Bush Squares Off with Bolivia and Venezuela

The burgeoning economic alliance between Venezuela and Bolivia also helps offset the difficulties that have arisen with Brazil and Argentina over Morales’s determination to exert greater control over natural gas exports. Both neighboring countries have significant investments in Bolivia’s gas fields and both are importing gas for domestic use at prices well below the world market. At a recent international gathering of Latin American and European leaders in Vienna, Austria, Morales and President Lula da Silva of Brazil exchanged harsh words over efforts to draft a new accord over natural gas. While the two leaders formally made up before they left Austria, there is little doubt that Chavez’s support provides Bolivia with leverage in its negotiations with its two more powerful neighbors. 

Venezuela is also signing a financial accord aimed at bolstering Bolivia’s banking and monetary system. This is intended to strengthen Morales’s hand vis-vis the United States and international financial institutions. The Bolivian government at the end of March announced that it would not solicit any new loans from the International Monetary Fund. 

Chavez’s visit to Bolivia coincided with the opening of the Exchange Fair, a project of the People’s Trade Treaty. Enterprises from Cuba, Bolivia and Venezuela participated with the goal of expanding commerce and sharing technical expertise. At the fair the vice-president of Bolivia, Alvaro Garcia Linera, criticized the U.S. neo-liberal trade regime, asserting: “It is not necessary for small producers and entrepreneurs to subordinate themselves to financial capital…. There are other forms of interdependence, other forms of globalization, other ways to generate regional exchanges of products, ideas, and necessities.” Garcia Linera concluded, “Bolivia needs the world and it will produce for the world.” 

Agrarian Reform 

T he government of Evo Morales began tackling the explosive issue of agrarian reform less than three weeks after nationalizing Bolivia’s natural gas and petroleum resources. In a country with glaring land inequities, Vice-President Garcia Linera proclaimed that large tracts of agricultural land would be redistributed to “peasants and indigenous communities.” While “productive lands” will be exempted from expropriation, Garcia Linera stated that this would not be the case for large underutilized holdings, “the latifundias that are gangster-like systems of extortion based on commercial, mercantile and political coercion.” 

Outlining a series of sweeping proposals for changes in the country’s agrarian reform laws, the Morales government is taking on elite economic interests located in the eastern region of the country. This is where most of the large landed estates are located, many of them acquired through political corruption and land speculation over the last three decades. According to Miguel Urioste, the director of the Land Foundation, an independent research center in La Paz, “Bolivia has a dual land system, the minifundias and subsistence agricultural plots in the west, and the capitalist enterprises tied to the latifundias in the east.” The prosperous estates produce soy beans, cattle, and other agricultural export commodities that have enriched a bourgeoisie based in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s third largest city. 

The devastating poverty that afflicts South America’s poorest country is bound up with this dysfunctional land system. Out of Bolivia’s 9 million inhabitants, 3.5 million people live in the countryside with about 80 percent subsisting at the poverty level. Garcia Linera noted in his address on agrarian reform that 40 percent of the country’s peasants and inhabitants of the indigenous agricultural communities live in conditions of extreme poverty, earning less than $600 a year. Indian women suffer the most at the bottom of this chain of exploitation. The vice president stated that, “Women will have special treatment” in the impending land redistribution program. 

Even before Garcia Linera publicly stated the government’s position on agrarian reform, virtually all the business and entrepreneurial associations in Santa Cruz, under the leadership of Branko Marinkovic of the Federation of Private Businesses, issued a proclamation expressing their “deep concern with the measures of agrarian reform that are coming from the administration of Evo Morales.” 

While many peasant and indigenous organizations are roundly applauding the changes in the agrarian reform law, a few leaders express reservations. Felipe Quispe, the  former head of the Union Confederation of Rural Workers of Bolivia, who has often challenged Morales from the left, said, “The government is committing an error because it is offering to discuss the agrarian reform plan with the large landowners who have historically exploited the peasants.” 

Militant indigenous movements are already staking out their intent to take over large estates. The Coordinator of Ethnic Peoples of Santa Cruz announced its determination to seize 14,000 hectares owned by Branko Marinkovic. “This land will automatically be taken because it is ours,” declared a representative of the ethnic groups. An official of the business coalition shot back, “This is an abusive assault and we are going to defend our private property with determination.” 

The dye is cast with the historic initiatives taken in May. Evo Morales now faces two potent adversaries—foreign energy corporations and the Bolivian bourgeoisie in Santa Cruz.