Bolivia's Poor Proclaim Abiding Distrust of Globalization

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/17/international/americas/17GLOB.html?th

 

Bolivia's Poor Proclaim Abiding Distrust of GlobalizationBy LARRY ROHTER

 

Published: October 17, 2003

 

 

 

 

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A PAZ, Bolivia, Oct. 15 — The many Indian protesters who choked the streets and

highways of this Andean nation again on Thursday may be poor and speak broken or

accented Spanish, but they have a powerful message.

 

It is this: no to the export of gas and other natural resources; no to free

trade with the United States; no to globalization in any form other than

solidarity among the downtrodden peoples of the developing world.

 

The force of that message may yet topple President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada,

who tried to quell the unrest by offering a package of concessions late

Wednesday night that the protesters rejected.

 

Instead they vowed to continue with demonstrations meant to force his government

to abandon a plan to export natural gas to the United States through a port in

Chile. The protests have already left more than 80 people dead over the past

month.

 

Sensing that public support for the president, weak to begin with, has all but

vanished, opponents of the gas export plan have now moved to press their

advantage.

 

" The blood that has been spilled is something sacred, " Felipe Quispe, leader of

the indigenous group that initiated the protests, said in response to Mr.

Sánchez de Lozada's offer, made in a televised speech. " So we can't negotiate

and we're not even going to talk. "

 

Several thousand workers, mostly miners from the south and coca growers from the

north, were reported to be marching on the capital Thursday. The armed forces

demanded that they disperse, saying that the military would erect barricades to

prevent them from entering La Paz, but the warning appeared to have gone

unheeded.

 

More than merely threatening the longevity of Bolivia's government, the

protesters have lent new energy to the discontent already percolating throughout

the region.

 

Across South America, labor unions, student and civic groups and a new wave of

leaders — Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil, and

Néstor Kirchner in Argentina — are expressing similar doubts about who actually

benefits from a free flow of international trade and investment.

 

But nowhere have those doubts been expressed as forcefully as in this poor

nation of eight million people, increasingly divided along class and racial

lines. A majority of Bolivians have Indian blood, descended from the original

inhabitants of this continent who got a foretaste of globalization centuries ago

with the age of exploration and the arrival of European colonizers.

 

" Globalization is just another name for submission and domination, " Nicanor

Apaza, 46, an unemployed miner, said at a demonstration this week in which

Indian women in bowler hats and colorful layered skirts carried banners

denouncing the International Monetary Fund and demanding the president's

resignation. " We've had to live with that here for 500 years, and now we want to

be our own masters. "

 

He and many other protesters see an unbroken line from this region's often

rapacious colonial history to the failed economic experiments of the late 20th

century, in which Bolivia was one of the first Latin American countries to open

itself to the modern global economy. The $5 billion gas pipeline project is only

the latest gambit.

 

Starting with the end of a military dictatorship two decades ago, Bolivia

embraced the free-market model. State-owned companies were sold off. Foreign

investment was courted. Government regulation was reduced, all in the name of a

new era of growth and prosperity.

 

The policies brought to heel runaway inflation. But otherwise, the average

Bolivian has had little to show for the government's embrace of policies urged

on it by the United States, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund,

now the focus of so much resentment.

 

Exports have actually declined compared with their level 25 years ago. Growth

has stalled for the past five years. Unemployment has soared, and Bolivia

remains the poorest country in South America, with a per capita income of less

than $950 a year — by some calculations, less than it was before the free-market

reforms. " After 21 years, the economic model in place has not solved the

problems of poverty and social exclusion, " said Carlos Toranzo of the Latin

American Institute for Research here.

 

The leading spokesman for the discontented here is Evo Morales, the charismatic

43-year-old leader of the coca growers' federation. As presidential candidate,

he finished barely one percentage point behind Mr. Sánchez de Lozada in the

election last year after a campaign that called for reversing the economic

course.

 

While few development experts see much benefit from reinforcing economic

barriers around an already landlocked nation, talk of self-reliance has taken on

great appeal.

 

" If you talk to average people about the Free Trade Area of the Americas or even

the gas export law, they really don't know that much about them, " said Eduardo

Gamarra, a Bolivian scholar who is director of the Center for Latin American and

Caribbean Studies at Florida International University in Miami. " But Evo Morales

and others have shrewdly used those ideas as a flag which plays on their deepest

fears, the loss of identity and the giving away of what they consider to be

their national patrimony. "

 

At a recent regional anti-globalization forum in Argentina, Mr. Morales

maintained that the United States and multinational companies have " a plan to

exterminate the Indian " in order to seize control of the riches of Bolivia and

neighboring countries.

 

" How much longer will the natural resources of Latin America remain in the hands

of transnational companies? " he asked.

 

That suspicion is rooted deep in this country's bitter history. In the colonial

era, silver from the mines of Potosí provided Spain with the wealth that allowed

it to forge a global empire, and in modern times, tin made a few families, like

the Patiños, fabulously wealthy.

 

" The wealth has always left the country and enriched foreigners, rather than

staying here to improve our lives, " said Pascuala Velázquez, an egg vendor of

Aymara Indian descent, " but we cannot allow that to happen this time with the

gas. "

 

Rather than export gas and other resources, the protesters insist that they be

used to help build an industrial base. But Bolivia does not have the money to

carry out such a program on its own, and as a diplomat who represents a South

American country asked, " Who in their right mind is going to be willing to

invest in a country that is so unstable and hostile to foreign capital? "

 

Perhaps another president could have convinced Bolivians of the merits of the

gas project, expected to quadruple the country's exports over the next decade.

But Mr. Sánchez de Lozada, 73, a loyal ally of Washington and a millionaire

former mining executive, is regarded here as so much a puppet of the foreign and

domestic economic interests that his every word is suspect.

 

One demonstrator, Remberto Clavijo, a shoe repairman of Quechua Indian descent,

said, " He has governed this country for the benefit of the gringos and the

multinational companies and the Chileans, not for the Bolivian people. "

 

 

 

 

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