Noviembre 20, 2005
Evo Morales in the New York Times
People outside of Bolivia know relatively little about Evo Morales. Some romanticize the movement as a faultless leftist utopia, while others demonize Morales by utilizing the same generalizations without truly seeing how the rhetoric has evolved. It’s fair to say that these inconsistencies (dare I say, "flip-flops") cloud the reality of where the entire MAS movement stands in relation to policy proposals, ranging from the extreme radical left to something more towards the center. This New York Times magazine article by David Rieff should provide better clues to where the party stands, while hoping to draw attention to differences from Latin America’s public enemy No. 1 and No. 2.
Even though Morales calls Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro close friends, it is his admiration for Brazil’s Lula that may give a sign as to how he might govern.
Many Bolivian observers say they believe that MAS is nowhere near as radical as its rhetoric makes it appear. They note that conservative opponents of Brazil's current leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, also predicted disaster were he to be elected, but that in office Lula has proved to be a moderate social democrat. And MAS's program is certainly much more moderate than many of its supporters would like. Washington, however, is not reassured. Administration officials are reluctant to speak on the record about Morales (the State Department and Pentagon press offices did not reply to repeated requests for an interview), but in private they link him both to narco-trafficking and to the two most militant Latin American leaders: Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's leftist populist military strongman, and Fidel Castro.
With over 75% of Bolivians favoring nationalization, it’s hard to say what contractual changes may be in store. Most agree that it is far from the Quispe model of confiscating everything without due compensation. It becomes more apparent that partnerships with the oil companies are still desired, but without the natural resource ownership by the foreign companies that has been the norm. This position suddenly doesn't seem so radical, as it is duplicated around the world.
A telltale sign of this is the way Morales and MAS, while not repudiating previous statements about the changes they want to make in the Bolivian economy, seem to be leaving the door open to a more moderate approach. Increasingly in speeches and interviews, Morales has taken to emphasizing that when, for example, he speaks of nationalization, he is mainly speaking of Bolivia's reassertion of sovereignty over its natural resources and of partnership with multinational corporations, not, à la Fidel Castro, of the systematic expropriation of the multinationals' interests in Bolivia. Morales commented to me that "Brazil is an interesting model" for cooperation between the state and the private sector, and, he added, "so is China."
There are many who feel that MAS is so ill-equipped to govern a nation and that they might blow the potential treasure of natural gas reserves. However, there have been some prominent economists who think that their proposals aren’t so wacky after all, which may prove important in legitimizing their position.
Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate who was formerly the chief economist of the World Bank and is now a professor of economics at Columbia University and a stern critic of many international lending institutions, put it to me this way: "They could do it." If Bolivia abrogated its existing contracts, he said, some of the non-Western oil giants would gladly negotiate new deals on better terms. "Petronas" - the Malaysian state oil company - "would come in, China would come in, India would come in." If Morales did nationalize the country's oil and gas, the multinational oil companies that currently hold the Bolivian concessions, including Repsol, a Spanish company, and British Gas, would probably sue Bolivia in an international court and try to organize an international boycott. But Stiglitz dismisses that threat: "If you had three, four, five first-rate companies around the world willing to compete for Bolivia's resources, no boycott would work."
When most people talk about Morales, phrases that come to the forefront always are associated with drug trafficking. Yet, with the number of political enemies he has, no one has yet to find proof that he teams up with the drug dealers. Without this proof, it seems difficult to place one’s finger on why Morales is so dangerous to the region.
Publicly, Thomas A. Shannon, Noriega's successor, has taken a more low-key approach. But the Bush administration's view of Morales does not appear to have changed significantly. Michael Shifter, a senior fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington, and one of the shrewdest and most experienced American observers of Latin America, told me that he has been struck by the depth of conviction in Washington that Morales is dangerous. "People talk about him as if he were the Osama bin Laden of Latin America," Shifter told me, adding that, after a recent lecture Shifter gave at a military institution, two American officers came up to him and said that Morales "was a terrorist, a murderer, the worst thing ever." Shifter replied that he had seen no evidence of this. "They told me: 'You should. We have classified information: this guy is the worst thing to happen in Latin America in a long time."' In Shifter's view, there is now a tremendous sense of hysteria about Morales within the administration and especially at the Pentagon.
It’s easy to lump Morales into the camp of Castro, where individual freedoms have been severely curtailed and with Chavez, who has overstepped his bounds on many occasions. However, Morales seems to want to distance himself from many of the extremes that both men employ.
But he is at some pains to make the point that neither Venezuela nor Cuba is a model for the kind of society he wants Bolivia to become. Castro and Chávez, he told me, are his friends, but so are Secretary General Kofi Annan of the United Nations, President Jacques Chirac of France and Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero of Spain. Morales also makes a point of emphasizing that the era of "state socialism" is past. Even when he is talking about the nationalization of Bolivia's natural resources, which with the depenalization of coca cultivation is the central plank of his campaign, Morales is at pains to point out that the model he has in mind is closer to Brazil's state-owned oil giant, Petrobras, than to anything Castro would endorse.
Posted by eduardo at Noviembre 20, 2005 09:28 PM
Comments
Wasn't Morales who said, in various occasions, he admired Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez and what they are doing with their lands?
I find Morales is starting to suffer from the linguistic "ambiguity" desease every politician suffers at the time of elections. If you ask me, he is just saying what people want to hear. Just as the other politicians are doing, naturally.
Posted by: Miguel (MABB) at Noviembre 21, 2005 09:34 AM
You are exactly right..which is it? 50-50% or total nationalization? I think now the voters need to decide which is the real MAS - the radical MAS or the left-center MAS?
Posted by: eduardo at Noviembre 21, 2005 11:06 AM
While it may be hard to work out what MAS actually stands for, be it radical or left-center, surely when (or just merely if...) they come to power that they're going to end up being the left-center MAS. And I think that the above article proves it.
Posted by: Thomas at Noviembre 23, 2005 04:58 PM
hi, I beleive that Evo should not be part of any prseident elections. He only cares about "his" people and that is not correct. Many people in Bolivia who are campesinos say that Politians do not care about them but that is not true. We should a President who will make the country a better one. By working together all will work.
Posted by: Angelica Guzman at Diciembre 15, 2005 09:35 AM
This is not right! Why on earth would Evo win the elections. An Igneous President in Bolivia! Like I said earlier he only cares aboout "his" people and that is not what a Prsident is suppose to do. As president you should care about everyone in that country. I do not agree with Evo and will never because it is not right that he has won.
Posted by: Angelica Guzman at Diciembre 19, 2005 12:00 PM