[A-List] Alvaro Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power

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

----- Original Message ----- From: "robert montgomery"
<ilyenkova@xxxxxxxxx> To: <marxism@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent:
Saturday, February 18, 2006 11:52 PM Subject: [Marxism] Re Alvaro
Garcia Linera: State Crisis and Popular Power


New Left Review 37, January-February 2006

Bolivia’s new vice-president analyses the dual crisis of his country’s
state. Exhaustion of the neoliberal primary-export model, and
bankruptcy of a ‘colonial’ republican order founded on mestizo
superiority.

ÁLVARO GARCÍA LINERA

STATE CRISIS AND POPULAR POWER

Three factors define the functioning, stability and representative
capacity of a state. The first is the overall framework of social
forces: the correlation between the different coalitions, both
dominant and subordinate, contesting the reconfiguration of what
Bourdieu called ‘state capital’—the ability to influence decisions on
matters of common import. Secondly, there is the system of political
institutions and rules that mediate the coexistence of hierarchical
social forces. In effect, this institutional framework is a
materialization of the founding correlation of forces that give rise
to a particular state regime, and the means by which it legally
reproduces itself. Thirdly, every state depends upon a structure of
common categories of perception, a series of mobilizing beliefs that
generates a degree of social and moral conformity among both ruling
and ruled, and which takes material form through the state’s cultural
repertoire and rituals.

When these three components of a country’s political life are visibly
healthy and functioning, we can speak of an optimal correspondence
between state regime and society. When one or all of these factors is
suspended or ruptured, we are presented with a crisis of the state,
manifested in the antagonism between the political world and its
institutions on the one hand, and the opposing actions by large-scale
social coalitions on the other. This is precisely what has been
happening in Bolivia in recent years. The successive uprisings and
popular upheavals that have rocked the country since 2000 may best be
understood as symptoms of a profound state crisis.

This crisis has a double character. In the short term, it is a crisis
of the neoliberal model, and the social and ideological basis on which
it has been constructed in Bolivia. But it is also, to paraphrase
Braudel, a crisis of the longue durée: an institutional and
ideological crisis of the republican state, premised since its
foundation on a colonial relationship to the indigenous majority of
the Bolivian people. Let us examine how these aspects are manifested
at the social, institutional and ideological levels in Bolivia today.

Framework of social forces

The starting point for analysis of the balance of social forces in
Bolivia since the mid-1980s is the political and cultural defeat of
the labour movement organized around the cob. [1] For decades after
the popular revolution of 1953, this had articulated the needs of a
wide front of urban and rural working classes, representing popular
demands regarding the administration of the social surplus through
structures such as union membership and workers’ joint management.
After the dispersal of this labour movement, a social bloc consisting
of business fractions connected to the world market, elite political
parties, foreign investors and international regulatory bodies was
consolidated, which then took centre stage in the definition of public
policy. For the next fifteen years, these forces became the sole
subjects of decision-making and initiative in public administration,
reconfiguring the economic and social organization of the country
under promises of modernization and globalization—first and
second-generation structural reforms, privatizations,
decentralization, tariff-cutting and so forth.

Since the turn of the millennium, this relationship of forces has been
challenged from below, and the guaranteed elitism of the
‘neoliberal-patrimonial state’ thrown into question, as new forms of
organization and politicization have reversed the footing of the
subaltern classes. The protests and road blockades of April and
September 2000, July 2001 and June 2002 signalled a regional
reconstitution of social movements capable of imposing public
policies, legal regimes and even modifications to the distribution of
the social surplus through the strength of their mobilizations. [2]
Laws such as No. 2029, which sought to redefine ownership of water,
and laws enabling the sale of state enterprises into private hands,
tax increases, etc, were annulled or modified under pressure from
social movements and popular uprisings. Presidential decrees such as
that closing the coca market or mandating interdiction in the Yungas
had to be withdrawn for the same reason. Financial legislation was
amended in line with the national demands of organized popular groups
(indigenous communities, retirees, coca-growing peasants, co-operative
miners, policemen), demonstrating the emergence of social blocs which,
at the margins of parliament, and—following the mas successes in
2002—with support from within it, have the strength to stop the
implementation of government policies, and impose the redistribution
of public resources by non-parliamentary means.

The important thing to note about these popular groupings, hitherto
excluded from decision-making, is that the demands they raise
immediately seek to modify economic relations. Thus their recognition
as a collective political force necessarily implies a radical
transformation of the dominant state form, built on the
marginalization and atomization of the urban and rural working
classes. Moreover—and this is a crucial aspect of the current
reconfiguration—the leaderships of these new forces are predominantly
indigenous, and uphold a specific cultural and political project. In
contrast to the period that opened with the 1930s, when the social
movements were articulated around a labour unionism that held to an
ideal of mestizaje, and was the result of an economic modernization
carried out by business elites, today the social movements with the
greatest power to interrogate the political order have an indigenous
social base, and spring from the agrarian zones excluded from or
marginalized by the processes of economic modernization. The Aymaras
of the altiplano, the cocaleros of the Yungas and Chapare, the ayllus
of Potosí and Sucre and the Indian people of the east have replaced
trade unions and popular urban organizations as social protagonists.
And despite the regional or local character of their actions, they
share a matrix of indigenous identity that calls into question what
has been the unvarying nucleus of the Bolivian state for 178 years:
its monoethnicity.

In addition, the elite coalition is itself showing signs of fatigue
and internal conflict. The economic programme of the past twenty
years—privatization of public enterprises, externalization of profit,
coca eradication—has resulted in a narrowing of opportunities for some
sections of the national bourgeoisie, exacerbated by the shrinking of
tax revenues owing to the growth of the informal sector. As their
long-term outlook has darkened, the different elite fractions have
begun to pull apart, squabbling over the reduction of profits
transferred to the state, the refusal by foreign refiners to adjust
the purchase price of petrol, the renegotiation of gas prices with
Brazil, [3] land taxes, etc. Their shared project of the last decade
is over.

The backdrop to the current crisis of the business bloc and to the
insurgency of social movements is the Bolivian economy’s
primary-export, enclave character. [4] The fact that industrial
modernity is present only as small islands in a surrounding sea of
informality and a semi-mercantile peasant economy limits the formation
of an internal market capable of supporting value-added business
activity, even if it reduces wage costs. Vulnerability to the
fluctuations of world commodity prices is an endemic feature. In that
sense we can say that the longue durée crisis of the state is the
political correlate of an equally long-term economic crisis of the
primary-export model, which is incapable of productively retaining
surpluses, and hence unable to deploy the capital necessary for
national development. Thus the Santa Cruz Civic Committees’ proposals
for departmental autonomy, renewed every time there is a discussion
about how income from hydrocarbons is to be allocated, or the demands
for self-government by the indigenous communities, not only question
the configuration of state power, but also reveal the underlying
crisis of the established economic order.

Political institutions

Since 1985, Bolivia’s elite political parties have sought, with the
authoritarian support of the state, to substitute themselves for the
old regime of political mediation carried out by the trade unions,
which had linked the communal heritage of traditional societies with
the collective actions of workers in large-scale enterprises. The
party system, under Bolivia’s particularly skewed constitution, was
prescriptively defined as the mechanism through which the exercise of
citizenship should function. However, it is clear that the old party
groupings have not proved able to turn themselves into genuine
vehicles for political mediation, capable of channelling social
demands towards the state. They remain, above all, familial and
business networks through which members of the elite can compete for
access to the state administration as if it were a patrimonial
possession; connections to the voting masses are largely organized
around clientelist links and ties of privilege. [5]

With the syndical basis of Bolivian citizenship destroyed, and a new
form of electoral participation barely perceptible, other popular
forms of political mediation began to emerge with the turn of the
century. Social movements, new and old, have asserted their own modes
of deliberation, mass meetings and collective action. There are thus
two types of institutional system in Bolivia today. In the Chapare,
Yungas and Norte de Potosí regions, community forms are superimposed
not only on party organization, but also on state institutions
themselves, to the extent that mayors, corregidores and subprefects
are de facto subordinated to peasant confederations. In the case of
the northern altiplano, several subprefectures and police posts have
disappeared over the last three years and ‘community police’ have been
created in provincial capitals to preserve public order in the name of
the peasant federations. During the blockades that accompanied the
anti-privatization protests of 2003–05, hundreds of communities on the
altiplano constituted what they call the ‘great indigenous barracks’
of Q’alachaca, an ad hoc confederation of militant ayllus and
villages.

The Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta’s notion of the ‘apparent state’
is of clear relevance here. Due to the social and civilizational
diversity of the country, large stretches of territory and sections of
the population remain outside, or have not interiorized, the
disciplines of the capitalist labour process; they recognize other
temporalities, other systems of authority, and affirm collective aims
and values different from those offered by the Bolivian state. [6]
Through the political and economic struggles of the last five years,
these layers have undergone a process of increasing institutional
consolidation, in some cases permanent (politicized agrarian
indigenous territories) and in others sporadic (urban areas of
Cochabamba, La Paz and El Alto). As a result, the neoliberal state has
been confronted with a fragmenting institutional order and robbed of
governing authority. The alternative system, anchored in the world of
indigenous experience marginalized by Bolivia’s uneven modernization
process, is challenging the state’s centuries-long pretence at a
modernity based on texts and institutions that are not even respected
by the elites who propound them; and who themselves have never
abandoned the methods of seigneurial and patrimonial politics. The
generalized corruption in the state apparatus is nothing other than
the modernized representation of these habits through which elites in
power take on and reproduce state functions.

The liberal-capitalist political culture and institutions that are
both being overtaken by the social movements, and traduced by the
actual behaviour of the elites in power, presuppose the individuation
of society: the dissolution of traditional loyalties, seigneurial
relations and non-industrial productive systems. These processes, in
Bolivia, have affected at most one third of the population. The
Bolivian state, however, including its current ‘neoliberal’ variant,
has, as a sort of political schizophrenia, constructed normative
regimes and institutions that bear no correspondence to the ‘patchwork’
reality of our society which, in its structural majority, is neither
industrial nor individuated. The effect of the indigenous and plebeian
social movements, which in Habermasian terms stress ‘normative’ over
‘communicative’ action, is thus to call into question the validity of
republican state institutions that present a mere simulacrum of
modernity, in a society which still lacks the structural and material
bases upon which such modernity might be based.

Mobilizing beliefs

Since 1985, the ideological blueprints offered to the Bolivian
population have been the free market, privatization, governability and
representative democracy. All these proposals were illusions, but
well-founded ones, since although they never materialized in any
substantial sense, they did bring about a realignment of actions and
beliefs in a society which imagined that, through them and the
sacrifices they demanded, it would be possible to attain wellbeing,
modernity and social recognition. The upper, middle and subaltern
urban classes—the latter having abandoned all expectations of
protection from the state and workplace unions—saw in this offer a new
path to stability and social betterment.

By 2000, the gulf between expectations and realities was driving a
disappointed population into conflict with state authority. The
promise of modernity had resulted only in intensified exploitation and
an increase in informal labour (from 55 to 68 per cent in 20 years);
that of social betterment, in a greater concentration of wealth and a
refinement in forms of ethnic discrimination. Privatization,
especially of hydrocarbons, far from expanding the internal market,
has seen an accelerated flight of earnings into foreign hands. This
breakdown between official schemas and lived reality has left large
sections of the population highly receptive to new loyalties and
mobilizing beliefs. Among these are the national-ethnic claims of the
indigenous masses, which have produced a sort of indigenous
nationalism in the Aymara section of the altiplano; state recovery of
privatized public resources—water, hydrocarbons—and the broadening of
social participation and democracy through recognition of non-liberal
political practices of a collective and traditional bent (indigenous
community, union, etc). These convictions are actively displacing
loyalties to the liberal, privatizing ideology of the state.

We could say that the Bolivian state has lost its monopoly over the
capital of recognition, and that we are passing through a period of
transition in the structures of allegiance. A striking feature of the
new movements is that they dispute both the discourses of neoliberal
modernity and the founding certainties of the republican state—that
there is an inherent inequality between indigenous and mestizos, and
that Indians are not capable of governing the country. The fact that
the Indians, accustomed to giving their votes to the ‘mist’is’
(mestizos), have over the past few years voted extensively for the
emerging indigenous leaders, denotes a watershed in the symbolic
structures of a profoundly colonial and racialized society. For
indigenous social forces, the construction of urban hegemony is posed
as a central strategic task, for it is here that their identity
confronts its own hybridity or dissolution in face of the
composition—not without ambiguities—of mestizo identities, both elite
and popular.

In Bolivia, then, the pillars of both the ‘neoliberal’ model and the
republican state have deteriorated rapidly. It is this conjunction of
crises that helps to explain not just the radical nature of the
political conflict over the past five years, but also its complexity
and irresolution. Such crises cannot endure for long, because no
society can withstand long periods of political vacuum or uncertainty.
Sooner or later there will be a lasting recomposition of forces,
beliefs and institutions that will inaugurate a new period of state
stability. The question for Bolivia is what kind of state this
mutation will create. There could be increased repression, leading to
the introduction of a ‘neoliberal-authoritarian’ state as the new
political form, which might perhaps solve the crisis of the courte
durée, but not that of the longue durée, whose problems would soon
manifest themselves again. Or there could be instead an opening of new
spaces for the exercise of democratic rights (multicultural political
forms, combined communitarian-indigenous and liberal institutions) and
economic redistribution (a productive role for the state,
self-management, etc), capable of addressing both dimensions of the
crisis. In the latter scenario, a democratic resolution of the
neoliberal state crisis will have to involve a simultaneous
multicultural resolution of the crisis of the colonial republican
state.

Hegemonies, Zavaleta argues, can grow tired: there are moments when
the state ceases to be irresistible, when the population abandons the
ideological frameworks that allowed it to accept the elite’s ordering
of society as desirable. The uprising of October 2003 was the maximal
expression of the masses’ dissent from the ‘neoliberal-patrimonial’
state, and hence of the exhaustion of its form of hegemony. [7] If
each state crisis generally goes through four phases—manifestation of
the crisis; transition or systemic chaos; conflictive emergence of a
new principle of state order; consolidation of the new state—October,
with its hundreds of thousands of Indians and urban masses in revolt
in the cities of La Paz and El Alto, and its culmination in the flight
of President Sánchez de Lozada, inescapably marked the Bolivian state’s
entry into the transitional phase. The initial acceptance of the
constitutional succession of Vice-President Carlos Mesa was due not so
much to deference towards parliamentarism as to a popular attachment
to the old prejudice of the personalization of power, the belief that
a change of personnel is in itself a change of regime. But there was
also a certain historical lucidity with regard to the further
consequences implicit, given the present correlation of forces, in the
abandonment of liberal-democratic institutions.

But if there can be no state domination without the consent of the
dominated—progressively eroded in Bolivia since the blockades of
2000—there can be no successful opposition without the capacity to
postulate an alternative order. This is precisely what the insurgents
discovered: they were able to paralyse the state with their blockades
but were unable to put forward an alternative and legitimate power
project. Hence the ambiguous and confused truce of the Mesa period
(2003–05), during which the distinguished broadcaster attempted to
channel the insurgents’ minimum programme (resignation of Sánchez de
Lozada, constituent assembly, new hydrocarbons law), while leaving in
place the entire governmental machinery of neoliberal reforms.

Revolutionary epochs

It was Marx who proposed the concept of the ‘revolutionary epoch’ in
order to understand extraordinary historical periods of dizzying
political change—abrupt shifts in the position and power of social
forces, repeated state crises, recomposition of collective identities,
repeated waves of social rebellion—separated by periods of relative
stability during which the modification, partial or total, of the
general structures of political domination nevertheless remains in
question.

A revolutionary epoch is a relatively long period, of several months
or years, of intense political activity in which: (a) social sectors,
blocs or classes previously apathetic or tolerant of those in power
openly challenge authority and claim rights or make collective
petitions through direct mobilizations (gas and water coordinadoras,
indigenous, neighbourhood organizations, cocaleros, small-scale
farmers); (b) some or all of these mobilized sectors actively posit
the necessity of taking state power (mas, csutcb, cob); [8] (c) there
is a surge of adherence to these proposals from large sections of the
population (hundreds of thousands mobilized in the Water War, against
the tax hike, in the Gas War, in the elections to support Indian
candidates); the distinction between governors and governed begins to
dissolve, due to the growing participation of the masses in political
affairs; and (d) the ruling classes are unable to neutralize these
political aspirations, resulting in a polarization of the country into
several ‘multiple sovereignties’ [9] that fragment the social order
(the loss of the ‘authority principle’ from April 2000 till today).

In revolutionary epochs societies fragment into social coalitions,
each with proposals, discourses, leaderships and programmes for
political power that are antagonistic to and incompatible with one
another. This gives rise to ‘cycles of protest’, [10] waves of
mobilization followed by withdrawals and retreat, which serve to
demonstrate the weakness of those in power (Banzer in April and
October 2000 and June 2001; Quiroga in January 2002; Sánchez de Lozada
in February and October 2003). Such protests also serve to incite or
‘infect’ [11] other sectors into using mass mobilization as a
mechanism to press their demands (teachers, the retired, the landless,
students). At the same time, these mobilizations fracture and
destabilize the social coalition of the ruling bloc, giving rise to
counter-reactions (the so-called business-civic-political ‘crescent’
in the east of the country), which in turn produce another wave of
mobilizations, generating a process of political instability and
turbulence that fuels itself. Not every revolutionary epoch ends in a
revolution, understood as a change of the social forces in power,
which would have to be preceded by an insurrectionary situation. There
are revolutionary epochs that lead to a restoration of the old regime
(coup d’état), or to a negotiated and peaceful modification of the
political system through the partial or substantial incorporation of
the insurgents and their proposals for change into the power bloc.

The present political period in Bolivia can best be characterized as a
revolutionary epoch. Since 2000, there has been a growing
incorporation of broader social sectors into political decision-making
(water, land, gas, Constituent Assembly) through their union,
communal, neighbourhood or guild organizations; there has been a
continual weakening of governmental authority and fragmentation of
state sovereignty; and there has been an increasing polarization of
the country into two social blocs bearing radically distinct and
opposed projects for economy and state.

At one pole, the fundamental nucleus is the indigenous movement, both
rural (peasant) and urban (worker) in composition; this clearly
represents a different political and cultural project for the country
to any that has previously existed. The economic programme of this
pole is centred on the internal market, taking as its axis the peasant
community, urban-artisanal and micro-business activity, a revitalized
role for the state as producer and industrializing force, and a
central role for the indigenous majority in driving the new state. At
the other pole is the ascendant agro-export, financial and petroleum
business bloc, which has played the most dynamic role in the
liberalizing sectors of the economy. This bloc has a clear image of
how Bolivia should relate to external markets and of the role of
foreign investment, and it favours the subordination of the state to
private enterprise and the preservation, or restoration, of the old
political system. Anchored in the eastern and southeastern zones of
the country, beyond the current organizational reach of the social
movements, it deploys an openly racialized discourse.

This political polarity is this further structured by three underlying
cleavages: ethno-cultural (indigenous/qaras-gringos), class
(workers/businessmen) and regional (Andean west/Amazonian crescent).
In the case of the ‘left’ pole, the mobilizing identity is
predominantly ethno-cultural, around which worker identity is either
dissolved (in a novel type of indigenous proletarianism) or
complements indigenous leadership at a secondary level. For the ‘right’
pole, mobilizing identity is primarily regional in nature; hence the
importance of the Civic Committees, agitating for regional autonomy,
for these conservative forces.

This polarization has led to a dissociation between economic dominance
and political dominance, creating a period of instability since the
components of power are divided between two different zones, neither
of which has any immediate possibility of displacing the other.
Economic power has moved from west to east (reinforced by foreign
investment in hydrocarbons, services, agro-industry), while the
sociopolitical power of mobilization has been reinforced in the west,
giving rise to a new geographical uncertainty at the level of the
state. The interesting thing about the ‘paradox of October’, the
period opened up by the insurrection that overthrew Sánchez de Lozada,
is that this regional separation simultaneously expresses a
confrontation of sharply differentiated ethnicities and classes:
businessmen in the east (Santa Cruz, Beni, Tarija), and the indigenous
and mass sectors in the west (La Paz, Cochabamba, Potosí, Oruro), both
waiting to pounce on a state administration which, in territorial,
social and cultural terms, can no longer express the new economic and
political configuration of Bolivian society. It is true that there are
businessmen, indigenous, mestizos, workers and peasants in every part
of Bolivia; but the ascendant discourses and identities articulated
within each region are differentiated by these class, ethnic and
territorial roots.

Overall, the map of sociopolitical forces in Bolivia shows a highly
political field, with tendencies on both sides pushing for solutions
through force, either by coup d’état (mnr) [12] or insurrection
(csutcb/cob), or through electoral resolution, either via a
restoration of the old regime (adn) [13] or its progressive
transformation (mas). None of these tendencies has yet managed to
construct a bloc with a majority over the other components, still less
over the other sections of the population that would be indispensable
for a social leadership capable of a long-term hold on state power.

>From the point of view of the social movements and their prospects for
an indigenous-popular transformation of the state, there are two
alternatives: a path of gradual, institutional change by electoral
means led by Evo Morales, and an insurrectional path for the
revolutionary transformation of the state. The first would require the
construction of an electoral bloc around Morales, negotiated with
other leaders and social movements, that would be strong enough to
generate a unified popular and indigenous pole with the ability to
rule. The broad social backing needed would require proposals for
change robust enough to attract those urban sectors—middle-class,
upwardly mobile popular, and even business layers linked to the
internal market—who are at present reluctant to accept an indigenous
governmental solution, and without whose support an indigenous
electoral triumph would be rendered unviable.

The two paths, electoral and insurrectionary, are not necessarily
antagonistic; they could turn out to be complementary. On both,
however, the indigenous-popular pole should consolidate its hegemony,
providing intellectual and moral leadership of the country’s social
majorities. There will be neither electoral triumph nor victorious
insurrection without wide-ranging, patient work on the unification of
the social movements, and a practical education process to realize the
political, moral, cultural and organizational leadership of these
forces over Bolivia’s popular and middle strata.

*******************

[1] Central Obrera Boliviana: organization of workers from large
enterprises in different branches of production. In the wake of labour
flexibilization, closures of businesses and privatizations implemented
since 1985, its social base has been reduced to teachers, public
hospital employees, university students and some urban guilds.

[2] [In 2000, a rate hike imposed on the department of Cochabamba’s
newly privatized water supply led to massive protests, with strikes
and blockades shutting down the city. On April 4, some 100,000
strikers and protesters broke through the military cordon surrounding
the city’s central square and held a mass open-air assembly. On April
8, Aguas del Tunari’s contract on the water supply was revoked by the
Banzer government. The same months saw the mobilization of cocaleros
and peasant colonizers against the threat of coca eradication, with
indigenous people’s organizations playing a leading role in mounting
road blockades that threatened to cut food supplies to La Paz. In June
2001 cocaleros in the Yungas valleys succeeded in driving out the
joint us–Bolivian eradication force. Two months later, Banzer ceded
the presidency to his deputy, Quiroga—nlr.]

[3] [The state-owned Brazilian company Petrobras is a major purchaser
of Bolivian natural gas, along with the Spanish Repsol—nlr.]

[4] José Valenzuela, ¿Qué es un patrón de acumulación?, Mexico City
1990.

[5] P. Chaves, Los límites estructurales de los partidos de poder como
estructuras de mediación democrática: Acción Democrática Nacionalista,
degree thesis in sociology, La Paz 2000.

[6] Luis Tapia, La condición multisocietal: multiculturalidad,
pluralismo, modernidad, La Paz 2002.

[7] [Protests at the Sánchez de Lozada government’s scheme to export
gas reserves through Chile (a national enemy since it had robbed
Bolivia of access to the sea in the 1879–83 War of the Pacific),
rather than process them domestically, escalated into a full-scale
insurrection in La Paz and El Alto in October 2003, ending in the
ouster of the president—nlr.]

[8] Movimiento al Socialismo: political organization led by the
indigenous peasant leader Evo Morales. Rather than a party, it is an
electoral coalition of several urban and rural social movements.
csutcb: organization of indigenous and peasant communities founded in
1979, led by Felipe Quispe.

[9] Charles Tilly, European Revolutions, 1492–1992, Oxford 1993.

[10] Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective
Action and Politics, Cambridge 1994.

[11] Anthony Oberschall, Social Movements: Ideologies, Interests and
Identities, New Brunswick 1993.

[12] Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario: nationalist party that
led the popular revolution of 1952 and in the 1980s pushed through the
liberal reforms of the Washington Consensus.

[13] Acción Democrática Nacionalista: party founded in 1979 by the
dictator Hugo Banzer, which he led in subsequent elections, gaining
the presidency from 1997–2001.

This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from
http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm