The Fiercest Political Campaign in Bolivia

Now this is Bolivian politics at a boil – intensity; masses out in the streets; sound trucks blaring, beckoning people to come out; a mobilization that counts its numbers in the thousands.

No, I don't mean the anti-MAS general strike in Santa Cruz today. The fiercest political campaign of the year in Bolivia, far fiercer than the July vote for delegates to the Constituent Assembly, is the race taking place today in Cochabamba to elect members of…the administrative board of the telephone company.

No, I am not kidding.

It has been going on for weeks – banners, candidates, flyers, campaigning. The phone company, COMTECO, is a cooperative, so anyone who has forked over the $1000+ to own their own phone line gets to vote for the men and women who will steer the network of cable and wire into the next decade.

Here is what the scene looked like this morning as I made my way on the slowest trufi bus in the world past the stadium (yes, the soccer stadium) where the vote is being held.

Armies of young people in the colored t-shirts of their candidates – red, blue, yellow and white were the favorites – are desperately handing out paper flyers to any open fingers they can find. Another candidate is having his flyers handed out by a round man in a bright red "lucha libre" (wrestling) mask. So many huge banners, most hand painted on vast strips of what look to be old bed sheets, are hanging from the trees and electric cables that it is hard to see much of anything else. A candidate whose ubiquitous campaign photo features him holding a phone (clever, no?) has his supporters handing out the tiny saplings of pine trees. I am still trying to sort that one out.

Regardless who places first in today's vote, I think the big winners are the women who spent the morning doing a bumper business in sales of juice and silpancho (flattened and fried chunks of beef) to the hungry crowd. My bus was so slow snaking through that crowd that I was tempted to get off, buy one, and get on again.

The campaign promises banded around by the candidates have been, well, not exactly lofty. The most common seems to be to increase, from 90 to 120, the number of calls we are allowed to make a month free before having to start paying the equivalent of 12 cents per call. I am in favor of that. My teenagers are too, I'll bet. Other candidates promised to cut their salaries if elected. I have no opinion there.

None of them mentioned fixing COMTECO's wobbly broadband Internet service, which would have been my chief issue if I could vote. That and doing something about those company technicians who set my computer on fire the day they installed the service, and claimed it was just a coincidence. I am also against candidates who use sound trucks in the street below my office.

I asked a friend of mine, "Why so much interest in who runs the phone company?" He explained that each of the winners gets 20 jobs to hand out. I can’t verify that, but it would provide an explanation for why some guy would so eagerly dress up as a wrestler and hand out flyers all morning.

I am not sure what kind of job that prepares him for at the company. But I'll bet the guys who set my computer on fire looked good in that costume during the last election.