Bolivia: A Way Back to Being a Nation

After living a decade of my life in Bolivia I am still an outsider. I always will be. My passport is blue, not dark red. My tongue will always botch-up Spanish. An even though my children are Bolivian, I am a gringo, with eternal limits on my ability to understand this place where I live. Nor is it my place to tell Bolivians what to do. I am an observer.

But anyone looking honestly at the events of the past week here has to recognize that Bolivia is a nation on the edge of a precipice. More than one journalist has quoted me this past year saying, "Never underestimate the ability of Bolivia to look like it is about to careen over the side of a cliff, and then not do it." Well, the possibility seems less remote now.

None of the major leaders or movements in this country today is looking for consensus. Instead, each is preparing for battle, readying the armaments of political war.

The President is pressing forward to adopt a new national Constitution through a process that now completely excludes the opposition and any meaningful dissent. The Constituent Assembly process has started to look more cartoonish by the day.

The main opposition party has acted out a strategy, for more than a year, intent entirely on blocking legitimate change. It has played the game of making the Constituent Assembly impossible, and then trashing it for being dysfunctional.

The Governor of Cochabamba talks democracy but then calls on the military to rise-up and sends his employees into the streets on motorcycles with sticks to deal with those who don't share his point of view.

To be sure, I could go on and name others acting in similar ways, but it is sufficient to say that there are so many people hell bent on pushing Bolivia over the edge right now that finding people and institutions to blame is pretty easy work.

There are really only two ways forward right now. One is political battle, the results of which are impossible to predict but, as we have seen over and over, aren’t likely to be peaceful or pleasant. The other is some kind of initial steps toward compromise – an agreement, at least, not to jump together into the abyss.

Here are five ideas that I think are important to that way forward, none of which will work unless they are taken together and agreed to by all the major sectors and actors:

1. The Constituent Assembly needs to be given one final extension to complete its work (3 months perhaps). It needs to convene somewhere other than Sucre, where its work has been rendered permanently impossible. All parties need to agree to participate and MAS needs to commit itself firmly to the rule that no constitution can be approved by the Assembly without a 2/3 vote.

2. The opposition parties and MAS need to make a genuine commitment toward reasonable compromise on the key issues. That might begin with an agreement to bring the proposed constitution to a national ballot in two parts. The first would be the articles on which there already is a reasonable consensus, or at least 2/3 support, and there are some. The second could be a package of articles that have 51% support, but short of 2/3, such as Presidential re-election. To satisfy Sucre, a third measure could allow a national up-or-down vote on moving the capital, and let them make their case.

3. All sides need to agree to stop bringing out their respective mobs to either "stop" or "protect" the Assembly. Attacks should also cease on media and public offices.

4. All sides should stop calling for the various resignations of the other. From Manfred to Morales there should be an agreement that those elected in 2005 should serve out their full terms. Without that, and a serious toning down of the mutual attack rhetoric, all sides will be driven to their most extreme and least productive behavior.

5. The governors of all nine Bolivian departments, the President and the Vice President, and the mayors of the major cities should appear together before the national media to declare that, while deep differences remain between them, they are committed to a unified nation and a peaceful way forward. The people of Bolivia need that a lot right now.

Just to be clear, none of this is likely to happen. I still kind of hope that Santa Claus will show up here next month too, but that doesn't mean I'll wait up for him Christmas Eve.

Gone are the days when the Catholic Church could act as mediator and call all sides to dialog. No other person or institution in Bolivia today has the credibility or clout to do so either. The leaders who would need to genuinely make this happen would have to initiate this on their own. But it is pretty clear that each of them has made the calculation that it is time to stoke their respective bases' hatred and darker passions; not to be peacemakers.

No, this vision of a way back from the brink (and there are certainly others) is not a prediction of how things might go. More, it is a means of measuring how far we are from that here. And that is a very worrisome thing.