Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

ELECTIONS-BOLIVIA: Quiroga Offers Continuity

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Dec 17 2005 (IPS) - From 2001 to 2002, Jorge Quiroga took over the presidency of Bolivia from ex-dictator Hugo Banzer. But now he’s aiming at getting elected on his own merit, while promising to give continuity to the current economic model, strengthen ties with the United States and toughen the country’s anti-drug policies.

Quiroga, 45, has the personality of a successful professional who is fully in harmony with the free-market economic transformations Bolivia has undergone since 1985. He graduated summa cum laude in industrial engineering at the College Station of Texas A&M University and earned a masters degree in business administration from the University of St. Edward’s in Austin, Texas.

After working for computer giant IBM in the United States, he returned to Bolivia in the late 1980s with his U.S. wife Virginia Gillum, and was soon launched on a meteoric political career.

A father of four, he is active in long-distance running, football, basketball and mountain-climbing, and says he longs to reach the summit of Mount Everest.

He is running in Sunday’s elections as the candidate for the right-wing Democratic and Social Power front (Podemos). He hopes to reach the presidency for the second time, although the polls place him five points behind indigenous leader Evo Morales, of the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS).

If no candidate garners at least 50 percent plus one of the ballots cast, Congress will elect the winner from the two most-voted candidates, and whoever is backed by two-thirds of the 157 legislators will govern the country for the next five years.

Quiroga has the support of a right-wing current that would like trade relations with the United States to be strengthened through a free trade treaty, and that is keen on a controversial project to export natural gas to California and Mexico.

This project has caused the downfall of two presidents in the last two years, due to the staunch opposition of the working class and poor in this Andean nation, where 70 percent of the population of 8.6 million lives below the poverty line.

Quiroga was serving as vice president to Banzer – who was Bolivia’s dictator from 1971 to 1978 and constitutional president from 1997 to 2001 – and assumed the presidency when Banzer resigned because he was dying from cancer.

Political analysts say Quiroga was responsible for the proposal to export natural gas from this landlocked country through a port in Chile, with which Bolivia has had a tense relationship since losing its Pacific shoreline to that country in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific.

But in public he was careful to safeguard his image, given that the project has awakened passionate and sometimes violent debate from the start.

His successor, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, attempted to implement the five billion dollar gas deal, but was forced instead to step down and flee the country on Oct. 17, 2003, after a month-long popular uprising in which at least 70 people were killed when he called the army out.

Vice President Carlos Mesa replaced Sánchez de Lozada. But his weak position in the face of the powerful foreign oil companies prevented him from enforcing a new law aimed at charging the corporations higher royalties and taxes on gas exports, and he was forced out of office last June by popular discontent and tough parliamentary opposition.

He was in turn replaced by the head of the Supreme Court, Eduardo Rodríguez, who was charged with calling early elections. The new president will take office in January 2006.

Quiroga is also a firm defender of the anti-drug policy of the United States, which seeks to eradicate thousands of hectares of coca leaf plantations in the semi-tropical Chapare region in central Bolivia – the region that gave rise to the social action movement backing the MAS candidate, Morales.

According to United Nations figures, there are 27,700 hectares of coca leaf plantations in this South American country: 10,100 hectares in Chapare, 17,300 in the Yungas region in the department (province) of La Paz, and 300 in the Apolo region, to the north of La Paz, the seat of government. The law only authorises the cultivation of 12,000 hectares, for traditional uses and medicinal purposes.

During the 12 months he served as president, Quiroga forged ahead with the forcible eradication of coca crops, despite resistance from small farmers and the deaths of several farmers and members of the security forces.

Quiroga first appeared on the public scene in 1991, in a position that was decisive for Bolivia’s entry into the era of privatisations. From his office as deputy minister of public investment, he masterminded the sale of 32 medium-sized public enterprises under the leadership of then minister of planning Samuel Doria, who is now another one of Quiroga’s political rivals as the candidate for the centre-left National Unity party.

Quiroga and Doria broke down the opposition to the sale of state enterprises, although the government at the time preferred to keep telecommunications, oil, railways, electricity and smelting plants under state control.

But these sectors were privatised by Sánchez de Lozada in his first term in office (1993-1997).

Quiroga, of the rightwing Nationalist Democratic Action (ADN) party, was later minister of finance, which put him in a position to develop good relations with multilateral financial organisations such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

After managing the ADN campaigns for the municipal elections in 1993 and general elections in 1995, Quiroga was invited by the head of the party, Banzer, to be his running mate on his presidential ticket for the 1997 elections.

At the age of 37 he was sworn in as vice-president of the Republic and president of Congress, and later completed Banzer’s term of office. Afterwards, he returned to his work as a consultant and academic at the Woodrow Wilson Centre in Washington.

His opponents criticise the fact that he was absent from Bolivia during a time of great turbulence.

Although Quiroga inherited the leadership of ADN, he chose to resign from that position in 2004, and created the 21st Century Alliance (Alianza Siglo XXI) made up of some 40 citizens’ groups, which later became the Podemos front.