Left-indigenous struggles in Bolivia: searching for revolutionary democracy

Monthly Review, Sept, 2005 by Jeffery R. Webber

Mesa's Post-October Regime: A Map of Social Forces

Although Mesa visited El Alto immediately after assuming power and assured the masses that he would follow through with the October Agenda, he quickly demonstrated his true political orientation. Despite the fact that Mesa's rhetoric drew sharp distinctions between his politics and Goni's, there was a deep continuity between his economic and social policies and those of his predecessor.

On every issue--macroeconomic policy, fiscal policy, hydrocarbon politics, the treatment of the unemployed and poor indigenous peasants, bilateral trade negotiations with the United States, and the establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas--important to the popular sectors who so courageously rose up and allowed him to assume power--Mesa acted on behalf of the imperial powers and the sections of the Bolivian bourgeoisie with an international capitalist orientation. His cabinet, logically, was stacked with gonista ministers.

Meanwhile MAS, after playing virtually no role in the October insurrection, failed to respond to the historical opportunities that arose in its aftermath. Rather than carrying through with ongoing mobilization and street politics in solidarity with the radical, mobilized popular forces, it opted for cooperation with the Mesa regime, accepting Mesa's discourse, ignoring his practice, and focusing on its incoherent strategy of seducing the urban middle classes in hopes of winning the presidential elections set for 2007.

The gap between Mesa's televised sophistry and the reality of his practical agenda could not endure the passage of time. The honeymoon ended in January 2005 with the eruption of Bolivia's Second Water War, based in El Alto. Altenos organized a seventy-two hour general strike in El Alto through the organizational structure of the Federation of United Neighbors of El Alto (FEJUVE-El Alto), which had been a key institution, along with El Alto's Regional Workers' Central (COR-El Alto), in the October insurrection of 2003. The strikers demanded the immediate expulsion of Aguas del Illimani (the private consortium controlled by the French multinational Suez), and its replacement by a new, nonprofit water company under social control. FEJUVE also began to express a politics linking their frustration on this issue to the failure of Mesa to comply with the October Agenda more generally. Wisely, Mesa did not train the guns on the strikers, and instead issued a decree that terminated the contract signed with Aguas del Illimani in 1997.

Mesa's failure to use violence, together with the protesters' effective mobilization tactics and their success at placing the issues of nationalizing gas and a Constituent Assembly back into the public sphere, resurrected the social forces on the extreme right. These were based primarily in the department of Santa Cruz, but stretched into the departments of Tarija, Beni, and Pando. Public discourse on this matter pits the east (Santa Cruz) against the west (primarily La Paz) of the country.