Politics: Bolivia's Constitution: Prez Evo Morales confronts obstacles to his grand plan, economy sputters from nationalizations
.
When Evo Morales won election as President of Bolivia last year, it took him only months to nationalize the oil industry (more technically, the hydrocarbon industry, as it's termed in Spanish). Bolivia's hydrocarbon industrial sector is dominated by a number of foreign-based mega-corporations owned by shareholders who purchased their interests in these multnationals on the international stockmarkets. Besides processing and uses of hydrocarbons in Bolivia itself, the main customers for exports are Brazil and Chile.
Between the external owners and the external customoers, Morales seeks ways of, in effect, changing the whole structure of ownership, extraction, and exploitation of Bolivia's natural wealth--especially, in one plan, by reassiging it to the country's poor -- who mostly are configured demographically in the jointly-predominant two indigenous ethnolinguistic communities, the Aymara and the Quechua. Aside from the sheer demographics of Bolivia, however, the current and historic social dominance resides in the minority whites and meztizos (people of mixed-ancestory). These intersecting class, educational, medical, ethnic, and linguistic differences within the population further translate into regional differentials. So there are tensions between regions of the country, principally East vs West conflicts.
Latin America > Bolivia
At present, the Morales nationalization and his convening of an assembly to work a year to rewrite the nation's Constitution and thereby alter the role of courts and govt administration in relation to the legislative body of parliamentarians, has been stalled in each particular.
Beginning with the economy ond the key industries of hydrocarbons -- investment, drilling and pumping, Morales has shaken the confidence of the corporations who now are putting no further funds into their existing facilities and functions. The country is not receiving full benefits of the existing hc industries and companies, which are declining from lack of maintainance while paying the exorbitant taxes imposed by Morales. AP via Internatonal Herald Tribune reports "Bolivia says gas production not enough for new exports" (Sep26,2k6):
LA PAZ, Bolivia -- Bolivia has acknowledged it does not have the production capacity to boost its natural-gas exports but said current output is enough to honor contracts with Argentina and Brazil while meeting domesticdemand.A Nov1,2k6 deadline is breathing down the neck of the Bolivian govt to pay its bills (including its bureaucracy, judges, and legislators). And, despite Vice President Alvaro Garcia's denial, two days ago, "the Bolivian Hydrocarbons Chamber, which represents Bolivian and foreign energy companies operating in the Andean country, said Bolivia risks failing to meet Argentine and Brazilian demand because multinational companies [operating in Bolivia] have frozen new investments due to the nationalization."Vice President Alvaro Garcia said in remarks published Tuesday in the local press that Bolivia had plenty of natural gas underground but "not at the wellhead."
He said the lack of production capacity was the fault of previous governments — particularly the 2001-2002 administration of former President Jorge Quiroga, now an opposition leader — that allowed multinational oil companies to avoid prior commitments to invest in production.
Garcia denied the production bottleneck was the result of the government's May 1 oil and natural gas nationalization decree, under which all foreign companies are required to sign new government contracts before November 1 or leave Bolivia.
Hydrocarbons Minister Carlos Villegas also said Bolivia does not have surplus gas to export, but said it will comply with its export contracts to Brazil and Argentina, while also meeting domestic demand.
In the wake of the nationalization, Brazil's state-run oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, has said it has frozen US$2 billion (€1.6 billion) in Bolivian investments, while Spanish-Argentine firm Repsol YPF has said it has reduced its investments to the bare minimum.This picture of defaulting on supply to major customers ready and waiting for delivery, and at the same time scaring away investment both to presently active hydrocarbon corporations and to any further investors on the international capital markets, puts the entire Morales project between Spanish qustion marks. Which translated means, between a rock and a hard place.A senior Petrobras official on Tuesday said Bolivia may not have enough gas to meet its export commitments to Brazil and Argentina unless new investments in production are made.
These qustion marks pertain not only to the Bolivian govt's economic infrastructure, but to the lawnch of Morales' massive project of radically restructuring the Bolivian state and putting it at the service of the people (where "the people" = the Aymara and the Quechua, the race-marked poor majority who, as it happens, speak languages other than Spanish, the tongue and the literature of the elites).
At the Centre for Latin American Studies, Oxford University, professor John Crabtree in "Bolivia: the battle for the two-thirds" (Sep26,2k6), OpenDemocracy provides a pro-Morales analysis of the constitution-writing process:
Bolivia's ruling party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) is locked into a politically consuming battle with the right-of-centre opposition in the assembly that is to rewrite the country's constitution. Each side is now mobilising its supporters in what is turning into a key struggle for power and influence. For the leftwing government of President Evo Morales, this represents the most serious challenge since it took office in January 2006, following Morales's and the MAS's decisive victory in the presidential and legislative elections on 18 December.Crabtree goes on to delineate the East vs West conflict in Bolviaian politics:The constituent assembly was elected on 2 July 2006 and formally began its deliberations on 6 August, Bolivia's independence day. It is based in the country's juridical capital, Sucre, and has a year to agree [to] a draft constitution. So far, however, it has yet to begin its substantive business. Pro-government and opposition groups have failed to agree even on the basic rules that will govern the assembly's work, particularly on the margin by which decisions should be made.
The MAS delegates argue that individual decisions should be passed by a majority (50%-plus-one) of votes; the opposition - chiefly the rightwing Podemos coalition - says that the margin should be two-thirds. The MAS has a numerical majority of seats in the assembly - 137 of the 255 seats - but this represents 33 fewer than would be needed for a two-thirds majority. For the opposition, the issue of numbers is decisive in whether it will have any genuine influence over the proceedings or just become part of a rubber-stamp institution.
Behind this argument over numbers is a wider question of the interpretation of a linguistically ambiguous component of the constituent assembly's operating rules. The statute governing the assembly states that its decisions must be approved by a two-thirds majority. The MAS argues that this means that the final draft constitution as a whole needs to be approved by two-thirds, but that a simple majority is enough for each individual decision. The opposition contends that the MAS just wants to be able to override the opposition parties and effectively rewrite the constitution along the lines it sees fit.
The main political champion of regionalism has traditionally been the Comité Pro Santa Cruz (CPSC), the civic committee in Bolivia's economic capital which has long sought to achieve greater freedom and autonomy from La Paz. The CPSCM is made up of representatives of the dominant sectors of Santa Cruz's elite, and its power has increased along with the growing predominance of the cruceño economy over the rest of Bolivia. The decline of Bolivia's traditional mining economy and the growth of cash-crop agriculture and hydrocarbons since the 1970s has increased Santa Cruz's share of GDP at the expense of the highland departments. The CPSC has managed successfully to identify the regional interests of Santa Cruz with those of the local elite.Crabtree then cites the two major issues (and tacks on a third, in passing), a trio of issues that feed the fire of the regionalist drive, especially in the East, especially in the economic capital of Santa Cruz:The CPSC took the lead in orchestrating the 8 September protests against the government. It did so in conjunction with similar civic committees in the rest of eastern Bolivia, particularly in the cities of Tarija and Trinidad (the capital of Beni). It was aided in this endeavour by a number of more shadowy organisations with a clearly anti-indigenista and far-right agenda, such as the Unión Juvenil Cruceñista (UJC) and the so-called Nación Camba. These use vigilante tactics to elicit support for pro-regional autonomy campaigns.
1.) The earlier demise there of the mining industry which gave way to an emergent hydrocarbon industry (both in the extractive sector) after private enterprise was permitted into hydrocarban extraction and processing. We have already looked at this key industry.
2.) The second economic factor driving the regionalist temptation of Bolivia's East and the nation's economic capital, Santa Cruz, is the agriculture sector. (As an aside, it's important at least to mention that the most significant agricultural industry is the cultivation and harvesting of coca leaves, and their processing into cocaine. Crabtree avoids this factor and how it relates to the eastern region of Bolivia as a whole and to Santa Cruz, the economic hub.) Crabtree:
Rural social movements, involving peasants and migrant workers as well as the landless, have openly associated themselves with the MAS. The government's plan to introduce agrarian reform has caused alarm among the organisations representing commercial agriculture, especially the Camara Agropecuaria del Oriente (CAO), another stalwart backer of the CPSC.3.) "[Elite groups in Santa Cruz] are also highly suspicious of the government's policies of "ethnic affirmation", which may give new rights to lowland indigenous groups over the land they occupy and the resources on (or beneath) it." Indigenous internal immigrants have taken over land and squatted on it semi-permanently. The problem here is that these people do not know how to make their squats economically viable (compare farm takoevers in South Africa and Zimbabwe). The outlook is not promising, and Morales' plan must tackle both the landlessness, the worklessness (without income), and the lack of small-farmer lore. Except in those instances concentrated in the coca-growing industry.
To these analyses we now must add that of Isabel Moreno and Mariono Aquirre, "Bolivia: the challenge of state reform" (Sep15,2k6) OpenDemocracy.
The new government's failure to win an absolute majority opened the door to complex negotiations about the state and power that will take at least a year to resolve. At the same time, both questions highlight a series of problems which affect the structure of the Bolivian state itself; in particular, its democratic capacity to carry out a reform which could facilitate the construction of a more equal society that could combat endemic poverty and accommodate Bolivia's different identities (ethnic, linguistic, social and regional).Of all the sources consulted, Morena and Aquirre's is the most sociologically systematic. Succinctly, they summarize the ground covered already in the course of this blog-entry: "the political programme of Evo Morales combines resource-extraction, attention to the rights of the indigenous people, and attempt to reform land ownership."
But parallel to all that, as a separate item, M and A assert: "as a country of extensive coca production led now by a populist left-winger, Bolivia has attracted close political attention from the United States." Somewhat bothersome here is the reference to the USA, as tho an agriculture devoted to the export of a crime-surrounded, h+ly addictive and life-destroying drug is of no intrinsic interest to the political analysis of the Morales phenom in Bolivia.
For our purposes here the final consideration regarding the new Evo Morales regime in Bolivia is "the indigenous factor. 60% of Bolivia's 8.6 million inhabitants are Amerindian; the indigenous communities have been marginalised by the political process and have suffered harsh exploitation since the colonial era; 62.7% of the population is poor (most of those indigenous); 26.5% live in extreme poverty."
The indigenous people have recently gained more institutional and judicial space, for example through the constitutional reform of 1994 (which recognises Bolivia as a multi-ethnic state) and through Article 171 of the constitution (which recognises collective rights). The so-called "people of the east" have a system of communal justice with established procedures, one that is secondary in relation to the state as a whole. Maria Teresa Zegada of the University Mayor of San Simón in Cochabamba says, however: "these formal gains have not had a real impact on the conditions of the people."Morales has some blind spots to be sure, but his driving concern for correcting the structural flaws in Bolivian society in order to advance justice for all at least is shaking up the historical drift of Bolivia into deeper misery for most of its people. Hopefully, he will not kill off free enterprise nor alienate potential investors who can help Bolivia's ability to offer work and income to its people.
-- PoliticarpFuther Resources:
Bolivia: Ruling Holds Military Accountable for Rights Abuses
Bolivia - Wikipedia article
Bolivia - Google Search results
Bolivia Inc (business news)
Bolicia Web - News and Media
No comments:
Post a Comment