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Bolivia's Indians
Confront Globalization
by John Mohawk
The following article by John Mohawk of the
Seneca Nation from Indian Country Today's August 20, 2004 issue
illustrates how the Aboriginal performance of demonstration in South
America can be a vehicle for change.
In 1781 Andean Indians laid siege to La Paz, the
capital of Bolivia, for 109 days. The white people were reduced,
it is said, to eating shoe leather and rats. A Spanish army rescued
the colonists and captured the leader, Tupak Kateri. His was a gruesome
execution (tied to four horses, drawn and quartered), but he left
his tormentors with a prophecy: "I will return," he said,
"and I will be millions." It is a prophecy that is echoing
in the mountains these days, and it has the attention of the United
States. Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and the
Indians are the poorest people in Bolivia. For three years there
has been political turmoil there (some call it insurrection, a term
which has a connotation that agitation for political change lacks
legitimacy), and the movement has frustrated multinational corporations,
challenged the American behemoth's designs for globalization, and
nearly elected an openly Indian president. Had it been successful
in the latter endeavor, he would have been the first Indian president
of any country in the Western Hemisphere since Benito Juarez in
Mexico in 1858.
The current movement began with the Zapatistas
in 1994 (also directed against globalization) and was echoed in
movements in Ecuador, Guatemala, and especially in Bolivia. Bolivia
is special. About 1.5 million Indians live in autonomous villages—places
over which the government has little or no control. Their movement
is evolving in an unusual way. Most movements for change idealize
a past and try to rebuild a version of it. Many see their movement
as postmodern, where modernity is defined as the arrival of Columbus,
the conquest, the subjugation, slavery, racism, and all the negatives
that define Indian life since 1492. They speak of going past all
that to a new day, and in Bolivia Indians lead the anti-corporate,
anti-globalism effort. In 2002, Indians led a revolt against privatization,
a key piece of globalization policy, when the Bechtel Corporation
tried to gain a monopoly over all the water in Cochabamba, Bolivia's
third-largest city. Bechtel tried to charge so much for the water
that it threatened to bankrupt the people of the city. Demonstrators
forced Bechtel out and reinstated the public ownership of the water
system.
In 2003, following U.S. desires, the Bolivian
government sold rights to natural gas which was then headed to the
market for Mexican and U.S. consumers. On October 12, the 511-year
anniversary of the landing of Columbus, Bolivian soldiers attacked
Indian peasants in the Andean city of El Alto, the largest Indian
city in Latin America. Hundreds were wounded and 65 died, but it
sparked a nationwide movement of peasants, Indians, and workers
that culminated in the siege of La Paz and forced President Gonzales
Sanchez de Lozado to flee to Miami. (The President had impeccable
globalization credentials; he was a mining executive trained at
the University of Chicago in free-market economics.)
Indian movements have shaken the status quo in
Latin America. The Mapuche Indians are part of a major political
resistance to timber companies in southern Chile, and in Ecuador
Indian demonstrations against oppressive prices toppled the government
in 2000. Critics of the Indian movements, such as the Wall Street
Journal, speak with alarm about an Indian movement which wants to
do away with the nation-state of Bolivia and return to the days
when Indian nations ruled the land under traditional laws. Proponents
of that way of thinking say that in those times, there were no rich
or poor, and no acquiescence to exploitation. Bolivia is a mountain
country with cities in very cold areas. It also has enormous natural
gas resources. American companies see the problem as how to get
the gas out of Bolivia to someplace friendlier, like Chile, where
it could be liquefied and sent to markets in the north. They would
like to accomplish this with as little interference from Bolivia's
Indians as possible.
The way the advocates of globalization see it,
the Indian movement would discourage investment and the country
would become even poorer. The Indians in opposition to globalization
are called radicals and other names because of their opposition.
They point out that they benefit little from privatization of their
natural resources and suffer much from the imposition of economic
policies from the North. Since then the new president, Carlos Mesa,
has promised to hold a referendum on how the gas can be developed.
Plans are being made for a new constitutional convention which may
give Indians more political power.
The most extreme advocates of unrestrained globalization
believe in the privatization of everything, and they are intent
on exporting this idea to the world. Such people believe there should
be no public ownership of anything. Under their plans, postal services,
social services, prisons, public transportation, parks, roads, utilities,
water works and everything governments have been known to own should
be sold off in the name of "efficiency." At Cochabamba,
Bechtel laid claim even to the water that ran off people's roofs.
Needless to say, "efficiency" means providing services
at the absolutely lowest cost possible, which has resulted in prisons
that are seriously understaffed and would threaten services including
telephone, postal and even electricity in remote areas because corporations
would cease functioning whenever they were not making money. In
the United States, corporations long ago acquired the status of
"persons" under the law, but they are not people. Given
the standard of behavior they exhibit, if they were persons they
would be diagnosed as sociopathic because they exhibit no sense
of responsibility to society. Ask Bolivians about this.
Bolivians have written letters to Iraq with stories
of the struggle against Bechtel. Iraq is to be the U.S poster child
for privatization, and under occupation its laws were changed to
permit foreigners to own practically everything. It is illegal under
international law for an occupying power to transfer the assets
of an occupied nation, and this may be a reason for the early transfer
of "sovereignty." The Baathists were a socialist political
party and the government provided free food and a wide range of
benefits to the population and owned a wide range of assets. Iraqi
oil, when it is flowing as the Bush administration hopes, will provide
a revenue stream that could pay for a whole range of corporate services,
from water to transportation to electricity to education and more.
That's what was, and is, missing in poor countries
like Bolivia: a revenue stream to enrich the corporations. In Bolivia,
the problem was getting blood from a stone. In Iraq, the problem
is winning the hearts and minds while bleeding the people through
corporate billing for everything of value while keeping them from
having anything to say about it.
John C. Mohawk, Ph.D., columnist for Indian
Country Today, is an author and professor in the Center for the
Americas at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
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