December 2005   
 

DECEMBER 30 – The landslide victory of Indian peasant leader Evo Morales in the December 18 Bolivian elections was met with jubilation by most of the international left, and dire pronouncements from spokesmen for U.S. imperialism. Winning close to 54 percent of the vote, the leader of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement Towards Socialism) is the first candidate in recent Bolivian history elected with an absolute majority. Yet despite the hopes placed in him by his peasant and indigenous followers, we warn that the MAS is neither socialist nor part of the workers movement, and Morales’ bourgeois nationalist government will administer Bolivia within the framework of capitalism, spelling more misery for the masses.

The vote for Morales was almost double that received by the rightist second-runner, ex-president Jorge “Tuto” Quiroga, a U.S. favorite and protégé of former dictator Hugo Banzer. Despite the National Electoral Court’s purge of large numbers of voters in many MAS strongholds, Morales’ party also won three governorships and a majority in the House of Representatives. The traditional parties of Bolivia’s corrupt political operators were virtually wiped off the electoral map, but new right-wing formations made advances in a number of departmental (provincial) and local races. Morales is scheduled to enter the Palacio Quemado presidential palace on January 22.

The election of an Aymara Indian and former coca farmer, in the turbulent heart of South America, was major news in the world press. The New York Times (24 December) called the election the latest “lurch to the demagogic left” in Latin America. Noting Morales’ friendship with Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, it complained that “denunciations of Yanqui imperialism” are now coming not only from the streets but from presidential palaces. Shortly before the election, the Times asked if Morales represents the “second coming” of Che Guevara. The question reflects the delirium besetting the Yankee imperialists, and their puppets in the Bolivian military (who with the CIA murdered Guevara).

Although Guevara’s image is often displayed at MAS rallies, and vice president-elect Alvaro García Linera, the preeminent intellectual of Bolivia’s indigenista left, was the theoretician of the former Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army (EGTK), today Morales and García Linera advocate an “Andean and Amazonian capitalism.” In two worker-peasant uprisings (October 2003 and May-June 2005), Morales played the key role in blocking a workers revolution, instead helping install new bourgeois rulers to divert the struggle into a parliamentary dead-end. It should also be noted that despite the demonization of Morales by Washington, important sectors of the Bolivian workers movement did not support the MAS in the elections.

Bolivian president-elect Evo Morales (right) and vice president-elect Alvaro García Linera wearing wreaths of coca leaves while campaigning in the Chapare region of Bolivia last November.
(Photo: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky/New York Times)

Morales’ election certainly reflects the urgent hope of fundamental social change among the the oppressed majority in Bolivia, the poorest country in South America, where turbulent mass struggles have toppled two U.S.-backed presidents in the last two years. The election of the first indigenous president in the country’s history has generated great expectations among the masses excluded from power by the k’ara (“white”) elite. Morales, who came to prominence as the leader of coca-growing peasants targeted by the U.S. “drug war,” calls himself “Washington’s nightmare.” Yet even before the vote, the U.S. embassy went out of its way to say that “we will work with and collaborate with whoever you elect.” If Quiroga was Washington’s Option A, working through Morales to subvert mass struggles is its Option B (“U.S. Already Toying With the Evo President Option,” Econoticias Bolivia, 14 December).

The MAS was key to the “constitutional solution” worked out to safeguard the fundamental interests of Bolivia’s rulers and their Yanqui godfathers in the first and second Guerras del Gas (Gas Wars). When the mass murdering president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada was driven out in October 2003, Morales engineered the installation of “Goni’s” VP, Carlos Mesa, as president. And when Mesa was driven out by protests last June, Morales pushed for the head of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodríguez, to be made  interim president, and early elections were called. Anxious to reassure domestic and foreign capital, the MAS removed “radical” planks from its program while assiduously courting “patriotic” entrepreneurs.

In his first declarations after winning the presidency, Morales promised that his government will respect private property and “will not confiscate or expropriate properties held by the multinationals” – the imperialist oil and gas conglomerates whose sweetheart deals with his predecessors set off the recent upheavals. Seeking to balance between social forces that came close to civil war over the past years, he vowed that his government will represent and incorporate Bolivia’s “social movements.” In fact, he seeks to subordinate those movements to the capitalists.

On December 23 Morales made a pact with leaders of El Alto, the working-class Aymara city near La Paz that was the epicenter of protests that toppled presidents Mesa and Sánchez de Lozada. Four days later, the president-elect traveled to the eastern city of Santa Cruz for a meeting with leaders of Bolivia’s hard-right business elite. Chamber of Industry and Commerce head Gabriel Dabdoub declared: “Evo Morales was clear in assuring us that he will attract investments and that the nationalization he proposes does not mean expropriation but managing resources on the basis of the income” from taxes and royalties on oil and gas. At the meeting, Morales agreed to the demand of the Comité Pro Santa Cruz to privatize the fabulously rich iron and manganese deposits of  Mutún.

Most strikingly, Morales praised the racist Santa Cruz elite for demanding “autonomy” – a from the Indian altiplano – and promised to help them achieve it. “I don’t want to expropriate or confiscate any property,” Morales reiterated at the meeting. “I want to learn from the entrepreneurs” (Página 12 [Buenos Aires], 28 December). The department of Santa Cruz is run as the private fiefdom of the agribusiness “entrepreneurs,” who use fascistic goon squads to prevent unionization of their largely indigenous workforce. In June, Santa Cruz politician Hormando Vaca Diez, head of the Senate, brought the country to the brink of civil war with his drive to take over the presidency, calling Indian protesters “demons” and vowing to “impose order” through massive repression.           

For his part, MAS theoretician García Linera stresses that the MAS will build a “center-left” government. Underlining his slogan of “Andean capitalism,” he says it will be “linked to global markets” and “entrepreneurial sectors,” which would last 40, 60 or even 100 years. The slogan is utopian/reactionary in its appeal to an imaginary “national” form of class exploitation. However, its actual content is to give a more “Andean” face to semi-colonial Bolivia’s subordination to real, international capitalism (imperialism). Now the MAS is taking pains to show that the entrepreneurs it seeks to ally with include the business elite of Santa Cruz, whose drive to grab an even larger slice of oil and gas profits has enraged Bolivia’s impoverished masses.

The bourgeois Morales regime does not merit the slightest confidence from the workers and peasants. Indigenous, peasant and labor leaders will be brought in, as the traditional politicians have proven incapable of taming the masses. They will be joined by figures from openly capitalist parties. The MAS itself is a petty-bourgeois nationalist party with a reformist vocabulary, whose parliamentary deputies include a number of bourgeois politicians who have migrated from other parties. Already in the antechambers of the Palacio Quemado, it is in the process of becoming a bourgeois party enforcing capitalist class rule.

The principle of proletarian class independence is a matter of life and death in Bolivia, where nationalist leaders have set the masses up for slaughter time and again. Left organizations that called to vote for Morales have once again betrayed the interests of Bolivia’s workers, heroes of some of the harshest class battles in the hemisphere’s history.

Today, even the U.S. liberal press quotes some Bolivian activists’ warnings that if Morales refuses to deliver, the result could be “civil war.” The answer is not to demand “que Evo cumpla” (that Morales fulfill) his bourgeois program, but to build a revolutionary party that can lead the working people to victory in the class war. This requires a policy of intransigent proletarian opposition to his regime. It means forging a genuine Trotskyist party based on the program of permanent revolution from the heart of South America to the “belly of the beast,” where New York’s transit workers just provided a glimpse of the enormous power of the multiracial proletariat.

MAS Populist Nationalism Will Resolve Nothing

Map: The Economist

A glance at Bolivia’s history shows a long tradition of bourgeois “socialism”: in the wake of the devastating Chaco War (1932-35), nationalist colonels David Toro and Germán Busch called their regimes socialist in order to co-opt labor and peasant sectors. Successive populist regimes, notably those of the MNR (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement) that came to power in the 1952 revolution, carried out nationalizations (tin, oil) more daring than anything proposed by Morales, who in a historical context is far from radical and only appears so from the vantage point of the U.S. “war on drugs.” The popular-front UDP (People’s Democratic Union) government of 1982-85 imposed International Monetary Fund austerity and paved the way for rightist regimes that closed the nationalized mines and privatized everything in sight. Each populist and popular-frontist cycle of class collaboration opens the way for a new cycle of rightist repression.

Today, Morales is attempting to balance above the abyss. Members of his transition team say he will change “neoliberal, free trade” policies, in particular the unlimited importation of goods from abroad and the anti-union “free hiring” laws that have been in force for the past twenty years. They also vow that the new government will reject U.S. military interference under the guise of the “war on drugs.” While restating his opposition to Washington’s policy of coca eradication, Morales stresses his willingness to work with the White House on what he calls a genuine effort against narcotics trafficking. (Underlining Bolivia’s semi-colonial relation to the U.S., the Pentagon recently took 30 surface-to-air missiles away from the Bolivian army.) Morales has sought to cultivate approval from European governments astute enough to seek advantage from Washington’s clumsiness in Latin America.

The issues that make Bolivian society so explosive are class issues. The country has the second largest natural gas reserves in Latin America. Who will control, own and benefit from this wealth? Workers, peasants and slum-dwellers are acutely aware that since the Spanish conquest, the country has depended on one primary commodity after another: the Indian majority sank ever deeper into misery while the Spaniards siphoned off fabulous riches in silver, followed by the “tin barons” who were junior partners to British and American capital. The racist exclusion of indigenous peoples has gone hand in hand with their brutal exploitation in the mines and on the land.

Under pressure from mass protests, the MAS sometimes called vaguely for nationalization of gas, while clarifying that what it really meant was increasing tax and royalty levels. (Morales was not alone in giving his own spin to the word “nationalization” – in the face of mass anger against the energy conglomerates, almost all of the presidential candidates used it in their campaigns.) Morales worked closely with former president Mesa to design the phony referendum of June 2004 that provided a “democratic” rubber stamp to imperialist control of natural gas. Today, Morales promises to avoid even a bourgeois nationalist takeover of natural resources. Yet as the history of Bolivia (as well as Mexico, Argentina, Brazil and other countries) shows, even nationalization would at most limit the extent of imperialist looting of Bolivia’s wealth, subject to the dictates of the international market and the laws of capitalist exploitation. Trotskyists insist that the only way Bolivia’s poor will benefit from the gas reserves is if they are expropriated by the working people. This requires a social revolution putting power into the hands of a worker-peasant-indigenous government.

 Bolivia’s Indian peoples constitute 62 percent of the population. Over half (52 percent) of indigenous Bolivians live in “extreme poverty” according to the World Bank; in rural areas, this figure rose to 72 percent between 1997 and 2002. The average income for employed Indians is 63 dollars a month, compared to non-Indians’ starvation wage of 140 dollars a month (La Jornada [Mexico City], 20 December). Figures for school attendance, health, child labor and other social indicators show the same pattern: gross inequality within an overall framework of unendurable poverty and grinding exploitation. Daily life is ever more difficult for triply subjugated indigenous women. This is what capitalism means for Bolivia’s oppressed majority! Timid reforms cannot make even a dent in it.

What about the land? The day after his election, Morales made a speech in his Cochabamba headquarters vowing: “The MAS will respect private property, except for unproductive lands. This has to be dealt with, because there are people without land, and so the peasant will have work.” Bolivia had one of Latin America’s most extensive land reforms after the 1952 revolution. Yet the capitalist framework meant that the peasantry remained impoverished, while agribusiness interests in Santa Cruz received huge government subsidies. Today, 100 families own 25 million hectares of land, while two million people work five million hectares. Sixty percent of productive lands are in Santa Cruz (Clarín [Buenos Aires], 20 December).

It will take an agrarian revolution, as part of a socialist revolution against the entire system of class exploitation, for the poor and landless to rise out of poverty by expropriating the capitalist farms and instituting modern, mechanized and scientific agriculture through encouraging collective production. Only through such a revolution will oppressed indigenous peoples be able to take for themselves the rights and power denied them for centuries. As for the “war on drugs,” it is a pretext for imperialist intervention in Latin America and racist repression in the ghettos and barrios inside the United States. Revolutionary Marxists oppose all laws criminalizing drugs and defend the right of Bolivian peasants to unlimited cultivation and sale of coca. Throw out all U.S. troops, spy agencies and “advisors”!

The right-wing elite of Santa Cruz, Tarija and other gas-rich regions in the east and south despises Morales’ plebeian base as “indios revoltosos” (uppity Indians). The MAS leader’s fawning before these racists can only embolden them. Meanwhile, the military high command expressed its disapproval of Morales’ request that outgoing president Eduardo Rodríguez freeze military transfers and promotions until after January 22, when Morales takes over the presidency. In a brazen act of insubordination, Army commander General Marcelo Antezana publicly objected to the president-elect’s request. The Bolivian army and police are notorious for their endless massacres, most recently the murder of more than 80 protesters in October 2003. Yet Morales – like Chile’s Salvador Allende in the 1970s and the Spanish Republic in the ’30s – pledges to respect the “institutionality” of the military, the brutal enforcers of capitalist power and privilege. MAS defense spokesman Juan Ramón Quintana stated that “Morales has committed himself to respect the institutionality of the armed forces, and guarantees the fulfillment of its regulations” (Clarín [Buenos Aires], 24 December).

Defense of the most basic interests, and lives, of Bolivia’s exploited and oppressed requires decisively defeating and expropriating the Santa Cruz oligarchs as well as the La Paz/Cochabamba industrialists and dismantling the officer corps and military structure that are covered with generations of workers’ blood. Like all the other burning issues of Bolivia’s class struggle, this cannot be accomplished through the MAS formula of “refounding” bourgeois democracy with a Constituent Assembly – in a country which has had almost as many constitutions as military coups. The workers and peasants need their own self-defense committees, leading to worker and peasant militias and councils (soviets), which can win over rank-and-file soldiers against the officer caste that serves the ruling class.

A socialist revolution in Bolivia, in the heart of Latin America, would have immediate consequences in this increasingly polarized continent. The powerhouse of the region’s proletariat is the working class of Brazil, where the popular front of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva faces widespread worker discontent. Like Argentina’s President Néstor Kirchner, Lula recently announced that he will make early debt payment of billions of dollars to the IMF, while the army and cops attack landless peasants and slum dwellers. In Peru, President Toledo’s capitalism with a “cholo” (Indian) face has used naked repression against massive labor protests. In Ecuador, the left and indigenous organizations helped put into power the rightist military officer Lucio Gutiérrez, who brought Indian leaders into his cabinet only to dump them after they served his purpose of demobilizing worker-peasant-Indian unrest, and was then himself ousted by mass protests last April.

To the north, Mexico’s popular-frontist mouthpiece La Jornada (19 December) expressed the hope that Morales’ victory would presage the voice of the “people” being “heard forcefully in the 2006 [Mexican] presidential elections.” What they mean is a victory for the candidate of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which governs Mexico City in the interests of Mexican and foreign capital, sending granaderos (riot police) to break the heads of striking teachers and students. The new walls Washington plans to build along the border with Mexico cannot seal the U.S. off from social upheavals in Latin America. Immigrant workers – a “human bridge” between the continents – are a dynamic sector of the multiethnic U.S. proletariat.

Washington’s disquiet over Morales’ close relations with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is mirrored by most of the left’s hopes in a Caracas-La Paz alliance. A bonanza of oil profits gives the Chávez regime a margin of maneuver qualitatively greater than what Morales will have in impoverished Bolivia. Meanwhile, efforts by Venezuela and other South American countries to form a regional energy cartel have disquieted MAS spokesmen eager to protect Bolivia’s particular interests as a gas provider. Most fundamentally, the nationalist government in Caracas rests on the armed forces of the bourgeois state – its “Bolivarian” rhetoric cannot break imperialist domination of Latin America. Trotskyists defend Venezuela militarily against U.S. coup attempts and threats of aggression (as we would do in the event of U.S. moves against a Morales government in Bolivia), without giving any political support to this nationalist regime.

A month before the elections, an Andean Information Network analysis (18 November) noted that while the MAS “faces significant popular pressure to enact sweeping reforms,” it has “taken pains to appease international interests and allay fears of a radical socialist regime.” Thus “many within Bolivia’s social movements view Morales’ and MAS’s positions as not going far enough.” The electoral victory of Evo Morales highlights class contradictions that his bourgeois regime will be unable to conciliate or suppress.

Faced with the hard reality of capitalism under a MAS government, broad sectors of the Bolivian masses may undergo further rapid radicalization. Revolution is rarely far from people’s minds on the impoverished altiplano. But revolutionary victory requires a break from the tradition of national narrowness of even the “far left” in Bolivia, and a fight for a Federation of Andean Workers Republics as part of the Socialist United States of Latin America, extending revolution to the North American and world proletariat.

The Left and Evo Morales

Bolivian mine workers federation marches in La Paz, June 8. Miners are key sector of Bolivian
proletariat. What is urgently required is to forge revolutionary leadership. (Internationalist photo)

Bolivia, with its history of violent class conflict and class-conscious labor movement, is a highly politicized country, where even market vendors’ associations display Che Guevara’s image on their banners. In the 1990s, the movement of coca producers led by Evo Morales arose in the Chapare region of Cochabamba, and soon drew the attention of sectors of the Bolivian left. The followers of Argentine “Trotskyist” Nahuel Moreno boasted for several years that they were key advisors to Morales’ movement. Until a parliamentary spat divided them recently, Evo’s No. 2 was former long-time miners leader Filemón Escobar, who had, in previous decades, been the highest-placed labor leader of Guillermo Lora’s Partido Obrero Revolucionario (POR –Revolutionary Workers Party), the main Bolivian organization describing itself as Trotskyist.

Since running a feverish national election campaign in 1985, the POR has refused to vote in elections, claiming the revolution is just around the corner. It maintained this position in the December 2005 vote, writing: “The repudiation of elections which can be felt today reveals that the proletarian revolution is advancing rapidly” (Masas No. 1966, 30 September 2005). At the same time, this party showed its centrist nature (revolutionary in words, opportunist in deeds) yet again in the May-June 2005 upsurge. The POR helped the bureaucracy of the COB (Bolivian Labor Federation) set up a short-lived “National and Indigenous People’s Assembly,” where labor, peasant and neighborhood association leaders made ringing speeches denouncing Morales’ sell-out of the mass protests, only to fall in line with the MAS as it helped transfer power to interim president Rodríguez (see “Myth and Reality: El Alto and the ‘People’s Assembly’” (The Internationalist No. 21, Summer 2005).

After the May-June upsurge, the COB leaders talked vaguely of establishing some kind of “Political Instrument of the Working People” while wheeling and dealing with various small nationalist groupings. More recently, a “First National Workers’ and People’s Summit,” held in El Alto in early December called by the COB, the Regional Labor Federation (COR) and the Bolivian Mine Workers Federation (FSTMB), declared that the elections “called in order to dismantle the tenacious struggle of the nation’s exploited masses will not resolve the problems that are strangling Bolivians nor will they defend the sovereignty and dignity of the nation” (Econoticias Bolivia, 12 December 2005). Its “answer” to the electoralism of the MAS was to call to resuscitate the stillborn “People’s Assembly” ... at a meeting in April. The nationalist bureaucrats seek to cover their impotence with bombastic names for non-existent organizations.

The abortive campaign for a “Political Instrument of the Working People” brought a new effort to pressure the COB leaders to the left by a small group called the LOR-CI (Revolutionary Workers League – Fourth International), part of the tendency led by the Argentine PTS, a split from the Morenoite current. Serving as a left cover for the bureaucracy is standard procedure for this tendency. The LOR-CI was a junior partner of the POR in the May-June bloc for the People’s Assembly. In the latest elections, the LOR-CI rightly refused to vote for Morales, but it continues to call on the COB, neighborhood associations and other groups to establish a “real” People’s Assembly at the same time as it tails the MAS slogan of a Constituent Assembly.

Recent days have seen furious polemics by the Argentine Partido Obrero (PO) of Jorge Altamira, in defense of its gung-ho support to Morales. “We Call to Vote for Evo Morales and the MAS,” headlined El Obrero internacional (December 2005), organ of Altamira’s campaign to “refound the Fourth International.” The day after the elections, Altamira issued a declaration titled “The Partido Obrero Hails the Victory of Evo Morales and the MAS.” This was followed up by an article proclaiming the Bolivian election “A People’s Tsunami” (Prensa Obrera, 22 December 2005). While criticizing Morales’ program, PO claimed among other things that congressmen elected on the MAS slate “include genuine revolutionary militants whose candidacies were decided by vote in People’s Assemblies.” Challenged by the PTS for its open support to class collaboration, PO responded with the Stalinist-style smear that anyone who did not vote for Morales was supporting the right wing and “working for an ‘overall defeat’ of the masses.” (Prensa Obrera, 22 December).

Another of the many left tendencies calling to vote for “Evo” is the international grouping around Ted Grant and Alan Woods, British Labourites who lately have cast themselves as “Marxist” advisors to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez. They write:

“The experience of a Morales government is a necessary step in the development of the consciousness of the masses in Bolivia. And the elementary duty of revolutionaries in Bolivia is to accompany them in this experience. They have no alternative but to call for a critical vote for the MAS....”

–“Bolivian elections: What position should the Marxists take?” (16 December)

Cloaked in objectivism, this is the same argument opportunists made to support Kerensky in 1917 Russia, the Spanish and French Popular Fronts in 1936, Allende in 1970, and innumerable nationalist regimes throughout Latin America: class collaboration, and all the defeats it brings the workers, are “a necessary step” for the masses, which “revolutionaries” must accompany.

This has nothing in common with the outlook and program of Leon Trotsky, whose Fourth International called to tell the truth to the masses and swim against the stream of class collaboration, fighting for proletarian opposition to all bourgeois governments, the only way to defend the masses against the class enemy and prepare real revolutionary victories.

While various pseudo-Trotskyists compete with each other in tailing after the MAS or the COB bureaucrats with their respective class-collaborationist calls for “constituent” or “people’s” assemblies, the League for the Fourth International has insisted that what’s posed in Bolivia today is to begin to build an authentic Trotskyist party to lead the struggle for genuine workers councils as the organizing center for proletarian revolution (see the series of articles and on-the-spot reports from Bolivia in The Internationalist No. 22).

For its part, the now centrist Spartacist tendency has reached a new low as its Mexican comrades now denounce us for calling for soviets in the May-June Bolivian events, claiming this is impossible since according to them there is “no working class in Bolivia today” (never mind the thousands of factories in the city of El Alto alone). In other words, these fake-Trotskyists believe socialist revolution is impossible in Bolivia. This is strikingly similar to arguments made by García Linera, including at a talk at the University of Mexico City, where the MAS theorist sought to defend this line against comrades of the Grupo Internacionalista (Mexican section of the LFI) speaking from the floor.

The program of genuine Trotskyism is more relevant than ever to Bolivia today. Washington spokesmen have expressed an acute fear of revolution in the Andean country: despite their distaste for Morales, they see that he may prove unable to contain the masses for long. Last summer, a senior advisor to U.S. war secretary Rumsfeld warned in a public talk: “You have a revolution going on in Bolivia, a revolution that potentially could have consequences as far-reaching as the Cuban revolution of 1959”; the events “could have repercussions in Latin America and elsewhere that you could be dealing with for the rest of your lives” (quoted in the  article by David Rieff, “Che’s Second Coming?” New York Times Magazine, 20 November 2005). With their military bogged down in the dirty colonial occupation of Iraq, the U.S. rulers are increasingly nervous about securing their Latin American “backyard.”

On the day of the Bolivian elections, New York Times correspondent Juan Forero quoted a middle-aged indigenous community leader who said, “What we really need is to transform this country. We have to do away with the capitalist system.” Quite correct! Bolivia is indeed fertile soil for the program of permanent revolution. The task of the hour is to forge the nucleus of a real Trotskyist party in intransigent struggle against the new bourgeois regime, the traditional parties of right and “center,” the reformist/nationalist bureaucrats and the opportunists who tail after them. Realizing the hopes of the indigenous and working masses means fulfilling the imperialists’ worst fears: a socialist revolution that ignites revolutionary struggle throughout the hemisphere and beyond.  n