The Life and Work of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse?

For the last several days, the flow of the Internet and a few irresponsible journalists have been warning us that Bolivia is being threatened by “peacekeeping” forces made up of Chilean, Paraguayan, and Brazilian troops led by U.S. commanders and soldiers. It has also been speculated that Peru disagrees with this plan for international intervention to “defend threatened democracies,” and is willing to enter into a military conflict with Chile to settle old scores from history. I think we must be clear here: the purpose of all this, of building up a scenario of sub-continental war, is to provoke uncertainty, anxiety, and doubts among the Bolivian population going into the December 4, 2005 elections. It is also possible, though unlikely, that an attempt is being made to provoke a civil conflict between the “trade unionist west” and the “enterprising east” in order to break out of a “disastrous impasse.” On the one hand, it would seem that the horsemen of the Apocalypse, embodied in Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, are sending messengers to provoke fluctuations in voter preference polls for Evo Morales and his Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), whose possible electoral victory is quite worrying to the U.S. State Department. And so, as long “Tuto” Quiroga and Samuel Doria Medina, candidates for the PODEMOS (“We Can”) and UN (“National Unity”) coalitions, seem to enjoy the Bolivian electorate’s preference, we can supposedly relax. The other preference (for MAS) would mean entering into fear and paranoia about the possibility of a conflict widened to involve the entire Southern Cone. Well, a few sociological paradigms would say that it is more the fear of the threat of a violent event than the fear of the event itself.

But let’s move on to an analysis of the real situation in Bolivian politics. Unfortunately, the previously mentioned “disastrous impasse,” which has been analyzed dozens of times by Álvaro García Linera (formerly a television commentator, now the MAS’ vice presidential candidate), reflects in a certain way the inability and weakness of Bolivia’s neoliberal democracy, which has still not struck a balance in the construction of an inclusive nation-state. Although the universal right to vote was passed in 1952 to include women and the indigenous in order to build a representative democracy, in 1994 and 2004 a primary phase in the building of a participatory democracy, through emphasis on local governments and referenda, was entered into. Nonetheless, will all these advances, the Bolivian political crisis deepened with the corrupt behavior of the “traditional” party apparatuses, which since 1985 have been seduced by the “trickle down” theory of economics. At its height, this neoliberal and social-Darwinist concept ended up impoverishing the Bolivian population even further, and astronomically enriching a few businessmen and multinational corporations that enjoyed former president Sánchez de Lozada’s favor. A case in point would be the contracts for natural gas exploration, illegal under Bolivian law, that are estimated to have produced a gross profit of US$18 billion since 1997 for Repsol, Petrobrás, Maxus, Enron, and British Gas. This example is just one of the many that exist within the process of “privatization” that the MNR and other parties like AND, MIR, and UCS carried under the deceptive concept of “capitalization.” For many in Bolivia, “capitalization” turned out to really be the “decapitation” of the entire society.

The task assigned to the Constituent Assembly for June of 1996 is precisely to build a “new” nation-state on the foundation of rational political balances between social movements, regions, communities, cities, and indigenous peoples that participate vigorously in the Bolivia of the 21st century. The central issues to Bolivia’s 21st century social agenda, provoked by Cochabamba’s “water war” in 2000 and the “gas war” in the city of El Alto in 2003, revolve around three central ideas: defense of natural resources; land redistribution; and the construction of a new state in the context of a mixed economy, enriched by the communal economic logic of reciprocity. That is to say, it is a reworked version of the tasks that faced Bolivia in 1952, but contextualized to the needs of the 21st century.

Although there are still political dinosaurs on the right and the left, Bolivians know that current conditions in the globalized world will not permit “nationalization” in the old 1950-60 paradigm. For example, hydrocarbon “nationalization” is no longer so simple an act as the MAS’ electoral slogans would make it out to be. On the other hand, the exportation of gas to Chile without added value, via the Spanish company REPSOL (which, acting as a middleman, is the transnational corporation that stands to gain the most from such a deal), without even changing the terms of the 57 illegal contracts, is not a viable political agenda for a Tuto Quiroga/PODEMOS administration, either…

After all that has passed, Bolivians want to find a rational path, one of mixed societies, fair prices, and balanced negotiations with capitalist groups that are willing to take risks instead of simply plundering. The purpose of this is to consciously eliminate the high levels of poverty that exist in Bolivia, with the additional understanding that more than half of the Bolivian population is below the age of twenty.

Finally, if the Bolivian political situation deteriorates any further than what the absurd struggle for regional redistribution of congressional seats in the 2005 elections has already produced, this attempt to break with the democratic process could affect the entire Andean subcontinent. But the approval and execution of this break depends upon the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.