A Real Clash of Civilizations

"Unfortunately, people that don't know Bolivia very much think that we are all just Indian people from the west side of the country ... poor people and very short people and Indian people. I'm from the other side of the country ... we are tall and we are white people and we know English, so all that misconception that Bolivia is only an "Andean" country, it's wrong. Bolivia has a lot to offer " -- Gabriela Oviedo, Bolivia's 2004 Miss Universe contestant

Bolivia has become ungovernable. A long and tortuous history has caught up with this poor Andean state, and it's not pretty. Since the Spanish discovered silver in 1545, the threads of her history have been consistent: Economic and political power has been concentrated in the hands of a small, white elite, and the country's fabulous natural wealth has been fed into foreign coffers while the indigenous majority labored, suffered and died in a domestic economy that is one of the hemisphere's great basket cases.

Something had to give. The election of Evo Morales, an Aymara "Indian," marked the end of five centuries of Bolivian-style Apartheid, a system of tiered citizenship based on ethnic and social cleavages rather than legal oppression.

Bolivia has become ungovernable; its institutions have failed and its citizens have created a new hybrid form of government, a combination of mob rule and democracy. Carlos Mesa, who was forced to resign in the wake of massive social unrest last fall, had been president for less than two years. He came in with great hope as a reformer. Observers said he passed over Bolivia's traditional elites and appointed indigenous rights activists to his cabinet. But that wasn't enough to soothe a populace with a new awareness of its power. His predecessor, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, served for just one year. Eighty people were killed in the riots that ended his presidency.

The mainstream analyses of Morales' election, while not wrong, have been largely ahistoric and have missed the big picture of what's going on in this tiny, landlocked country.

The stories note as a throwaway that Morales is the first Aymara Indian to head Bolivia, but that's not enough. In all of Latin America, Bolivia is the only country where a majority of the population is indigenous. Depending on what statistics you trust, 55 percent to 70 percent of Bolivians are Quechua or Aymara "Indians" and just 12 percent to 15 percent are "white" (the remainder are mestizos or "other").

Throughout Latin America, there's been a sea change in indigenous peoples' perception of how their identity fits into the larger social and political picture of their societies. Historically, the "white" ruling minority in Bolivia used the "creole-mestizo identity" to marginalize indigenous groups and keep them passive while they sweated and died in the country's notoriously dangerous tin mines.

By the early 1990s, that began to change. The traditional pro-labor parties had been crushed in the previous decade, the price of tin had bottomed out, and new social movements -- far more radical than those that preceded them -- started to gather around ethnicity, somewhat like the black identity movement in South Africa that gained strength in the 1970s. The indigenous majority began to see cultural identity through the lens of social and economic marginalization (and vice versa). It was a genie that, once out of its bottle, couldn't be contained.

And it's not enough to say that Bolivia is one more domino falling in the revolution against the neoliberal policies pushed in Washington and Geneva, although that's true. In Bolivia, like everywhere else, racial and ethnic stratification is tightly interwoven with economic class.

The fact is everyone running for office in Bolivia in recent years has been a foe of neoliberalism -- at least on the campaign trail. Of the 2002 campaign, Carolyn Shaw, a Latin American scholar, wrote: "The most distinguishing aspect of elections in Bolivia was that virtually all the candidates lashed out to attack neoliberal strategies." Even Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who instituted the despised, IMF-dictated "El Plan de Todos"in the mid 1990s, renounced the "Washington Consensus." "I don't believe in neoliberalism, I believe in an open market economy," he said, somewhat enigmatically. "This stuff about the invisible hand, it just doesn't work that way."