Newley Purnell

Sucre remains calm, but La Paz is getting worse, so it´s actually better that we´re here…not in a safety sense really, since we´d be equally safe there, but at least we can go out and walk around a bit here and go to restaurants and such.

I believe there is more international coverage of the situation now, and I wish I could offer better insider info, but although no one really knows what is going to happen, I will give the background I know.

The situation is a bit remisiscent what happened in Venezuela last year, where the president was unpopular and people wanted him to step down and protested to that end. Goni, the president, doesn´t seem like he is going to step down; he was, in fact, elected, and this is a democratic country with constitutionally dictated policies, and what kind of precedent does it set for an elected official to step down outside of the protocols for such a change?

That said, he was elected with just 22.5% of the popular vote (even less than G Dub, whose administration backed Goni in the 2002 election), and the man behind all present protests, Evo Morales, got 22%. Evo is the leader of the Movement to SocialismParty, and many see this as his attempt to gain control he thinks he should have anyway. He has the support of a lot of Bolivia´s poor country-folk, like the coca growers, of which group Evo was a member before his move to politics. Unfortunately, the feeling is that a lot of his monetary support comes from the cocaine producers (who are rich, unlike the coca growers), who would greatly benefit from the abolishment of the US-backed coca eradication policies which Goni has supported and Evo wants to get rid of.

This is just one of Evo´s stances that puts him on the wrong side of the US government (not to mention the name of his party…). Many people here resent the one-sided dictatorial nature of Bolivia´s relationship with the US (as it is in most poor latin american nations), and see Goni, who has spent most of his life in the US and, unbelievably enough, speaks spanish with a gringo accent, as the whipping boy of
the US.

By the way, Bolivia had more governments in the 20th century than any other country, so people are somewhat used to this kind of thing. But why is everyone so pissed? The gas issue is one thing, but it´s really more of a flashpoint than a reason. Bolivia has the second-largest natural gas reserves in S. America, and the plan to sell the gas rights to a private (probably US) company, which would extract the gas and send it through a pipeline to the nearest port in Chile and on to market in the US and Mexico, is very unpopular.

For one thing, because many Bolivians still resent their loss of coastline to Chile over a hundred years ago, but mainly that so many industries have been privatized here (part of the IMF recommendations to stabilize Bolivian currency (which worked) and economy (which hasn´t seen much change) and there has been no benefit to the poor majority of Bolivians. For example, the train system was sold to a Chilean company and now trains don´t run to La Paz because the route wasn´t profitable. The national phone system was sold to an Italian company, etc., etc. It seemed that the rich were the only people to benefit from these changes. They don´t want to see the same thing happen again without guarantees that they will see some benefit.