The Rise and Fall of Bolivia's Evo Morales

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Essay

Latin America's Left Turn

Jorge G. Castaneda

With all the talk of Latin America's turn to the left, few have noticed that there are really two lefts in the region. One has radical roots but is now open-minded and modern; the other is close-minded and stridently populist. Rather than fretting over the left's rise in general, the rest of the world should focus on fostering the former rather than the latter -- because it is exactly what Latin America needs.

Evo Morales's rise from the humblest of origins to the Bolivian presidency has been remarkable. Since taking office five years ago, this son of subsistence farmers has won himself fame, bolstered his support, and filled ordinary Bolivians with pride through his unabashed defense of indigenous rights, his refusal to compromise at the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, and, more broadly, his willingness to thumb his nose at states far larger and more powerful than his own. When the country adopted a new constitution (largely of Morales's making) that enhanced rights for the environment and native peoples in 2009, the leader in La Paz officially turned his charging rhetoric into concrete results. In the space of just a few years, Morales convinced Bolivians, and not just the traditional elites, that their government can serve their interests and make a difference on the world stage.

All this makes the developments of the last month that much more confusing -- and surprising. Many in Bolivia today are asking what went wrong. How is it that, just a year after ushering in a new law that gave unprecedented rights to what he calls "Mother Earth," Morales fought to build a freeway through a national park, trampling on protected indigenous territory? Could it really be that, after protests erupted, the first indigenous president in the history of South America violently repressed the very people who were instrumental in granting him that honor in the first place, leaving more than 100 injured?

In fact, he did both, which has caused a political crisis in La Paz and undermined his comfortable grip on power. The explanation for Morales's confusing turnaround lies in something that Bolivian dissidents have been complaining about for a while now. The leader's intransigence -- the exact quality that helped him remake Bolivia -- now threatens to undermine his administration. 

To be fair, there are many reasons for Morales's about-face. His constituents push for inconsistent agendas -- many of them want both development and conservation, for instance. And Morales's desire to diminish U.S. hegemony has forced his government to strengthen ties with another world power, Brazil, which happens to be financing the controversial freeway. But above all, throughout his political career, Morales has displayed an impressive capacity to inspire people to struggle against establishment forces. Now that he is the establishment, he has not been able to come to terms with the fact that compromise is a necessary part of wielding power.

To appreciate the twist of fate, consider Morales's ascent. He took office in 2006, with 53 percent of the vote, and immediately convened a constitutional assembly. While that process forged along, he bucked widespread international fears over uncontrolled drug production and cracked down on cocaine manufacturing. The economy soared under his direction, posting an average of 5.2 percent annual growth through 2009, a rate not seen for 30 years. His administration won praise for making cash transfers to poor families conditioned on their agreement to keep their children in school, as well as for providing public health care to all pregnant women and infants. 

The opposition challenged Morales regularly, but he parried their attacks with ease. He fended off a 2008 recall referendum waged by the wealthy and mostly white elites of the low-lying eastern provinces, where oil money flows. When he prevailed with two-thirds of the vote, Morales put the newfound political capital to use, finalizing the new constitution. A popular vote a year later formalized its adoption. Morales was riding high. 

After he securely won a second term, Morales set out to, as he put it, "decolonize" the country. He nationalized the gas and oil industry, instituted land reforms, chipped away at U.S. influence by building contacts with other nations, such as China and Iran, and granted indigenous societies the right to create their own legal institutions. He defended the environment, or Pachamama ("Mother Earth," in Aymaran), as he regularly calls it. He pulled it off. In October of 2009, the UN General Assembly named Morales World Hero of Mother Earth.

Morales departed for the December 2009 climate-change conference in Copenhagen bursting with confidence. After placing the blame for climate change squarely with industrialized nations and on the capitalist model, he insisted that wealthier countries pay billions of dollars in reparations to their less developed counterparts. The top U.S. representative called the request "wildly unrealistic," and Washington subsequently cut climate-change aid to Bolivia. Morales invited world leaders and activists to Cochabamba for an environmental conference of his own. Some 30,000 people from more than 100 nations took him up on his offer. Later, Bolivia passed a law that recognized Mother Earth as a living entity and, at least on paper, gave nature its own rights (as opposed to rights regarding nature held by human beings).

So it was all the more confounding when Morales decided to build a freeway through the heart of a national park and indigenous territory known as TIPNIS, an acronym for Territorio Indígena y Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure. The plan would provide a quicker route between Cochabamba and Beni, promoting regional integration and economic development. The road was not originally Morales's idea -- it was also proposed by former President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada -- a point that critics raised repeatedly. To make matters worse, the road was financed by Brazil and, opponents claimed, would largely serve that nation's interests. The great decolonizer was simply trading one master power for another.