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BOLIVIA: Indigenous Majority Won Struggle for New Constitution

Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Mar 31 2006 (IPS) - The roots of the process that will lead to the July election of a constituent assembly to rewrite Bolivia’s constitution can be traced back to a 700-km 1990 march through Amazon rainforest and over the mountains surrounding the capital by indigenous people demanding respect for their rights over their land.

One of the first bills to be signed into law by indigenous President Evo Morales, who took office in January after winning the Dec. 18 elections with 53.7 percent of the vote, was the “special law to convene a constituent assembly”, under which some four million voters will elect 255 delegates to redraft the constitution. The elections will take place on Jul. 2.

Simultaneously, a referendum will be held on greater autonomy for the resource-rich eastern provinces, as demanded by the elites in the wealthy province of Santa Cruz.

Bolivia, a country of nearly nine million people, is divided between the western highlands, home to the impoverished indigenous majority, and the wealthy eastern provinces, which account for most of the country’s natural gas production, industry and gross domestic product (GDP). Much of the population of eastern Bolivia is made up of people of European (mainly Spanish) descent.

Bolivia’s 53 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves, worth an estimated 100 billion dollars – the second-largest in South America after Venezuela’s – are concentrated in the eastern and southern parts of the country.

Civic leaders in the eastern provinces want greater local control over the administration of natural resources and the taxies levied on them.

The constituent assembly, meanwhile, will begin to meet Aug. 6 in Sucre, the country’s “constitutional capital”, and will have six months to a year to draw up the new constitution, which will be voted on by Bolivians in a referendum within 120 days of its completion.

The 1990 march “for land and dignity” was prompted by longstanding concerns of small indigenous groups on the verge of disappearing, who were facing intense pressure from landowners, ranchers and loggers constantly encroaching on their ancestral land.

On a sunny day that year, some 600 men and women set out from the central square of the city of Trinidad, the capital of the northeastern Amazon jungle province of Beni. The church bells marked the start of their 35-day journey, which gradually drew media attention as they made it over high passes in the Andes mountains and reached La Paz.

The march created public awareness on the plight of indigenous people, and the growing pressure prompted then president Jaime Paz Zamora (1989-1993) to issue decrees that prevented logging on certain tribal lands in the province of Beni, restored land to indigenous groups, and marked out several indigenous territories.

The demonstrators helped Bolivian society “discover” the indigenous people of the country’s Amazon jungle region. Indigenous people in the eastern lowlands are hunters and gatherers, and their way of life differs from that of the highlands Quechua and Aymara Indians, who comprise a majority of the Bolivian population.

The demand for recognition of their traditional lands was a question of life and death for these small ethnic groups, who were condemned to vanish if their territory was not preserved. According to the Indigenous Confederation of Eastern Bolivia, groups like the Pacahuara, who number just 30, or the Yuki, made up of less than 200 people, were being choked to death by pressure from powerful economic interests keen on amassing more and more land.

The march gave birth to one of the central demands of the indigenous struggle in Bolivia: the redistribution of land, the ownership of which is heavily concentrated, to allow landless campesinos (peasant farmers) to contribute to production and the economy.

Since then, the call for a constituent assembly to redraft the constitution has been one of the pillars of the social protests that have shaken Bolivia, South America’s poorest country, and brought down two presidents in less than two years.

In October 2003, month-long protests by the residents of El Alto, a sprawling working-class city next to La Paz, ended up toppling the government of Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (1993-1997 and 2002-2003). The demonstrations, which were opposing a plan for exporting natural gas, were violently quashed by the police, and 67 demonstrators were killed.

And in June 2005, Sánchez de Lozada’s successor, Carlos Mesa, was forced to step down by protests demanding the nationalisation of the country’s natural gas industry and a new constitution.

The demands by Bolivia’s indigenous people that the country be “refounded” on the principles of national control of natural gas and other resources and access to land and other opportunities for the poor were the driving force behind the growth of Morales’ Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party.

But while activists are pleased that a constituent assembly will be set up to rewrite the constitution, some complain that the candidates of social organisations will only be able to run in the Jul. 2 elections if they have the backing of a political party, citizens group or indigenous association that has been recognised by the national electoral authority.

With so little time left before the Jul. 2 constituent assembly elections, many social organisations will be unable to gather the necessary number of signatures – equivalent to two percent of registered voters – needed to gain recognition from the National Electoral Court.

That means some 40 social organisations will be either left out of the process or forced to negotiate with political parties, in order to be included on their lists, Carlos Mariaca, with the Bolivian Confederation of Disabled Persons, told IPS.

Under these conditions, initiatives for the “construction of a new Bolivia” could be politicised, while civil society participation would be limited, said the activist. He added, however, that he accepted the risk.

Lawyer José Luis Gutiérrez Sardán, representing the “Pre-Constituent Assembly and Pre-Autonomy Referendum National Council”, was among those who pushed for the participation of all trade unions and social and indigenous organisations.

But negotiations between the ruling MAS, opposition parties and the civic leaders of the province of Santa Cruz decided on the route that was adopted by the election authority, he explained to IPS.

The “Pre-Constituent Assembly and Pre-Autonomy Referendum National Council”, which was created in November 2005, is made up of 23 representatives of different social sectors, indigenous groups and academia. Its task is to summarise the demands set forth by the groups that pushed for a constituent assembly and a referendum on provincial autonomy, and to provide inputs for the constituent assembly agenda.

Nancy Tufiño, who heads up the community justice programme at the public University Mayor de San Andrés, told IPS that the conditions agreed for the election of the members of the constituent assembly will limit the participation of campesino organisations and women’s groups fighting for equal rights.

“People from rural areas want to express their concerns in the constituent assembly with their own voice,” she said.

Women’s and campesino groups are now meeting to outline their demands, which focus on governance, participation and gender equality, Cintia Irrazábal, the community justice programme’s academic secretary, commented to IPS.