New Social Explosion in Bolivia

by Gerry Foley

On the second anniversary of the flight of the former Bolivian president, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, the issue that provoked the mass mobilization that drove him from office and from the country resurged with a new force. An estimated 18,000 people demonstrated in the capital city of La Paz on Oct. 18 to protest the profiteering of the big oil companies that seek to exploit Bolivia’s hydrocarbon reserves—in particular, its natural gas, estimated to be the second largest source in Latin America.

The Bolivian radical webzine Econoticias reported Oct. 18: “Dynamite sounded as never before in La Paz in a new day of struggle for the nationalization of the gas and oil. Thousands of demonstrators coming from the countryside, the mines, and the interior towns took over the city and today pressured the congress not to pass President Carlos Mesa’s law favoring the oil companies.

“‘If the congress passes Mesa’s bill, we will shut him in,’ said a determined Donald Ore, a peasant leader from the eastern community of Reyes … who marched a walk along with the peasants and coca farmers from the Valley of Cochabamba.”

There were three principal components to the demonstration—peasants, cooperative miners, and trade unionists from the Bolivian Confederation of Labor (COB). They were united against Mesa but supported different projects.

The coca farmers, who are organized by Eva Morales’s party, the MAS, and the cooperative miners supported a proposal that did not challenge the ownership of the hydrocarbon sources but only demanded that the profits be shared equally with the Bolivian people. The COB, on the other hand, called for outright nationalization of the country’s petroleum resources.

Mesa’s bill proposed giving Bolivia a third of the profits. In the climate of an upsurge of mass protest against the oil companies, it was simply pushed aside. The congress did not even dare to discuss it, much less pass it.

Mesa was Sanchez de Lozada’s vice president. He continues to represent the same neoliberal program and the same interests as his former boss, who is now drinking the bitter waters of exile in Miami. He was able to assume the presidency only by default because the leaderships of the mass movement were not prepared to put forward a political alternative representing the fighters that defeated the repression of Sanchez de Lozada.

The mine workers, the traditional backbone of the Bolivian working class and its most radicalized sector, were decimated by the mass layoffs that followed the privatization of the mines in the 1990s. Their forces have been scattered and to some extent demoralized. But in the great battles of October 2002, their greatest organizational achievement, the COB, reemerged as the only body able to offer leadership to the movement as a whole.

Econoticias reported on a division in the peasant contingents between the coca farmers led by Morales and the Ayamara Indians led by Felipe Quispe, known as “Mallku,” the Condor, who it described as more radical. But these accounts did not describe any specific proposals of this current.

In general, Quispe represents radical “indigenismo,” or Indian nationalism, but not an explicit socialist program. He is a former guerrilla fighter.

The conflict over the control and use of the hydrocarbon sources is producing an explosive polarization in Bolivian society. The radicalized masses are able, apparently, to dominate the capital, which is overshadowed by the giant working-class satellite city of El Alto, in which soviet-type (revolutionary workers’ council) formations emerged in the October 2002 upsurge.

But the right has a powerful base in the departamento of Santa Cruz, where Bolivia’s oil industry has developed. In an Oct. 27 article, Econoticias reported that the local organization of the oligarchy, the Asemblea de la Cruzenidad, had called for a campaign of civil disobedience against the national government, for the negotiation of a deal with the oil companies that would “harmonize” the Bolivian national interest with the imperialist oil trusts, and for autonomy for the province to serve as a bulwark for the interests of pro-imperialist business there.

Econoticias also reported that the imperialist countries and institutions have been stepping up their pressure on Bolivia: “U.S. pressure was expressed officially yesterday through the deputy secretary of state for the Andean region, Charles Shapiro, and the U.S. ambassador, David Greenlee, who visited President Carlos Mesa to make clear the Bush government’s position.

“Simultaneously, high functionaries of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund pressured the congress to facilitate the multi-million-dollar deal with the international companies for the export of natural gas to the United States, Mexico, and Argentina.”

The discovery of vast hydrocarbon reserves in this traditionally volatile Andean country, combined with a mass upsurge against a sell-out to the imperialist corporations by working people driven to desperation by ever more brutal exploitation, has once again made Bolivia the crucible of social revolution in Latin America.

In the surrounding countries of southern Latin America, the leaders of anti-imperialist mass movements and revolutionary organizations will be following closely the lessons of the test that is underway in Boliva.

The article above first appeared in the November 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.