How true it is that nothing lasts forever. Bolivia’s exploited classes, of mainly indigenous origin, are now confronting more than five centuries of exclusion. This territory’s original inhabitants were subjugated by the cross and the sword during the colonial period, they were harassed and had their lands taken from them under the Republic, and their culture was ignored during the bourgeois democratic revolution of 1952. Now, as they finally take State power by democratic means at the beginning of the 21st century, the dominant minority accuses them of wanting to install the “first racist, fascist State in Latin America”.
The current historical juncture is characterized by a profound crisis of the market economy, of liberal democracy and of the very foundations of the old republican Colonial State, a mono-cultural, centralist and exclusionary State that has remained intact since the foundation of the Republic.
The current historical moment opened by the indigenous and working-class movements resembles the period between the 1940s and 1950s in which a struggle for power between the “rosca” [oligarchy] and the popular movement marked the prelude to the nationalist revolution of 1952.
What is new is that the indigenous peoples are now the challengers of the old colonial State –which was both subordinated to foreign powers and the architect of today’s racialized class-society. Determined to liberate themselves form their accursed colonial heritage, the historically excluded sectors, who were never recognized as subjects with political rights, are changing the course of the State and attempting to consolidate cultural, socio-economic and institutional reforms in the country.
The exercise of politics has been “deprivatised”. Previously it was in the hands of the systemic parties, whereas now the masses have burst onto the scene, appropriating the bourgeois democracy and the normative judicial apparatus which has historically subordinated them. Vice President Alvaro García Linera defines this juncture in “Leninist” terms: “It is the moment of the masses (…) Bolivia’s indians have decided to become political actors and decision-makers. This is the most important event in the history of the Republic and has delivered a mortal blow to the neo-liberal model”.
In the minds of the exploited classes, a different vision of the State has crystallized, and a Second Republic is emerging, one whose sustenance is the communitarian civilization ignored from the Republic’s inception.
From the beginning of this century a “new plural and social subject” is under construction, and it demands a new national project. It has broken with the old, colonial, Republican State and assumed the historical challenge of collectively building the new Social Unitarian State based on Plurinational Communitarian Law. Its aim is a true Bolivia –one that is democratic, productive, peaceful and committed to integral development and the free will of the people.
Without moving an inch beyond the conservative boundaries of the exhausted neoliberal paradigm, the most reactionary political and business interests have rejected the democratic battle of ideas and called for fascist tactics to block the transformations promoted by the immense majorities.
Minorities entrenched in the region of the “half moon”, deceived by the agro-industrial, land-owning comercial elite and linked to multinationals, openly violate the democratic rules of the game. They denigrate institucional rule, practice the crime of sedition, openly call for disobediance and organize de facto mini-republics that are independent of central authority.
In Search of Pluralism
The Right understands the background of the current programme of transformation as the “domination of one group by another”. It sees the “closing-down” of political, economic and cultural freedoms, the construction of a “racist State” with the “constitutionalization” of the term “native indigenous campesinos”. According to the Podemos parlamentarian Walter Javier Arrázola Mendivil, this term has no sociological or historical foundation and shatters the universal principle of “citizenship”.
The conservative political sectors see only the decendents of the pre-Conquest Peoples and Nations being recognized by the new Political Constitution of the State, whilst other social identities built in the last 500 years, such as the mestizos [mixed Spanish/indigenous] are denied any value.
The Right says that the new Magna Carta “creates first and second-class citizens” and ignores “mestizaje” [the ‘mixed race’]. In this way, “being indigenous” becomes a means of social and economic advancement and a kind of “cultural and economic revanchism”. But is this really the case?
The prelude to the Magna Carta approved at the end of 2007 describes the existence of a wide diversity of cultures in our national territory. These cultures had no experience of racism until the advent of colonial rule.
Now, the Bolivian people propose the building of a new, truly pluralist State, inspired by the memory of its martyrs and its past social and indigenous struggles. The indigenous worker-campesino majorities are carrying out a bourgeois democratic revolution. They don’t seek to wipe out the conservative political minorities, but rather demand respect and equality for all.
The only goal of the indigenous emergence, says García Linera, is equality –nothing more, nothing less. That is why its premise is the construction of a State that is respectful of political, economic, juridicial, cultural and linguistic pluralism. Above all, it must promote the “intercivilizational complementarity of the Bolivian people in all their diversity”, living together, and with universal access to water, work, education, health and housing.
However, the new Political Constitution of the State seeks to establish the foundations of a new “pluralistic society” from the political, economic, juridicial and cultural perspective, and transcending the postulates of economic liberalism and representative democracy.
To this end, the indigenous worldview for the first time ever becomes a substancial part of the Plurinational State’s identity. Now, communitarian institutions are recognized as an inherent part of the State’s forms of economic, political and cultural organization. [1]
For the conservative Right-wing, the Constitution’s reconognition of the pre-colonial indigenous nations and peoples is excessive. It considers this recognition a disproportionate benefit from the Plurinational State, as with the institutional representation of the State or the Autonomous Indigenous Territories and their sovereign control of renewable and non-renewable resources.
It is inconceivable for them that the native, indigenous campesinos should have direct representation with their “practices and customs”, 50% representation in Congress and other State organisms/institutions such as the Constitutional Tribunal, the Agro-ecological Tribunal and the Plurinational Electoral Council. But the only thing the Constitution really does is recognize the free will and self-determination of these peoples, in accordance with Agreement 169 of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the UN Declaration on indigenous peoples ratified by the majority of the world’s countries on the 13th September, 2007. [2]
“Mestizos” vs. Indigenous Peoples
The Right minimizes the importance of indigenous demographics in Bolivia and sticks closely to the concept of “mestizo multiculturality” to devalue the communitarian orientation of the current changes. “The statistical mean in each indigenous group or ethnicity (37 in total) is a little over a thousand inhabitants, which the political and ideological project of the MAS attempts to configure as a nation”.
According to parlimentary representative Arrázola, there are only two numerous indigenous groups in Bolivia: the Aymara and the Quechua (91% of the indigenous population) who inhabit the departaments of La Paz, Oruro, Potosí, Chuquisaca and Cochabamba, the western half of the country. The other 9% is made up of almost 500 thousand natives distributed amongst 34 lowland ethnicities (Pando, Beni, Santa Cruz and Tarija). The opposition legislator claims that there is no “credible data” that shows a native and indigenous majority in Bolivia, the only document que backs this claim is the “Censo de Población y Vivienda” carried out in 2001, which concludes that 62% of Bolivianos identify themselves as indigenous. This study, adds Arrázola, did not offer Bolivians the choice of identifying themselves as mestizos, unlike a study realized five years earlier (“Auditoría de la Democracia, Informe Boliviano 2006”), which arrived at the conclusion that 64% of Bolivians describe themselves as mestizo or cholo; 19% indigenous or native, 11% white, 0,55% black and 4,28% none of the above. “Genetically” it’s imposible to demonstrate racial or ethnic purity, since globalization has created a hybrid world. Even the President of Bolivia is a “mestizo or cholo” because his surname is ‘Morales’, of Spanish origin, whilst ‘Ayma’ is of indigenous origin, says Arrázola.
What is certain is that the national majority identifies with one or another of the country’s 37 ethnic groups, some of which extend beyond national boundaries. To the 1.3 millon Aymaras who inhabit La Paz, Oruro, Potosí and Cochabamba, we must consider the 100 thousand Aymaras in Chile concentrated in Tarapacá and Antofagasta, with another 600 thousand in Peru, mostly in Puno, Arequipa, Moquegua and Tacna. In Peru alone, the Aymara occupy a territory aproximately the size of Belgium or Switzerland in seven of the Puno department’s 10 provinces. Besides this, the Guarani make up almost 300 thousand in Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil.
A “Marxist-Stalinist State”?
The conservative political sectors see the MAS program’s use of the term “indigenous” as an ideological prop of a “Marxist-Stalinist” State –one that substitutes ethnic struggles for the class struggle.
Whilst the official Constitution guarantees the protection of private property, the centralized “State capitalism” of a planned economy will, in their opinon, lead to a gradual elimination of private property.
The fact is that Morales’ government negotiated new contracts with the oil companies which guarnateed their holdings, their investments and their profits. It provided strong guarantees for private property and investment in accordance with the law, whilst the new Constitution essentially proposes that the old elites share power with the emerging indigenous elites.
The economy envisioned by the new pluralist State expressly states that the communitarian, State, private and scoial-cooperative forms of economic organization, “are equal before the law” and are articulated on the principles of complementarity, reciprocity, solidarity, redistribution, equality, sustainability, balance, justice and transparency.
The four axes of the new pluricultural State under construction are: 1. The State as protagonist in the economy and responsible for the equitative redistribution of the national wealth; 2. Equality between Bolivia’s diverse peoples and cultures; 3. The right of the indigenous peoples to take decisions at a State level; and 4. The autonomous national State.
One of the objectives of the changes is the reconstitution of the indigenous communities –facilitating the autonomous development of their collective culture. Its starting point is an acknowledgement of the current unequal land distribution. The west covers a third of the national territory and is home to almost two thirds of the population, whilst the east, which covers two thirds of the country, is home to little more than a third of the population.
The Right claims that the MAS will take advantage of the native, campesino concept to redistribute eastern territories. In this way, the inhabitants of the west can “conquer”, “neo-colonize” and promote a process of “acculturization” of the lowland inhabitants who historically, culturally and sociologically built “mestizo identities”.
A single national project and regional resistance
The conservative political sectors define the current juncture as a struggle between two distinct visions of two distinct and different countries. But in practice, the minoritarity provincial classes lack a concrete program, as in 1952, and are simply opposing the new political and economical project that is dominated by the national majorities.
Small clans permanently linked to political power, and co-governing with the military dictatorships and neoliberal regimes, were cornered by a popular insurrection in 2003. After 20 years of pacted democracy, this is the first government in which these groups are not directly administering the state apparatus.
The land has become a strong and cohesive rallying point for the national oligarchy. A report by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) reveals that approximately 100 feudal-style families own five times more land (25 millon hectars) than two million campesinos (five million hectars) condemned to scratching a living from eroded and over-exploitated mini-estates. On average, a landowning family in Bolivia holds a quarter of a million hectars (250 thousand) whilst a campesino family must make do with one hectar.
The concentration of land is most notorious in the departament of Santa Cruz. There, the latifundios [large estates] were initially set up with the help of ex- dictators and later by corrupt functionaries and politicians of the old, defunct political parties such as the ADN, MIR and MNR after the “second agrarian reform” of 1996. [3]
The clan is powerful because in addition to land, it also owns rivers, forests, haciendas and even the very lives of its labourers. It controls agro-industrial sector, foreign trade, the banks and the communications media of Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija. It controls the principal business, civil and even popular organizations. And now the oligarchy has de facto control of the government and political power in Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija –that is, in four of the country’s nine departments.
Seing their interests threatened by a new Constitución that restricts individual land holdings to a maximum of 5 to 10 thousand hectars, the ruling classes openly conspire against the government and try to set up autonomous mini-republics. These have their own Parlament and Police forces, and total control over land, taxes, and the region’s natural resources.
The conservative minorities recovered their influence by championing autonomy and fighting centralism, which according to them is responsible for all the nation’s ills. “Bolivian and indigenous poverty, above all in the west of the country, is a result of State centralism and the concentration of decision-making in the government of La Paz. (…) Faced with the country’s poverty, the Eastern departments proposed decentralization and democratization of power, by means of the Departamental Autonomies”, says Arrázola, arguing that the rich Cruceño region (where 2/3 of the nation’s GDP is generated; Santa Cruz produces 1/3 del GDP, 50% of taxes and import duties and slightly more than half of Bolivia’s foodstuffs) grew “thanks to hard work, and the liberal and enterprising vision of its people”.
Businessmen, traditional-party politicians and various middle class professionals make up a solid anti-popular bloc capable of mobilizing great numbers of people. They have the firm support of the pro-Santa Cruz Civic Committee and the bourgeoisie as a whole: the Eastern Chamber of Forests and Fisheries (CAO), the Santa Cruz Chamber of Industry, Trade, Services and Tourism(Cainco), the Businessmen’s Federation and the Santa Cruz Cattle Ranching Federation(Fegasacruz).
The circumstantial leader of the clan is Branco Marinkovic, president of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee, who together with governor Costas, is the visible leader of the secessionist movement. On the 6th December, Marinkovic sent a letter to President Evo Morales to inform him that he was taking up a struggle “for democracy and freedom against dictatorship”, stating that Santa Cruz autonomy has no political motives and “no individual’s” personal interests behind. This despite the fact that he could be the principal estate-holder to suffer from the Agrarian Reform’s Communitarian Recovery Law. [4]
The United States Embassy promotes and finances the clan. Philip Goldberg has a close relationship with Costas y Marinkovic, whilst USAID finances rightist politicians. Goldberg also worked as Special Assistant to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 1994 and 1996. Holbrooke was one of the architects of Yugoslavia’s disintegration and the downfall of President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Goldberg, who promoted the separation of Serbia and Montenegro, was also in Kosovo, fomenting conflict between Serbs and Albano-kosovars. Now he encourages the rebellion of the Bolivian autonomists.
The rebellion of big business in the four departments has made it clear that Bolivian society has yet to overcome the defects of the past. In recent months, peasants and indigenous people have been denigrated, insulted, spat at and beaten on the streets of Santa Cruz and Sucre for the sole reason of having darker skin and wearing pleated pollera skirts and abarca sandals.
It’s as if we had regressed decades in a matter of months. All of a sudden, small white and mestizo groups are reincorporating discrimatory and racist expressions into their vocabulary, things we believed dead and buried. In Sucre and Santa Cruz, there is daily denigration of the “smelly and uncultured indians”, the “fucking indians”, the “dirty collas” and “uppity indians”. Today, the oligarchy defies the legitimate President merely because he is an “indian”, a “macaque”, an “ignoramus”…
The clan’s political hegemony is broken
The political crisis generated by society’s most conservative sectors has apparently stalled the country’s transformation, but it has simultaneously radicalized the position of the popular movements. On the 10th September, 2007, a “Conference of Campesinos, Native peoples and Popular Urban Organizations” ratified an urgent policy requirement. Namely, “expropiation of the latifundios without indemnization and their immediate distribution amongst rural and urban producers who are prepared to make use of it for the benefit of society”.
President Morales’ priority in his third year of governance is to accelerate the program of structural transformacion and the “decolonization” of the State with the help of a new National Coordinating Committee for Change. One of its first measures is the recovery and expropriation the holdings of landowners enslaving the Chaco’s indigenous people. [5]
The process of decolonization is irreversible. This is not a political speech, but a painful reality which must be approached with boldness. And as Morales says, the only way to transform the State is to close the deep wound which colonialism left in Latin America.
The government says it has fulfilled the basic program of the 2005 electoral campaign of 2005, such as hydrocarbon nationalization, and the establishment of a Constituent Assembly. It now tries to incorporate the philosophical principles of the indigenous community into the new State, meaning the equal redistribution of natural wealth and resources, and a collective “living standard” that does not depend upon anyone’s exploitation.
The aim of the Plurinational State under construction is the search for a decent standard of living –one with sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equality in the distribution and redistribution of the social product. The new Magna Carta questions neoliberalism from a communitarian perspective, privileging equality over freedom and collective rights over individual rights.
According to many analysts, Bolivia is experiencing a break with the philosophical principles of the “Enlightenment” –that is, a break with the idea of the individual as nature’s supposed owner and master. In the indigenous project, not only individual and social rights are claimed, but also those of nature itself.
The Bolivian State has recognized indigenous societies as alternative societal models, distinct from capitalism, the market and Western society. On the international scene it holds up this other kind of conviviality, superior to the Western individualism that has unleashed the environmental crisis.
The Bolivian social movements are building a more human civilizational model, austere and respectful of nature, with the invaluable contribution of the ancestral knowledge and practices of indigenous peoples. They are creating a collective subject that does not jettison individual creativity and private freedoms, but does privilege the individual’s intersubjective dimension and his essentially comunal identity.
Notes
[1] SECTION III: CULTURES. Article 99: I. Cultural diversity is the esential foundation of the Plurinational Comunitarian State. Interculturality is the instrument of cohesion and harmonious and balanced conviviality amongst all peoples and nations. Interculturality will respect differences within equal conditions. II. The State assumes the existence of native indigenous campesino cultures as reservoirs of values, knowledge, spirituality and cosmovisions as a firm resolution. III. It will be the State’s fundamental responsibility to preserve, develop, protect and promote the nation’s cultures.
[2] After 24 years of debate, the United Nations approved the Declaration on the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, which recognized the right to self-determination, possession of land, access to natural resources and the preservation of the traditional knowledge and culture of the world’s 370 million indigenous people. As victims of historic injustice, the colonization and usurption of their lands, territories and resources has prevented them from exercising their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests. Now these indigenous peoples are free from discrimination, according to the preamble of the historic Declaration. The Declaration also condemns doctrines, policies and practices based on the superiority of particular peoples or persons for any national, racial, religious, ethnic or cultural reasons. These are, it says, “racist, scientifically false, juridicially invalid, morally abhorrent and socially unjust”. Bolivia has become the first country in the world to pass into national law the historic Declaration of the United Nations. “Bolivia is a nation of nations”, said Evo Morales as he declared Law 3760 on the rights of the Indigenous Peoples.
[3] Three years ago, the INRA estimated that the Cruceño provinces of Guarayos, Chiquitos and Cordillera had 800 thousand hectars of recoverable land in the hands of 500 individuals. No small number of former ministers and legislators abused their power to monopolize land. Former Senate President Sandro Giordano and his wife, and the family of Luis Fernando Saavedra Bruno are notable examples.
[4] Notables in the right-wing power bloc are Oscar Ortiz, former manager of Cainco and now a senator for Podemos, the offshoot of the fascist ADN of ex-dictator Hugo Banzer; ex-President of Fegasacruz Antonio Franco (a rancher and current Podemos legislator who demanded the jailing of NGOs that help indigenous people) , and Branco Marinkovic, ex-President of the Businessmen’s Federation and now President of the Santa Cruz Civic Committee. In the civil section of the autonomist front, the former President of the Civic Committee Rubén Costas stands out. Today he is the Department’s governor. The former parlamentarian and MIR health minister Carlos Dabdoub is one of the movement’s ideologues and currently the Autonomy secretary for the Santa Cruz governorship. Who’s who in Santa Cruz. According to INRA, 15 families have half a million hectars of land which is an area 25 times bigger than the the city of Santa Cruz (20 thousand hectars). Also on the clan’s list are the Saavedra Buno, the Monasterio Nieme, the Justiniano Ruiz, the Roig Pacheco, the Rapp Martínez, the Antelo Urdininea, the Keller Ramos, the Candia Mejía, the Castro Villazón, the Ovando, the Fracaro, the Sánchez Peña, the Nielsen, the Bauer and Elsner. The Gutiérrez have 96 thousand hectars, the Paz Hurtado 76 thousand and the Gasser Bowles 72 thousand hectars. Marinkovic is the ideologue of the corporate “half moon” and is known as the busniness sector’s most lucid spokesperson. He became known for his unconditional defense of the Bolivian Hydrocarbon Chamber’s interests, an oil union affiliated to the Santa Cruz Private Businessman’s Federation. Marinkovic heads Industrias Oleaginosas Limitada (IOL) and together with the Cronembol and two multinationals, one Peruvian and the other North American, control the entire soya and sunflower oil industries, one of the axes of the eastern agro-power. They also own almost a fifth of the shares of the Banco Económico, according to the data of the the Superintendent of Pensions, Stocks and Insurance. The Marinkovic own, without title, more than 26 thousandl hectars in Santa Cruz, six thousand hectars more than the entire surface of the Cruceño capital. The Vice minister of Land and of the INRA are tryin to return the Yasminka (12.587 hectars) and Laguna Corazón (14.364 hectars) farms in the province of Guarayos to State hands. The Laguna Corazón property belongs to Branco and Yasminka belongs to his sister Yasminka Catarina. A part of the Yasminka farm is inside the original communal lands claimed by the Guarayo indigenous people, whilst 100% of the Laguna Corazón property is inside the Guarayos Forestry Reserve, which was created by supreme decree 08660 in 1969, and expressly prohibits human settlements. The faulty regulation of both farms is a perfect example of how powers in Santa Cruz took control of thousands of hectars in the east of the country with the complicity of former INRA authorities, judges and bribed indigenous leaders, breaking laws and altering the data of their land records in the process. The Laguna Corazón and Yasminka haciendas are not the Marinkovices’ only properties in Santa Cruz. According to the National Agrarian Reform Institute (INRA) archives, the family has at least nine other properties in the provinces of Guarayos, Chiquitos, Ñuflo Chávez, Sarah and Obispo Santiestéban. Cruceño cattle ranching is in the hands of the Kuljis, Áñez and Monasterios, as much for the size of its cattle herds as for the control over the slaughterhouses, refrigerators and supermarket chains. They are all connected to the previous neoliberal governments. The Kuljis are shareholders of the Banco Económico, owners of the paper mill Empacar and a tannery, owners of the television network Uno and of the Cruceño University Mateo Kuljis. The Monasterios own the large refrigerators, majority shareholders of the Cattle Ranchers Bank and owners of the televsion network Unitel. Oswaldo “Pato” Monasterios was a Senator for the MNR. According to INRA, in Santa Cruz the family owns 78.340 hectars in the rural area and 20.505 hectars in the capital. That is, they control an area of land three times greater than the city of Santa Cruz. A large part was given to them en as gifts by the military and neoliberal governments. Other banking heavyweights are the Saavedra Bruno, who control almost a fifth of the shares of Bolivia’s oldest bank –the National Bank of Bolivia. A report of the Superintendent of Banks reveals the enormous weight of the latifundistas in the shareholding packet of the national banking industry. It also shows that these mechanisms are used to strengthen their businesses and consolidate their power. More than half of all credits go to small business groups in Santa Cruz and less than half go to the country’s remaining eight departments. The Cruceño clans are strongly bound up with transnational capital, not merely because so many of them are descended from European immigrants (Germans, Croats and Serbs), but also because of their links with foreign companies. A third of soya and vegetable oil production and exportation is controlled by Brazilian businessmen. Another third of production and exports is under the control of Argentine and Russian businessmen and small Mennonite and Japanese producers.
Who’s who in Beni
The kingdom of the Guiteras, Llapiz, Sattori, Bruckner, Quaino, Dellien, Ávila, Nacif, Antelo, Salek. 10 families own just over half a million hectars (534 thousand), an area 500 times bigger than the city of Trinidad, the Benian capital.
Also present are the Gasser, Elsner, Carruty and the Bauer Elsner, European families that control trade, banking, public administration and the press. One of them, Ernesto Suárez Sattori, cattle-ranching latifundista and ex-parlamentarian of ADN, is the department’s governor.
Who’s who in Pando
Further to the north, in Pando, is the kingdom of the Sonnenschein, the Hecker, the Becerra Roca, the Vaca Roca, the Peñaranda, the Barbery Paz, the Claure, the Villavicencio Amuruz. These eight families hold about a million hectars equivalentes two thousand times the size of the capital, Cobija, run by another rancher, the ultra-right wing Leopoldo Fernández. His influence is such that even Morales himself offered him a MAS candidature for the governor of Pando. (See 1. “The rebellion of the 100 clans”, www.econoticiasbolivia.com; 2. “The land question –the background to the autonomy movement”, www.bolpress.com).
[5] There are still about a thousand landless Guarani families, with neither a salary nor basic rights such as free expression. As unbelievable as it sounds, the boss’ permission is required to even speak to them.
Translation: David Montoute
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