“Indigenists, Separatists Are Destroying Bolivia”

Indigenists, Separatists Are Destroying Bolivia
El Pais
Tarija province
11 September

I have been trying to survey some of the coverage of the current political crisis in the Bolivian press and electronic media.

This editorial from the Tarija daily El Pais was interesting, I thought.

The newspaper’s editorialist makes a play for what it describes as a moderate silent majority, based on a myth of mestizo racial identity that might seem familiar, for example, to Brazilians who follow debates here about the politics of racial identity.

Globo Journalism Central director Ali Kamel, for example, published a book here last year entitled We Are Not Racists which essentially reiterates an antiquated myth of Brazilian racial democracy — it goes back, at the very least, to Stefan Zweig’s Brazil: Nation of the Future — and brands the “black consciousness” movement as a form of reverse racism.

Ali Kamel is the most intellectually dishonest man in the Southern Hemisphere, however.

SAMBA NÂO É RUMBA. Noted with amusement by Brazilan press watchers: Boston Globe's geopolitically challenged headlined

I have never encountered more virulent racial hatred, openly expressed, in my life as I have in the corner bars and cocktail parties of São Paulo. I have heard the German term untermenschen used on more than one occasion. Seriously. The level of engrained racism among elements of the Brazilian urban “elites” is startling. Apartheid startling.

The rhetorical strategy of this editorial is a familiar one as well: It describes the political situation polarized between equally undesirable extremes and presents itself as representing the mean between them.

I am reminded of a Mexican newspaper editorial, for example, that described the situation after the 2006 elections in this way: Polarized by those who thought the election was fraudulent and those who thought it was legitimate, and decrying the extremism of both sides.

The thing was, however, that the 2006 Mexican elections were phonier than a 3-peso note bearing a portrait of Mickey Mouse.

Supporters of Evo Morales will no doubt argue that the editorialist misrepresents the president’s positions and reformist policies in order to create a false polarity. They may have something of a point. This simplistic rhetorical schema tends not to reflect the complexities on the ground very well. Its indictment of the errors of Bolivia’s political opposition is interesting, however.

My hasty translation follows.

The recent nomination of Carlos Romero, former member of the influential NGO Cejis, as minister of agriculture and rural development, merited a comment from UN leader Samuel Doria Medina, who said the new minister is committed to reconciliation and dialogue. This evaluation of Doria just goes to show, once again, that various sectors of society have yet to appreciate the corrosive influence of NGOs and their representatives on the government, starting with the vice president, García Linera. These people have drafted and approved an indigenist constitution whose implementation requires nothing less than the total destruction of the State and the mestizo Bolivian nation. It is no accident, therefore, that USAID has enthusiastically supported it in this endeavor. The NGO-tied minister Carlos Romero had been a member of the constitutional assembly for MAS, and played a decisive role in drafting his party’s constitutional proposals. Within MAS, he represents the hard line tendency that seeks to form 36 indigenous nations with their own territory, laws and government, replacing the laws and government of our nation.

Two interesting factual claims here: That the Morales constitution is just as “balkanizing” as the separatist movement is, and that USAID is supporting this balkanization. (That fellow from the Council on Economic and Policy Research recently challenged USAID to disclose details of its “democracy” programs in the country. Looking at their Web site, I see there is a pie chart indicating some $11 million in budgeting for “democracy” projects in 2007.)

I personally have no information that either claim is true. The claim that foreign NGOs — BINGOs, or “big international NGOs” — are corrosive of national sovereignty is often heard in Brazil as well. The editorial will later blast the U.S. for its choice of ambassador as well.

None of this, however, has been subject to a serious and thorough debate. Why is that? The answer is to be found in the notorious blunders of the other side in this dispute, those who have been deftly manipulated by the government in order to impose its divisive, indigenist project on Bolivia.

The nomination of the Yugoslavian Branko Marinkovic as head of the Santa Cruz civil commission, a man questioned over his enormous and allegedly irregular land holdings (he has even claimed the Laguna Corazón for his own private use) and the lawsuit he faces over a dubious 20 million bolivianos in CEDEIMS tax credits for what are alleged to have been phantom olive oil exports to Argentina, only undermines the legitimacy of the Santa Cruz civil movement.

Marinkovic is Croatian, I think.

Repeated acts of violence against police and the armed forces by shock troops in various parts of the country, including Tarija, constitute another major blunder, in that they express a deep racial prejudice and predispose police and the armed forces against legitimate aspirations to regional autonomy. One of the most critical moments in this series of blunders was [the humiliation to which peasants and indigenous people from Cochabamba submitted the Interinstitutional Commission, which they weakened, even obtaining the support of opposition civic leaders and governors.]

I may have mistranslated that. I am not familiar with the incident referred to.

Add to this more recent errors: the senator from Tarija who not long ago had the “patriotic” idea of proposing a single referendum to resolve the issues confronting the nation (the referendum on the return of the national capital to Sucre), yesterday defended the attack on gas pipelines with the despicable argument that cutting off the flow of revenue to the central government is the best response to the government’s cuts in IDH [oil and gas royalties] to the regions. In his “wise” political logic, it is better to kill the patient in order to cure the disease. As we see, extremes meet. Both extremes are out to destroy Bolivia.

But because, in the world of politics, you have to pay for your errors, the error committed by the U.S. government in sending Philip Goldberg as its ambassador to Bolivia, fully aware of his very public role in the bloody dissolution of Yugoslavia, was taken full advantage of by the NGO-dominated, indigenist, separatist MAS government, which made political capital on his expulsion from the country. As far as we know, this is the first time in history that Bolivia has expelled the American ambassador.

Evo and his indigenist advisors have made a terrible mistake in fomenting racial hatred against the Bolivian (mestizo) race in order to justify his impracticable and suicidal constitutional initiative. These errors, however, are obscured to a dangerous degree by those committed by an opposition infiltrated by separatists, by those bent on protecting the interests of the latifundio, by influence peddlers operating through the infamous “lodges.”

It is up to us, the vast majority of Bolivians who aspire to live in a united, multicultural, mestizo nation, to unmask the separatist and indigenist impostors who, as is now clear, are out to divide and destroy our nation. This explains the lack of genuine will to dialogue.

What is the position of the department prefect [provincial governor]? Will he follow in the footsteps of his allies of convenience, who are contaminated by separatism? Will he put on the Bolivian national jersey and confront both of these enemies of national unity?

This newspaper will continue to tirelessly advocate the unity and integrity of Bolivia, denouncing any and all efforts to divide it.