Headlines, Human Rights, Indigenous Rights, Latin America & the Caribbean

BOLIVIA: Divided Along Regional, Social and Ethnic Lines

Humberto Márquez

CARACAS, Aug 13 2008 (IPS) - The dialogue with opposition governors that Bolivian President Evo Morales has called for in the wake of Sunday’s recall referendum, to overcome the growing polarisation in the country, will run up against regional, social and ethnic divisions, according to analysts.

Morales obtained at least 67 percent support on Sunday, according to partial results – 14 percent more than in the December 2005 elections in which he was elected with 53.7 percent of the vote. But the right-wing governors of the pro-autonomy eastern provinces of Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija were also confirmed in office, with 56 to 66 percent support.

“Bolivia needs institutional mechanisms to channel conflicts, but they cannot be developed overnight,” Argentine political scientist Andrés Serbin, head of the Regional Coordinator for Economic and Social Research (CRIES), said in an interview with IPS.

The Argentina-based CRIES groups around 80 academic institutions and non-governmental organisations that study development issues and the prevention of conflicts in the region, and promotes social and economic research focusing on the participation of civil society, based on the assumption that the consolidation of strong democratic institutions requires active citizen involvement and oversight.

“The weakness of Bolivia’s institutions, which predates this government by a long shot, makes it very difficult to absorb and reorient a process of social transformation like the one that they are trying to carry out in Bolivia,” said Serbin.

To build strong institutions, Bolivia must develop meeting spaces where the different points of view can first be expressed, in order to move on to the search for common ground or shared viewpoints, said the analyst.

But he acknowledged that “it is very difficult to ask a historically excluded sector of society to sit down and engage in dialogue with another that it perceives as having exploited and excluded it for centuries.”

Serbin said Bolivia is facing regional divisions, as reflected in the autonomy movements in the relatively wealthier eastern lowland provinces; social rifts, because of the gap between a small wealthy minority and a dispossessed majority; and ethnic fissures between the country’s indigenous majority and the elite of European or mixed-race descent.

Five opposition governors who had initially refused Morales’ invitation to engage in talks aimed at solving the country’s political crisis decided on Wednesday to accept.

The government points to the landslide victory chalked up by Morales, whose support base lies in the country’s poor western highlands provinces, home to the indigenous majority, as proof of the high level of support for the changes he is pushing through.

These include a reform of the constitution that would give more participation to indigenous people, the re-nationalisation of the natural gas industry, and agrarian reform to reduce the heavy concentration of land in a few hands.

Morales and his allies are facing the staunch resistance of the rightwing economic and political forces from eastern Bolivia that have traditionally ruled the country, and which are seeking autonomy for their provinces.

Most of the country’s natural gas reserves and fertile farmland lie in the eastern lowlands.

The president’s main ally in South America, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, said Morales won “a gold medal” on Sunday.

But political analyst Heinz Dieterich, a German sociology professor and author based in Mexico who says he coined the phrase “21st century socialism” – the model to which Chávez, Morales and Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa subscribe – said “Washington and the oligarchy” were the real winners on Sunday in Bolivia.

In the referendum, the president, vice president and five of the country’s nine governors – one Morales ally and four opposition leaders – were confirmed in office.

But “to the contrary of some triumphant interpretations, (the referendum) is a clear defeat for the government, which not only reinforces the de facto division of the country but gives the separatist subversion a halo of legality that it did not previously enjoy,” wrote Dieterich.

As a result of Sunday’s vote, “separatism now ‘legally’ governs five of Bolivia’s nine” provinces, said Dieterich, who added that the country is heading towards “the hand-over of power to the neoliberals, or civil war.”

Serbin said that to keep the current situation from boiling over into civil war, “the steps taken by neighbours, in first place Brazil and then Argentina, are important. As far as possible, they should resort to the regional architecture, which has a strong legal tradition.”

As an illustration of how that architecture can work, he mentioned the diplomatic crisis triggered between Colombia and Ecuador in March when the Colombian military bombed a Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla camp within Ecuadorean territory.

At that time, an escalation of the conflict was averted by the Rio Group, the main Latin American mechanism of political consultation and coordination, and the Organisation of American States (OAS).

The OAS, which sent 300 election observers to Bolivia for Sunday’s vote, issued a call for dialogue this week.

“Bolivians are calling on their political class to sit down and negotiate agreements. That is the referendum’s most eloquent message,” said Eduardo Stein, head of the OAS election observer mission.

Stein, who was vice president of Guatemala from 2004 to early 2008, said there is no immediate risk of violent confrontation in Bolivia, but added that “the political actors who are facing off are playing around with the country on the edge of the abyss.”

For his part, Serbin said that “one key could lie in the new constitution, which will definitely be approved (by referendum), and which should contain peaceful dialogue-based mechanisms to settle differences, that allow agreements to be reached with regard to the necessary changes.”