the votes and 5 See Tapia, Luis, La cuarta derrota del neoliberalismo en Bolivia, OSAL, Observatorio Social de América Latina (VI no. 17 May-Aug 2005) pp. 153-158 6 V. Quiroga, Carlos, Rebelión popular y los derechos de propiedad de los hidrocarburos, OSAL, Observatorio Social de América Latina (VI no. 12 Sep-Dec 2003) p. 30 3 A Rebel in the Palace? Callum McCormick beating the candidate of the exhausted establishment by 20%. Important to note here is that the crisis that enveloped Bolivia society between October 2003 and the elections of December 2005 was not primarily economic in nature. There was nothing akin to, for instance, the catastrophic rates of inflation that had crippled the country in 1984-1985 and effectively disqualified the left from power for a generation. The ‘lost decade’ of the 1980s had given way to growth rates higher than the Latin American average between 1990 and 2003.7 Of course, levels of poverty and extreme poverty, particularly in rural areas, remained amongst the highest on the continent (and therefore in the world). Social indicators such as infant mortality resembled those of sub-Saharan Africa more than they did neighbouring states such as Chile or Argentina.8 Poverty rates did fall slightly from 60% to 57% in Bolivia between 2002 and 2006, as they did across the continent – although even this slight improvement was only clawing back the ground lost in the 1980s and 1990s.9 The main feature of period was note economic crisis, but the collapse of the political system under the pressure produced by the Gas War. This collapse, although dramatic, in truth came at the end of a longer process of fragmentation and decline for the party system inherited from the revolution of 1952. Between 1985 and 2002,
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