The Left Won in Bolivia, But Don’t Rejoice Yet!
International leftists blinded by paternalistic noble savagism
Mark Cramer (author of Old Man on a Green Bike and Urban Everesting)
Will the erosion of environmentalist policies in Bolivia under Evo Morales be reversed under the newly elected government? Will there be a reconfirmation of the lofty precepts of the Bolivian Constitution, including protecting La Pachamama (Mother Earth) and the Vivir Bien (living in harmony with nature)? Will international leftists, blinded by a romanticized noble savage view of Bolivia’s first indigenous president, finally heed the warnings of Bolivian indigenous activists and environmentalists, who were abandoned, and even thwarted, by the Morales administration?
Lessons from the Bolivian election
The leftist party Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) won by a resounding margin in Bolivia’s presidential election on October 18. Progressives around the world are celebrating the victory of Luis Arce, former finance minister in Evo Morales’ government, and his environmentalist running mate, David Choquehuanca.
Interim president Jeanine Añez immediately congratulated Arce. Foreign leftists who fear-mongered that Bolivia’s right-wing interim government would not hold a fair election were proven dead wrong.
The numerical results put into question a romanticized view of Evo Morales, who had attempted to run for a fourth term by staging a Yes/No referendum back in 2016. A Yes vote would have changed the Constitution, allowing him to run, but the Bolivian people voted No. Eventually judges hand-picked by Morales concocted an illegal ruling to supersede the Constitution, allowing him to run anyway, in 2019.
During the run-up to the controversial 2019 election, I witnessed government employees compelled to leave work to attend Morales’ campaign rallies. I inadvertently helped pay for his campaign, by riding the public transportation Teleférico cable car lines in La Paz that displayed Evo’s portrait on each cabin. If you wanted an instant Evo ad, all you had to do was switch on the hypothetically neutral state-funded public broadcasting system.
The 2019 election results were eventually aborted. (See “Postscript” for details.) The first-round tally gave Morales the lead with 46.83% of the vote, and that with full state apparatus applying a heavy hand in his favor.
Compare those results to the just-completed October 18, 2020 vote, in which Arce, of the same MAS party, ran without government support. Some foreign pundits cautioned us that the interim “coup government” would block Arce’s election. Yet Arce received 55.11% of the vote.
Independent leftist Bolivian analysts believe Arce did so much better in 2020 than Morales in 2019 precisely because the names of Morales and his unpopular running mate were not on the ballot!
Foreign leftist journalists had stoked fears that the Bolivian extreme right was going to take over the country. But anyone who had lived in the country knew that Bolivia’s resourceful social movements formed a firewall against the racist far right. Centrist journalist Carlos Mesa received 28.85% support, and far-right candidate Luis Fernando Camacho ended up with 13.97% of the votes, support that was largely confined to his regional base in Santa Cruz.
The right wing has been crushed, a satisfying but entirely predictable result. However, environmentalist provisions of the 2009 Constitution are still under threat.
Between 2007 and 2011, shortly after the start of the Morales presidency, I worked with a French support group helping Bolivian ambassadors counteract an anti-Morales European media bias. While the French newspaper Le Monde was applauding secessionist racists in Santa Cruz, we gave presentations on the environmentalist 2009 Constitution that empowered indigenous peoples in Bolivia.
The Morales government was cause for great hope around the world. Initial government measures negotiated control of energy resources (directing a much larger share of profits to the populace), combatted racism, expanded the middle class and played an inspiring role at international climate conferences. So what went wrong?
Forest fires, mega-dams, biofuels, GMOs: the environment under assault
Blinded by noble-savage sentimentalism, the international left has been largely uncritical of Evo Morales’ environmental policies. I cite one example.
The Grayzone article “Western Regime Change Operatives Launch Campaign to Blame Evo Morales for the Amazon Fires” chastises environmentalists for using the forest fires to undermine the Morales government. The Grayzone article exposes one duplicitous environmentalist who blamed the catastrophic 2019 fires on Morales. But the same article fails to even mention that Evo’s Law 741 and Supreme Decree 3973 in early summer of 2019 authorized controlled fires to expand from 5 hectares to 20 hectares, in support of agribusiness, which legitimate Bolivian environmentalists have linked to the fires. The Grayzone article cherry-picked one environmentalist with nefarious connections and used her to cancel out all the others.
Furthermore, the Grayzone article absurdly mentions that “Bolivia’s most affected area, Chiquitanía, is not even in the Amazon,” a laughingly irrelevant observation, since Chiquitanía is in the Department of Santa Cruz, and therefore included in the expanded fire areas covered by Law 741 and Supreme Decree 3973.
The article refers to the “dubious implication that the world’s first indigenous president harbors anti-indigenous sentiment” while failing to even mention credible indigenous opposition to Evo.
Of course, “world’s first indigenous president” is blatantly false, since Peru’s Alejandro Toledo, a Quechua Indian, was elected president of Perú in 2001.
“First indigenous president” is the shield of knee-jerk anti-imperialists to fend off criticism of Evo. The myth of the uncorrupted noble savage has blinded them from the reality that the formerly anti-imperialist government of Morales had learned to embrace neo-colonialist policies.
Bolivian environmentalists have not fallen for such noble-savage sentimentalism. In the wake of the Chiquitanía fires, Elizabeth Peredo wrote:
“The decisions of President Morales and Vice-President García Linera have led to unparalleled despoliation of the territory and its incredible social fabric. Their wager on ethanol, their permissiveness regarding GMOs and the resulting expansion of cultivation, their stimulation of large-scale cattle raising for meat exports to China at great scale, their deregulation of limits on small-scale farming, their policies to expand gas and oil extraction in Bolivia’s forests, including even their absurd consideration of fracking as an alternative, go hand in hand with their recent approval of Law 741 and Decree 3973, which authorize “controlled fires” to expand the agricultural frontiers in times of climate change. The cumulative effect of all these actions has brought on this disaster.”
In the wake of the October 18 MAS victory, it’s essential for international observers to reflect on the perspectives of authentic Bolivian activists.
Some indigenous views of Morales’ policies
Alex Villca is an indigenous activist and the spokesman for CONTIOCAP (National Coordinator for the Defense of Peasant Originary Indigenous Territories and Protected Areas). He writes:
“No government throughout our history has genuinely represented indigenous peoples with dignity.”
But what about the bold redistributive measures enacted in the early years of Evo’s government, which began in 2006? Villca writes:
“This seemed a marvel at first glance, many of us really believed the story and had assumed it as such, obeying and abiding by everything that emanated from said government, including those legal and administrative measures that went against our own will.”
In 2011 a proposed government road cutting through a national forest was opposed by the local indigenous population, leading to government repression and the principled resignation of Bolivia’s chief climate negotiator, Pablo Solón.
The Bolivian “socialist” government’s capitulation to unbridled developmentalism is cogently explained by Devin Beaulieu, an anthropologist and long-time resident in Bolivia.
The devastating fires in the tropical lowlands provoked the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon River Basin (COICA) to declare Evo Morales and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro as persona non grata.
To counteract the negative publicity, in August 2019 Juan Ramón Quintana, who was Evo Morales’ powerful Minister of the Presidency and former graduate of the imperialist School of the Americas, accused the opposition of having started one of the Chiquitanía fires.
Soon after, but up at 13,000 feet above sea level, residents in the province of Potosí began protesting an unfavorable lithium mining deal with a German company.
Quality-of-life principles of the Morales government were gradually replaced by an infatuation with gross domestic product (GDP). As international financial institutions rode the Up escalator in Bolivia, environmentalists passed them on the way down. Pedro Portugal, Bolivian Aymara historian, summarized the situation:
“The government went back to what at first it had denied, in other words, respect for nature became extractivism.”
All the while, international leftist pundits failed to tone down their Evo-indigenous mantra, and tuned out the Evo-neo-liberal-capitalist warnings.
Alex Villca’s post-2020 election declaration defies such knee-jerk romanticism:
“When we wanted to claim our rights under the Constitution and international agreements, we encountered brutal repression in Chaparina and Takovo Mora. We will never forget this betrayal precisely because it came from someone who claims to be indigenous like us, when in reality he does not speak our language and does not understand our way of life.”
Indigenous protests against a highway through a national forest were brutally repressed in Chaparina, as were protests in Takovo Mora against gas and oil extractivism. Most emblematic is the protracted movement against a Morales government mega-dam project.
The Pachamama weeps, but the international left turns a blind eye
Alex Villca speaks for the indigenous movement that opposed the Morales government’s mega-dam project Chepete-Bala. He warns that, if the dam is completed, it will flood out four different ethnic nations in the lowland national parks: a man-made catastrophe.
Villca’s video shows the beauty of the Bolivian national parks under threat.
Watching just a few minutes of his video will highlight for you the magnitude of the mega-dam threat. To add insult to injury, because Bolivia is self-sufficient with regard to electricity, the megaproject is designed for energy export. And a market in neighboring countries for this surplus energy is by no means assured.
The “first-indigenous-president” refrain should be an insult to Morales himself, since it reduces him to a romantic symbol. Except that he cultivated this image in the foreign media.
Will Arce’s environmentalist vice president David Choquehuanca spark a recovery of the Vivir Bien principles of the Bolivian Constitution? Arce’s first comments after his victory referred to “correcting errors of the past government,” but he was not specific.
With the democratic election having taken place, some independent Bolivian leftists are guardedly optimistic. Many indigenous activists remain skeptical. International leftists should be more critical of the cult of personality and the narcissism that feeds it.
If Evo had respected the Constitution and the 2016 referendum, Arce or someone else from his party would have won in 2019, lives would have been saved and a year of tragic conflict would have been averted.
[For background on the devastation of neocolonialist extractivist economies in Latin America, two sources (among many) are recommended. Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America and Pablo Solón’s website, Systemic Alternatives.]
Postscript: chronology
With perceived irregularities in the mysteriously interrupted October 2019 vote count, the “Bolivia Said No!” movement flooded the streets, claiming fraud. With violence escalating on many sides, on November 10, 2019 Bolivia’s influential leftist labor confederation, the COB (Central Obrera Boliviana) in the person of Juan Carlos Huarachi, asked Morales to resign, to avoid bloodshed. The COB also called into question the personnel of Bolivia’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal.
By then Morales had begun to backtrack, but it was too late. For example, he annulled the hotly contested, neocolonialist lithium mining deal. When ordered to repress the demonstrations, rank-and-file police, most of them indigenous, had mutinied.
A questionable OAS report identifying election irregularities appeared to be a tipping point. However, most demonstrators in the streets were acting on their own piecemeal fraud evidence coming from eyewitnesses. That same night, the commander of Bolivia’s armed forces followed the inclination of the powerful COB in “suggesting” that Morales resign to maintain public safety. Morales resigned and went into exile, first in Mexico and then Argentina. Lethal violence ensued, on both sides.
Evo’s MAS party still held a congressional majority. In fact, two of his MAS senators were constitutionally in line to become interim president. But they too resigned, leaving the number three in line, right-wing senator Jeanine Añez, to inherit the interim presidency.
Unlike a classic coup government, Añez left Morales’ congressional majority intact.
Añez took the oath while repudiating the indigenous flag, the Whipala.
Faced with anti-racist protests, she backtracked, appearing with the Whipala alongside the Bolivian flag. Beyond symbolism, she engaged in policymaking that surpassed the scope of her interim role. Reversing her promise, she declared her own candidacy, was repudiated for doing so and finally ceded the far-right candidacy to Camacho.
Bolivians knew that Camacho had no vote potential beyond his native Santa Cruz region. It was clear that either the leftist Luis Arce, leading in polls, or centrist journalist Carlos Mesa would win. Anyone who had seen Bolivia claw its way to exemplary democracy following the coups of the past knew that the social movements would block any usurpation of power by the far right. The promised elections, delayed by the coronavirus, were held.
Fear-mongering international left pundits painted the situation with tabloid sensationalism.
The year of turbulence and tragedy would have been avoided if Evo Morales had accepted the “No” result of the 2016 referendum.
