Restoration of democracy, socialism and Indigenous pride in Bolivia

Luis Arce was elected as President of Bolivia in the elections held on 18 October. He is the chosen successor of Evo Morales, who was President of the country from 2006 to 2019. 

 

Morales made history as the first native Indian to be elected as president in 2006. Although two thirds of the eleven million Bolivians are indigenous, they had been ruled by a tiny (15% of the total population) white elite of European descent in the last five hundred years. The oligarchic rulers had excluded the Indians away from political and economic power. They had marginalized and discriminated against the Indians keeping them as poor, illiterate and backward. Bolivia was like South Africa minus the formal label and laws of Apartheid. Morales fought against this racial domination by mobilizing the Indians, uniting them and getting them to vote him as president in 2006. Morales comes from a typical poor Aymara Indian family without any educational qualifications. 

 

As president, the first priority of Morales was to uplift the Indians from poverty, provide access to economic opportunities and empower them politically. In 2009, he got a new constitution for the country to reflect the rights and aspirations of the Indians. He got the name of the country changed to “ Plurinational State of Bolivia” in recognition of the many  distinct indigenous communities of the country. 

 

Morales had done a tremendous job of transforming the country. Firstly, he gave unprecedented political stability to the country which had gone through many coups and dictatorships. There were five presidents in five years before he came to power. 36 of the 83 governments in the past had lasted a year or less. Morales was the longest-serving president of the country. He survived a few coup attempts, separatist insurgencies and US destabilization.

 

Secondly, his government had reduced poverty drastically in the fourteen years of his government with pro-poor and Inclusive Development programmes. His administration had reached out to the indigenous communities in rural areas with building of schools, hospitals, roads and utilities. The World Bank and other outside agencies have recognized this as the most successful poverty reduction in Latin America. 

 

Thirdly, Morales nationalized the oil and gas and other sectors from which he increased state revenue. He got better price for the gas exported to Brazil and he even fought with his idol President Lula for higher prices. He ploughed the increased revenue into welfare projects.

 

Fourthly, Morales managed the economy prudently and pragmatically despite his radical leftist rhetoric. This was evident from the impressive average annual GDP growth rate of 5 % from 2006 to 2018. During his terms, inflation and external debt were low and the currency remained stable. Before his presidency, the country had suffered hyper inflation and currency devaluations in four to five digits and had exploded with debt crises. 

 

More importantly, Morales gave dignity, self esteem and pride to the Indian community. The Bolivian ladies wore polleras (traditional pleated and long skirts) proudly to offices and shopping malls.

During the protests against the interim government, the Indians chanted “the pollera will be respected!” Before his official inauguration in 2006, he visited the ancient temple in Tiwanaku and performedtraditional rites seeking the blessings of Indian gods.

 

Morales lead a simple and austere life without any personal ostentation. He was free from large scale corruption and did not acquire personal wealth or indulge in any luxuries. He continued as a bachelor and dedicated most of his time for the country, except for his indulgence in playing football and occasional girlfriends. 

 

After having been in power for such a long period of 14 years, Morales should have stood down in the 2019 elections, as mandated by the term limit imposed by his own new constituition. This would have safeguarded his great legacy of achievements.

 

But hubris went to his head and he started believing that he was indispensable. He held a referendum in 2016 seeking approval for another term. This was rejected by the people. Disregarding the verdict, he went to the constitutional court and got from friendly judges a verdict approving his reelection, on the spurious ground of his personal human rights. This shocked and divided his own supporters.

 

Morales made his worst mistake during the counting of votes in the 20 October 2019 elections. The live counting and telecast was shut down abrupty and mysteriously for almost 24 hours, when the margin between Morales and his nearest rival Carlos Mesa was narrowing. The next day, counting was resumed and it was announced that Morales won with more than ten percent difference in votes. This raised suspicions. When the opposition and external election observers questioned, Morales agreed to an audit and later to holding a new election. But it was too late. Seeing the best opportunity to bring down Morales, the opposition resorted to protests and clashed with his supporters. The military and police took the side of the protestors and turned against him. The US-trained army chief had advised him to leave the country for his own safety. He got the message and took the offer of Mexico for asylum and from there went to Argentina. 

 

The power vacuum following his departure was seized by a conservative senator Jeanine Anez, who proclaimed herself as the interim president with the support of the military. She was the second vice president of the senate and overrode the claims of the president and first vice president of the senate after intimidating and rejecting their constitutuinal rights for succession. Anez formed an interim government consisting of conservative whites who wanted to take revenge on the Indians who kept them away from power for fourteen years. 

 

The interim government gave extra powers to the security forces which brutally suppressed the protests of the Indian supporters of Morales. During her swearing in ceremony, Áñez made a show of bringing Christianity with her, after the last administration’s emphasis on Indigenous traditions. “The Bible has returned to the government palace!” she declared, carrying an oversized Bible. Anez posted racist twitter messages belittling indigenous people. Her supporters burnt the multicloured traditional Indian flag insulting the indigenous.

 

The interim government carried out a witch-hunt against the leaders of MAS (Movimiento Al Socialismo- Movement for Socialism, the political party of Morales) with detentions and prosecutions. They charged Morales himself with terrorism (by inciting anti-government protests), communism, drug trafficking and sedition. Interior Minister Arturo Murillo vowed to jail Evo Morales for the rest of his life. Several ministers of Morales' government went underground, left the country or sought refuge in foreign embassies. The interim government even sought the help of Israel to fight “terrorism”. They resumed relations with US, which had earlier shunned Morales.  They suspended relations with Venezuela and Cuba and sent hundreds of Cuban doctors and Venezuelan diplomats home. Áñez participated in a ceremony in Santa Cruz to honor the military veterans who captured Ernesto “Che” Guevara in the Bolivian jungle on Oct. 8, 1967 to mock Morales who is an admirer of Che.

 

The blatant acts of revenge and restoration of policies of discrimination and disrespect to the indigenous people by the interim government pushed the Indians to reunite and vote for their own party MAS. The Indians realized that the white elite had not given up their past racial prejudices. 

 

The President-elect Arce is a moderate and pragmatic technocrat. He was the economy and finance minister of Morales and before that had worked in the Central Bank. He did his Masters in economics from a British University and had worked as professor in a Bolivian university. He was responsible for the successful management of the economy during the presidency of Morales. 

Besides winning the presidency with an impressive 55% (as against the 28% of his nearest rival and 14% of the third candidate),the MAS party has also won majority in both the Senate and the Lower House. This means that the government of Arce will continue to be stable and could continue the progressive socioeconomic policies of the Morales presidency. He has said,“We’re going to work and resume the process of change without hate, and learning and overcoming our errors as MAS.”

Morales will soon return to Bolivia from his exile in Argentina. However, he is not likely to get any governmental position. He will continue as head of the party and be active in trade union bodies. 

 

It is important to note that a number of new young MAS leaders have won the elections to the Congress. These talents will be nurtured under the Arce presidency to take over power in the future providing continuity to the rule of Indians. The new Indian leaders and cadres of MAS 2.0 have learnt valuable lessons from the mistakes of Morales and the excesses of the interim white government. With these renewed beginnings, Bolivia is set for a stable political future with economic equity. 

 

The success of the MAS party has gladdened the hearts of leftists in Latin America, who were dismayed by the right turn in some countries of the region. Bolivia has shown that socialism need not be a dirty word as its critics see it in Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba. The victory of MAS is an apt response to the right wing leaders such as Bolsonaro and Trump who were waging a war against socialism.

 

The success of the Indians in Bolivia is an inspiration to the forty million Indians in Latin America. The Indians in other parts of Latin America will now feel emboldened to seek their entitlements and respect for their identities.

 

Despite their excesses, the interim government of Anez should be given credit for holding free and fair elections. There were no major incidents of violence or controversies during the elections. Anez was quick to congratulate Arce even before the completion of counting of the votes. The main opposition candidate Carlos Mesa also accepted the verdict gracefully and promptly. The Bolivian democracy has now become stronger and more stable. The debates and speeches during the Bolivian election campaign of the candidates were more civilized and decent unlike the racist, polarizing, ugly, ridiculous and hate-filled noises in US, the biggest and oldest democracy in the Americas. Bolivia has also averted going to the other extreme of right from left as happened in the case of Brazil. The democratic renewal of poor little Bolivia is a ray of hope and optimism at this time when the democracies in US, Europe and other parts of the world are being vitiated by the polarizing forces of racism and extremism. 

 

Purgatory – Argentine novel by Tomas Eloy Martinez

“Desaparecido” (disappeared) is the theme of the novel “Purgatory” by Tomas Eloy Martinez, the Argentine writer. The noun ‘desaparecido’ is an addition to Spanish vocabulary by the Argentine military dictatorship which made thousands of leftists disappear. 

In the novel “ Purgatory”, Simon Cardoso, a young cartographer and leftist sympathizer is made to disappear by the military dictatorship. This is soon after his marriage to Emilia, the protagonist in the novel. Devastated by the disappearance, she spends the rest of her life waiting for the return of her husband. She does not believe the news that he was killed, since she has not seen the body. Her oligarchic father, who makes money by collaborating with the Generals, thinks it is good riddance. Unable to have a life of her own without her love, she spends her whole life searching for her disappeared husband. She goes to Brazil, Venezuela and Mexico, when she gets false tips of sightings of Simon in those countries. Finally she settles in US but continues to look out for Simon even there. She is completely obsessed with her impossible hope of return of her husband and is lost in hallucinations and delirium.  She meets another Argentine also on exile in US and tells him her story. She says to him “the most unbearable loneliness is not being able to be alone”.

 

During the military dictatorship, the soldiers went on a rampage by picking up anyone, branding them as subversives and detaining, torturing and killing with impunity. Emilia and Simon were detained when they were on a map making mission in Tucuman area for the Automobile Club of Argentina. But the illiterate and ignorant soldiers on patrol in the area did not understand the mapping work. They arrested the couple, abused and tortured them. Emilia was saved by her influential father but not Simon. 

 

When asked about the whereabouts of someone abducted by the regime, one of the dictators responded, “ ni vivo, ni muerto, simplemente desaparecido” (not alive nor dead but simply disappeared). The military picked up leftists, and anyone suspected of sympathizing with communism, jailed, tortured, killed and even thrown a few prisoners from planes. Workers disappeared from their factory gates; farmers from their fields, leaving tractors running; dead men from the graves in which they had been buried only the day before. Children disappeared from their mothers’ wombs and mothers from the children’s memories. The sick who arrived in hospital at midnight had disappeared by morning.  Truth was made to disappear by the false propaganda of the regime.

 

The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo movement started a silent protest march in Buenos Aires in 1977 seeking information on their ‘disappeared’ children. The regime abducted three of the mothers and made them also ‘disappear’. Undeterred, the other courageous Mothers continued their march throughout the time of dictatorship which ended in 1983. 

 

The military regime made even the body of Evita disappear in 1955. Fearing that her body and burial ceremony would rally the leftists, the authorities sent the body in a coffin to be buried secretly in a cemetery in Milan. They made identical coffins and sent them to other European cities to confuse anyone trying to trace it. Finally Evita’s body was found and brought back to Argentina in 1974. 

 

In 1974, the Montonero guerrilla group kidnapped from the cemetery the body of General Aramburu who lead the coup against Peron and became President in 1955-58. He was earlier abducted and killed by the Montoneros in retaliation for his execution of Peronists. The group demanded the return of Evita’s body in exchange for that of Aramburu. Once Evita's body arrived in Argentina, the Montoneros gave up Aramburu's corpse and abandoned it in a street in Buenos Aires.

 

The military regime made even the names of Evita and Peron disappear from the public after the coup in 1955. Mentioning of the names in public or media was prohibited and violation was punished with imprisonment. In government files, Evita’s name was avoided and she was referred as ‘that woman’, ‘deceased’, ‘mare’ and ‘the person’.

 

Martinez has described in poignant detail the anguish and agony of Emilia who is unable to come to terms with the disappearance of her husband. This was the case with thousands of other Argentines who lost their loved ones and could not say farewell with proper burials. 

 

Martinez has written novels and articles on the disappearances, dictatorship and devastation of the Argentine society. My reviews of three of his novels in the links below:

The Peron Novel- https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2010/02/peron-novel-by-tomas-eloy-martinez.html

Santa Evita - https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2008/08/santa-evita-argentine-novel-by-tomas.html

The Tango singer- https://latinamericanaffairs.blogspot.com/2009/10/tango-singer-novel-by-tomas-eloy.html

 

Purgatory is Martinez’s last novel before his death in 2010.

 

Martinez himself was a victim of the dictatorship. The newspaper for which he was working in Buenos Aires was closed down by the authorities. He was forced into exile in Venezuela where he lived from 1975 to 1983. Thereafter he moved to US. On his exile, he says, ‘No one returns from exile. What you forsake, forsakes you’. 

 

El Salvador, the country in need of The Saviour

El Salvador was given its name by the Conquistador Pedro de Alvarado who dedicated the land of his conquest to Jesus Christ, The Saviour (El Salvador). The capital of the city is San Salvador which means Holy Saviour. The country is in dire need of the help of The Saviour.  It has one of the highest murder rates in the world and is notorious for deadly gang wars. The country has been traumatized by civil war and the right wing military dictatorships which massacred thousands of indigenous people and leftists. These days, the country keeps hitting news headlines in US with the caravans of Salvadorians seeking asylum, giving more fuel to Trump’s anti-migrant vitriols. It is in this context that we get a Salvadorian perspective of the issues from Roberto Lovato, a Salvadorian writer living in US,  in his memoirs “Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas”, published in September 2020. He narrates the history of the tragedy of violence through his own personal life story and that of his family. 

Lovato has the unique real life experience of having lived as a Salvadorian mara gang member in US, guerilla fighter in Salvador against the dictatorship, a redeemed evangelical and finally as a writer, journalist and human rights activist for the refugees from Central America coming into US.

 

Lovato’s father Ramoncito was an illegitimate son of a rich coffee planter. His mother was a poor Indian woman Mama Tey who worked for the planter.  Roberto is traumatised at the age of nine after witnessing the 1932 Matanza (cold bloodeded massacre) of indigenous community in his village by the military death squads.  After the massacre, Mama Tey flees to San Salvador, the capital where she makes a living by stitching clothes for low class prostitutes. Ramoncito gets his first job as a receptionist in a brothel, receiving customers and serving coffee for them. He takes to alcoholism and crimes in the company of his other poor friends. Later he and his mother move to Los Angeles, which has the largest Salvadorean community in US. His son Roberto Lovato is born and brought up in Los Angels. Lovato and his Salvadorean friends are taunted and attacked by the bigger Mexican and local white gangs. Life for Salvadorian youth in US is as insecure and dangerous as in El Salvador. For protection, Lovato joins a small Salvadorian gang “Los Originales” which steals cars and distributes drugs. But despite this gang involvement, Roberto finishes his university studies successfully and becomes a professor and writer. Moved by the tragedy of the massacre of innocent people, he travels to El Salvador and joins the FMLN (The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) guerilla movement fighting against the military dictatorship. He gets guns and supplies for the guerillas from US arranged by his own father besides others. After the end of the civil war, Lovato returns to US and resumes his academic career.

 

Lovato goes back to El Salvador to investigate the old massacres and the new gang wars. He goes to Ahuachapán, where his father was born and learns that his grand father (from father’side) was one of the active participants in the massacre of the Indians. He meets ex-guerilla leaders of FMLN who have now come to power through the ballot. He interviews members of the two notorious gangs MS 13 and Barrio 18. He visits the places where leftists and Indians were executed and buried in anonymous mass graves. He sees the working of the forensic laboratories which work with the bones and skulls to identify and analyse them for the government and family members. 

 

The Salvadoran military death squads had run “counterinsurgency” programs that starved, shot up, and bombed indigenous communities they perceived as supporting the FMLN, the main guerilla movement. As a former Guatemalan president and School of Americas (at Fort Benning, Georgia) graduate José Efraín Ríos Montt put it, “The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish, you have to drain the sea.”  Ríos Montt was eventually convicted of genocide but was not sentenced due to his poor health.

 

In the infamous El Mozote massacre of 1981, Colonel Monterrosa and his troops mistook nearly one thousand campesinos for FMLN guerrilla–sympathizing civilians and slaughtered them. Investigations by forensic specialists have revealed that many of the victims were women and children. Of those killed, 553 were minors, 477 of whom were under twelve. The majority of the children were six years old or younger. 

 

The US supported the right wing military dictatorships of El Salvador and gave counter insurgency training in the School of the Americas to Salvadorian and other Latin American military officers. Of the twelve accused in the El Mozote massacre, by the UN Truth Commission report, ten, including Monterrosa, were graduates of the School of Americas. Counterinsurgency is a multi-billion-dollar industry for US arms dealers and military contractors who supply weapons, helicopters and other equipments to Latin America. The guns used by the Salvadorian gangs are illegally supplied from US.

 

Those killed in the massacres were buried in mass graves throughout the country. The cruelty of this can be seen from a letter from the country’s director of public health,who advised the governors and mayors “to take necessary sanitary measures in the face of reports of growing numbers of unburied bodies and mass graves. It is necessary to make the dimensions [of the mass graves] uniform for reasons of health. The accumulation of no more than fifty corpses in a single grave allows for better decomposition and less absorption into the soil. Even better would be isolated graves, in which no more than eight to ten corpses would be placed”.  The land of El Salvador made fertile by a natural mix of volcanic ash and minerals, there is a new fertilizer, the decomposed bodies of thousands of indigenous people.

 

Lovato falls in love with a FMLN guerrilla fighter and diplomat who comes to LA to work with the Salvadorean community. Born to a poor Indian family she studied to become a nun. But when her family was killed by the army, she joins the guerrillas. She surprises Roberto saying that she loves operas and her favourite one is ‘O Fortuna’ from Carmina Burana,”. She says calls it as her ‘música de combate’, the music she listened in times of personal and political combat. She says, “Whenever we would march in protest against the government policies and death-squad killings, they would often kill many protesters. And then, to make things worse, they would play opera music in the government radio to mock us. So it became the music for us to remember our martyrs, our música de combate”.

 

After all these adventures, Lovato is now settled in his postwar identity as a writer, journalist and human rights activist. He has finally found peace after almost twenty-five years of clandestinity, secrets, and fear. He is critical of the US police which treats all the Central Americans and Mexicans as gangsters and drug traffickers and harasses the whole community. 

  

Lovato says, “Throughout my life, our family has been divided by the border between memory and forgetting. Where most see the refugee crisis as “new,” I see the longue durée of history and memory. Where many see the story beginning at the border, I see the time-space continuum of violence, migration, and forgetting that extends far beyond and below the US-Mexico border. Where others see mine as a Central American story, I see it as a story about the United States”. True. It was the genocide and atrocities of the US-supported right wing Salvadorian military dictatorships which made people flee to US in the beginning. The US trained the Salvadorian military in counter insurgency and also sent its own advisors to guide and observe some of the operations. The US gave billions of dollars of military assistance which was used by the Salvadorean dictatorships to fight its own people. Young Salvadoreans in US were forced into gang culture by the US drug gangs. The notorious MS 13 and Barrio 18 gangs of El Salvador were originally formed in Los Angeles. When US deported the Salvadorean gangsters back to their home country, they formed bigger gangs and caused mayhem with more deadly US weapons. This has made more Salvadoreans flee and seek asylum in US. It is a vicious cycle with clear US complicity and culpability as the exporter of gang culture and illegal weapons to El Salvador. 

 

Lovato ends the book saying, “My Salvadorean journey from being half dead to more fully alive has begun”. He quotes the poignant lines of the famous Salvadorean poet Roque Dalton who also took up guns as a guerilla fighter and took bullets becoming a martyr in 1975.

 

Ser salvadoreño es ser medio muerto

Sobrevivimos pero medio vivos

 

To be a Salvadorean is half dead

We survive but only with half living