8/10/08
A Bolivian Mea Culpa
Diego von Vacano
Imagine for a second that, come November, Barack Obama wins by a landslide. Backed by political
capital amassed by a large victory margin, he enlists Hillary Clinton to promote a universal-coverage
health care policy. This is successful, and is supported by most of the country. However, some elites
in a conservative area of the US, say Texas, believe this is too socialistic, and set up all sorts of
unconstitutional roadblocks to Obama's reforms. Some even mobilize to promote secession.
This hypothetical scenario is not far from what is going on in Bolivia. Back in 2005, when Evo Morales
became President under the banner of his explicitly-named 'Movement Towards Socialism,' he
received around 54% of the vote, the highest ever in a Bolivian presidential election. It is difficult to
believe that anyone who voted for his party didn't know of its leftist tendencies. One reason for his
victory was a surprising share of the vote that went to the MAS in the Santa Cruz area, a traditionally
conservative ranching state. Yet it is elites in this part of Bolivia that are now resisting Morales'
administration, to the point of supporting Nación Camba, a separatist movement.
While Barack Obama is no socialist (indeed, he is far from it), Morales' rise to power has blended
leftist ideas with a realistic acceptance of globalization. His energy policy is a case in point: while
'nationalization' has taken place, it does not involve a simple state takeover of gas and oil companies.
The state has become a majority shareholder in most cases, and is making deals with multinational
corporations as well as foreign governments such as India, China and Brazil, to maximize profits.
Thus, Morales has been far from a radical populist in the first years of his administration.
The referendum taking place today in Bolivia is an important test of democratic accountability for the
ruling party. Rather than to proceed without any concern for what the average Bolivian citizen thinks,
Morales is willfully submitting his leadership to a general assessment. This may, in practice lead to
entrenchment by opposing sides further down the road, but it is a necessary step to see if there is
democratic legitimacy to Morales' reforms. The real issue in Bolivia is not whether Morales may follow
in the authoritarian footsteps of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, but rather whether the country is able to
come to terms with its age-old racial problems.
Much of the resistance to Morales in Santa Cruz is fundamentally racist. Growing up in Bolivia in the
1970s, I had an experience that was not too far from living in a system of apartheid. I came from a
middle-class, mostly white and Western family, with relatives in the major cities of La Paz, Santa Cruz,
and Cochabamba. In all three places, I knew people who were of the upper-class, white elites, and
witnessed all sorts of racist and factionalist attitudes among them.
I attended the Franco-Bolivian School, where almost all students were white. Sometimes some
would make fun of students who happened to have darker skin, calling them cholos, which is a
derogatory term for quasi-Westernized indigenous people. In our classrooms, teachers made racist
jokes against cholas openly, eliciting perverse guffaws from young students. We studied the French
language, French geography, read about European history, memorized the Marseillaise, but paid little
attention to Bolivia's own past. Others in the Zona Sur, the white, upper-middle class suburban area
of La Paz, were equally indoctrinated in the superiority of foreign ways, such as students in the
German School or the American School.
Most of us in the middle and upper-middle class had at least one Indian maid. The term 'maid'
is really a misnomer, since these household workers are closer to slaves. Our maid or empleada, was
called Julia, and even though we had a warm personal relationship with her, her darker skin, Aymara
garb, and "funny accent" separated her from us. She worked basically all day, since there were no set
limits to the number of hours she had to be ready to cook, clean, wash dishes, or take care of us. I
remember that she had Sundays off, but often worked even those days as well. Whenever we went to
the market, we'd pay some old Indian man to carry huge and heavy grocery bags on his back in
exchange for what amounted to a few pennies.
To us in these elite circles, the indigenous people of Bolivia were similar to the way that French
pied-noirs described Arabs: as a dark, inert mass. Albert Camus' depiction of native Algerians in The
Stranger is not far from how indigenous Bolivians were seen (and still are in some places) by those
who were wealthier, more Westernized, and—above all— whiter. As a child, I would draw mocking
cartoon depictions of Indians in vignettes I called choleríos, images of drunken, slovenly, uncivilized
indigenous people that were based on how I saw them whenever we went to the Cochabamba
countryside.
On those trips, my father would tell us of how, before the 1952 Revolution, Indians were
treated as chattel, and they worked as pongos, basically beasts of burden until they old bodies could
barely stand. After the revolution formal equality was instituted, but in fact racism simply penetrated
daily life and permeated everything from schools to hospitals to politics. Throughout the seventies,
eighties, and nineties, most politicians (who basically benefited themselves) were white or mestizo, or
mixed-race. Few were indigenous, and when one did emerge, like Domitila Chungara, a homemaker-
turned-Marxist who helped end the Banzer dictatorship in 1978, she was met by widespread racial
ridicule coming from the upper echelons of a highly stratified society.
Rather than offer facile critiques of Morales as a 'populist,' or a naïve defense of his leadership as if it
were a return of the idealistic 1960s, it is important to look at Bolivia's strife-ridden racial past. Few
countries in the world were as racially-divided as Bolivia was throughout the twentieth-century.
Bolivians of all races and ethnicities should look in the mirror and try to be honest about the privileges
or burdens that they may have received as a result of their skin color and the way they speak
Spanish. A republic is based on the principle of the common good, and to the extent that Bolivians are
not able to see past the color barrier, it will never be fully realized.
A Bolivian Mea Culpa
Diego von Vacano
Imagine for a second that, come November, Barack Obama wins by a landslide. Backed by political
capital amassed by a large victory margin, he enlists Hillary Clinton to promote a universal-coverage
health care policy. This is successful, and is supported by most of the country. However, some elites
in a conservative area of the US, say Texas, believe this is too socialistic, and set up all sorts of
unconstitutional roadblocks to Obama's reforms. Some even mobilize to promote secession.
This hypothetical scenario is not far from what is going on in Bolivia. Back in 2005, when Evo Morales
became President under the banner of his explicitly-named 'Movement Towards Socialism,' he
received around 54% of the vote, the highest ever in a Bolivian presidential election. It is difficult to
believe that anyone who voted for his party didn't know of its leftist tendencies. One reason for his
victory was a surprising share of the vote that went to the MAS in the Santa Cruz area, a traditionally
conservative ranching state. Yet it is elites in this part of Bolivia that are now resisting Morales'
administration, to the point of supporting Nación Camba, a separatist movement.
While Barack Obama is no socialist (indeed, he is far from it), Morales' rise to power has blended
leftist ideas with a realistic acceptance of globalization. His energy policy is a case in point: while
'nationalization' has taken place, it does not involve a simple state takeover of gas and oil companies.
The state has become a majority shareholder in most cases, and is making deals with multinational
corporations as well as foreign governments such as India, China and Brazil, to maximize profits.
Thus, Morales has been far from a radical populist in the first years of his administration.
The referendum taking place today in Bolivia is an important test of democratic accountability for the
ruling party. Rather than to proceed without any concern for what the average Bolivian citizen thinks,
Morales is willfully submitting his leadership to a general assessment. This may, in practice lead to
entrenchment by opposing sides further down the road, but it is a necessary step to see if there is
democratic legitimacy to Morales' reforms. The real issue in Bolivia is not whether Morales may follow
in the authoritarian footsteps of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, but rather whether the country is able to
come to terms with its age-old racial problems.
Much of the resistance to Morales in Santa Cruz is fundamentally racist. Growing up in Bolivia in the
1970s, I had an experience that was not too far from living in a system of apartheid. I came from a
middle-class, mostly white and Western family, with relatives in the major cities of La Paz, Santa Cruz,
and Cochabamba. In all three places, I knew people who were of the upper-class, white elites, and
witnessed all sorts of racist and factionalist attitudes among them.
I attended the Franco-Bolivian School, where almost all students were white. Sometimes some
would make fun of students who happened to have darker skin, calling them cholos, which is a
derogatory term for quasi-Westernized indigenous people. In our classrooms, teachers made racist
jokes against cholas openly, eliciting perverse guffaws from young students. We studied the French
language, French geography, read about European history, memorized the Marseillaise, but paid little
attention to Bolivia's own past. Others in the Zona Sur, the white, upper-middle class suburban area
of La Paz, were equally indoctrinated in the superiority of foreign ways, such as students in the
German School or the American School.
Most of us in the middle and upper-middle class had at least one Indian maid. The term 'maid'
is really a misnomer, since these household workers are closer to slaves. Our maid or empleada, was
called Julia, and even though we had a warm personal relationship with her, her darker skin, Aymara
garb, and "funny accent" separated her from us. She worked basically all day, since there were no set
limits to the number of hours she had to be ready to cook, clean, wash dishes, or take care of us. I
remember that she had Sundays off, but often worked even those days as well. Whenever we went to
the market, we'd pay some old Indian man to carry huge and heavy grocery bags on his back in
exchange for what amounted to a few pennies.
To us in these elite circles, the indigenous people of Bolivia were similar to the way that French
pied-noirs described Arabs: as a dark, inert mass. Albert Camus' depiction of native Algerians in The
Stranger is not far from how indigenous Bolivians were seen (and still are in some places) by those
who were wealthier, more Westernized, and—above all— whiter. As a child, I would draw mocking
cartoon depictions of Indians in vignettes I called choleríos, images of drunken, slovenly, uncivilized
indigenous people that were based on how I saw them whenever we went to the Cochabamba
countryside.
On those trips, my father would tell us of how, before the 1952 Revolution, Indians were
treated as chattel, and they worked as pongos, basically beasts of burden until they old bodies could
barely stand. After the revolution formal equality was instituted, but in fact racism simply penetrated
daily life and permeated everything from schools to hospitals to politics. Throughout the seventies,
eighties, and nineties, most politicians (who basically benefited themselves) were white or mestizo, or
mixed-race. Few were indigenous, and when one did emerge, like Domitila Chungara, a homemaker-
turned-Marxist who helped end the Banzer dictatorship in 1978, she was met by widespread racial
ridicule coming from the upper echelons of a highly stratified society.
Rather than offer facile critiques of Morales as a 'populist,' or a naïve defense of his leadership as if it
were a return of the idealistic 1960s, it is important to look at Bolivia's strife-ridden racial past. Few
countries in the world were as racially-divided as Bolivia was throughout the twentieth-century.
Bolivians of all races and ethnicities should look in the mirror and try to be honest about the privileges
or burdens that they may have received as a result of their skin color and the way they speak
Spanish. A republic is based on the principle of the common good, and to the extent that Bolivians are
not able to see past the color barrier, it will never be fully realized.
