The Campaign…in Spain

Here in Cochabamba, campaigning for the December 6 Presidential vote is beginning to become more visible every day.

Large, yellow and very hi-tech billboards for Evo Morales are popping up at various locations over town, including a giant one in “ground zero” of Cochabamba’s middle class, La Recoleta, just steps from the even more massive Cine Center multiplex. Morales’ chief rival here, former Governor Manfred Reyes Villa, working with fewer funds, has opened his campaign office just across the street from where the Union of Household Workers has its local office.

So odd placements abound.

But the stop on the Bolivian campaign trail that really mattered this week wasn’t in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz, La Paz, Oruro or even Tiquipaya. It was in Madrid, where an appearance by Morales brought thousands to a stadium normally used for bullfights. The official speech by Morales was about the rights of immigrants. Spain is home to a wave of some quarter million Bolivians who have migrated there over recent years, to become construction workers, nannies, caregivers for the elderly, and maids.

But the subtext of the speech, and one likely reason for Morales’ first visit to Spain since his inauguration nearly four years ago, was something else. In December, for the first time, the huge population of Bolivians living abroad will be eligible to vote. An estimated 2.5 million Bolivians live abroad. To be certain, the number that will actually vote in December will be much smaller than that. But the new extension of the vote to Bolivians abroad means that the political battleground between Morales and Reyes Villa (the only two serious contenders) will extend far beyond the streets of Cochabamba – to the huge Bolivian enclaves of Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires and Arlington, Virginia.

Until April of 2007 Spain was a particular magnet for immigrants from Bolivia. Before then Bolivians could enter the country without a visa. Thousands of ‘one-way tourists’ filled Aerosur’s new Madrid-bound flights each week, having memorized a few lines for immigration authorities about the Spanish tourist attractions they hoped to see, but really intending to make contact with the cousin or sister who proceeded them and then find a job.

In fact, most of the Bolivians living in Spain today don’t do much sightseeing at all. Instead they live in fear of being caught by police. A summer ago I spent the day in Madrid with two Cochabamba sisters that I have known since the early 1990s, both of who migrated to Spain in the pre-2007 rush. One of them, who works as a live-in caregiver for two elderly Spanish sisters, hasn’t seen her children in three years. I asked them what they had seen of Madrid – La Plaza Mayor, the grand parks, the Puerta del Sol.

“We never go anywhere,” one of them told me. “We go from work to home, that is it. The police even wait outside the Internet call centers that we use to call our families. We wake up with this fear, we carry it with us all day, and we go to sleep with this fear.”

It is women like these that could cause a serious stir in the December vote, if they decide to participate.

In Madrid on Monday, Morales made his pitch as a clarion call for immigrant rights. "We all have the right to live in any part of the world, respecting the laws of each country." It is rhetoric that should be attractive to the Bolivians living in the once-upon-a-time Empire.

But calls by Morales or anyone else are unlikely to change the increasingly rigid rules against immigration being imposed by the European Union. It is those rules, pushed hardest by France and Italy, which have contributed to the end of Spain’s previous hospitality.

The Bolivian President’s speech is also at odds with the way that the Bolivian government deals with “undocumented” immigrants here. I am friends with a young couple from Buenos Aires, parents to three young children, all here without papers. They live in Bolivia with the same fear of discrimination and deportation that my Bolivians friends in Madrid face.

As President on a state visit, it is much easier for Morales to wage a subtle campaign among the Bolivian diaspora than it will be for Reyes or any of his opponents. He also has a more natural base in the biggest communities of Bolivians abroad. The people who have left to be fruit sellers in Buenos Aires and nannies in Barcelona come mostly from Bolivia’s struggling working poor – a political base that generally backs the President.

The enfranchisement of these new voters is one wild card amidst the general predictions of an easy first round victory for Morales in December, but it is a card that seems to play well in the President’s political hand. Will we see a Manfred rally anytime soon in Mar de Plata? Will we see Morales pitching for votes at Sunday mass in Falls Church? These scenes are unlikely, but this time around, Bolivians abroad will have the option to no longer be spectators of the electoral Olympics back home, but participants.