Unfortunately,
Morales is not a character in a Romantic novel by Chateubriand,
the 19th-century French author who assuaged Europe's bad conscience
by idolizing indigenous Latin America. This is a real-life tragedy
that will have lasting consequences for Bolivia.
Evo Morales
and his party, MAS, have led a successful crusade against foreign
investment in Bolivia the last couple of years. Foreign investment
has dropped to one tenth of what it was in 2003. By forcing the
cancellation of foreign contracts and the introduction of confiscatory
new taxes, Morales has prevented Bolivia from developing natural
gas reserves amounting to 52 trillion cubic feet.
Morales represents
a particularly toxic mix of nationalism and populism that has
re-emerged in South America in the last few years. His movement
has potential "spill-over" effects in the countries
that border Bolivia, including Peru, where Ollanta Humala, another
nationalist populist, is rising fast in the polls.
One only
needs to look at Morales' own life story to realize his own deprivation,
like that of so many other Aymara Indians, was the result of nationalism,
populism, and socialism, and not, as he maintains, of globalization.
Why did he
become a coca grower in the 1980s? He was born in Isallavi, in
the tin-mining region of Oruro, at a time when tin mines lay in
ruins. The reason for their decline was the 1952 revolution, which
"nationalized" them and created a bureaucratic mining
entity known by its acronym COMIBOL. The revolution raised miners'
salaries by 50 percent but failed to keep up investments, so production
collapsed. Eventually, thousands of families, among them the Morales
family, had to move elsewhere.
Now Evo Morales
wants to do to the natural gas fields of Tarija what the 1952
revolution did to the tin mines of Oruro and other parts of Bolivia.
Where did
Evo Morales go to escape the consequences of those policies as
a young man? He went to the Yungas, near La Paz, to try agriculture.
What did he find? In 1953, the revolutionary government had undertaken
land reform, expropriating those estates it deemed unproductive
and handing them to some peasant associations. Restrictions on
property rights were so abundant and legal frameworks so dodgy
that a few years later Bolivia had to import food because its
unproductive minifundia were useless. Unlike Taiwan's agrarian
reform, which created a property-owning mass of peasants, Bolivia's
revolution undercapitalized the land. So when Evo Morales arrived
in Yungas, he realized agriculture was in no better shape than
mining.
Now Morales
is proposing to do to his country's farms precisely what was done
to the land in 1953. He wants to expropriate "those that
are unproductive" and hand them over to peasant cooperatives
under the same restrictions that made economies of scale impossible
five decades ago.
Where did
young Evo go after Yungas? To the rainforests of Chapare, which
offered the only opportunity available to him. That opportunity
was coca -- coca not exactly geared towards the production of
shampoo, toothpaste, and medicines. In Chapare, the new coca grower
rose through the ranks of unionism, until he emerged in 2000 as
a voice against foreign capital and the insufficient free-market
reforms of the 1990s, which he blamed for social ills that were
the result of five decades of nationalism and socialism's ill-fated
attempt to correct the oligarchic legacy of the colonial era.
Morales accuses
U.S. capitalism of impoverishing Bolivia. But the U.S. should
actually be faulted for funding populism and socialism! Between
the start of the 1952 revolution and Morales' internal migration
in the 1980s, nine tenths of the money Bolivia received from abroad
were grants and soft credits from the U.S. By 1957, the United
States was subsidizing 30 percent of the government's budget.
With this encouragement, more nationalizations took place in the
late 60s under general Ovando and in the early 70s under general
Juan José Torres. Needless to say, the protectionist policies
in vogue throughout the region, including import substitution,
were dominant under most Bolivian governments.
It is hardly
surprising that in those circumstances thousands of families should
have turned to coca. Then, caught up in the anti-drug effort,
they saw their livelihood almost disappear at the end of the 1990s
when coca leaf was reduced from close to 100,000 acres to 7,000
acres through eradication efforts (another 24,000 acres are legally
grown elsewhere). Morales emerged as a national hero.
In the last
few years, Morales, not the most radical among the radicals, has
held his country by the throat, squeezing it every time it gulped
for air, as when it tried to export gas to the U.S. through Chilean
ports. Inevitably, the reaction to this populist leader in the
more modern parts of the country has fueled the separatist cause
of south-eastern regions like Santa Cruz. The result is a powder
keg of a country that Bolivia has become.
Good luck
on December 18th!
