A weekly column featuring progressive viewpoints
on national and international issues
under-reported in mainstream media
for release June 14, 2005
btl061405.html
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Bolivia's
Poor Indigenous Population
Rises Up to
Demand Nationalization
of their
Nation's Energy Resources
Interview with Jim Schultz,
executive director of the
Democracy Center,
conducted by Scott Harris on
June 6, 2005
Listen in RealAudio:
schultz061705.ram
(Needs RealOne player or RealPlayer)
After two weeks of militant
protests across Bolivia demanding the nationalization of the Latin American
country's energy resources, President Carlos Mesa offered his resignation in a
televised address on June 6. Mesa's resignation, the second time he's offered
to step down in a year, would not take effect until accepted by Bolivia's
Congress. Evo Morales, leader of Bolivia's leading opposition party, the
Movement Toward Socialism, said that the resignation of President Mesa was not
enough and called for the resignation of both the Senate president and speaker
of the House. New elections could be called by a caretaker government headed by
the chief justice of Bolivia's Supreme Court.
Tens of thousands of protesters
made up of miners, labor activists and Bolivia's poor majority indigenous
population had converged on Bolivia's capital city of La Paz the night
President Mesa resigned. The people of La Paz have experienced food and fuel
shortages as a result of road blockades erected by demonstrators in recent
weeks.
Although 92 percent of Bolivians
had supported a 2004 referendum directing the government to take back control
of the nation's oil and gas industries, the International Monetary Fund had
threatened to withhold aid if contracts with private energy companies were
challenged. Between The Lines' Scott Harris spoke with Jim Schultz, executive
director of the Democracy Center in Cochabamba, Bolivia, who analyzes the roots
of the nation's popular resistance to U.S.-backed neoliberal economic policies
and their connection to the wider progressive movements across Latin America.
JIM SCHULTZ: Bolivia is the
poorest country in South America. It sits atop the second largest gas and oil
reserves in all of South America, and Bolivians are very concerned that those
resources be developed in a way that average Bolivians are going to see the
benefits.
Ten years ago, the gas resources
were privatized. The benefits go to foreign corporations like British Petroleum
and others. And so there's this huge movement demanding that the oil and gas be
taken over again by the government the way it used to be. The government
doesn't want to do that, it's under enormous pressure from the International
Monetary Fund, from companies like British Petroleum and others to leave the
oil and gas in their hands.
So right now the capital of La Paz
is shut down, virtually entirely, by tens of thousands of protesters who have
come down from the indigenous areas of the highlands above the capital. Here,
in Cochabamba where I live and work, the center of the city has been shut down
almost every day for the last week. There's no automobile or bus traffic in or
out of the city; we're closed down.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Maybe you could
speak to a little bit of the history that has brought Bolivia to this point in
time.
JIM SCHULTZ: Yeah, a little
context, just because I don't think most people think of Bolivia very often
except for llamas and ladies in big skirts and bowler hats. First of all, Bolivia
is a beautiful country, its highlands, its jungles, its valleys, its got the
most indigenous population in the entire Western Hemisphere.
That said, Bolivia has for the
last 20 years been the primary lab rat in Latin America for a whole set of
economic policies imposed on it from abroad. I mean, if you think about the
United States right now, in the U.S. you're having a big debate over what to do
with Social Security. The president wants to privatize it, a lot of people are
resisting that, I think, for good reason. One of the most fundamental decisions
that a democracy makes is: What's public and what's private-- education, health
care, social security. Well, in Bolivia that decision was completely taken out
of the people's hands, taken really out of the government's hands by the
International Monetary Fund, who said, "Look, you're dependent on foreign
aid. If you want foreign aid, if you want the assistance from the International
Monetary Fund, here's the commandments. First, you have to privatize your national
resources including oil and gas."
Bolivia is resisting that. And so
what you have actually in this country is two different social movements, or
big changes happening in the country at the same time. The first is a very
broad popular resistance to these economic policies. The second is, this is a
country in which 60 percent of the population are indigenous. They are locked
out of power in this country, and they are demanding that they become the
stakeholders in the country and in its politics, that they deserve to be.
These two things have come
together in the war over gas. Because the indigenous population is especially,
I think very sensitive to what it means to have natural resources stolen out
from underneath their feet.
BETWEEN THE LINES: Jim Schultz,
finally, I'd like to ask you this, how is the current crisis in Bolivia
connected to progressive activism and a rejection of neoliberal economic
policies pushed by Washington across Latin America?
JIM SCHULTZ: Well, that is a very important
question and a good one to end on. I'm an American, I'm from California and
when you're from the United States at this time in history, it's easy to be a
little depressed because it sure looks like the country is marching toward the
right and toward a set of values that most of us don't agree with and it's very
hard to see how we're going to pull it back.
Latin America is marching in the
exact opposite direction. There are a lot of reporters who come here and they
all want to write the story about the "New Left" in South America.
And it's much more interesting than to call it the "New Left." This
isn't the second coming of Che Guevara.
What's happening here is not ideological. What's happening here is a
very broad -- Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador -- a very broad
reaction against the practical failure of a set of market fundamentalist
economic policies imposed on this country from abroad, and other countries as
well.
You know, I live here and the poor
who live in Latin America really don't have the luxury of ideology. What they
want are practical solutions. Can they get water? Can their kids get educated?
Can they get access to health care? Can they find a job?
If these economic policies of
privatization and the rest had worked, if they had delivered the goods, I think
people in this continent would have been embraced them. The fact that not only
have they not embraced them, but in country after country, these policies are
being rejected -- it's because they are a practical failure. They just don't
work. They only make the lives of the poor more miserable, and that's what's
happening here.
People take their politics very
seriously in a place like Bolivia. They can't afford to just read about it in
the newspaper or listen to it on the radio. They have to act. They have to be
engaged, because it affects their lives in a direct way.
So I think what's happening in
Bolivia is part of something that is happening all over this region and it is
really worth people in the United States, especially progressives, to try to
understand what it really means.
Contact the Democracy Center by
calling their San Francisco office at (415) 564-4767 or visit their website at
http://www.democracyctr.org.
Related links on our website at
http://www.btlonline.org/btl061705.html#1hed
* The Narco News Bulletin: http://www.narconews.com/
* International
Forum on Globalization: www.ifg.org
* Council
on Hemispheric Affairs: www.coha.org
·
North American Congress on
Latin America: www.nacla.org
* International
Forum on Globalization: www.ifg.org
·
Scott Harris is executive producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 35 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending June 17, 2005. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Scott Harris and Anna Manzo.
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