Rahul+Mahajan,+Dual+Power,+Revolution,+Reconquista

Rahul Mahajan, Empire Notes, June 13, 2005
=Radio Commentary -- Bolivia and the Indigenous Reconquista=

The last few weeks in Bolivia have been nothing short of astonishing. In 2000, in what was dubbed the "Water War," the people of Cochabamba expelled an international consortium headed by Bechtel that had taken over their water supply and jacked up prices. In 2003, the people inaugurated the "Gas War" because of rage at a foreign investment deal that would give Bolivians only a tiny fraction of the total profits to be made from extracting and selling their natural gas (just as had been the case with 500 years of extraction of silver and tin). In October of that year, the Gas War claimed a head of state, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, who had to resign and go in disgrace to Miami.

This time around, in the second stage of the Gas War, things have gone far beyond that. Another head of state, Carlos Mesa, is gone – and, unlike in 2003, he was not replaced by his natural constitutional successor. That would have been Hormando Vaca Diez, head of the Senate, hated as a feudal plantation owner with a violent law-and-order fetish; though desperately desiring power, he had to agree not to take the presidency, instead allowing it to pass to the head of the Supreme Court.

Re-nationalization of Bolivian gas is now permanently on the agenda.

Ordinarily, we could simply stop there and say, in this post-Cold-War political climate, this much is all that we could possibly expect. But, after 25 years of there being no alternative, something new is stirring in the air – most particularly, in the rarefied air of El Alto, the massive Andean shantytown that is the world's gateway to La Paz, Bolivia's capital.

To understand these events fully requires terms that we were told history had forgotten – much as the indigenous were told history had forgotten them.

Here's one: dual power. This is a situation in which popular movements, while not having overthrown a state, have removed the state's monopoly on control. Not only can the popular movements exercise direct political power (rather than merely attempting to influence elected representatives), the state is conversely highly constrained in the exertion of power.

This situation has existed in Bolivia for some weeks and continues, at least at the moment.

Miners, farm-workers, and coca-growers organized; the indigenous majority of Bolivia, Quechua, Aymara, Chiquitano, and Guarani, mobilized. Making clever use of Bolivia's geography, they paralyzed the country. The neighborhood association of El Alto mobilized to lay siege to La Paz much as the followers of Tupac Katari did over 200 years ago. Gas and oil fields around the country had been seized; and a variously estimated 70 to 120 roadblocks at strategic points had brought road traffic to a standstill. With that leverage, the government had to take these movements very seriously.

Here's another long-forgotten word: revolution. The idea is out there. For many political leaders on the far left of the popular mobilizations, it took the form of a push for a Constituent Assembly that would supersede the existing government and write a new constitution for Bolivia. This might start with codifying the nationalization of all Bolivia's natural resources, but it wouldn't be legally required to stop anywhere; an entirely new political system could be inaugurated.

This incipient revolution has been no tea party. It has involved miners marching with sticks of dynamite and angry verbal battles between political organizations committed to the struggle and people tired of cooking with firewood and dramatically rising food prices. And yet, to the remarkable credit of all Bolivians, only one person has been killed during this evolving drama, killed, of course, by the state security forces.

After 500 years of massacre, genocide, rape, slavery, torture, and exploitation, that the indigenous of Bolivia should begin their reconquista so peacefully staggers the imagination – and, one hopes, stretches it as well.

It will not happen right now. Splits on the left, the difficulties imposed by these tactics, and the general inhospitability of the world to change from the roots have, I think, already caused this revolutionary tide to start ebbing. It could hardly have been otherwise. But this I will predict: this is not the last time the Indians of Bolivia will enhance our political vocabularies.


 * From: http://www.empirenotes.org/