More on elections down South …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:00 AM on June 28, 2006.

Bolivia has an election coming up on Sunday as well. I'll get to that in a second, but first a few more points on Mexico.

Although it didn't really fit into the Top Ten List format* of the Mexican election preview on the front page, this could have an impact on Sunday's vote:

What started as a teachers' strike here five weeks ago has grown into a major movement to oust the governor of Oaxaca State that could affect the presidential election on July 2.

…the teachers, who number 70,000, have been joined by dozens of community groups, Indian rights organizations, farmers' cooperatives and revolutionary parties...

The governor's decision a week ago to use the state police to dislodge the striking teachers from the central square, resorting to the old ruling party's tactics, outraged left-wing organizations across Oaxaca …

Now, politicians and voters worry that the spiraling political crisis will interfere with the presidential election in unpredictable ways.

The teachers' union and its allies vow to disrupt the voting if the governor does not resign, and a fifth of the polling places are in schools. Yet the teachers are divided, with some saying they want to vote and some, including union leaders, calling for a protest vote against Mr. Ruiz's party and President Vicente Fox's National Action Party. That would benefit the leftist front-runner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador...

With 3.3 percent of the nation's voters in Oaxaca, and Mr. López Obrador running neck-and-neck nationwide with the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón, any shift in votes toward the leftist could be significant …

Allow me a small tangent here.

I've never quite gotten the "liberal" media's hostility towards the Latin American left. I think it's some kind of deeply ingrained holdover from the Cold War. Whatever the case, mainstream papers like the WaPo and the New York Times really have a transparent bias against el izquierdo. It's manifested in the stories they choose to highlight, those they tend to ignore and in the non-neutral language they use to describe the political scene to our South.

The last graph of the excerpt above has a good example of the latter; note how "the conservative candidate, Felipe Calderón" is opposed with "the leftist front-runner, Andrés Manuel López Obrador." I may be reading too much here -- I consume a lot of crappy Latin American reporting and that causes me to have a bias -- but "leftist" seems a hell of a lot more extreme than "conservative."

Of course, the word "liberal" is tough in international reporting because economic liberals are political conservatives and in many countries the "liberal" party is center-right. But I also see the word "rightist" in an increasing amount of academic writing, and I wonder why they don't grab that. You only see the word "right" -- or derivations thereof -- when the subject is the far right, or in reference to violent actors, as in Colombia's "right-wing paramilitaries."

If you don' want to use "rightist" because it's an uncommon usage in the news, why not contrast "conservative" with "progressive"? Those terms are familiar to readers. That is, if you're trying to write neutrally for an American audience.

[hops off his soap box]

Onto Bolivia, where voters will also go to the polls this Sunday, in this case to choose a new constituent assembly, and to vote on a referendum giving regional governments more autonomy.

Bolivian president Evo Morales looks set to get an assembly with which he can implement the economic plan released earlier this month called "Refounding Bolivia." It says that natural resources are social property, to be managed by the state in cooperation with the private sector. It's a radical departure from the prevailing economic models in Latin America, a combination, according to one (conservative) analyst, of "the consensual decision-making and communal justice systems of indigenous political systems" and "western state institutions, such as justice systems."

Whatever that means.

In the Orwellian Newspeak that's become common in U.S.-Latin American relations, the State Department warns that Morales "could use the Constituent Assembly vote" to promote "potentially antidemocratic reforms."

Note that in a previous referendum, Bolivians were asked (among other questions):

1) Do you agree that the Bolivian State should recover ownership over all hydrocarbons at the wellhead?

92.19% voted "yes"

2) Do you agree that [the state-owned oil company, which had previously been privatized] should be re-established, reclaiming state ownership of the Bolivian people's stakes in the part-privatized oil companies, so that it can take part in all stages of the hydrocarbon production chain?

87.31% voted "yes"

3) Do you or do you not agree that Bolivia should export gas as part of a national policy framework that ensures the gas needs of Bolivians; encourages the industrialization of gas in the nation's territory; levies taxes and/or royalties of up to 50% of the production value of oil and gas on oil companies, for the nation's benefit; and earmarks revenues from the export and industrialization of gas mainly for education, health, roads, and jobs?

61.74% voted "yes"

That's basically what Morales is doing. This undemocratic stuff is just fucked up.

The referendum is an attempt to blunt those popular plans. Regional autonomy is a sticky wicket in a country with a huge divide between the lowlands, where the big ranchers and industrialists (and the white folk) are, and the highlands where Morales draws his base.

Morales is opposed to it and he's popular. According to a poll by Apoyo, Opinión y Mercado (via Angus Reid Consultants), Morales, who was elected last December with 54 percent of the vote, has a 75 percent approval rating.

Violence is a distinct possibility in a society that's becoming increasingly polarized.

For more on Bolivia's natural resource "nationalization," see Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz' op-ed, "Who Owns Bolivia?" For background on Bolivia's economic upheaval, see Mark Weisbrot's AlterNet article, "Latin America Shifts Left: It's the Economy," and for a look at the social and ethnic dynamics in Bolivia, see my piece: "A Real Clash of Civilizations."

*You, my fine readers, just love top ten lists.

Joshua Holland is a staff writer at Alternet and a regular contributor to The Gadflyer.