In the Heart of the Heart of the Continent

Your first impression of Cochabamba depends on where you’re coming from. Flying up out of Santa Cruz, in the hot green eastern Bolivian lowlands, Cochabamba looks high and dry. About 8000 feet above sea level, the valley of Cochabamba lies seven or eight thousand feet below the eastern crest of the Andes. The lack of humidity assaults your skin and sinuses. Nights and mornings are chilly.

But if you’re coming down from La Paz, the world’s highest capital city at 12,500 feet, and its even higher El Alto airport, Cochabamba appears lush, with trees and fields of commercial crops, including flowers. The weather feels mild and the air, bracingly oxygen-rich, a relief from the sharp, thin atmosphere of the higher Andes, where hallucinogenic snowy peaks hover above the unlikely urban sprawl.

In Bolivia, geography is destiny. In this country of ecological and political extremes, Cochabamba occupies a centrist position, a middle way. If Bolivia is in many ways the beating heart of South America, Cochabamba is in a sense the heart of that heart. But, despite its aura of moderation, the city finds itself in a rhetorical and sometimes violent crossfire between the highland and lowland cultures. That topographical tension, which began centuries before the current reign of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, is but one of many ethnic and economic divisions in this country.

Cochabamba is a pivotal department (as the states are called here), key to the balance of power and to whether or not Bolivia will transform into a more egalitarian, participatory democracy, as Morales proposes, or retain its traditional, hierarchical structure that has kept the indigenous Bolivian majority deep in poverty for centuries.

A few days after my arrival in Cochabamba in August 2006, the streets filled with tumult. Demonstrators marched through the city center, shouting and waving flags, adding mayhem to the already chaotic downtown traffic patterns. What an amazing coincidence, I thought, that I should land in the midst of this seismic political upheaval. When I asked taxi drivers what all the excitement was about, they shrugged. For them, such a public outpouring was just one more obstacle to avoid, another headache. How they could be so indifferent to this historical moment, I wondered. But I was greener then than the flanks of the Andes in the rainy season.

As the cabbies knew, and I later learned, there was nothing exceptional about those demonstrations. They were the typical actions of some aggrieved group seeking some form of justice: higher wages, better living or working conditions, more public services. In the United States, most policy deliberations occur outside the public eye, and protest is a limited, somewhat suspect, strategy. Many Americans seem reticent, if not apathetic, toward public policies with which they disagree. Protestors are confined to certain areas by police and promptly arrested if they venture beyond them or try to block a public thoroughfare.

Bolivian democracy frequently plays out in the streets. Such routine, raucous manifestations of need and desire reflect in part the lack of responsive institutions – judicial or legislative – to which Bolivians can appeal. Perhaps because public venting is a kind of social safety valve, the police usually make no effort to inhibit demonstrators. On the contrary, protesters here can hold motorists, and sometimes the entire city, for ransom. The best organized paros or strikes, are forecast in local media before they happen. This allows wary citizens to make plans – to stock up on food and figure alternatives for schoolchildren – before the streets become blocked.

Sometimes paros happen without warning. You head out to work or school or the grocery store and run into a blockaded street. It can happen fast. You get to the store okay but can’t get back. The best organized bloqueos use busses and cars to block the roads. More spontaneous or humble efforts simply employ rocks and tree branches or even human bodies to achieve their goal. A paro civico is a citywide blockade that tries to achieve urban paralysis, the better to get quick attention for their cause.

Police do not try to remove these blockades. If there is any official presence at all, police may warn motorists not to try to run these blockades, since any interference at these highly-charged flash points can meet with violence. Resourceful drivers learn to pursue complicated detours around such obstructions, which may lead down obscure dirt roads or into traffic jams in far flung rutted fields.

Blockading an entire city to get attention for a cause may smack of desperation. Necessity is a mean mother. Those who exist on the edge of economic catastrophe have few options when push comes to shove. Or, in Bob Dylan’s words: “When you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose.” Such tactics may appear crude and desperate to some foreign eyes. But compared to the rampant apathy and alienation in the United States, Bolivian democratic practice appears dynamic and socially pervasive.

Not long after our arrival in Cochabamba we met an American woman who warned us to stock up on food, a generator and other emergency supplies in case blockades might trap us in our house for long periods. Even then her warning struck us as somewhat over the top. But her husband is one of half a dozen agents in the Cochabamba office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. U.S. government employees endure a constant bombardment of “advisories” from the U.S. Embassy and aggressive/defensive tactical security advice from their employers. When the autonomy vote took place in Santa Cruz in May, the Embassy sent out countrywide “advisories” and put the DEA in lockdown. The agents had to spend the weekend in their homes.

During the Christmas season, we drove through the neighborhood where that DEA family lived, an exclusive, privileged zone, with homes behind high stone walls topped with spikes or barbed wire. The neighborhood of Manfred Reyes Villa, who was then Prefect of Cochabamba and later voted out of office by a recall referendum. We were wondering which house might belong to the DEA family when we saw huge wooden driveway doors, only slightly smaller than those which hid King Kong. A Christmas wreath, perhaps six feet in diameter, hung on the door. And beside the wreath stood a uniformed guard in a flak jacket, holding a machine gun. Not exactly “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men,” but fairly emblematic of the official U.S. presence in Bolivia.

When we looked at places to rent, we noticed that many homes displayed a map of Bolivia dated 1859. It took us awhile to realize why. For Bolivians to whom size matters, those were the good old days. Since then Bolivia has fought – and lost – territorial wars with four of its neighbors (Brazil, Peru, Chile and Paraguay). Most painfully, by losing the War of the Pacific in 1884, Bolivia gave up its sea coast to Chile. Now the Bolivian Navy is reduced to patrolling Lake Titicaca, which is itself divided with Peru, thanks to another conflict. (A cab driver in Lima told me a lame, predictable joke about that war: “We got the titi and they got the caca.”).

These days Bolivia is a battleground for two ongoing, intersecting struggles, one national, the other international. The internal conflict is the latest incarnation of the age-old tension between the highland and lowland cultures. A fundamental – but now unspeakable – aspect of this tension is the racism of mestizos against indigenous peoples, barely concealed behind political and economic arguments. This struggle has acquired a new urgency because of two factors: the election of Evo Morales to the presidency and the recent dramatic prosperity of the lowland departments.

Raised in the Andean highlands outside the city of Oruro, Evo Morales is of Aymara descent. The Aymara and Quechua peoples are the dominant indigenous ethnic groups in highland Bolivia and Peru. Their cultures and languages predate the Incan empire. Like many internal migrants in Bolivia, Morales was forced to leave his family farm because of catastrophe. El Nino weather conditions ruined the crops and killed the animals. He moved with his family to the lowland Chapare region of Cochabamba and worked in agriculture. (The city of Cochabamba in the upland valley of the same name, is the capital of the Department of Cochabamba.)

Morales became involved in the politics of coca growing and rose in the 1980s and 90s to become the head of the coca growers’ union. Representing their interests put Morales at odds with the Bolivian national government and their U.S. backers, who wanted to eradicate coca. In 1997 Morales was elected to the national Legislature with a large majority. He objected to the growing militarization of the Chapare in the name of the drug war. In 2002 the Legislature voted to expel him, a move Morales saw as engineered by the United States.

The next chapter of the Morales saga is available for witness in an extraordinary documentary film, Our Brand Is Crisis, directed by Rachel Boynton. A behind-the-scenes look at the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, Boynton’s film offers a sharp portrait of Bolivian-American relations. U.S. political campaign consultants Stanley Greenburg, James Carville and Robert Shrum allowed Boynton incredible access to their deliberations and machinations. They had no doubt they could manipulate their candidate to victory. And they did, but with disastrous consequences.

Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka Goni) hired Carville and Company (GCS) to help him win back the top office, even though his previous, unpopular presidential tenure had done nothing to alleviate Bolivian poverty or unemployment. A wealthy elitist, Goni spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent that reflected his U.S. upbringing and gained him the nickname “Gringo”. His arrogance was exceeded only by that of his paid political consultants.

Goni entered the race with several significant ‘negatives.’ First, he was old, 72 (John McCain’s age). Second, in his first presidential term, from 1993 to 1997, he had promised to create 500,000 jobs, but didn’t deliver. Worse, his ‘capitalization’ program was seen as selling off the national patrimony to enrich foreigners. As GCS strategist Jeremy Rosner informed Goni early on: “Over half the electorate can’t stand you…” Goni did not look surprised to hear this. The American consultants told Goni what to say, how to dress and even how to walk and talk. While they honed Goni’s image, they also ran a series of negative ads against his main competitor, Cochabamba Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa. They raised doubts about Reyes Villa’s military connections and the source of his wealth. How did a former army captain turned city mayor get so very rich?

The third presidential contender, Evo Morales, was a distant longshot for the office until he got some unintended help. U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha called Morales a liar for claiming the United States wanted to assassinate him. This public American scolding lifted Morales dramatically in the polls. Goni wondered aloud to the press if the ambassador might not be on Evo’s campaign payroll.

Evo’s rise and Manfred’s fall created a photo finish. In the end Goni won the presidency with 22.5 percent of the vote, to 20.9 for Evo Morales and 20.8 for Manfred Reyes. As Carville admits in the film, the result might have been different had the election been a day earlier or later. Though he had claimed throughout the campaign to have “an emergency plan” to rescue the Bolivian economy, Goni never produced one. Six months after the election, Evo Morales led a large protest against Goni’s government. When Goni tried to raise taxes a month later, even on the poor, the country exploded in violence.

Boynton asked Rosner if he did not think it a dangerous idea to elect a man to the presidency who lacked public support. Though clearly stunned by the disintegration of public order in the early months of Goni’s reign, Rosner insisted: “This guy had the best formula” for helping the people. He admitted to feeling “frustrated” with Goni’s failure, but dismissed Morales as an “irresponsible populist.” Beyond the chatter about focus groups and the political posturing of candidates and their advisers, the hard life of the impoverished Bolivian majority continues on with no relief in sight.

After fourteen months in office, during which more than one hundred Bolivians died in anti-government violence, Goni resigned and fled the country, back to the site of his father’s political exile and his own childhood in suburban Washington, D.C. Bolivia continues to seek his extradition; the U.S. continues to refuse. A Bolivian court has also demanded the extradition of Goni’s Defense Minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, wanted for genocide in the “Black October” massacre of sixty anti-government protestors. Sanchez Berzain lives in Miami where he works with ex-ambassador Manuel Rocha. Jeremy Rosner could only conclude that “There are conditions that ultimately democracy can’t deal with.” Goni’s vice president, Carlos Meza, took over until new national elections were held in December 2005. Evo Morales won the presidency then with 54 percent of the vote.

At the end of the film, we learn that Carville and his associates continue to advise political campaigns worldwide. Clearly, they don’t care whom they represent, as long as they’re paid. After Carville’s performance in the 2008 Democratic primaries – featuring remarks about Judas and cojones – and his meddling in the politics of places he knows little about, the less we hear from and about him the better.
Two months after Goni’s election, Manuel Rocha was replaced as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia by David Greenlee, a man equally hostile to Evo Morales. Greenlee was succeeded in 2006 by Philip Goldberg, whom Morales accused of orchestrating support for his political opponents. Morales finally expelled Goldberg in September. Relations between Bolivia and the United States continue to be tense.

On June 9, a protest against the U.S. refusal to extradite Goni’s former Minister of Defense, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, turned violent. Marchers brought their protest to the U.S. embassy in LaPaz, where police subdued them with tear gas. Ambassador Goldberg returned to Washington for “consultations” about embassy security. In July, USAID was kicked out of the Chapare region at the request of the coca growers, who complained that American aid projects always came with strings attached, usually intended to eradicate coca crops.

Rocha’s televised anti-Morales rant resembled the frequent anti-Chavez rhetoric of George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice. In both cases, gringo opposition has energized and legitimized the person they are trying to demonize. The vocal antagonism of the Bush regime has been a godsend to Hugo Chavez, allowing the Venezuelan demagogue a focus for his fiery, at times quixotic, crusade for a new socialism in Latin America. Morales too has gained great stature inside and outside Bolivia from the hamfisted, Manichean American attacks on his brand of populism. Chavez has made a great show of rallying to the side of Morales, his Bolivian ally against the yanqui imperialists.

Conspiracy theorists here see the hand of Chavez behind every move Morales makes. In similar fashion, the United States is rumored to be funding and nurturing all the forces of opposition to the Morales regime. There is no doubt that Venezuela and the United States are exploiting the internal divisions within Bolivia for their own ends. But to what extent the Bolivian political drama is a battle of surrogates for outside countries is not clear. Bolivians naturally resent this interference.
The United States always claims to stand for freedom. But U.S. support for the murderous Uribe regime in Colombia undermines American lip service to human rights.

Nor can Latin Americans forget the violent U.S.-backed overthrow and murder of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. They also remember the U.S.-backed coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. And now memories of other U.S. interventions, including those in Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, are resurfacing thanks to the Bush-Cheney reactivation of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American waters.

Gunboat diplomacy and big stick intimidation hardly create favorable conditions for inter-American dialogue. Such bullyboy tactics bespeak a lack of vision and ideas, a hallmark of the Bush-Cheney years, not to mention respect for our neighbors. Paranoia is not a viable foreign policy. It only solidifies opposition to U.S. proposals and alienates the rest of the hemisphere. Problem: Everyone in Latin America already knows this; most citizens of the United States neither know nor care.