Bolivia: The Grope & Fail has a hissy fit

I've been enjoying watching Latin America slip through American fingers like unprivatized water: Cuba, Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, now Bolivia and soon Chile. The Americans hardly have a friend remaining down there, with the possible exception of Colombian President Alvaro Uribe Perez--and a few corporate toadies like an anonymous editorialist in today's Globe and Mail. I reproduce the editorial, a classic of its kind, interleaved with my comments.

The editorial is entitled "What Bolivia risks." That has resonances for old Latin America watchers. The people of Bolivia have been stupid enough to abuse their democratic privileges and vote for a socialist, and there will be consequences if they don't smarten up. It's on their head.

Sick of corrupt old-line political parties, tired of the U.S.-led campaign on cocaine cultivation and angry at what they consider the plundering of Bolivia's natural-gas wealth, Bolivians made it clear before Sunday's presidential election that they want change. Well, they are going to get it now.

I like the clever last sentence. But what about that "plundering?" It's not, of course, plundering: Bolivians consider it plundering, but it's just...investment. Sure, astronomical profits are being made while Bolivia's 9 million people remain the poorest in Latin America, with a $2,600 per capita income, but "plundering?" That's a trifle strong, isn't it?

The apparent winner, Evo Morales, is a left-wing rabble-rouser

In other words, a progressive and popular individual has won--and not "apparently," either. (Don't Globe editorial staff read the papers?)

who wants to seize control of Bolivia's natural resources from greedy "transnationals"

Imagine, Bolivians wanting to "seize control" of their own natural resources. Who do these upstarts think they are? Everyone knows they belong to the US as of right.

and decriminalize the growing of coca, the raw material of cocaine.

This is grossly misleading. Here is Morales on the subject:

"I want to make an alliance with the US, with others, a real alliance against drug trafficking, but not against the cocaleros [coca growers]," Mr Morales says, sitting in his campaign headquarters at La Paz. "Zero cocaine, but not zero coca."

Of course, the alternative is blitzing the coca farmers off the face of the earth, the US’s favoured solution.

A former llama herder and trumpet player who now heads a coca farmers union,

Good God! Three strikes against him at the start! He obviously has no right to govern. Ignorant Indians workers who fool around with musical instruments don’t know how to run a country. Bolivia needs lawyers, corporate executives, military men, people who know what's what. And he's a union leader too? What were those benighted Bolivians thinking?

Mr. Morales made his name leading the radical street protests that have racked Bolivia.

Well, those protests "racked" the power structure, anyway. They included successful demonstrations against the privatization of water, including rainwater, in 2000 (led by Oscar Olivera, now a critical supporter of Morales), and, in 2003, against the continued siphoning off of Bolivia's huge gas and oil reserves.

The story of Bolivia is in fact only a short chapter in the continuing story of global exploitation and poverty, in short, the narrative of the utter failure of neoliberal policies that have caused so much human misery in Latin America and around the world. John Crabtree notes in his book Patterns of Protest that 60% of Bolivians live on less than $1 a day and only 16% have enough to meet their basic needs. This, while they are sitting on vast reservoirs of oil and gas, and foreign corporations are making millions by pumping it all out of the country.

He boasts of his affinity with Hugo Chavez, the anti-American demagogue who leads Venezuela.

If the wildly popular Hugo Chavez, who has won supervised elections with ease and survived both a coup attempt and a recall vote, is "anti-American," it goes without saying that he must be a "demagogue": meaning, “the people like him, but I don’t.”

He vows to "bury the neo-liberal" state and fight the evils of capitalism.

Horrors! But Morales is in good company. Besides, neo-liberalism is doing a good job of burying itself.

To many Bolivians, Mr. Morales's brave talk of battling globalization and standing up to the Americans has a satisfying ring. But his formula of Yankee-bashing, statism and economic nationalism has been tried before in Latin America, with disastrous results. In the 1960s and 70s, the region's then mostly authoritarian governments took many big industries under the state's wing and put up high barriers to imports, hoping for home growth. Instead they got hyperinflation, debt and stagnation. It would be madness to return to those discredited policies now. Yet that is precisely what some Latin American governments seem prepared to do.

Whoa, slow down there. There are enough progressive Latin American countries around now to create their own trading block. They are sitting on enough natural resources to eliminate poverty in their part of the world forever. Now they're in a position to negotiate fair contracts with foreign investors, rather than submit to corporate gang-rape as in the past. The nerve of these backward-looking Latinos, opposing the natural order of things: multinational corporations divesting poor countries of their resources, and tossing a few crumbs to the local elites to keep the peons in line.

Bolivia and Venezuela are not the only countries turning left. Brazil has a left-leaning, though pragmatic, president, Luiz Inacio de Silva. Peru has seen the rise of a former military officer, Ollanta Humala, who hopes to follow Mr. Morales's populist road to the presidency. Argentina's President Nestor Kirchner delights in bashing the International Monetary Fund, while Uruguay's government has been cozying up to the egregious Mr. Chavez.

Yup. The world's going to hell in a hand-basket. End Times must be near. According, at least, to our egregious propagandist editorialist.

If Bolivia continues the leftward lurch, it is bound to suffer.

Marines? International capital boycotts? Forget it. That's nostalgia. There are just too many countries on track now to be put off by that kind of threat. It's wishful thinking, from a romantic apologist for Manifest Destiny.

Mr. Morales's threats against foreign energy companies have already hurt the country's economic hopes, which rest on its huge gas reserves. It needs outside help and capital to exploit them.

The man's not even assumed office yet, and he's "hurt" Bolivia's economic hopes already? By demanding the renegotiation of contracts with the multinationals? Get serious. If there's a profit to be made, even a slimmed-down version, the corporations will be lining up to sign deals.

His hostility to the United States could hurt, too. Washington wants to negotiate a free-trade agreement with Bolivia, as it recently did with Peru.

We've seen what that kind of agreement can do in Mexico, a land of increasing poverty and unemployment, precipitously falling wages and toxic waste dumps. So, frankly, who cares what Washington wants? The only "hurt" is going to be in Washington, and maybe in the offices of the Globe and Mail. Bring it on.

That would help protect the 100,000 Bolivians who work making clothing, jewellery and other goods for export. The U.S. is also offering hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, but only if the government helps suppress the growing of coca. Mr. Morales defends the plant, which he claims has many legal, traditional uses among Bolivian Indians. An Aymara Indian himself, he held a press conference on Sunday at which coca leaves were scattered on a Bolivian flag.

It's an outrage--an Indian in power, never mind that 62% of Bolivians are indigenous. The blatant racism of the editorialist is here exposed for all to see. Coca does indeed have traditional uses among Morales' ignorant brown-skinned countrymen, but, as already noted, Morales wants to eliminate the cocaine trade.

Mr. Morales says he will become Washington's "nightmare" when he takes office. If he implements his backward promises, the nightmare will be Bolivia's.

Not likely, unless Bush withdraws from Iraq and goes sniffing about the Bolivian countryside for those elusive WMDs. But not even Bush has the ability to invade several countries at once. Sleep tight, now.