[A-List] Álvaro García Linera

["James Daly" <james.irldaly@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

New Left Review 37, January-February 2006

The Left owes its December victory in Bolivia to the popular movements
that have stymied water and gas privatizations since 2000. Forrest
Hylton surveys the landscape ahead, and the militant formation of
Morales’s running mate Álvaro García Linera.



FORREST HYLTON

The Landslide in Bolivia

Introduction to Álvaro García Linera



The victory of Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo coalition
in the Bolivian presidential and legislative elections on 18 December
2005, after five years of tumultuous mass protests against
Washington-backed privatization and coca eradication programmes, opens
a new period in the country’s history. In electoral terms, it would be
hard to exaggerate the significance of the result. Whereas successful
Bolivian presidential candidates usually score below 25 per cent of
the popular vote, and none has ever topped 37 per cent, Morales and
his vice-president Álvaro García Linera have won 54 per cent, on a
turnout of 85 per cent. They carried all the cities except the
right-wing stronghold of Santa Cruz, and even took 33 per cent to the
Right’s 42 per cent in Santa Cruz Department, thanks in large part to
García’s months of campaigning there, and despite the disqualification
of hundreds of thousands of voters on a technicality. Morales is the
first Bolivian president ever to have been accorded an absolute
majority. In the only country in the western hemisphere in which the
bulk of the population identifies itself as indigenous, he is the
first indigenous head of state.




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The question as to whether a Morales–García government will follow the
Lula or the Chávez path—willing subordination to global capital, or
robust populist reformism along the lines of Bolivarian social
democracy—though pertinent, ignores the distinctiveness of Bolivia’s
developmental path and its long-standing insurrectionary traditions.
mas itself is not so much a party, in the accepted sense of the term,
as a coalition of personalist factions, with that of Morales
exercising unquestioned supremacy; it has none of the bureaucratic
infrastructure of the Brazilian pt, for example. Formed to represent
the coca-growers of Chapare in the 1998 elections, mas only broke
through onto the national stage in 2002, when Morales, the cocaleros’
charismatic union leader, was just beaten by Sánchez de Lozada for the
presidency by 23 to 21 per cent, and mas became the second largest
grouping in the Chamber of Deputies.

mas has had a complex relationship to the multi-hued mass protests
that have, since 2000, successfully overturned the privatization
programme in the ‘Water War’ of Cochabamba; stymied the us-backed coca
eradication projects in the Yungas and the Chapare; forced the repeal
of an imf-imposed tax increase, aimed at replenishing state coffers
emptied after Sánchez de Lozada’s pro-multinational reforms slashed
hydrocarbon royalties from 50 to 18 per cent; rallied against the
export of raw Bolivian gas and for its domestic processing, in the
Days of October 2003 that saw the ousting of Sánchez de Lozada; and
renewed demands for hydrocarbon nationalization in the summer of 2005,
bringing down his successor, Carlos Mesa. The mas central leadership
and Morales have often tail-ended these mobilizations, whose common
objectives have been to establish sovereign control over national
resources and to convoke a constituent assembly to restructure
political and economic life. [1] At the same time, mas has been the
only available vehicle for their national articulation.

Morales, born in Oruro in 1959, migrated to the Chapare with his
family as a child and was involved in cocalero organizing from his
early teens; his brother remains in Oruro and has a powerful mas base
there. Álvaro García Linera, his vice-president, was born into a
middle-class mestizo family in Cochabamba in 1962 and radicalized in
high school under the Banzer dictatorship. As a maths and science
student at unam in Mexico City, 1981–85, he was closely involved in
Central American solidarity campaigns against the Reagan-backed
counter-insurgencies. Returning to Bolivia, he worked with militant
tin miners in the Cédulas Mineras de Base, which later fused with the
‘red ayllu’ wing of the high-plains Aymara peasant movement, forming
the egtk (Tupac Katarí Guerrilla Army), one of Latin America’s few
indigenous-led guerrilla forces, in 1990. His first book, Crítica de
la nación y la nación crítica, was published in 1989 under the nom de
guerre Qananchiri—Aymara for ‘the one who clarifies things’. De
demonios escondidos y momentos de revolución came out under the same
name in 1991. Captured the following year, García was held
indefinitely in Chonchocoro Maximum Security Prison on charges of
armed uprising. Forma valor y forma comunidad de los procesos de
trabajo, published from gaol in 1995, reflected his reading.

After an activist campaign secured the release of the egtk militants
in 1997, García found a post teaching sociology at the Universidad
Mayor de San Andrés in La Paz, producing, among other works,
Reproletarización (1999), La condición obrera (2001) and Estado
multinacional (2005). He was a founding member of the radical
intellectual forum Comuna in La Paz, contributing a stream of essays
to their collections. [2] A creative interpreter of Bourdieu, García
became one of the leading theorists of, and speakers for, Bolivia’s
rising indigenous, rural and working-class social movements. Following
the 2002 elections, his contributions on radio and tv helped redefine
the terms of the national debate to reflect the new centrality of
these currents and their demands. As an educated mestizo who had taken
up arms with the indigenous guerrilla, suffered imprisonment yet not
reneged, García had acquired a particular prestige and legitimacy in
the eyes of many in the popular movements. When, in the summer of
2005, Morales and his advisors invited him to stand as
vice-presidential candidate for mas, of which he was not a member,
García asked that the social movements be given time to express their
views, rather than agreeing to a caudillo arrangement.

As García describes in the essay published below, ‘State Crisis and
Popular Power’, written before the elections, Bolivia currently
confronts a crisis both of the colonial republican state and of the
neoliberal model. The new Morales–García government will be faced with
an entrenched economic and political elite, with powerful agribusiness
interests in the eastern part of the country arguing for regional
autonomy. It will come under strong pressure from oil and gas
multinationals, led by Brazil’s Petrobras and Spain’s Repsol, over
nationalization, and from the us Embassy over coca production and
relations with Caracas and Havana.

Though mas will have a bare majority in the Chamber of Deputies,
having won 65 out of 130 seats in December, it will be in a minority
in the new Senate, elected under the ferociously disproportional
system favoured by Bolivia’s political caste (in each of the nine
Departments, the lead party gets two seats, the second party one). mas
has 12 Senate seats out of 27; podemos, the new conservative
coalition, has 13 seats; the mnr and un each have one—the electoral
collapse of the former being another significant outcome of the polls.
In addition, the right has won six of the nine departmental
Prefectures—comparable to us state governors’ mansions—including not
only Santa Cruz but Cochabamba and La Paz; mas holds only Oruro,
Potosí and Chuquisaca, making regional resistance to central
government initiatives likely. As Morales’s chief economic advisor
Carlos Villegas has pointed out, mas also suffers from a lack of
competent administrators.

Morales has announced that it is the new Constituent Assembly, to be
elected in July 2006, that will determine sovereignty over Bolivia’s
mineral and hydrocarbon deposits and set parameters for relations with
the multinationals, as well as crafting more representative political
institutions. The mas programme also calls for the right of households
to cultivate a half-hectare of coca for personal use, while condemning
narcotrafficking. Unlike the Lula government, that of Morales faces
pressure from highly mobilized popular movements, and will have to
meet some of their expectations if it is to avoid confronting the
street protests that toppled two Bolivian presidents in as many years.
Cultural concessions may come cheap. But the demand that gas reserves
be processed domestically, for value added, rather than exported raw
by the mncs at bargain prices, remains crucial for the national
development of a country where three-quarters of rural homes lack
electricity. If the party, such as it is, attempts to rule over the
movements, Morales and García will find themselves vulnerable from the
Right and, within their own ranks, to advocates of more vertical,
caudillista modes of command. Alternatively, mas might seek to devise
ways to strengthen the movements that brought it to executive and
legislative power, thus recasting relations between state and society
so as to expand opportunities for political participation. A failure
to move towards a solution of the social and political crisis
currently confronting Bolivia, however, may bolster the attractions of
maximalism, both on the altiplano and in Santa Cruz.



[1] See Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, ‘The Chequered Rainbow’,
nlr 35, Sept–Oct 2005.

[2] See El regreso de la Bolivia plebeya, 2000; Tiempos de rebelión,
2001; Pluriverso: Teoría política boliviana, 2001; Democratizaciones
plebeyas, 2002; Memorias de octubre, 2004; Horizontes y límites del
Estado y el poder, 2005.




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