Electoral fraud

[Jan Klimkowski]

A Tale of Two Bolivias
Behind the Ongoing Gas Wars, a Geographic Rift Between Rich and Poor


By Teo Ballvé
2004 Narco News Authentic Journalism Scholar
August 27, 2004

Excerpt from the full article here:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue34/article1056.html

During the “gas war,” the Youth Brigade in Santa Cruz along with the officially unaffiliated, ultra-rightwing Unión Juvenil Crucinista — another militant separatist youth group — violently repelled an approaching march of mostly indigenous protestors. Amid a hail of flying rocks and shouts of “Colla (highlanders) pieces of shit,” the marchers were unable to enter the city.

The first president of the extremist Unión Juvenil Crucinista, founded in 1957, was Carlos Valverde Barbery. He is currently the primary ideologue of Nación Camba — a kind of unofficial godfather of the movement. Valverde first achieved national prominence in the 1970s when the brutal regime of Gen. Hugo Banzer rewarded him with the appointment of Health Minister for his role in leading a paramilitary group supporting the military coup. Valverde believes the creation of two independent republics is “the only solution for the country.” And adds, “Why should we keep unity, if [the two regions] are so totally different? We have absolutely nothing in common on so many levels.”

Nación Camba first began to organize in response to massive land invasions and occupations in Santa Cruz carried out by the Bolivian Landless Movement (Movimiento Sin Tierra — MST) in 2000. Of all Bolivia’s departments, Santa Cruz continues to have the most unequal distribution of land. According to the government’s Institute of Agrarian Reform (INRA), only 25 landowners hold around 22 million hectares in Santa Cruz — almost 60 percent of the department’s total territory, nearly the size of the U.S. state of Montana.

Inaction on promises of land distribution by INRA and the recent arrest of MST leader Gabriel Pinto has led the MST to step up their land occupations. Many MST members are recent migrants from the altiplano, which inflames the conflict with ethnic and regional connotations by pitting landless, migrant indigenous campesinos from the altiplano against lowland, mestizo landowners.

At a ranch owned by Rafael Paz Hurtado, MST leaders directed authorities to a weapons cache they alleged belonged to paramilitary “self-defense” units hired by landowners to protect their lands from encroachment. Paz told authorities he had the rifles, automatic weapons and grenades to protect his farming equipment and animals. A press release by the local bloc of the MST firmly denounced the arms deposit: “Our country cannot stand for the proliferation of paramilitary movements at the command of landowners due to the voracity of transnationals and local oligarchic interests.”

To counter the growing presence and strength of the MST, Nación Camba has its own program for providing landless campesinos with a small plot of land. It has even managed to build a small base of support among new arrivals from the altiplano by offering parcels to those that join the ranks of Nación Camba. It also seeks to sway public opinion throughout the media luna region to its favor by functioning somewhat like a think tank, publishing articles, editorials and position papers.

Because Nación Camba’s proposed separation from Bolivia is presented as a vehicle for greater economic independence and prosperity, the movement has found a willing partner in—and built a strong alliance with—the Santa Cruz Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CAINCO). CAINCO president Zvonko Matkovic, for example, declared, “What we should do is simply and smoothly separate ourselves [from Bolivia].” The alliance between these two groups represents the urban, mestizo elite at the helm of the autonomy movement.

When asked what he thinks should be done to the “radical” (indigenous) movements Matkovic responded: “A heavy hand, a heavy hand. In any other country, people that go against the economy of the country, of the state, are people that are arrested and tried. That is what this government does not have the will to do.”

CAINCO represents about 1,500 companies operating in the region, and according to its mission statement it “serves to protect and defend the interest of its member companies,” among them, oil and gas companies. In fact, many of the international conglomerates with existing gas contracts in the region—Repsol-YPF, Petrobras, Enron—are members of CAINCO’s board of directors.

CAINCO enjoys generous funding from local and international organizations. It has a long established relationship with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). The IDB’s Multilateral Investment Fund gave 1.3 million dollars to Bolivia’s Foundation for Business Development, of which CAINCO is one of four members.

The stated objective of the IDB loan is to “facilitate the entry into the formal economy of businesses located in Bolivia.” However, the category of “Awareness and Dissemination” in the loan accounts for an entire 21 percent of its total funds. The bulk of funds in this category finance a “communications campaign,” “printed materials,” “contracting the mass media” and “service promotion.”

Media has played a significant role in shaping public opinion on the gas issue, according to Bolivian political analyst Eduardo Gamarra in a risk assesment paper he wrote for the USAID agency: “An autonomous media-based opposition (oposición mediática) exerted an unusual degree of influence and was a significant source of conflict [in the gas dispute]. The media have indeed been extremely active and critical of government policy and also of … [indigenous] opposition groups.”

More striking, however, is that, according to documents released by the U.S. government under the Freedom of Information Act by Narco News journalism professor Jeremy Bigwood, CAINCO receives funds from the congressionally funded U.S.-based National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

The NED has a controversial history of supporting groups in foreign countries hostile to governments that Washington deems unseemly. Earlier this year in Haiti, the NED contributed to the destabilization of the government of a democratically elected leader. The NED also gave funding to Súmate, a group whose sole purpose was to organize a recall referendum against twice-elected President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

In this case, the NED’s activities are seemingly business-oriented. CAINCO’s first ever NED grant came just in time for the July 18 gas referendum. CAINCO received the grant, totaling 128,285 dollars, on May 1. The stated purpose of the grant is to research and advocate for the modification of the federal law on “Contracts of Goods, Labor, General Services and Consulting,” which sets rules on purchases, bids and contracts. Gas exploration and exportation contracts, for instance.

According to the NED, the law needs changing because “the decree puts more emphasis on the private sector than on the public sector to reduce corruption at the same time that it does not guarantee bidders’ rights,” says the grant. And, says the NED, fighting corruption will make Bolivia more attractive to international investment.

The NED grant, among other things, is therefore helping CAINCO pave the way for private companies to obtain favorable government contracts and invest in the exploration and exportation of the region’s natural gas. Despite the pending hydrocarbons law still to be decided in congress to determine how the reserves should be developed, Matkovic firmly supported recent moves by President Mesa to prematurely begin selling gas to Argentina. And he did not fail to mention that he was worried by “pressures imposed by radicalized social sectors, looking for another upheaval in the country”—a veiled reference to altiplano groups.

Clearly, the gas issue has become the most divisive issue Bolivia has faced in decades. But the fallout from the gas war along with other recent and similar upheavals—the April 2000 Cochabamba “water war” and the February 2003 tax riots—are only symptoms of a more profound process currently underway. These insurrections have forced a nationwide evaluation of the gamut of neoliberal policies—market liberalization, privatization and the general dissolution of the state—carried out in recent decades.

The majority of the population in the altiplano, the part of the country most devastated and marginalized by these policies, is wholly rejecting the neoliberal economic model. Groups like CAINCO and Nación Camba—along with its offshoots—have recently gained prominence because they are directly contesting this blatant rejection, in some cases violently, because it is an economic system that continues to serve them particularly well as the landed elite and captains of industry.

Since they comprise a minority elite, these groups have manipulated and exploited prevalent threads of racism and regional divisions that have long-plagued Bolivian society. Much like the conservative movement of the United States, these groups have decided to maintain their economic hegemony by waging their battles in terms of culture rather than economics, because the latter would alienate their less affluent supporters.