A Bolivian Opposition Primary?

Welcome back from the holidays and welcome back to some updated analysis of Bolivian election politics.

Three weeks from today Bolivians will go to the polls yet again, this time in a referendum on a new national constitution backed by President Evo Morales and MAS. The fact of the vote itself was a major breakthrough, the product of tense, internationally monitored, negotiations between MAS and its regional and party opponents. In October, a wide array of Bolivia’s warring factions agreed to bring the proposed constitution to a vote, in exchange for MAS acceptance of hundreds of amendments large and small.

In the view of some, the deal was wise political compromise that brought Bolivia back from the brink of even wider violent conflict. In the view of others, the sweeping changes were a sellout by MAS, rendering the new document little different in effect than the one Bolivia has now.

Regardless of one’s view on the compromises that paved the way for the January 25th vote, two stories here are worth more attention.

The first is what the vote this month signifies as a measure of ongoing Morales/MAS public support. The second is the call from some corners of the opposition for a nationwide ‘primary’ vote to determine one sole candidate to go up against Morales in the new Presidential elections likely next December.

Morales and the Voters

If you track the trend line in voter support for Evo Morales over the past six years, the steady and significant rise in his support is indisputable.

As a dark horse presidential candidate in 2002 Morales leapt to a surprise second place finish behind the winner, former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, largely thanks to the suspicious public denunciation against Morales by the then-U.S. Ambassador. That strong finish gave Morales nearly a quarter of the national vote.

Three years later, in the December 2005 elections Morales won, he garnered a historic 53% of the vote, more than double his support in 2002. A few months later, in the July vote for delegates to the Constituent Assembly, Morales was not directly on the ballot, but his MAS party surpassed his previous vote total once again, slightly, winning 54%.

Then last August, in a nationwide referendum on the continued service of Morales and the regional governors, a vote demanded by Morales opponents, the President trumped even the most optimistic expectations, wining a lopsided 2/3 of the vote to stay in office (while two of his most vociferous opponents were tossed out of office by strong majorities).

So the question now is: How will Evo do on January 25th?

The vote in three weeks is not only on a new constitution; it is a new measurement of Morales’ popular support with Bolivian voters. Few serious observers think that MAS will come up short of the simple majority needed to make the new constitution the law. But there is plenty of room for Morales to fall far short of the 2/3 he received in August. If he does, the opposition that seems currently to be almost neutered will smell opportunity once more.

Plenty has transpired since the August vote that can alter the country’s political math. Violence tore through two departments in September. Morales declared open season on the U.S. government, expelling the U.S. ambassador and the DEA, and getting hit back with suspension of Bolivia’s participation in the Andean Trade Agreement (at a potential cost of 20,000 jobs). The Morales administration has also been hit with a series of corruption charges, ranging from accusations that his Minister of the Presidency helped smuggle in trucks without paying the required customs charges, to Morales’ placement of a 25-year-old with no professional qualifications as the chief administrator under the Governor of Cochabamba.

If MAS wins the vote this month with 55%, say, it will declare a sturdy victory. But if its support falls even 5% from the difficult-to-meet 2/3 it won in August, watch for opponents to rally.

The Opposition Primary

If the MAS-backed constitution wins, as expected, only then will the real campaigning begin. Approval would trigger a new round of elections in December for President, Governors, and Mayors, all across the country.

Two things will stand out as very different from elections past. The first is that Evo Morales will be constitutionally empowered to stand for reelection. That is a big change in a country where presidential reelection has been long prohibited, a change that Morales fought for hard.

The second is the very real possibility that Morales’ chief opponents might agree to another historic first – a national primary which would select which one of them would take on Morales, one on one.

One of those would-be opponents, Burger King magnate and former candidate Samuel Doria Medina (pictured above) is pushing a plan for a Bolivian primary among Morales’ chief potential opponents. That would include, as a start, himself and two former Sanchez de Lozada Vice-Presidents, Carlos Mesa and Victor Hugo Cardenas. The three, and potentially others such as former President and PODEMOS leader, Jorge Quiroga, would square off in a national vote in which all voters who wish could participate.

Nothing in Bolivian law provides for such a vote, nor does it prohibit one to my knowledge. The results would have to be honored by nothing more than each candidate’s word.

Why would this be a politically brilliant move?

First, it wraps the opposition in the mantle of popular democracy. “Who picked Evo to be the MAS candidate?” they will ask. “Not the people,” they will say. Second, it generates excitement, a nationwide election in which Morales is left to look on from the sidelines. Mexico’s disgraced PRI party invoked a similar ‘let’s have a primary’ move to help resurrect itself in the last election.

Most importantly, if the opposition really can narrow itself down to one candidate against Morales, that gives it the best chance possible (still, to be quite clear, a long shot) of beating him in a year. Evo benefits enormously from being the sole candidate on the electoral ‘left’ while the ‘right’ always manages to let individual ambitions saddle it with a line-up of candidates who split the field.

So welcome back from time off to contemplate cheese dip and Santa instead of the wild terrain of Bolivian politics. With three weeks to go, politics is back on.


Note to Readers: To deal with the cascade of Spam comments submitted to the Blog I changed the settings to require moderation of any comment posted more than five days after the original post. Since nearly all the comments made here do come within the first few days, that shouldn't be a problem. If you post a comment after 5 days, you may not see it for a while. I only go through and check them every week or so.

Grateful for the Holidays

This holiday season in Bolivia I am grateful for…my family being together…rains that have painted the Cochabamba Valley green…turkey leftovers…falling on my bike into a really large pond of mud…the friends that have come by to say hello…my daughter’s fabulous pumpkin pie…the comparative lack of commercialism surrounding the holidays…the look on my dogs' faces when they get to share in the turkey leftovers…the cool hammock my wife gave me…the rubber band gun my daughter gave me…time to read…all the great lights in Plaza Colon, complete with 267 simultaneous Christmas songs (different ones) playing from those strings of lights…relative peace in Bolivia…getting woken up at 7am on Christmas morning by a six-year-old…the CD I made with five different versions of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" (especially the Bruce Springsteen and Pointer Sisters versions)...talking to family in the U.S. on the phone…not screwing up the mashed sweet potatoes…the pumpkin pie (worth mentioning twice since there is a whole pie still left)…not much email…walks with my dogs…that the guys who I saw in the woods this week weren’t actually cutting down trees but planting them…hope…and a week without Blogs.

Happy holidays to all our readers from all of us at The Democracy Center!

When Goals and the Policies to Meet them Don't Match

Perhaps it is from too many years spent in the world of practical politics, but I am burdened by the twin beliefs that public policy ought to be logical and that diplomacy ought to be strategic.

This week actions taken by President Evo Morales violated both those rules, in my view. I write of them here because I think political debate and disagreement is valuable. This is not a debate over the aims that the Bolivian government seeks to achieve (I agree with those aims in this case) but the means with which it seeks to secure those aims.

New Cars Only Need Apply

Earlier this week President Morales announced an executive decree that will ban the import of any car into Bolivia that is more than five years old. Morales' stated goals are twofold, to reduce auto emissions and traffic in Bolivia and to stop the nation from becoming a dumping ground for cheap used cars being imported in from Japan.

As someone who breathes the troubled air in Cochabamba and commutes in by public transit from Tiquipaya each morning, these are both great goals. But does a ban on six-year-old Toyotas really advance them, and at what cost?

First, it is a wicked myth that the cars flooding into Bolivia these days (the Associated Press reports that the number of cars in Bolivia has doubled in six years) are junkers.

The wave of incoming vehicles can be seen first hand at a sea of steel called the Zonafraco. Aisle after aisle of 1995-2000 Toyotas and other brands, various models, stretch across a muddy field. These autos are called 'transformers', not because they can be converted into robots, like the toy of the same name (that would be cool). They are called that because they arrive from Japan with the steering column and all the controls on the right side of the car. An army of Bolivian mechanics then 'transform' all those controls to the left side, in a manner so expert now that the average buyer can't tell.

A year ago, when my family and I moved out to the boonies beyond Tiquipaya, we finally broke our nine-year no-car rule and bought one of these, a 1995 Toyota Rav4 with about 50,000 miles on it. We paid $6,500 to a woman who runs a small business importing these cars through Chile, doing the 'transformation', and the Bolivian paperwork, which is expensive and formidable.

Now even back in my car-crazed home state of California, a 1995 Toyota with 50,000 miles is far from being considered a 'junker.' It may be the vehicle of choice for a 25-year-old with a massive student debt, but it is not junk. In Cochabamba a 1995 car is considered, by most people, virtually a new car. The same holds true for the 1995 Toyota Corollas ($4,500) and similar 'transformed' Japanese imports that make up the nation's fleet of taxis and smaller public transport.

What will the new policy accomplish?

It will certainly raise the price of cars. I dropped by the Toyota dealer on my walk through the city this morning. Price of a 2008 Toyota Corolla: $24,000. Price of a 2008 Toyota Rav4: $33,000. If you can find any used 2004 models (the oldest that would be allowed for import next year) they will probably be cheaper, but not by much. And you can bet that the resale price of older cars will jump as well.

This is essentially the age-old policy of reducing demand for a good by raising its price – which is a very odd approach for a government that seeks to be an advocate of the people with limited means.

The other sure effect will be to eliminate a large number of jobs in a nation starving for them, and we aren’t talking abut jobs for a wealthy elite. One low-income family I know has been hoping to get into the expanding taxi-trufi business (public transport lines that are always full) giving jobs as drivers to at least three of them. That's gone if they have to pay $20,000 for a car. Thousands of mechanics are employed moving all those steering wheels around. Kiss those jobs goodbye. The woman I bought my car from is also no lady of wealth. It's a side business added on to the microscopic store she runs downtown selling soda and groceries.

One person was killed this week in a clash between the government and people raising a road blockade to protest the proposed ban.

So what about those laudable goals of reducing traffic and pollution? There are plenty of good options, most all of them better than arbitrarily setting five years as the retirement age for imported cars.

If reducing the number of cars in Bolivia is the aim, the government could pick from a variety of options. It could limit imports but not shut the door on older cars that regular people can afford. It could create a buy-back program to get rid of the real junkers, as other governments have done.

If Bolivia wants to reduce the use of cars in its traffic-clogged cities, there are better options for this as well. The government could develop a plan to make Bolivia's streets something more than a death challenge for cyclists. It could encourage more use of public transit by allowing only public transit vehicles in the center of the city. It could add a heavy surcharge on families who own more than one vehicle.

Should Bolivia try to reduce emissions from cars? Again, absolutely. But anyone who has ever been in traffic in Bolivia knows that the big contamination isn’t coming from a 1995 Corolla taxi that, like 95% of them, has been converted to natural gas. It is the thick black smoke belching out of the back of those 1970s vintage, diesel-burning Dodge Microbuses. In addition to being dirty, they are also big and slow. That's why anyone here who can is switching to the much quicker (and cleaner) gas-powered 'taxi-trufi' lines.

But those lines are populated by the very same 1995 Toyota Ipsums (seats 8) that Morales' decree would now keep from entering. So where is the logic for that?

No Ambassadors from Obama

The other news-grabbing initiative from the Bolivian government this week came on the foreign policy front, at a meeting of the Latin American and Caribbean Presidents in Brazil. President Morales introduced his suggestion with a spot-on prediction, "I want to make a proposal that many are not going to like." He then called on his Presidential colleagues to join him in expelling all U.S. ambassadors from the region until the U.S. government agreed to lift its decades-old economic embargo against Cuba.

The proposal was quickly shut down by the other Presidents. Brazil's Lula da Silva said, "We must be prudent and diplomatic and wait for Obama to assume power. I am hopeful that American policies toward Latin America and the Caribbean will change.”

Again, the problem here is not with Evo's objectives. The U.S. embargo against Cuba is a Cold War relic that only serves to make life worse for the people who live in Cuba and which has certainly not achieved its stated objective of bringing the Castro government to its knees. Truly, if someone poked a dog in the face with a stick every day for almost fifty years to make it move and the dog never moved, would we still buy the argument that, "it's only a matter of time?"

The embargo has never really been a policy about Cuba as much as it has been about the politics of the Cuban-American voters in South Florida. If Florida were not a swing state in U.S. Presidential politics the embargo would have come down about the same week as the Berlin Wall.

The issue, again, is not the end but the means to it.

In Washington last month I heard from people close to the new administration a consistent refrain. President Obama will have his hands full almost completely with the global financial meltdown and his efforts to pull troops out of Iraq (and put them into Afghanistan). Latin America? It will be abut as close to the bottom of the Obama priority list as a continent and a half can be. Cuba? Farther down still.

Is the best way to pave the way for a change in Cuba policy to poke a new president in the eye?

Certainly other presidents didn’t think so. If the new president of the U.S. is anything he is shrewd. He and the advisors around him, including on Latin America, will be very keen on looking strong as both the U.S. people and foreign government size him up. The last thing he is going to do is change Cuba policy because he is being threatened by the President of Bolivia. If anything, such a move by Morales and others will also make it less likely that he lift the embargo.

Diplomacy rule #1: Put yourself in the shoes of the one you are trying to persuade and ask the question, "What are the politics?"

In a Democracy Ideas Need to be Challenged

In both these cases – of used cars from the east and diplomacy with the north – the basic lesson is the same. In governing it is not enough to have the right goals. You also need to have the right policies that get you there.

Getting the right policies rarely comes from unilateral decrees declared on the fly without much thought. We all need to be challenged, to have our logic tested. It makes everything we do smarter.

In the case of Evo's call for a diplomatic expulsion threat against the U.S., his presidential colleagues provided that challenge and a policy that didn't make much sense was set aside. In the case of the ban on cars manufactured before 2004, there was no space for the policy to be challenged, no time or room provided for debate. Which is why Bolivia may end up with a very goofy policy, and one which could do a good deal of damage to the very goals it is supposed to advance.

Undermining a government and challenging its thinking are two different things.

Mesa Tosses Hat into the Bolivian Presidential Ring

If Bolivians approve a new constitution next January 25th, as widely expected, that will set in motion a new campaign for President the following December (a year from now). For months, those who follow Bolivian politics have speculated – who would lead the opposition to Morales?

Manfred Reyes Villa, the former Governor of Cochabamba announced his candidacy in August. But 24 hours later voters in the department kicked him out of office by a lopsided majority. So his return now seems unlikely.

The other governors, while most enjoy strong popularity in their own regions, are widely disliked in other parts of the nation and would have trouble putting together a national candidacy.

An indigenous candidate would seem to have the most likely shot at digging into Morales formidable base. It was an indigenous woman backed by the region’s conservative elite that proved a winning formula in Chuquisaca’s governor elections earlier this year. But the indigenous candidate one hears most mentioned, former Vice-President Victor Hugo Cardenas, carries the burden of having served with the deeply unpopular Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, and having been out of public view for more than a decade.

Now the speculation has a real candidate to focus on, a formidable one, former President Carlos Mesa.

The well-known historian and journalist who resigned his brief presidency in June 2005 told reporters in Lima, Peru on Friday that if the new constitution is approved in January, he’s in. Mesa, according to a report in the Latin American Herald Tribune, said that he is "ready to take part in the electoral process if and when the constitution is approved,” and announced that he is forming a new political party to carry his candidacy.”

Prospects for Mesa the Sequel

What are Mesa’s chances against Evo?

Clearly, given Morales’s unbroken string of ballot victories – strong majorities in his December 2005 election and in the subsequent vote for Constituent Assembly delegates, and his 2/3 landslide in the August referendum – Mesa starts as an underdog. But not one without a shot.

A successful Mesa candidacy will rely on two main factors, I think.

The first will be Mesa’s ability to make himself the lone candidate of the conservative and middle-class voters who form the natural anti-Evo constituency. That constituency is definitely out there and will leap to a candidate that seems reasonable and might have a chance. But the right wing and traditional elite in Bolivia are notoriously inept at unifying behind one candidate and it is a stretch to believe that Presidential wannabes such as former President Jorge Quiroga, perhaps Reyes Villa, and others, will actually defer to Mesa, with whom no love is lost. Evo’s big political advantage since 2005, on the other hand, has been his total dominance as the lone electoral leader on Bolivia’s left.

The second will be Mesa’s ability to pull apart Evo’s current base, going after its most fragile alliances. Morales will have been president for three years at that point and Mesa will challenge him on how much life has really gotten better for most Bolivians, especially if the global financial crisis comes home to roost in the Bolivian economy in 2009. Watch him form alliances with indigenous leaders not closely tied to MAS and Morales, including possibly asking Cardenas to be his running mate. Although two former Goni Vice-Presidents might be hard for a lot of voters to swallow.

Mesa’s last presidency, one he inherited when Sanchez de Lozada was forced to resign, failed because he was never able to establish a political base that matched his public popularity. He tried to position himself in the middle between left and right and ended up as political ‘road kill’ on the center divide. Mesa’s political skills have never matched his journalistic ones and it is unclear that they are much better now. I have interviewed Mesa, however, when he was Vice-President, and he is an intelligent and thoughtful man, and deserves a lot of credit for publicly breaking with both Goni and the U.S. Embassy over the government-sanctioned killings in October 2003 that forced Goni’s resignation.

One More Mystery Solved?

Mesa’s announcement in Lima (an odd choice of venue, by the way) does potentially solve one Bolivian political mystery. Three weeks ago we reported here that the U.S. campaign firm populated of former Bill Clinton aides, Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research was making a sequel of its own in Bolivia. The firm, led by former Clinton pollster Stanley Greenberg, ran the 2002 Sanchez de Lozada campaign, famously documeted up-close in the award-winning documentary by Rachel Boynton, “Our Brand is Crisis.”

In October, as we reported earlier, the firm posted a job announcement seeking an "International Campaign Representative" in Bolivia:

[We are] seeking a highly professional individual to work in-country as part of a political campaign in Bolivia as our on-the-ground representative. Applicant must have substantial experience in politics and/or campaigns, preferably including political organizing and communications strategy, and fluency in Spanish. Contract would begin as soon as possible. Contract likely for a few months, possibly longer. Requires very long hours and ability to multitask, deal with senior-level officials, and operate in a high-stress setting.

The firm declined to name its candidate when we asked them last month. One of the potential clients we named then was Carlos Mesa. So are the U.S. consultants who helped retuirn Goni to office in 2002 looking to do the same for his former running mate in 2009?

Look for the answer to that, and more on the coming campaign, here on the Blog.