Bolivia: Mesa Washes His Hands and Does Nothing with New Law

A little more than half an hour ago, in a conference broadcast by all the local media, Presidential Minister José Galindo (a top cabinet member) defined President Carlos Mesa’s position on the new hydrocarbons law… and it is nothing so much as washing hands hands of it and leaving Bolivia in nearly the same situation as before.
“The president has consciously decided to maintain the position he took in March (not to sign the law),” said Galindo. But Galindo also made it clear that in not passing the law, neither was the president vetoing the new hydrocarbons policy. They simply rested on article 78 of the Bolivian Constitution, which says:

Art. 78. Promulgation by the President of the Congress

Laws not vetoed or promulgated by the President of the Republic within a period of ten days from their reception will be promulgated by the President of the Congress.

This, kind readers, means that all the pressure to approve this law falls into the hands of the of the president of the Congress (and of the Senate), Hormando Vaca Diez, of Santa Cruz, a man we identified just over a year ago as one of Bolivia’s principal right-wing coup plotters.

With this maneuver, Mesa hopes to take an enormous weight from off his shoulders: his responsibility to the multinational petroleum companies on one side, and on the other side a confrontation with the social movements, especially the most radical ones.

Nevertheless, and despite the enormous march they began yesterday in the town of Caraollo, the sectors aligned with Evo Morales have already modified their position. Resigned to the idea that this law will be approved no matter what, the members of Congress from the famous coca grower’s group are now talking about proposing five substantial changes to the new law, according to Congressman Santos Ramírez, member of Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) and the man in charge of MAS’s original hydrocarbons proposal.

Meanwhile, the social movements of the city of El Alto (La Paz’s huge, poor, ethnic Aymara-dominated suburb) have scheduled an assembly for this afternoon to define the schedule of their mobilizations. Among their first declarations it seems that the sitation hasn’t changed for them, and that their basic demands (Mesa’s renunciation, Congress’s shut-down and hydrocarbon nationalization) remain in full force…

We will keep following this, so don’t log off yet…