The
Last Czar
On
October 20, in revenge for Bolivian President Carlos Mesa’a
approval of the “trial of responsibilities,” congressional
representatives affiliated with former president Gonzalo Sánchez
de Lozada’s party, MNR (National Revolutionary Movement),
voted for the Hydrocarbons Law presented by the Mixed Commission
on Economic Development. Given that MAS (Movement Toward Socialism)
led the commission, the MNR voted for an old nemesis against a
newer enemy. President Mesa’s bill -- which favored foreign
oil companies in keeping with Sánchez de Lozada’s
Decree 1689 -- was not even seriously considered. Only the regional
delegation from Tarija in the south and some MIR (Revolutionary
Left Movement) deputies opposed the legislation that made it through
the first of three stages in the passage from bill to law.
Consistent
with MAS’s interpretation of the results of the July referendum
and the demands of last year’s October insurrection, the
new law would require contracts signed under Decree 1689 to be
re-negotiated, with a higher percentage of ownership passing to
the state oil and gas company (YPFB), along with a rise in taxation
from 18% to 50%. According to the oil companies that oppose it,
if the law is not seriously amended during the second or the final
stage in November, it will put $3 billion of foreign capital invested
since 1999 at risk.
In
an October 22 interview with the editorial board of the Miami
Herald, Sánchez de Lozada accused Mesa of being a coup
plotter. Having consulted with his lawyers at the Miami firm of
Steel, Hector, and Davis, “Goni” reversed earlier
declarations regarding his willingness to appear before a Bolivian
court. He now declined to comply with future extradition requests,
since according to Sánchez de Lozada in Bolivian there
exists a “lynch-mob environment.” In said interview,
the seventy-four year old reiterated his claim that he had been
the victim of a vast conspiracy in which Mesa had played his part.
Commenting on Sánchez de Lozada’s assertions, former
Minister of Education Hugo Carvajal, himself a participant in
one of Sánchez de Lozada’s shadier political maneuvers*,
said, “What happened in October was not a product of ‘narcoterrorism’
and ‘narcoguerrillas’ or any of that. There was no
conspiracy…. At the time, he said that there was action
against the established government, but he never presented any
evidence or explained the issue adequately” (La Prensa,
October 23).II. Imperialism, Sub-imperialism, and Big Oil
Like
his former boss, President Mesa also retracted previous statements.
The opposition to the Hydrocarbons Law coalesced so swiftly and
from so many directions that Mesa moved aside and made no serious
effort to block it. Others would take care of that. Over the weekend
of October 23-24, however, Minister of the President José
Galindo inundated the airwaves with warnings that if the Hydrocarbons
Law were not substantially amended during the following stages,
foreign oil companies, including Petrobras, would pick up and
leave Bolivia. For its part, the Brazilian government stated that
the $600 million in road-building credits, for a country in which
80% of roads are unpaved, was conditional upon the passage of
a law that did not put Brazilian investments -- meaning those
of Petrobras-- in danger.
Charles
Shapiro, US Under-Secretary of State for the Andean Region, arrived
in La Paz on October 21, and was quick to step into the vacuum
created by Mesa’s decision to “respect” legislative
autonomy. Shapiro pointed out discrepancies that the new law would
introduce with laws guiding the FTAA, a version of which the US
government hopes to install in the Andean region in the coming
years. The Bush administration is currently negotiating free trade
agreements with Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru, with Bolivia “observing,”
and Shapiro spent the weekend of October 23-24 lobbying political
parties to re-draft the law so that Bolivia would not lose its
“opportunity” to become part of the US-dominated regional
trading bloc. As Shapiro put it, “The United States also
has laws.” A meeting with Evo Morales’s MAS, whose
parliamentary commission designed the law under the leadership
of Santos Ramírez, was included in the Under-Secretary’s
weekend agenda**.
By
any account, Evo Morales and MAS have scored a stunning victory
over both the Mesa administration and the US government -- thanks
to the vengeance of Sánchez de Lozada’s MNR! If the
bill makes it through the next two stages intact, Mesa will have
to veto it, thus losing any remaining shred of popular legitimacy;
or he will have to watch from the sidelines as the US government
re-engineers the bill to protect the investments of petroleum
multinationals. In either scenario, Mesa loses and Morales wins.
As if to illustrate the point, the Brazilian government has announced
that its representative will meet with Morales rather than Mesa,
reflecting a realistic assessment on the part of Lula and his
advisors as to where the threat to multinational petroleum profits
lies. Those who are hopeful about a Kirchner-Chávez alliance
that would create Petrosur, and eventually include a partnership
with Petrobras, might find reason for skepticism when considering
Petrobras’s staunch opposition to the new Hydrocarbons Law
in Bolivia, and the determination of the Brazilian government
to repeal it by lobbying Morales.III.
Revanchist
Regionalism
In
addition to responses from the great powers of the hemisphere,
in Bolivia the approval of the law stirred rightwing reaction
in the south (Tarija) and east (Santa Cruz). Earlier in the week,
and for the first time, President Mesa had confronted the rightwing
agro-industrial bloc by declaring that the department of Santa
Cruz, where an important portion of Bolivia’s gas reserves
lie, would have to show “solidarity” with other departments
rather than try to bolster its power and wealth at their expense.
Even
before MAS’s law was approved, polarization along regional
lines had begun to deepen, and the new law has added fuel to the
fire. In Tarija and Santa Cruz, the Civic Committees were livid
over the “centralist” domination of their respective
regions -- a domination that MAS, the MNR, and MIR have enshrined
in law. The Civic Committees and entrepreneurial associations
demanded a radical rewriting of the bill. Like the “federalists”
from La Paz at the end of the nineteenth century, who came to
power through victory in a civil war, today’s regionalists
use the disproportionate amount of revenue transferred from their
regions to the central government as an argument for political
autonomy.
Leaving
aside the myth of a “productive, modern, entrepreneurial
region” that has pulled itself up by its bootstraps -- the
dominant self-definition in Santa Cruz -- as early as the administration
of Hernán Siles Suazo (1956-60), the eastern lowlands were
favored for development with state subsidies from the highland
mining industry as well as foreign loans and credits. This deliberate
transfer of wealth and power to the east was more fully systematized
under the dictatorship of General Hugo Banzer Suárez (1971-78),
whose core supporters were the agro-industrialists organized in
the Civic Committee of Santa Cruz and the FSB. The vicious coups
of 1979 and 1980 -- the latter orchestrated by ex-Nazi exiles,
neo-Nazi mercenaries, and a cocaine baron, and actively supported
by the Brazilian dictatorship -- can be read as desperate regionalist
attempts to block the triumph of a progressive center-Left coalition
based in the western highlands and valleys.
Thus
the politics that the self-appointed spokesmen (not women) of
the south and east promote is counterrevolutionary in a concrete
historical sense. It has as its aim the rollback of the October
agenda of national sovereignty over natural resource extraction,
refining, consumption, and export. The president of the Chamber
of Industry, Commerce, Services, and Tourism (CAINCO), Svonko
Matkovic, alerted the Congress of the Santa Cruz Association of
Private Enterprise that the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)
and the IMF had frozen credits until a new law could be drafted.
Hysteria would not be too strong a word to describe the response
from regionalist entrepreneurial associations and Civic Committees,
which is not directed against the MNR for having voted for the
new law, but rather against Mesa, whose own bill threw the multinationals
and their cruceño partners most of the bones they asked
for, raising taxes to a maximum of 32%.
The
irony is that even as his party voted for the law in question,
Sánchez de Lozada has close allies at the highest levels
of key international financial institutions -- like Alfonso Revollo,
his former Minister of “Capitalization” (privatization),
who headed up the Bolivia desk at the World Bank until the Mesa
administration demanded a new appointee, at which point Revollo
became part of the “Modernizing the State” group at
the IDB. In a meeting with the Fiscal Commission of the Chamber
of Deputies, representatives of both the IDB and the World Bank
worried over the possibility of a default on debt service if the
new Hydrocarbons Law is passed without serious revision. IV. The
Past in the Present?
At a moment marked by record prices of crude oil, nightly US air
strikes on urban Iraqi neighborhoods, and an anti-colonial resistance
that depends, tactically, on car bombs, kidnappings, and videotaped
beheadings, it may be of some comfort to know that somewhere out
there, the specter of Bolshevism still haunts the counterrevolutionary
imagination; and that the passage of a new Hydrocarbons Law through
its first stage was enough to provoke such an uproar, as well
as what novelist William T. Vollmann has called “the twinkling
fear”***.
Forrest
Hylton can be reached at hyltonforrest@hotmail.com.
Notes:
*
In September 2003, Carvajal resigned from his post as Minister
of Education, took up his seat in parliament in order to elect
the MNR candidate for the office of Defender of the People once
the MNR had forced the hugely popular Ana María Campero
out of the running. Carvajal then resigned his seat in parliament
to resume his duties as Minister of Education.
**
As noted in “From ‘Goni
go home!’ to ‘Goni a Chonchocoro!’”,
President Mesa recently negotiated an agreement with Morales,
MAS, and the coca growers’ trade union federations to allow
a cato (.5 hectares) of coca per family. US AID hailed the agreement
because it would allow US AID to carry out its alternative development
schemes in a climate of considerably less hostility. However,
both Charles Shapiro and US Ambassador David Greenlee found it
“worrisome” that Bolivia might fail to uphold what
are euphemistically called its “international obligations,”
which consist of the pledge to the US government to eradicate
8,000 hectares of coca in 2004, of which 6,000 hectares have already
been eradicated. While US foreign policy toward Bolivia remains
incoherent, there is no clear division between the State Department
and the Pentagon-CIA.
***
In Argall (Viking, 2001), Vollmann uses the phrase to describe
how British colonists during the first two decades of the seventeenth
century felt about the proximity of indigenous groups in the Chesapeake
Bay area, particularly along the James River.