Bolivian crisis explodes, Latin America rallies behind Morales

In the United States, where most people know little about other countries, Time magazine is playing the South American crisis as if it were a matter of Saturday morning children's cartoon villains at play. "Behind Chavez's Potty-Mouthed Rant," was the headline on the Time story.

Well, yes, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez used some choice words, as he is wont to do, on the occasion of declaring US Ambassador Patrick Duddy persona non grata. The Venezuelan government took this action as a gesture of solidarity with Bolivia, whose President Evo Morales had similarly thrown out US Ambassador Philip Goldberg.

Goldberg was expelled in the wake of an upsurge in secessionist violence in five eastern lowland provinces where most of Bolivia's oil and gas is located. These are led by conservative white political and economic elites and, unlike Bolivia as a whole, have non-indigenous majorities. In a series of August recall votes, voters in four of those provinces ratified the mandates of their secessionist governors by solid majorities, the national electorate approved of Morales by a much larger margin than the governors won and some conservatives in the leftist president's indigenous highland strongholds were recalled. After the voters handed down the split decision, the Bush administration in Washington called on Morales to compromise with the lowland secessionists.

In the weeks since the recall vote, secessionist protests have escalated in number and intensity. In part this is because a constituent assembly is about to submit a draft of a new constitution to Bolivian voters. The proposed new constitution would confirm that the nation rather than the regions owns the oil and gas rights and mandate a land redistribution scheme that offends the large landowners who dominate lowland politics, and polls are indicating that it would be approved by a wide margin.

September saw the occupation of a number of national government offices in the lowland provinces and violent clashes between pro- and anti-Morales demonstrators that took several lives. On September 11 in Pando province at least eight Morales supporters riding in a convoy of trucks headed toward a pro-government demonstration died in a machine gun attack at a roadblock set up by secessionists. The following day the president imposed martial law in the province, closing bars, banning gathering and prohibiting the carrying of arms by anyone other than the army.

Meanwhile, secessionists bombed a gas pipeline through which Brazil gets half of its natural gas supply, briefly turned off the valve to another pipe that supplies gas to Argentina, and took over three airports in the lowland regions.

The Bolivian Army moved in to retake the airports, killing two anti-government protesters at the one in Pando's seat at Cobija, and to get the gas flowing to Brazil and Argentina again. The soldiers met armed resistance from secessionists on the streets of Cobija, which is on the Brazilian border.

Morales directly accused "Brazilian and Peruvian assassins under the command of Pando Governor Leopoldo Fernández" in the September 11 machine gun attack. Fernández argued that the attack wasn't an ambush as Morales characterized it, but a confrontation between opposing factions of Bolivians that was provoked by government supporters.

While it appears that there will be the most serious of criminal charges lodged against one of the lowland governors, Morales did agree to meet with all of the rebellious provinces' governors. He also met with a representative of the OAS, who called for a peaceful solution to the dispute, and attended a South American summit hosted by Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

Morales also ordered Ambassador Goldberg to leave, citing meetings with secessionist leaders, revelations earlier this year that the US Embassy had asked Peace Corps volunteers and a Fulbright scholar to report any Cuban or Venezuelan citizens they encountered in Bolivia and financing through the US Agency for International Development (USAID) for opposition groups. "Without fear of the empire, today I declare Mr. Philip Goldberg persona non grata," Morales said. "Looking for the division [of Bolivia]," the Bolivian president alleged, Goldberg "sought to create the conditions for a species of civil war."

Venezuela, whose president has also faced various US-supported attempts to oust him, followed suit by expelling the American ambassador in Caracas. Hugo Chávez has been the target of a long campaign of vilification by public officials of both major parties and by the mainstream press in the United States, while Morales is less well known and seen by many Americans who do know something about the Andean region as the elected representative of Bolivia's two-thirds indigenous majority who is opposed by a predatory white power structure that had held power since the Spanish Conquest. Thus it's not surprising that many US news organizations and politicians are treating the crisis not as something to do with Bolivia but a matter of the Venezuelan president behaving badly.

In South America, however, the crisis is viewed much differently.

First, indigenous peoples throughout the Americas view Morales as a folk hero and in those countries with substantial indigenous populations --- including Panama --- that perspective has become a political fact of life that the parties can ignore only at great peril to their electoral chances.

Second, with the exception of Colombia all South American countries are to a certain extent lined up against the economic policies known as the Washington Consensus. Some, like Peru, Chile and Uruguay, approve of free trade with the United States but have opposed the US terms for the stalled Free Trade Area of the Americas and lined up against the developing countries in the failed Doha Round of World Trade Organization negotiations. Others are concentrating on building an altenative set of economic alliances and institutions, such as the MERCOSUR trade bloc, the Banco del Sur international financial institution, the TeleSur television channel, the ALBA trade alliance and the Petrocaribe energy plan that Venezuela has promoted. Moreover, in country after country, Latin American leaders are far more cautious and pragmatic about economic matters than politics. That's why, for example, the leaders of the 2002 coup attempt against Hugo Chávez were only recognized by one Latin American president --- Panama's Mireya Moscoso --- and that was taken both within Panama and internationally as a major diplomatic gaffe.

So did the lowlands secessionists expect US troops, or at least American arms, to come flying into the airports to which Morales sent troops? Bolivia's landlocked, with its militarily strongest neighbors being Brazil and Argetina. Brazilian President Lula da Silva called for peace talks between Morales and the rebel governors, asked Bolivians to keep the gas supply flowing to his country, and added that Brazil would not tolerate the breakdown of Bolivia's institutions. Argentine President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner called her colleagues in other South American countries to talk about the crisis, and meanwhile her Foreign Ministry issued a statement blasting the secessionists for "grave acts of terrorist violence and sabotage" and offering the president's "full and unconditional support to the constitutional government of Evo Morales."

In the other countries that border Bolivia, Paraguay has a new leftist president and despite historically tense Paraguayan - Bolivian relations Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo won't allow his nation's use as a base from which to attack Bolivia; and Chile also has a long history of troubles with Bolivia but is also not about to let its territory be used to support secessionists. That leaves Peru, whose President Alan García has been engaged in a long-running war of words with Evo Morales but which has a huge indigenous population that would be deeply offended by any Peruvian attempt to overthrow or undermine Morales.

At the September 15 summit of the 12-member Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) presidents and foreign ministers in Santiago, Chile --- which was also attended by OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza --- there were unanimous calls for an end to the violence and a negotiated settlement of disagreements. A few leaders, most prominently Hugo Chávez as was expected, criticized US interference in Bolivia.

The day before, while traveling in Peru, Ecuador's President Rafael Correa opined that Morales and Chávez had good reasons for expelling the American ambassadors from their countries, and although he said that US diplomats in his country had behaved properly toward his administration he would expel any foreign emissary that tried to interfere in Ecuador's internal affairs or compromise its national security. In Honduras, President Manuel Zelaya also backed Bolivia's expulsion of Goldberg and delayed his acceptance of the new US ambassador's credentials due to the crisis.

US State Department spokesman Sean McCormack answered Bolivia's charges by calling then untrue and saying that Morales knows they are false. The Bolivian and Venezuelan ambassadors in Washington were declared persona non grata to reciprocate for the American diplomats' expulsions.

In the US Congress, Democrat Eliot L. Engel, who heads the Western Hemisphere subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said that he "feels outraged" by Goldberg's expulsion from Bolivia and Morales's criticism of the US Agency for International Development. "This time Morales has gone too far," Engel said.

But the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a Washington think tank, pointed out that "despite numerous requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act, the United States has not turned over all the names of recipient organizations of USAID funds" in Bolivia, and noted that during the Bush administration USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy and other US governmental or quasi-governmental agencies have been funding groups that oppose Latin American governments that the White House would like to see defeated. "Until recently, USAID had an 'Office of Transition Initiatives' operating in Bolivia, funneling millions of dollars of training and support to right-wing opposition regional governments and movements," the group added.

On the Republican side of the aisle, Representative Dan Burton called for an end to US economic and anti-drug aid to Bolivia and the raising of import duties on Bolivian products.

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