Originally published June 2008.
An empire not only cares little, if at all, for the citizenry of any nation that may serve as its base of operations; it also does not care for the foreign subjects imposed upon in said operations. This statement seems too obvious: after all, imperialism is commonly thought to be inherently, absolutely a negative thing - an impolite accusation, a final incrimination. What is the reason for this assumed badness, or political incorrectness, of imperialism? The oppression of those colonized (or neo-colonized), of course: those unfairly, and perhaps violently, denied the right of political self-determination, or a nation whose sovereignty has been impugned. Anti-imperialism, as its name suggests, is thus defined by its negative goals: what it wants people not to do.
Appropriately then, from the perspective of the anti-imperialist, the liberal reformer, the radical socialist, or, for that matter, any non-U. S. citizen of America (read: Western Hemisphere) the positive side-effect of the U. S. getting bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan has been its relative lack of interest, or rather its inability to intervene, in its neighbors to the south. In 2002, the W. Bush administration did encourage a coup d'etat in Venezuela, but Hugo Chavez returned to power within days, and the U. S. had to walk away with its tail between its legs, spouting newspeak and double talk, a rare and very-pleasant sight to see in the history of inter-American relations.
The contrast between the first decade of the Twenty-First Century and the Eighties or Sixties is remarkable. Fidel Castro, as far as many silly Americans were concerned, gave the Soviet Union the opportunity to challenge the cherished Monroe Doctrine. Soon enough, all of "Latin" America found itself under the microscope, any trace of evil "Communism" sure to subject a nation to interventions, often rash and brutal, increasingly the work of a tiny cadre of adventurers. In the 1980's, a similar situation arose. The U .S. claimed the same reason: the U. S .S. R. encroaching upon American territory. But U. S. intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador was part of the Cold War in name only, because Americans hissy-fittingly wanted it so. These interventions also aimed to kick the "Vietnam syndrome," offering Americans an arena in which to direct all the aggression that had risen from the psychic interior to the psychotic surface in Indochina - but, in this case, for Americans the aggression was largely rhetorical and ideological, so that they would not have to do any fighting, unlike in Vietnam or later in Iraq. The Nicaraguans and Salvadoreans - and Guatemalans and Hondurans - would suffer the violence.
Once past Mexico, the Central American isthmus, and the Caribbean (an "American lake," of course) the U. S. empire historically has been less present, and yet more likely to find supporters among the natives. Of all the South American nations, the U.S. has dictated policy, and effected "regime change," in Bolivia most often. Granted, at certain moments - Chile in the early 1970's, or Venezuela in the present - other South American nations have received a far-greater share of the Estados Unidos' unfortunate attention. But since the Second World War, Bolivia overall has received the most. Indeed, historians of U. S.-Bolivia relations have noted the asymmetry of the two nations' historical experience, as if U. S. omnipotence is a force of nature unlikely to be brought to bare by mere humans. Whereas the U. S. has been a model of political stability, with the same constitution in effect since 1789, Bolivia has had 16 constitutions and, roughly, 200 governments, including countless military regimes. The U.S. was the first independent nation (in the modern meaning of the world) of the Western Hemisphere, while Bolivia in 1825 became the last of the continental Spanish colonies to achieve independence. The Americans began as colonists who dispossessed the earlier population, whereas Bolivia remains a nation consisting of a substantial majority of First Americans - nearly all of whom consider Spanish, to the limited extent they speak it at all, their second language - historically ruled by a small European elite, with the mestizo population (about 30 percent now) gradually increasing over time. And most of all, the U. S. has been rich and productive, while Bolivia has struggled to make effective use of its natural resources and compares with Caribbean nations in its dire poverty.
The First Bolivian Revolution, of 1952, brought forth some dramatic changes, including redistribution of land, the extension of the right to vote to the vast indigenous population, which to that point had been completely kept out of Bolivian politics, and nationalization of the three largest tin-mining companies. The revolution also found an unlikely supporter in the Eisenhower administration, only to find its changes diluted and its supporters divided by the conditions the U.S. gave in tandem with generous financial aid. One would have hardly expected this curious move on the Americans' part. The Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (M .N. R.) had been a thorn in the Americans' side since it first came to prominence during the Second World War; its leaders, including the new president, Víctor Paz Estenssoro [1952-1956], had opposed Bolivia's deal to provide tin to the U. S. at a discount price in exchange for financial aid. The Americans in turn made slanderous accusations of Nazi leanings among the M. N. R.
Nonetheless, the Americans did not violently reject the nationalization the three largest tin-mining companies, like it did Guatemala's similar nationalization of United Fruit holdings. Few Americans were involved in Bolivia's mining industry; the three companies in question were largely British-owned. Also, unlike in Guatemala, the military in Bolivia had been decimated by the violence of 1952 and the preceding six years of right-wing dictatorship led by the "tin barons" themselves. Thus, no military laid in wait to be a U. S. puppet. Dwight Eisenhower's brother, Milton, became a sort of unofficial ambassador to the South American nation, and Bolivia became, with post-Arbenz Guatemala and Haiti, one of only three American nations to receive direct financial U. S. aid, instead of loans, in the 1950's.
Furthermore, since Americans were on the side of a democratically-elected nationalist political party with a broad base of support, John Kennedy looked to Bolivia as an example of what he hoped to accomplish with his Alliance for Progress, an ambitious plan for the modernization of the empire's southern neighbors that would undercut Fidel Castro's rival vision of nationalist revolution. Unfortunately, most U. S. aid under both Eisenhower and Kennedy actually went toward the reconstruction of the Bolivian military. Though Kennedy reversed Eisenhower's approach and allowed U.S. money to go toward government-run operations, especially the state tin-mining and oil companies, the policies this funding complemented distanced the leadership of the M. N. R., especially Víctor Paz Estenssoro, president again [1960-1964], from the tin miners and leftist, liberal Bolivians in general. These policies included a new oil-production code that allowed foreign companies to reap most of the benefits of Bolivia's oil, thus undermining the state corporation, and food shipments that helped in the short run but also hampered Bolivian agricultural production. With the M. N. R. leadership increasingly isolated, the military eventually stepped in as the only patron the Americans could rely upon. The Triangular Plan, a U. S.-devised reform of the tin-mining industry, was the rub: in 1964, the M. N. R. began to implement its varied decrees against the wishes of the tin miners, who soon found themselves virtually at war with the goverment, giving the military the necessary excuse to take over.
Similarly, throughout the Americas, the increase in U. S. aid and involvement that came with the Alliance mostly led to military dictatorships. From 1962 through Lyndon Johnson's intervention in Dominican Republic in 1965, besides the Bolivian and Dominican, military coups occurred in Peru (1962), Argentina (1962), Guatemala (1963), Honduras (1963), and Brazil (1964). While the Argentine, Peruvian, and Guatemalan led only to brief military rules, the others lead to longer periods of dictatorship and, more important, foreshadowed what was to come in the next two decades, when military regimes of greater endurance arose not only in Argentina and Peru, but also Uruguay and Chile, and the kind of instability seen in Guatemala and the Dominican Republic would become the new norm throughout Central America and the Caribbean.
A potential second revolution took place in 1970-1971, with the quick rise--and quicker fall--of Juan José Torres, a general who led a small cadre of leftist-nationalist military officers who'd grown tired of their nation's subservience to foreigners. This aborted revolution was perhaps doomed from its awkward beginning. Following the example of leftist-nationalists in the Peruvian military, who'd taken the reins of their government in 1968, the commander-in-chief of the Bolivian military, Alfredo Ovando, had overthrown the U.S.-backed government of René Barrientos in 1969 and subsequently nationalized Gulf Oil's Bolivian holdings. Barrientos had led the 1964 coup (or golpe, the Spanish word). He spent most of his time in "office" implementing the aforementioned Triangular Plan, which not surprisingly turned out to be more a deform, or destruction, than a reform: Barrientos essentially fired miners and destroyed their union. Mining in Bolivia, at that point central to its economy for nearly five decades, has never recovered.
Che Guevara's unsuccessful attempt to begin a continent-wide revolution in Bolivia in 1967 initially led to increased U. S. support for Barrientos. Guevara not only failed to communicate with the indigenous population of the area he chose as his base of operations, he also couldn't get along with the Bolivian Communist party and had no links with the tin miners who at the same time were engaging in real battles with the Barrientos regime. Less than a year after Guevara's fatal misadventure, Antonio Arguedas Mendieta, the interior minister and chief of intelligence, gave a copy of Guevara's diary to the Cuban government and berated Barrientos for his slavishness toward the U. S. and its Central Intelligence Agency (C. I. A.) operatives, who according to Arguedas had extensive influence in Bolivia and granted Barrientos little if any respect. At the same time, disputes within Barrientos's government, and the general shift globally toward "anti-Americanism" amid the Vietnam debacle and the anti-war movement within the U. S., as well as declining financial assistance from the Americans, encouraged nationalists within the military and civilian political parties to emerge, or re-emerge, to challenge Bolivia's neo-colonial position.
Once in power, though, Ovando faltered. After the Gulf Oil nationalization, he had difficulty finding any company or nation to buy Bolivia's oil, especially given the lack of infrastructure with which to refine the oil and ship the final product. Right-wing military men soon were plotting against Ovando, who as a result allowed Torres to stage his own golpe. Among other moves, Torres nationalized mining deposits that had been granted to U. S. companies under the Triangular Plan, expelled the Peace Corps, and refused to challenge various "direct action" maneuvers young radicals of the time engaged in, such as the take-over of conservative newspapers and U. S. government offices. He also supported the Popular Assembly, founded by various unions and leftist political parties, which aimed to formulate new policy and direct the government for the benefit of the "people," so to speak. Torres, though, soon fell prey to the same rightists in the military who'd turned against Ovando, and when another general, Hugo Banzer, staged a successful golpe in August, 1971, he had the added bonus of extensive U. S. and Brazilian support.
Undoubtedly, the real Second Bolivian Revolution came in the period, 2003-2005. As with Ovando and Torres, Morales's time in office was immediately defined by nationalization of natural resources: whereas it had been oil in 1969, it was natural gas in 2006. Whereas Ovando's nationalization quickly failed, Morales's has met with success, a stunning turn of events we'll return to in a moment. First, what caught the attention of the world were the massive protests of October, 2003, and May-June, 2005, that forced two presidents from power, and in turn the election in December, 2005, of Bolivia's first president of First American descent. Symbolically, the half-millennium of European rule had come to end. In reality, of course, several mestizo men had been president, and Morales did not come from an isolated indigenous community or political party. However, he had been a leader among the coca growers who had challenged their nation's acquiescence in the U. S. "War on Drugs." In short, the events that constituted the Second Bolivian Revolution were inconceivable before they occurred; few could have imagined a coca grower rising to the presidency on the back of a genuine mass uprising of the poor and dispossessed. More than the continued prominence of Hugo Chavez, certainly more so than the return of Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua or the election of Rafael Correa in Ecuador [the latter, not blessed with oil money like Venezuela, has hardly been effective and the former has largely rejected his Sandinista past and undermined the very democracy he once helped implement, and has been propped up, cynically and stupidly, by Chavez] and even more than the election of relatively-moderate leftists in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Chile, and Peru, the Second Bolivian Revolution has come to define a new era in the history of the Americas.
The roots of this revolution lie in the presidencies of Sánchez de Lozada, known as Goni [1993-1997], and Hugo Banzer [1997-2001, when he left office after being diagnosed with cancer; the presidential term of office had been extended to five years, placing the next election in 2002; Vice-President Jorge Quiroga served the remainder of Banzer's term]. Goni and Hugo, despite their cute names, have certainly played ugly roles in Bolivian history. Banzer, following his golpe of 1971, had governed the nation with little remorse toward those who voiced opposition, and little regard for constitutional niceties, only returning the nation to democratic rule in 1978 at the behest of the Carter administration (and even still, further military take-overs hindered democratic governance until 1982). Goni, with his abbreviated second term as president after winning the 2002 elections, more than anyone has come to symbolize the failure of Bolivia's transition to democracy. One should view the film Our Brand Is Crisis, directed by Rachel Boynton, which documents how the political-consulting firm Greenberg Carville Shrum helped Goni win the Aught-Two contest, managing to show both how pathetically-ignorant the Americans in question were regarding Bolivian society, and how blithely-disinterested Goni was about the entire electoral process; in other words, one gets a small taste of the aristocratic attitudes of the elite class Goni (now an exile in the U. S.) was part of.
The conflict over natural gas grew out of a larger "capitalization" program Goni initiated and Banzer continued. Foreign companies were allowed 50-percent-ownership of, and complete control over, the state oil company, as well as telecommunications, airlines, railroads, and electricity and water utilities, with the hope that the investments these companies would make, and the free-market methods they would impose, would finally push Bolivia closer, economically speaking, to the rest of South America.
Furthermore, Banzer shifted the government's anti-coca programs from that of voluntary eradication, wherein the government paid farmers to switch from coca to other crops, to direct, involuntary eradication performed by special police units. This approach proved effective, and Bolivia quickly became only a secondary source of the specific kind of coca used for cocaine production, especially as civil war in Colombia made that nation the new coca-cocaine epicenter.
With Banzer's approach to coca eradication especially, the neo-colonial or, simpl, -incompetent nature of Goni's and Hugo's governments is apparent. Watching Goni in Our Brand Is Crisis, one senses that he truly believes that he was only engaging in common-sense policies designed to lift Bolivians out of poverty, and that the extraordinary protests which forced him from office in October, 2003, resulted from pathetic ignorance on the part of a good number of Bolivians (since one cannot imagine he'd admit that a majority actually supported the upheavals). But one must remember that, for most of the 1980's and 1990's, the Bolivian government devoted a significant amount of its time and resources toward drug control, entirely because of U. S. demands. In other words, because a foreign government wanted help with a domestic-policy agenda, Bolivians were forced to put aside or de-emphasize all sorts of goals pertaining to their basic livelihood. Moreover, the Bolivians who took to the streets to protest foreign exploration and exploitation of their nation's natural-gas reserves were not foolish; they understood that the foreign companies involved wanted the raw product at the cheapest possible price, and that Bolivia's leaders cared little about the profits from natural-gas sales extending outward, evenly, to the population as a whole. Carlos Mesa, who replaced Goni in 2003, tried to compromise on the natural-gas issue, refusing the nationalization option. The result? The 2005 uprising, though echoing the varied concerns expressed two years prior, largely focused on the demand for nationalization.
With the post-revolutionary year of 2006 came the real surprise: Morales successfully pulled off the nationalization of Bolivia's natural gas and, most important, renegotiated contracts with the companies that had been set to make more money under the previous administration. The key here was Morales's decision not to expropriate the property of the private companies in question. Instead, the natural-gas reserves were declared to be the property of the state; if private interests refused to recognize the change, they faced expulsion. The nationalization took effect on May 1st, and by the end of October Morales had renegotiated contracts with all of the companies that had been operating in Bolivia.
A few reservations must be made though. First, Chavez's Venezuela provided crucial support. Its financial aid, and its own oil and natural-gas production, has not only helped its American neighbors but also discouraged the U. S. and the International Monetary Fund (I. M. F.) from making demands. It must be said, though, that Morales has largely avoided blatant steps toward dictatorship like those of Chavez and Ortega.
Second, Morales hasn't been as successful with another campaign promise he followed through on: the writing of a new constitution. The constitutional assembly, whose members were chosen in a special election, has been bogged down by representatives of the eastern provinces, who in turn have demanded increased independence from the La Paz government. [The new constitution was completed in 2009.--Ed.]
The movement for autonomy on the part of the four eastern provinces does pose troubling questions for the meaning and legacy of the Morales government. If a vast majority of Bolivia's natural gas resides in the east, what substantial difference lies between the efforts of right-wingers like those of the Poder Democratico y Social (PODEMOS) to exploit and encourage the growing separatism of Santa Cruz when Bolivians of the west previously tried to get rich off the natural resources of coca and minerals, with little desire (except on the part of the radical tin miners) to share with those who were not directly involved? Contemporary leftism too often defines itself by good intentions alone, but pressing ecological concerns increasingly force us to address the results of both good and bad intentions--and to question the very notion of material progress. Wealthier nations that want to exploit their natural environment to a lesser extent, for humanity to be less of a cancer on the planet, perhaps have little to say to the citizens of poorer, small nations still endeavoring to be part of the industrialized world. Before dismissing such a perspective as an example of unbearable condescension towards the poor (or what some sloppily refer to as the "Global South") one should consider environmentalism's quasi-religious, and thus (vaguely) anti-humanist, orientation. On the other hand, one should ask why those who were repeatedly cheated out of their money in the global marketplace keep returning there, hoping this time it'll be different, and assuming that because they're the losers they don't contribute to its problems.
The Bolivian example works best as a distant inspiration. Look to the very name, the Movimiento al Socialismo.... As with the party that led the First Bolivian Revolution, the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, the use of the word, "movement," suggests the fruitful transience of Bolivian politics. Though the M .N. R. became an institutionalized mockery of its original self, few other Bolivian parties have lasted so long - the major exception being the Falange Socialista Boliviana, a right-wing group modeled on the Spanish Fascists. Curiously, the other major, long-standing political organization, the Central Obrera Boliviana (C. O. B.), or national workers' union, was dominated for decades by the tin miners, whose union espoused Trotskyite Communism, making it one of the few mass-based Trotskyite movements in the world. Between the Falange and the C. O. B. lies a rich array of political and ideological perspectives in a nation whose population still amounts to less than 10 million. [In the Twenty-Twenties, the nation's population now stands at around 12 million.--Ed.] An embarrassment of riches for a nation of such poverty, in contrast to the few choices of stable nations, where the state's monopoly of violence is rarely questioned. Thus, even as such, the nature of Bolivia's positive example to the world is not clear.
Unfortunately for the M. A. S., the historical tendency of the Bolivian political spectrum to be lop-sided far to the left, with a wide array of parties--colored by Communist, indigenous, Christian, liberal, and other proclivities--offset by the Falange, the Acción Democrática Nacionalista (A.D.N., founded by Banzer in the Nineties, in turn replaced by PODEMOS), and a few other, minor parties adding scant flesh to a bare-bone right wing, may have given way to a new tendency toward a relatively-even divide between a radical Andean west and a conservative lowland east. The parity between these geographic halves does not extend to the population of the nation, which is still tilted toward the west. But the rightists have proven to be formidable opponents to Morales. In the past, the likes of Banzer required extensive U. S. support to win their political and military battles. The new rightists might not need as much (though they'll still get it; Americans are already up to no good in neighboring Paraguay). Such a result would be precisely the kind of unexpected ironic twist we would expect from a true revolution.