Bolivia's Poor Proclaim Abiding Distrust of Globalization
October 17, 2003
By LARRY ROHTER
LA PAZ, Bolivia, Oct. 15 - The many Indian protesters who
choked the streets and highways of this Andean nation again
on Thursday may be poor and speak broken or accented
Spanish, but they have a powerful message.
It is this: no to the export of gas and other natural
resources; no to free trade with the United States; no to
globalization in any form other than solidarity among the
downtrodden peoples of the developing world.
The force of that message may yet topple President Gonzalo
S=E1nchez de Lozada, who tried to quell the unrest by
offering a package of concessions late Wednesday night that
the protesters rejected.
Instead they vowed to continue with demonstrations meant to
force his government to abandon a plan to export natural
gas to the United States through a port in Chile. The
protests have already left more than 80 people dead over
the past month.
Sensing that public support for the president, weak to
begin with, has all but vanished, opponents of the gas
export plan have now moved to press their advantage.
"The blood that has been spilled is something sacred,"
Felipe Quispe, leader of the indigenous group that
initiated the protests, said in response to Mr. S=E1nchez de
Lozada's offer, made in a televised speech. "So we can't
negotiate and we're not even going to talk."
Several thousand workers, mostly miners from the south and
coca growers from the north, were reported to be marching
on the capital Thursday. The armed forces demanded that
they disperse, saying that the military would erect
barricades to prevent them from entering La Paz, but the
warning appeared to have gone unheeded.
More than merely threatening the longevity of Bolivia's
government, the protesters have lent new energy to the
discontent already percolating throughout the region.
Across South America, labor unions, student and civic
groups and a new wave of leaders - Hugo Ch=E1vez in
Venezuela, Luiz In=E1cio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and N=E9stor
Kirchner in Argentina - are expressing similar doubts about
who actually benefits from a free flow of international
trade and investment.
But nowhere have those doubts been expressed as forcefully
as in this poor nation of eight million people,
increasingly divided along class and racial lines. A
majority of Bolivians have Indian blood, descended from the
original inhabitants of this continent who got a foretaste
of globalization centuries ago with the age of exploration
and the arrival of European colonizers.
"Globalization is just another name for submission and
domination," Nicanor Apaza, 46, an unemployed miner, said
at a demonstration this week in which Indian women in
bowler hats and colorful layered skirts carried banners
denouncing the International Monetary Fund and demanding
the president's resignation. "We've had to live with that
here for 500 years, and now we want to be our own masters."
He and many other protesters see an unbroken line from this
region's often rapacious colonial history to the failed
economic experiments of the late 20th century, in which
Bolivia was one of the first Latin American countries to
open itself to the modern global economy. The $5 billion
gas pipeline project is only the latest gambit.
Starting with the end of a military dictatorship two
decades ago, Bolivia embraced the free-market model.
State-owned companies were sold off. Foreign investment was
courted. Government regulation was reduced, all in the name
of a new era of growth and prosperity.
The policies brought to heel runaway inflation. But
otherwise, the average Bolivian has had little to show for
the government's embrace of policies urged on it by the
United States, the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, now the focus of so much resentment.
Exports have actually declined compared with their level 25
years ago. Growth has stalled for the past five years.
Unemployment has soared, and Bolivia remains the poorest
country in South America, with a per capita income of less
than $950 a year - by some calculations, less than it was
before the free-market reforms. "After 21 years, the
economic model in place has not solved the problems of
poverty and social exclusion," said Carlos Toranzo of the
Latin American Institute for Research here.
The leading spokesman for the discontented here is Evo
Morales, the charismatic 43-year-old leader of the coca
growers' federation. As presidential candidate, he finished
barely one percentage point behind Mr. S=E1nchez de Lozada in
the election last year after a campaign that called for
reversing the economic course.
While few development experts see much benefit from
reinforcing economic barriers around an already landlocked
nation, talk of self-reliance has taken on great appeal.
"If you talk to average people about the Free Trade Area of
the Americas or even the gas export law, they really don't
know that much about them," said Eduardo Gamarra, a
Bolivian scholar who is director of the Center for Latin
American and Caribbean Studies at Florida International
University in Miami. "But Evo Morales and others have
shrewdly used those ideas as a flag which plays on their
deepest fears, the loss of identity and the giving away of
what they consider to be their national patrimony."
At a recent regional anti-globalization forum in Argentina,
Mr. Morales maintained that the United States and
multinational companies have "a plan to exterminate the
Indian" in order to seize control of the riches of Bolivia
and neighboring countries.
"How much longer will the natural resources of Latin
America remain in the hands of transnational companies?" he
asked.
That suspicion is rooted deep in this country's bitter
history. In the colonial era, silver from the mines of
Potos=ED provided Spain with the wealth that allowed it to
forge a global empire, and in modern times, tin made a few
families, like the Pati=F1os, fabulously wealthy.
"The wealth has always left the country and enriched
foreigners, rather than staying here to improve our lives,"
said Pascuala Vel=E1zquez, an egg vendor of Aymara Indian
descent, "but we cannot allow that to happen this time with
the gas."
Rather than export gas and other resources, the protesters
insist that they be used to help build an industrial base.
But Bolivia does not have the money to carry out such a
program on its own, and as a diplomat who represents a
South American country asked, "Who in their right mind is
going to be willing to invest in a country that is so
unstable and hostile to foreign capital?"
Perhaps another president could have convinced Bolivians of
the merits of the gas project, expected to quadruple the
country's exports over the next decade. But Mr. S=E1nchez de
Lozada, 73, a loyal ally of Washington and a millionaire
former mining executive, is regarded here as so much a
puppet of the foreign and domestic economic interests that
his every word is suspect.
One demonstrator, Remberto Clavijo, a shoe repairman of
Quechua Indian descent, said, "He has governed this country
for the benefit of the gringos and the multinational
companies and the Chileans, not for the Bolivian people."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/17/international/americas/17GLOB.html?ex=3D10=
67384949&ei=3D1&en=3Dc8003f2f596234cd
---------------------------------
