BOLIVIA: Popular Movement Calls for Dissolution of Congress

By Franz Chávez Reprint | | Print |

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Jan 6 2004 (IPS) - Leaders of the popular uprising in Bolivia that toppled the right-wing government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada last October are calling for the dissolution of Congress and the creation of a ”patriotic civic government”.

But their proposal does not have the support of their strongest political ally, the leftist Movement To Socialism (MAS) led by parliamentarian Evo Morales, the powerful leader of Bolivia’s coca-farmers. MAS is the strongest political force in Congress.

Jaime Solares, the head of the COB central trade union, and Roberto de la Cruz, a member of COR, a trade union federation in El Alto, Bolivia’s biggest shantytown, explained the movement’s discontent with parliament in separate interviews with IPS.

They said the trouble was the legislature’s failure to respond to the people’s demands that Bolivia’s abundant natural gas reserves, second only to Venezuela’s in South America, be developed in such a way as to benefit all segments of the population, rather than just the local elites and foreign oil companies.

They also complained that Congress has done nothing to modify Sánchez de Lozada’s free-market economic policies.

”This Congress has not understood how far the movement behind the October rebellion is willing to go. We prefer to die before allowing the coming generations to continue suffering,” de la Cruz told IPS.

Although the movement envisions caretaker President Carlos Mesa as the head of the ”patriotic civic government” that it wants to create, the president clearly marked his distance from that initiative in his weekly address to the nation Sunday.

In his televised speech, Mesa said ”there can be no democracy without Congress.” He also emphasised his complete respect for Bolivia’s constitution and laws.

Parliamentary Deputy Gustavo Torrico of MAS also said his party would staunchly defend Bolivia’s democratic system, and stated that closing down the legislature would amount to ”an invitation to dictatorship and ungovernability.”

In a conversation with IPS, Torrico said there has been no rupture among the social movements, trade unions and political forces that staged the four weeks of protests and rioting which led to the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada on Oct. 17, 2003.

He also counselled patience, and urged the movement to give Mesa a chance to translate the demonstrators’ demands into laws.

”We must avoid the errors of the past, like the re-creation of the revolutionary popular assembly that was violently squashed in the 1970s by the dictatorship headed by the late Hugo Banzer,” said the MAS lawmaker.

On Sunday, the president announced that a national referendum would be held on Mar. 28 to allow voters to decide on the best way to develop Bolivia’s huge gas reserves.

The October protests were sparked by an unpopular plan to build a five-billion-dollar pipeline through Chile to sell gas to the United States and Mexico.

The referendum on Bolivia’s energy policy will be held even though the proposed natural gas deal with a U.S. company collapsed.

The referendum will also focus on the election of a constituent assembly to rewrite the constitution.

Mesa, who was vice-president, became interim president after Sánchez de Lozada stepped down.

In his address to the nation, Mesa said ”the independence of the branches of the state is the secret to a well-functioning democracy.”

The central argument set forth by de la Cruz in his call for the dissolution of Congress was that the people’s representatives in parliament have turned a deaf ear to the demands of the people of El Alto, a poor district north of La Paz that was the epicentre of the protests in the last stage of the social uprising.

The protesters were demanding the repeal of Bolivia’s law on hydrocarbons, which grants foreign corporations rights to natural gas reserves in the southern part of the country.

When de la Cruz told IPS that ”We prefer to die before allowing the coming generations to continue suffering,” he was referring to the dozens killed in El Alto and La Paz in the harsh military crackdown on the protests the week before the Sánchez de Lozada administration collapsed.

According to the office of the people’s defender, 57 people were killed, although human rights groups put the number at over 80. The decision to call out the army prompted Mesa to leave the government on Oct. 13.

Mesa is now trying to get Congress to amend the law on hydrocarbons, in order to ensure a larger share of gas revenues for Bolivia, and to make affordable natural gas available to Bolivia’s urban population.

Bolivia is South America’s poorest country. More than 70 percent of the population of 8.2 million lives below the poverty line, three out of ten people are trapped in the most extreme poverty, and unemployment stands at 13 percent, according to official statistics.

From Sep. 15 to Oct. 17, peasant and indigenous groups, trade unions and the people of El Alto mounted roadblocks in western Bolivia and poured out onto the streets to protest a plan to export natural gas to the United States through a port in Chile, an enemy since Bolivia lost its Pacific coastline to that country in a war that ended in 1879.

Although the protests were triggered by the plan to build a pipeline to export Bolivia’s natural gas, demonstrators also began to loudly voice demands for jobs, a living wage, and an end to austerity measures that have had a heavy impact on the poor.

Bolivia has 54 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, the second-biggest in South America.

The Pacific LNG consortium, made up of Spain’s Repsol, British Gas and Pan American Energy, a U.S. company, planned to sell 36 million cubic metres of gas a day to another U.S. corporation, Sempra Energy, which would have distributed the gas in the state of California.

But on Dec. 18, the Fides News Agency reported that the project had fallen through, and confirmed that Indonesia would provide Sempra Energy with liquefied natural gas (LNG) for the California market.

Solares, meanwhile, accused Congress of ignoring the people’s demands, and of failing to modify the structural adjustment and free-market economic policies which first began to be implemented in 1985 by then-president Víctor Paz Estenssoro.

Under Solares’ leadership, COB has regained the strength it enjoyed in the 1950s, when it was the driving force behind a nationalist revolution that led to the nationalisation of the country’s mineral resources and to the redistribution of land as part of an agrarian reform programme.

Solares said that if Mesa refuses to lead the ”patriotic civic government” proposed by COB, general elections should be held to choose new national authorities.

But Mesa, in response to the demands voiced by Solares and de la Cruz, said ”We must be able to work without being subject to blackmail.”

In his first message to the nation in 2004, Mesa announced for the first time that he would complete Sánchez de Lozada’s term, in 2007.

Political analysts interpreted that decision as a sign of prudent distancing from the social movement that held the October protests, and of the president’s plan to strictly adhere to the constitution.

Mesa’s statements could also be seen as a warning that ”there must be a limit to the demands put forth by some of the leaders” of the October ”gas war”, said political analyst Jorge Lazarte, a former member of the National Electoral Court.

Ericka Brockmann Quiroga, a representative of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, the party that co-governed with Sánchez de Lozada, said the threats issued by the trade union leaders were a sign that ”the extreme left and the extreme right are drawing closer together, with the aim of generating instability and uncertainty.”