Bolivia: Burdens of a State Manager
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- Published on Sunday, 05 April 2015 22:51
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A Socialist Project e-bulletin .... No. 1102 .... April 6, 2015
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Bolivia: Burdens of a State Manager
Jeffery R. Webber
In the opening salvos of Latin America's uneven lurch to the Left in the early twenty-first century, Bolivia distinguished itself as the region's most radical socio-political terrain. Left-indigenous movements in the countryside and cityscapes alike threw the state into crisis and brought two successive neoliberal presidents to their knees -- Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, and Carlos Mesa in 2005. Evo Morales's party, the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Toward Socialism, MAS), leapt into the power vacuum opened up by this series of revolts, and there has been serious debate on the Left as to how best to button down the central political dynamic of the country ever since. In a country where 62 per cent... of the population self-identified as indigenous in the 2001 census, Morales became the first indigenous president through the December 2005 elections with 54 per cent of the popular vote, assuming office in January 2006. He repeated this extraordinary electoral success in December 2009, with 64 per cent, and again in October 2014, with 61 per cent.
The prolific writings of Vice-President Álvaro García Linera offer one window into the complexities of the political, ideological, and economic developments that have transpired since Morales first assumed office. With that in mind, the following detailed exposition and critical interrogation of the core arguments advanced in his 2011 book, Tensiones creativas de la revolución [Creative Tensions of the Revolution], is meant to shed some light on what is at stake in the competing characterizations of the "process of change" unfolding in Bolivia since 2006. If for many readers, only passingly familiar with the country, García Linera might seem to represent Bolivian radical theory tout court, in fact his intellectual output over the last nine years has been comparatively shallow, heavily determined by his role as second-in-command of the state apparatus. The rich and demanding provocations of his early work have largely been eclipsed by managerial apologia.