In a move that would make Zack de la Rocha proud, Bolivian president Evo Morales has decided to take the power back from multinationals operating in South America’s second poorest nation.
On Saturday, Morales nationalised four power companies, giving the state 80 per cent ownership of electricity production in the country.
“We are here to nationalise all the hydroelectric plants that were owned by the state before, to comply with the new constitution of the Bolivian state,” Morales was quoted as saying on Al Jazeera. “Basic services cannot be a private business. We are recovering the energy, the light, for all Bolivians.”
After years of stalled negotiations with the Bolivian opposition party, Morales is finally moving forward with his socialist-styled constitutional agenda.
The former trade union leader nationalised the hydrocarbon industry shortly after taking office in 2006, as well as renouncing the World Bank’s ICSID treaty. Morales sought to implement a new constitution in 2007 which would return much of Bolivia’s natural resources to state control. However, significant opposition from the wealthier eastern departments of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando, Tarija and Chuquisaca made it impossible to implement – with widespread social unrest that led to 30 deaths in the Pando region in September 2008. In January 2009 the constitution was approved, but there was still heavy opposition from the eastern lowlands, with the departments largely refusing to accept the terms of Morales’s new Bolivia.
Recently, that has all changed. In December Morales was re-elected with 61 per cent of the vote, and now the government has been given a new mandate to finish what it started.
The companies involved in the nationalisations include Bolivia’s largest power supplier, Empresa Electrica Guaracachi, owned by Britain’s Rurelec PLC, along with a hydroelectric company controlled by French conglomerate GDF Suez, Empresa Corani, and Valle Hermoso. The Empresa de Luz y Fuerza de Cochabamba – which was owned by workers and locals – has also been taken over.
Morales says that the government attempted to persuade investors to sell their shares in order to give the state a controlling stake in the companies, but this was not accepted. Several companies have launched legal action following the government’s nationalisation decree.
Morales has also said that the profits from the nationalisations will fund social programmes for the country’s impoverished indigenous groups –which account for nearly 70 per cent of the population.
Many critics are sceptical about Morales’s tactics, which follow closely in the vein of Venezuelan counterpart Hugo Chavez. However, there is one notable difference. Venezuela has a weak history of political dissidence prior to the social wave that swept in the former military commander.
Bolivia may be small, but it has a formidable record of political activism; in 2000 protestors forced out the multinational water consortium Aguas de Tunari in the Cochabamba Water Wars; in 2003 demonstrations over the exploitation of Bolivia’s gas led to the exile of former president Gonzalo “Goni” Sánchez de Lozada to the US; and in 2005 a resurgence of rioting forced the resignation of Goni’s successor, Carlos Mesa. Having led many of the protests that got him into power Morales knows that if he fails, Bolivians will have no qualms with forcing him on a one-way flight to Miami.
The Cochabamba climate summit held last week was hardly the media spectacle of Copenhagen. But the event – the first of its kind in Latin America- says much more about the shifting concerns of the region and Bolivia in particular, as it grapples with greater economic independence and looks to carve a name for itself on global issues.
The four-day People’s World Conference on Climate Change held in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba was organised by socialist president Evo Morales, who planned the grassroots gathering following Copenhagen last December, which he says ignored the concerns and views of developing countries.
“The raison d’être of the meetings here in Cochabamba was to advance the kind of genuinely ambitious solutions to combating climate change that many world governments failed to deliver on in the UN sponsored talks last winter,” explains Joseph Huff-Hanon in the Guardian.
The conference attracted over 12,000 delegates from more than 100 countries, with proposals including a demand for industrial countries to make binding commitments to tackle climate change; cut greenhouse emissions by half; and create an international court to punish climate crimes. Up to 31,000 people from indigenous groups and political movements turned up for the event. But as Anastasia Moloney reports in the Reuters Alertnet bulletin, few mainstream media outlets in Latin America, and internationally, bothered to cover it.
“In part, that’s because of how Morales is perceived by many of the region’s other leaders and by the editors of Latin America’s media,” says Moloney. “Morales, who leads one of the poorest nations in Latin America, enjoys little of the high profile of more powerful regional leaders from places like Chile and Brazil.”
But this may not be the case for long. Bolivia could soon become a far bigger player on the world stage through the recent discovery of vast lithium reserves, a find that market analysts say will be the country’s winning lottery ticket. Scientists believe that beneath Bolivia’s expansive salt flats lies nearly half the world’s supply of lithium – the metal used in laptops, mobile phones, and importantly, electric cars. As companies look to expand into the emerging green market, and car manufactures experiment with electric vehicles as an alternative to gas guzzlers, Morale’s climate summit fits nicely with the image of a new, environmentally-friendly Bolivia.
His administration has already started building an experimental plant for lithium extraction and has established a scientific committee to research the technology for processing of lithium carbonate. But the government is determined to avoid Bolivia’s history of mineral exploitation by foreign companies, and the mining ministry is looking to create a public private joint-venture that will do most of the processing within the country. Morales hopes – somewhat ambitiously– that Bolivia will develop the technology to export lithium batteries and even electric cars within the next 10 years.
One of Morales’s key messages at the summit was to follow the indigenous practice of living in harmony with nature. While Bolivia’s projected timeline on its lithium capabilities may be overly optimistic, at least one thing is certain: as this small, landlocked nation works toward becoming the world’s top green energy provider, the conference couldn’t have been more harmonious with Bolivia’s economic and political interests.
Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago at 4:41 pm. 1 comment
Latin America is slowly breaking away from its wealthier neighbours, and frankly, it’s about time. The region was one of the first areas in the world exposed to the spectre of colonialism. It began with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the sixteenth century, consolidated through the forced slavery of indigenous peoples and the robbery of natural resources, and ended with more than a few military coups, bloodbaths and social uprisings. If the summit last week- which excluded the US and Canada- is anything to go by, after centuries of imperial interference, the region’s leaders are proving they can go it alone.
On Tuesday the Caribbean Unity Rio Group Summit -composed of 32 countries in the Americas-met in Mexico to approve the so-called Community of Latin American and Caribbean States. The organization aims to provide an alternative to the Organisation of American States (OAS), which has come under fire from a number of Latin American presidents, not least of all Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez, for excluding Cuba and allegedly pushing a US-centred agenda. Cuban President Raul Castro unsurprisingly welcomed the move. He described the decision as “historic”, echoing the sentiments of Chavez, Brazil’s president Lula da Silva and Bolivia’s Evo Morales, among others.
But this is not the first occasion Latin American leaders have signalled their intentions to form a regional bloc. The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), a trading bloc comprised of eight countries including founders Venezuela and Cuba was created in 2004, with the purpose of offering inter-regional trading as an alternative to the US-led Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
But with the advent of an emerging, stronger Latin American market, how will the region’s new makeup affect the international playing field? And will it set a precedent for other regions in the developing world?
Mark Weisbrot commented in the Guardian last week: “The increasing independence of Latin America has been one of the most important geopolitical changes over the last decade, affecting not only the region but the rest of the world as well.”
Weisbrot cites Brazil’s backing for Tehran to develop enriched uranium and rejection of sanctions as a sign of the region’s shift away from US influence. And the consensus reached at the Summit on backing Argentina’s claim to the Falklands has also demonstrated considerable regional unity.
Today, few commentators will deny that Washington has become less important to the regional economy. A growing number of countries in Latin America have turned inward or toward the East for trade relations, and with the US struggling to combat recessionary woes, this trend is likely to continue. Though, perhaps most interestingly, Latin America has started to look toward markets in Africa and India. This development could signal a growth in trade between countries of the global south, giving rise to a more multipolar world order.
At the very least, the fact that Latin America’s new regional organization was approved by the likes of Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon – the leader of a rightwing administration with ties to the previous US government – should warrant some food for thought. Latin America has hardly yielded in unison to the whims of President Chavez, but the wide spectrum of support from far left to far right is an indication of the region’s growing consensus for sovereignty, with some very real repercussions for its neighbours and the wider world.
Posted 6 months, 1 week ago at 6:59 pm. Add a comment
The conservation of one of the largest national parks in the world is being threatened by loggers and landless peasants says environmental group Fundacion Gaia Pacha.The Madidi National Park faced one of its gravest threats in May this year when the ‘organizaciones campesinas,’ landless peasants from the neighboring territory of Apolo invaded the Anmi sector of the park in a protest for the creation of a more direct road between Apolo and Ixiamis. This would ultimately cut across the protected region of Anmi, enabling the locals to settle in the protected areas, as well as utilize the region for illegal logging and coca growing. It is believed that the protestors were also financially supported by wood exporting factories with key interests in using the park for logging. Roughly 600 protestors illegally occupied the park and cut down the highly expensive and endangered Mara wood, as well as threatening the lives of park guards and announcing that they would burn down the reserve if their needs were not met. According to Rodrigo the protest occured because, “the government has not solved the problems of roads, schools and health for the communities in Apolo.”
The groups also demanded the cancellation of the protection of the Tierras Comunitarias de Origen (TCO) groups within the park, despite the fact that it is their land and the external groups have no actual entitlement to it. The protestors called for a dialogue with the ministries in Apollo, and instead on May 28th they were met with police that forcibly removed them from the Anini area. In June, another protest occurred in which around 4,000 locals from Apollo waved Peruvian flags and demanded that the park and surrounding areas be annexed to neighboring Peru, as the Bolivian government was not responding to their needs. The locals desire to utilize the lands of Madidi would ultimately lead to the destruction of this area, though it is a difficult situation as logging is one of the few practices that can allow poor communities to eck out a substinance living.
Coordinator of the Fundacion Gaia Pacha, Rodrigo Meruvia, explained that these needs were addressed by the government through the Movimiento Sin Terra, through a strategy designed to give land to communities without enough space. While overtly this plan appears to be beneficial for these groups, the movement does not allow the communities themselves to choose the land they are given. These external communities are not content to share land of poor farming quality between at least 200 individuals, when the small communities in the Madidi National Park are given vast acres of fertile land.
The predicament presented by entrepreneuring locals is not the only threat either. It is a well known fact that the areas under conservation present lucrative money-making enterprises if put in the hands of big businesses and governmental projects. While the current Bolivian government has enforced the protection of Madidi National Park from the creation of a hydro-electric dam along the Beni River, this is not the case for conservation sites in many other areas. For example, the Pando region is facing pressure from Brazil to build a hydro-electric dam, which Rodrigo has said “is not a need of Bolivia, but only the need of border countries.” Within Bolivia there is “a pyramid of importance” Rodrigo explains, in which the lowest tier presents the credence of the government, the second is article 1333 of the Bolivian environmental laws, and the highest tier is occupied by the hydro-carbon laws. Hence it is not unheard of for environmental laws to fall by the wayside as oil exploitation agreements between Bolivia and neighboring countries take precedence. While the hydro-carbon laws are given higher importance than Article 1333 the risk of petroleum exploration in the Madidi National Park is a looming possibility.
Moreover, the efficiency of SERNAP in protecting the park is lacking in many respects as a result of poor organizational skills, communication, and the absence of leadership. This is at least partially attributable to the designs of transnational companies with an interest in sabotaging the park in order to exploit its natural resources. Many big businesses prevent SERNAP from doing its job through underhanded pay-offs to indigenous communities in return for causing problems for the organization.
In March 2000, National Geographic described Madidi National Park as one of the 20 most interesting tourist destinations on the planet. Over 500,000 tourists visit the park annually, supporting the greater part of Madidi´s internal economy. The business provided by the tourists encourages the communities within the park to maintain its upkeep, while it simultaneously provides them with improved living conditions. Though as Rodrigo is apt to point out, tourism in the park can be considered a double-edged sword if tourists are not properly supervised by park guards and SERNAP, as they are liable to damage the biodiversity of the region. The best option to avoid these dangers is the method advanced by the Fundacion Gaia Pancha: education.
Today Gaia Pancha is relentlessly working to expand the awareness of the importance of the Madidi National Park, as well as improving environmental accountability across Bolivia through seminaries, presentations, and projects in schools. The Fundacion Gaia Pancha has also worked with such groups as AGRECOL, FOBOMADE, ZOOPRAMA, and PROMIC to promote the benefits of biodiversity to the public. While the problems of maintaining the conservation of places like Madidi National Park can appear daunting when pitted against such behemoths as the ‘logic of the market,’ it is useful to remember another ideology presented by such organizations as Fundacion Gaia Pancha: the logic of sustainability.
Posted 2 years, 11 months ago at 1:47 pm. Add a comment
Groggily stumbling out of bed, I found myself gaping at the view greeting me from Plaza de Colon at 9:00 am. I was shocked to see the faces of dozens of Bolivians occupying at least four blocks around the plaza marching down 25 de Mayo Street. Normally on a Friday, particularly a Friday that is the first day of my trip in Bolivia, nothing could remove me from the comfort of my first night in a clean bed after four days traveling. Nothing of course, except the booming voices of marchers chanting slogans outside my window. After spending two weeks in Cochabamba it has become apparent that my experience that first day was in fact neither remarkable nor rare. Bolivia is a country in which the people “are doing politics even when they are not,” explained Leny Olivera, the project coordinator of the Democracy Center organization in Cochabamba.
This degree of political awareness is particularly unusual when compared with the lack of politically active movements in the Western world. As Melissa Draper, the assistant director of the Democracy center expressed, the amount of demonstrations that occur in Bolivia are rarely displayed in the US unless they are connected with elections, war, or in the case of major events. Even while engaging in the always enjoyable activity of people-watching, it is impossible not to notice the amount of Cochabambinos sitting in Plaza 14 de Septiembre with their heads buried behind the headlines of ‘Los Tiempos’ or ‘Opinion.’ In order to delve deeper into the causes behind this trend, the Cocha-Banner spoke with the members of the Democracy Center, Leny Olivera and Melissa Draper, as well as attending a local protest in Cochabamba.
The Democracy Center is an organization that promotes citizen-awareness, as well as research and reporting about Bolivia aimed at a foreign audience. It was founded in California by the Executive Director Jim Shultz in 1992, though it relocated its base to Cochabamba, Bolivia in 1998. Prior to her involvement with the Democracy Center, Melissa Draper worked in both Bolivia and India with grassroots women’s organizations, while Leny Olivera has been involved with Bolivian youth organizations and social movements for more than ten years. When asked about whether civilians in Bolivia felt a strong pull to engage in political matters, Melissa responded from her own experience as an outsider entering into the realm of Bolivian society. “It’s really impressive to see how Bolivians are so engaged in politics,” she explained. “Everybody knows what’s going on. Everyone’s interested in the smallest details in regional and national politics. Coming from the US it’s quite a contrast.” Both Leny and Melissa agreed that this phenomenon is attributable to the fact that within Bolivia, politics is a matter of survival.
Many problems in Bolivia both socially and economically center around “something urgent” according to Leny, and without an active civil society there are very few means for inducing change through the government. Moreover, after the January 2006 election of current president Evo Morales the elements of Bolivian civil society appear to have taken on a new dimension of complexity. When asked whether political activity amongst Bolivian citizens had increased since Evo Morales assumed office, Leny explained that it depends on the group in question. While previously politics were drawn along the lines of who was in the government and who was protesting against it, “now it is more complicated,” according to Melissa. The “Left” is too often used as an umbrella term for the numerous and varied social movements, indigenous groups, and organizations that can either support Morales or demand greater rights from the government. As Leny stated, “There is a great diversity among social movements and indigenous groups, and not all are affiliated with Evo Morales’ political party, MAS.”
The “Right” opposition groups that oppose the Morales administration have also altered tactics to incorporate a wider range of strategies through greater public demonstration. Melissa attended a hunger strike in Santa Cruz in early December 2006 which was staged by the civic leaders of Santa Cruz, and various members of the “Medialuna” departments (Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz, and Tarija). The hunger strikers were demanding greater autonomy from the La Paz-based national government. Melissa reported that “this was not like any hunger strike she had seen before in Bolivia.” Hunger strikes are typically affiliated with protests at universities or within local human rights groups. This time the hunger strike was conducted by affluent, ‘well-to-do’ Bolivian citizens. The tactics of the Right are not the only change affecting Bolivian society either; the growing divide within Bolivia has fueled greater civic tensions. This issue generated the violent confrontation between civilians that occurred this past January in Cochabamba. Leny explained that in the past, “all the confrontations in the country had been the people protesting against the government and the army, never among the people.”
Since the January violence in Cochabama Leny has become more involved in non-violent means of protest. She was invited to attend a three-week course in Vermont along with individuals from countries as diverse as Haiti, Iraq and India where she addressed some of the issues triggered by the January catastrophe. She says this kind of awareness by Bolivians will keep political and economic interests from dividing the country, something that she saw happen in January in a powerful display of racism and hatred. “Since that moment [in January],” Leny explained, “everyone is talking about how we need to find ways to avoid violence so that the people are never again exploited by political interests to breed hatred among Bolivians.”
Indeed, both women appeared to have high hopes for the progress of democracy in Bolivia. The fact that currently Bolivia has such an active civil society representing interest groups from nearly every walk of life implies that the government must take into account the diverse spectrum of Bolivian society. Such progress is demonstrated by the building of a new Bolivian constitution that must be approved by a consensus. However, while the Constituent Assembly appears to be a step toward development it should not be considered a panacea by any means, as both Leny and Melissa agreed that “the process became politicized” through measures such as the imposition of party-affiliation for all assembly members. As Leny stated, this meant that indigenous groups with no party affiliation “weren´t given the option to stand on their own.”
While the new Constitution is still in the making only time can tell how it will affect Bolivian society. In the meantime, the most noticeable form of civil action continues to be utilized by most groups in Bolivia to make their voices heard. This of course, is protest movements. In most cases groups use this strategy as a last resort when dialogue with the authorities appears to fall on deaf ears, especially when the group does not have the tools of education and contacts necessary to lobby for rights. Though it is evident that protests are not the only available channel by which people can reform governmental policies, it is perhaps the method that receives the most attention. The Cocha-Banner was able to explore this avenue of civil society by attending a demonstration organized by members of the group la Asociacion para la Defensa de los Derechos de los Animales (APPA) outside the Concejo Municipal building in Plaza 14 de Septiembre, Cochabamba.
The goal of the protest was to pressure the major (Alcade) of Cochabamba, Gonzalo Terceros, to approve an ordenanza that would make it illegal for circuses using animals in their shows to enter Cochabamba. The president of the organization, Liliana Perez, explained that the group was able to win this victory in Sucre previously with the support of many other organizations, and most importantly, the Constitution. Hence, she was optimistic that the demonstration would similarly affect the major in Cochabamba.
While the outcome of APPA´s protest in Cochabamba remains unknown, it is one among many cases in which Bolivians believe that the actions of the people can create change. This analysis raises some interesting questions in regard to the very nature of democracy. The fact that Bolivians seem more politically aware than the majority of western citizens is very likely a result of their rocky history with democracy in the past. Though if you believe that democracy is most truly represented by the direct will of the people then Bolivia appears to be moving in the right direction. After all, it is a country that does not often include a middleman between the people and the government. If for nothing else, it’s usually better to approach these things with a pinch of optimism. This can be particularly useful next time you find yourself staggering out of bed 3 hours earlier than you’re accustomed to after being woken up by the chanting of protestors outside your window!
