The other night I met Sam, a Bolivian who runs an internet service out of a simple room in back streets of La Paz. In his early 30s, he spent 10 years in New York before coming back here to start his own business last year. “Now”, he says, “I wish I could return”. Sam calls himself middle-class. Like several other small business owners or professionals I have talked to in the last few days he is disillusioned with the way the government of Evo Morales, which he voted for, has let him down since coming to power in January.
Just outside the door of his business, women from the rural countryside and alpine plains surrounding La Paz sit on colourful blankets and sell their vegetables and flowers for pennies. These women represent the other, much larger, section of Bolivian society which support Evo. Yet Sam’s vision of the future of Bolivia is very different, even incompatible, with those held by the Campesinas and urban poor of Bolivia.
It is this conflicting vision of the future which is the source of some of the schizophrenic utterings of Morales’ party, the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS). While one face of the party placates the rural and urban poor with rhetoric about the revolutionary nationalisation of Bolivia’s resources, another face reassures investors and the middle and upper class that its business as usual in the country and they have no need to fear.
An example is the speech given by Evo last weekend where he stated to an appreciative audience of impoverished miners that the next “urgent step” for the country was for the significant mineral resources of silver, tin and zinc “to pass to the Bolivian state under the social control of the Bolivian people.” The thing is, the state already owns the minerals in the ground; companies lease the land from the state in order to exploit it. Sure enough, come Monday, the Vice President was telling the press that “the private investor has no need to worry”. All that was going to happen aparently, was that the parastatal mining company COMIBOL was going to be revitalized, a far cry from revolutionary nationalisation.
The so-called nationalisation of the hydrocarbon sector is a similar case. Its not nationalisation at all, its a government buy back to get majority control of the companies so they can increase taxes and have more control over the sale prices and customers of the gas.
But while the rhetoric continues, people like Sam and even the poor rural campesinos that form MAS’s base, are running out of patience. The most tragic evidence of this are the recent violent clashes between miners at Huanuni which left 16 people dead and scores wounded. The clash, over the allocations of mining sites, forced Evo’s speech last weekend and no doubt a rethink in the upper ranks of the party of the new mineral policy which is due out on October 31st. But its also caused many to begin to wonder whether MAS has the ability to change Bolivia at all, or whether its all just talk.