I took yesterday off from covering the happenings in Bolivia; there’ve been some new developments, though, and I’ll get to them after a couple personal notes.
First, congrats to my kid brother Colin and the Beaufort (South Carolina) Academy high school soccer team, who won their second straight state championship yesterday. BA triumphed 2-1 over Greenville’s St. Joseph’s. And Colin, I’m proud to say, scored the winning goal. Josh Erikson, our neighbor and Colin’s good friend, had two assists and the other tally.
Second, just a few words about what I’ve been up to, as I’ve been devoting this space to the events further south of here.
Things are, as ever, tranquilo in Cuenca–I’ve got four classes and I’m taking a Spanish course of my own. Last weekend was fun: among other things, a group of my friends and I attended a Deportivo Cuenca (the local pro soccer team) match. Our side beat Liga de Quito 3-0.
And that’s about it. Things are low-key here in Ecuador’s southern Andes. Just how I like ’em.
Okay, on to Bolivia:
The AP’s Vanessa Arrington reported yesterday that new president Carlos Mesa is being pressured not to hold a referendum on whether or not the natural gas pipeline project should be completed:
Civic leaders and businessmen in Tarija, a southern Bolivian state that is home to most of the nation’s underground natural gas reserves, rejected President Carlos Mesa’s plans to hold a referendum on the idea.
They are demanding that the government move ahead with plans to export gas to the United States and Mexico.
And today, she tells us that Evo Morales, leader of Bolivia’s coca leaf growers, says Mesa has one month to show the nation’s poor that the he intends to help them.
Time Europe‘s Tim Padgett has written a tidy article about what Goni’s ouster means for the rest of South America. He mentions the new left-leaning administrations in Brazil, Peru, and Venezuela, but doesn’t mention Ecuador.
(And Ecuador should surely be considered a nation that’s drifting leftward, although Lucio Gutierrez, our prez, has, since being elected last year on a pro-Indigenous plank, become pals with Dubya. But more on Ecuador later; Al Giordano, as I mentioned yesterday, predicts Lucio will be the next South American head of state to fall. But people I’ve talked to here feel the Indigenous movement in Ecuador lacks the organization to cripple the country should their disillusion reach Bolivian proportions.)
There’s more incisive analysis from The Lincoln Plawg (he’s really on a roll, and even links to this humble blog): John Smith, doing his own speculating and commenting on Miguel Centellas’s intriguing thoughts, says of Mesa:
I get the impression of a Mr Smith Goes To Washington with a salsa beat: a guy with no party political background who thinks politics is usual is both corrupt and dispensable, and chooses to go amongst the people, cutting out the pesky middle-man of constitutions and elections, and such.
And, finally, Uruguayan journalist Eduardo Galeano argues that Goni got the boot because Bolivia’s people refused to let natural gas, yet another natural resource, be gifted to foreign interests. He also has harsh words for Goni, a gringo-in-disguise:
As for the fugitive Sanchez de Lozada, he lost the presidency but he won’t be losing much sleep. Though he has the crime of killing more than eighty demonstrators on his conscience, it wasn’t his first bloodbath. This champion of modernization is not bothered by anything that can’t turn a profit. In the end, he speaks and thinks in English–not the English of Shakespeare but that of Bush.
My thoughts: this is more anti-globalization rhetoric that has little basis in reality. (Though some fervent us-versus-America ranting can be expected; the US has just invaded and toppled and occupied another third world country; the rest of the world is just as vulnerable as Iraq.)
The bigger issue for the Bolivian protesters, it would seem to me, wasn’t the somewhat abstract notion of a pipeline pumping gas to the rich Yankees via the hated Chileans’ coastline. It was the very real condition the Indigenous population finds themselves in every day–suffering from abject poverty. And living with a biting sense of alienation.