opinion

What to do about Evo?

by Eric Jackson

The headline of this column ought to sound ridiculous, and it’s only due to retrograde thinking in Washington that it might make any sense at all. The Bolivian people have chosen Evo Morales, leader of the Movement Toward Socialism and champion of his nation’s coca farmers, as their president. A prolonged era of white minority rule over this overwhelmingly indigenous population is at an end.

Ordinarily, countries will accept the voters’ choice and respectfully negotiate with the incoming government to protect and advance their own national interests. That’s what even nations that fancy themselves as great powers ought to do.

Ah, but the representatives of the maladroit and arrogant Bush administration made asses of themselves in defense of Andean apartheid, failed drug policies and neo-liberal economics. They drove impoverished Bolivians away from the Washington Consensus and into the leftward direction in which most South Americans are moving. Bush’s people warned, cajoled, vilified and threatened in order to prevent Evo Morales’s election and the first results were that other South American countries and the Bolivian Army gave their election eve backing to the object of Washington’s wrath. Then the voters gave Morales an unpredicted first round absolute majority, a rare event in Bolivian presidential politics.

There is no cause for people in the United States to take this South American election as a threat or a crisis. It’s just what the people of another nation decided they needed to do for themselves.

However, the US government interfered in this election, as it has been interfering in Bolivia’s internal affairs for many decades, and this time the would-be power brokers failed in most spectacular form. At the very least, those diplomats and policy makers most closely identified with this failure need to be taken out of positions from which they can aggravate the alienation that many Bolivians feel when considering the United States and the things for which it stands.

In Panama’s Spanish-language newspapers, particularly El Panama America, you can already read the screeds coming out of Miami, all the stuff about the supposed Castro-Chavez-Morales “trident” aimed at the United States. That bizarre hallucination is but one more symptom of a Latin American policy entirely dominated by the most fanatical reactionaries among the Cuban exile community, people whose distorted vision sees every Latin American phenomenon in terms of Fidel Castro. No doubt, within the context of Florida politics this faction will be bolstered by the arrival of many of the henchmen of Bolivian dictators and kleptocrats, just like they were by erstwhile members of Venezuela’s sticky-fingered but inept ruling class after it lost its grip on power. But it really is time for the rest of America to see the Miami crowd as the source of bad advice and unsavory associations.

Yes, we can see that Dubya is thinking in other terms. As in stationing US troops in adjacent Paraguay. As in encouraging white secessionists who would split Santa Cruz and the eastern lowlands under which most of Bolivia’s oil and gas lies away from the impoverished Andean highlands. As in blaming Bolivia for the appetite for cocaine in the United States, even while playing down the huge role that the right wing AUC death squads who are allied with the Uribe administration in Colombia --- and in fact with the Bush administration --- play in the lives of American coke addicts.

What the Americans ought to do about Evo can only be done indirectly. It can only be done by filibusters against Bush policies in the US Senate, by voting the Republicans out of power in one or both houses of Congress next November, and by getting a new president who has a different attitude toward the rest of the Americas in 2008.

A different attitude? Yep. Different from that of George W. Bush and his father, and different from Bill Clinton’s as well. So different as to admit that the War on Drugs has been a costly failure and to switch to more sensible policies with which to confront the scourge of addictions. So different as to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court over human rights violators of every nation and to deny former Latin American rulers noted for their corruption or tyranny haven in the United States. So different as to scrap the NAFTA model as the template for economic relations in the hemisphere. And so different as to accept that, at long last, Andean peoples who were robbed and humiliated by the Spanish conquistadors and ruthlessly exploited by the succeeding oligarchies have arisen to take their rightful place in the world community.