Bolivia:
Natural gas, urban insurrection and revolutionary tradition
by Jeff Webber
Across the Third World a novel societal and demographic sea change is occurring. As Mike Davis has recently explained, urbanization is rapidly transforming the face of the underdeveloped world, spawning a vast and little-understood class of informal workers. Growing out of the debt crisis of the 1980s and the subsequent neoliberal economic restructuring, the countrysides are spilling out into the urban slums of Third World megacities and secondary urban centres.
The remarkable part of this trend is that the cities continue to grow even as economies stagnate and depress, suggesting the “push” from the countryside is vastly more important than the “pull” or allure of a better life in the city. As Davis puts it, “The global forces ‘pushing’ people from the countryside – mechanization in Java and India, food imports in Mexico, Haiti and Kenya, civil war and drought throughout Africa, and everywhere the consolidation of small into large holdings and the competition of industrial-scale agribusiness – seem to sustain urbanization even when the ‘pull’ of the city is drastically weakened by debt and depression.” The rapid expansion of cities while the state retreats from the economy and structural adjustment policies rape the popular classes has meant “an inevitable recipe for the mass production of slums.”
The 650,000 strong shantytown-city of El Alto, Bolivia encapsulates many of the more general traits of Third World slums: inadequate urban infrastructure, increasing economic insecurity, poor sanitation and so on. In a country where 62 per cent of the population identify themselves as indigenous, 82 percent of alteños (residents of El Alto) identify as such.
El Alto has grown rapidly since the 1950s, from approximately 11,000 people in 1950 to roughly 650,000 in 2001, with much of this growth since the 1980s. In particular, the confluence of three factors led to this spectacular expansion. First, droughts stemming from El Niño in 1982-1983 drove tens of thousands of subsistence peasants off their land and into El Alto. Second, the rapid collapse of the international tin market and the inception of the neoliberal assault, which targeted state-owned tin mines, led to a massive flight of ex-miners into the city in 1985. Finally, commercial liberalization and the flood of cheap imports that accompanied the neoliberal revolution in 1985 effectively emptied much of the countryside as farmers and herders went bankrupt.
As Juan M. Arbona and Benjamin Kohl note, “This intense migration has created a political culture that combines aspects of trade unionism with traditional forms of land-based organization within a context of marked economic insecurity and social frustration.” That social frustration has recently given birth to wide-scale mobilization.
In something of a replay of the 1781 indigenous rebellion led by Tupac Katari that laid siege to the colonial city of La Paz, the October 2003 “Gas War” was marked vividly by the eruption of El Alto and the occupation of La Paz, with up to 500,000 protesters demanding the resignation of neoliberal architect and then-president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, and a national referendum on the future of natural gas extraction, among other things.
To get at where this revolt came from and the complexities of the insurgent character it took, we need to look back at the material changes wrought by neoliberal economic restructuring and the ideological ploy of “neoliberal indigenism” used by the Bolivian state. We also need to understand the subjective identities and ideologies of the mobilized popular sectors that engage with class and ethnicity, drawing from a rich mosaic of revolutionary tradition within the geographic entity called Bolivia and beyond.
The 1985 elections brought to power once again the Movimiento Nacional Revolucionario (MNR), the party of the 1952 Revolution. Víctor Paz Estenssoro, an historic figure within both the MNR and the populist current of the revolution, assumed the presidency once again.
Forced by the mobilization of the popular classes, especially the militant mining unions, the MNR had instituted a dramatic series of national reforms immediately following the revolution. Known in Bolivian popular parlance as “el estado del ’52,” the political, social and economic reforms in the post-revolutionary era included land reform, the purging and discrediting of the Bolivian military, nationalization of mines, universal suffrage, ambitious universal education programs and a populist/corporatist political apparatus of cooptation, reward, as well as periodic repression to keep the revolution from taking a socialist course. While retaining a nationalist/populist character, the revolution nonetheless struck a blow to the landed oligarchy and the tin-mining elite, at the same time as it expanded the meaning of citizenship for the poor, indigenous majority.
1985 witnessed the end of this era. That year was characterized by hyperinflationary economic crisis and the high point of the political Left’s longstanding internal conflicts. Against this backdrop, the historically populist MNR orchestrated a revolutionary break with the state of ’52 social order, introducing a new, radically neoliberal model, where the state would no longer play the role as primary agent of development. A philosophy based on free market capitalism and a dogmatic faith in liberalization and privatization was crystallizing in a state controlled by an energized New Right and an unprecedented unity among the dominant capitalist classes.
The economic “reforms” introduced were based on the removal of the state from virtually all productive economic activity, the bankruptcy of “uncompetitive” productive enterprises, the mass firing of low and mid-level state bureaucrats, the near-total destruction of the state-owned tin-mining industry (with 60 percent of the militant miners losing their jobs, as much for political reasons as for economic rationale), and the de-peasantization of the countryside as small-holders fled to the city slums.
According to Bolivian-based economists Carlos Arze and Tom Kruse, the state has suffered dramatically from reduced capacity as a result of relinquishing its revenue-generating, productive enterprises. As a consequence, public spending on social needs such as health, education and so on, has deteriorated. Public sector employment has been more than halved, while the private sector, contrary to neoliberal mythology, has been unable to secure jobs for victims of state downsizing. At the same time, the insecure and highly exploitative informal sector of the economy has expanded rapidly, aided and abetted by the rural-to-urban demographic wave.
As Henry Veltmeyer and Juan Tellez remind us, “… the dramatic expansion of the informal sector both in Bolivia and elsewhere in the region is a clear indication of a generalized tendency toward the casualization and informalization of employment and a change in the conditions of employment. The latter are marked by lack of legal protection, increasing insecurity and uncertainty, as well as dramatic growth of what Karl Marx defined as an industrial army – that is, a reserve pool of surplus labor visible in its effects on the disciplining of labour and the weakening of its organization, its capacity to negotiate, and its flexibility (labour loses its mobility and becomes available at lower rates and in worse conditions).”
Neoliberal Indigenism
The neoliberal movement held its momentum throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s. In the first administration of Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997), however, the contradictions of the model were emerging and the discourse of the state consequently began to take on a more sophisticated tenor, one based on neoliberal indigenism. Sánchez de Lozada embraced as his vice president the renowned Aymara intellectual Víctor Hugo Cardenas, while the 1994 Constitution, in a departure from older nationalist discourse, declared Bolivia a “multiethnic and pluricultural” nation. Bret Gustafson writes, “Through the mid-1990s, neoliberal economic reforms in Bolivia were accompanied by legislative measures that ‘recognized’ indigenous identities, languages and organizations and ascribed to them new categories for participation within formal institutions of state governance.”
Therefore, we see the perverse embrace by the state of “indigenous culture,” or a call for the indigenous masses to adapt and incorporate themselves into the capitalist democratic order, while the regime proceeds apace, implementing an economic program that impoverishes the majority, robs them of sovereignty and control over their lives and disproportionately harms the indigenous poor. Enjoy the recognition of your languages. Shut-up about the economy.
Recent events have demonstrated the shallow veneer of the state’s “tolerance” of indigenous popular politics, while massive insurgent roadblocks, strikes, and full-scale mobilizations of mostly indigenous poor indicate that the subaltern sectors of society have not swallowed whole the paring of indigenous cultural recognition with a neoliberal economic order that impoverishes the same people it “recognizes”.
In the rupture of October 2003 Sánchez de Lozada demonstrated his willingness to open fire on the non-violent protestors, killing more people in 14 months than were killed under General Hugo Bánzer’s military dictatorship from 1971-1978, as Katherine Ledebur points out. Meanwhile, as societal tensions mounted during the Gas War, the overtly racist declarations of the mass media and elite figures outside the state highlighted the shallow reach of the state’s official discourse of tolerant neoliberal indigenism.
Revolutionary History
In the heat of reporting contemporary uprisings, the historic roots of social mobilization are often lost in the fray. It’s impossible to comprehend the subjective consciousness and ideologies of the current Bolivian radical protagonists without relating them to the complex revolutionary trajectories of the country in the past.
Even beginning only as far back as the 1952 revolution, we can begin to understand the key social forces in the popular blocs of one of Latin America’s most historically mobilized and radical populations. Following the revolution, there is no doubt that the Central Obrero Boliviano (Bolivian Workers Central, COB) - and within the COB, the mining union Federacion Sindical de Trabajadores Mineros de Bolivia (FSTMB) – played the predominant role in the struggle to socialize the Bolivian economy and to steer the Bolivian post-revolutionary cycle in a socialist direction, a direction at odds with the MNR and the nationalist/populist forces within the revolution.
Since its establishment, according to James Dunkerley, “the COB has developed into one of the most militant trade union confederations in the world. It has the distinction of being the only Latin American confederation that possesses authority over an entire workers’ movement, it has remained independent of all international affiliations, and – despite numerous reiterations of its rejection of party connections – plays a central and explicit role in national politics, paralleled only by that of the military.”
It was therefore a serious blow to the Bolivian Left when the international tin market collapsed in 1985 and the Bolivian state began its concerted attack on the miners’ union, effectively gouging out the heart of the COB and its capacity to mobilize against the neoliberal order.
Replacing the COB on the mantle of social struggle during the late 1980s and continuing to this day, the cocaleros (coca growers) of the Chapare region have taken up a central role in the Bolivian Left, struggling against the imperial adventures of the American state and its “drug war” throughout the Andean region.
The cocaleros have mounted tremendous popular resistance on a number of levels. Tactics have included mass rallies, marches, hunger strikes, road blockades, cultural events, expanding alliances, occupying government offices and forming the basis of a new political party: the Movimiento Al Socialismo (MAS), led by Evo Morales.
Nonetheless, it was not until 2000 that the Bolivian Left really moved from a defensive to an offensive position, with indigenous protests and road blockades in the altiplano and the internationally renowned Water War in Cochabamba. In the year 2000, argue Forrest Hylton and Sinclair Thomson, “a new revolutionary cycle was ushered in…. The latest insurgency constitutes a major challenge to Bolivian society’s internal colonialism and may lead to the formation of a new national-popular bloc representing the social majority.”
From their perspective, much of the union and Leftist political party mobilizations and political ferment during the post-revolutionary period until the mid-1980s represented a “national-popular” tradition which fought many courageous struggles for social justice and against dictatorships but nonetheless, “held, at best, a condescending view of indigenous participation in national political organization. These groups privileged a schematic vision of class consciousness over cultural identity as the basis for political action.”
Since the decline of the COB and Leftist political parties, however, indigenous politics has come to the fore. For Hylton and Thomson, the indigenous symbolism in the streets of the Gas War mobilizations stands out as a clear indication of this momentum. For example, commenting on the miners’ participation in the October revolt they write: “When mineworkers traveled from the mining center of Huanuni to join the protests in El Alto, they revived the memory and symbolic power of earlier proletarian struggle in the national-popular tradition. However, on this occasion they also surprisingly affirmed their own indigenous roots.”
While I’m not sure we can call the social struggles of recent years “the revolutionary intervention of popular forces,” I certainly agree that the confluence of different traditions has at least laid the seeds for a powerful national popular bloc of the social majority. In Hylton and Thomson’s eloquent analysis, the “October insurrection thus represents an exceptionally deep and powerful, though not unprecedented, convergence between two traditions of struggle – indigenous and national-popular. Earlier mobilizations, and some of their gains – notably the nationalization of mines in 1952 or petroleum in 1969 – left a more enduring legacy than had been supposed. Self-consciously building on earlier revolutionary cycles, especially those of 1780-1781, 1899 and 1952, the current cycle of 2000-2003 will leave its own legacy.”
At minimum it’s clear that the meaning of the October struggles penetrates far deeper than a struggle about natural gas. This revolt grew out of the political and economic contradictions of the neoliberal capitalist order set in place in 1985, and built on and expanded the, at times contradictory, revolutionary traditions of South America’s poorest country.
The future of mass struggle, and the rewards it might foster, remains opaque. However, as long as gross hierarchies and multiple injustices reign in Bolivia, the traditions of revolutionary insurrection will continue to find voices and actors. As I write these words, the transportation workers have gone on strike and a new Water War is emerging in El Alto.
Jeff Webber is a member of the Toronto Branch of the NSG and a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto.