Blog from Brazil #1

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Picture New York City up against wide sandy beaches and warm ocean. Or a city that seems so much both Latin America and Europe at the same time that you can forget which continent you are on. Or, along the shore at Copacabana, picture Southern California at summertime on steroids.

Rio, judging from my first two days here, lives up to its reputation.

I am here for two weeks, in land of Samba, Lula, the world´s second largest Jesus (Cochabamba still comes in #1 by several inches), and a really strange all-you-can-eat pizza place that has so many varieties that they include chocolate and banana! I am doing a case study of how Brazilians are organizing to bring democracy to the mysterious world of the public budget.

Stay tuned.

Once Again the US Takes the Side of a Latin American Killer

There are various stories in the Bolivian press today in which Bolivian political leaders express outrage at an official statement by the US government criticizing plans here to prosecute former President Gonzalo Sànchez de Lozada for murder. The ex-President was forced to resign in October 2003 when troops under his command presided over the killing of dozens of citizens during protests against his plan to export the country’s natural gas to the US. Dozens of others died at the hands of his government’s repression the February before, during protests against an IMF belt-tightening package.

Today “Goni”, as he is called here, is living in exile in the US, writing op-eds for US newspapers and spinning some amazingly false tales about what happened to him. I saw him a few months ago, sitting alone in the Miami airport as we waited to board the same flight to Washington.

I haven’t seen the exact words of State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, but from references to it he dismissed the prosecution effort as “political”.

Whether prosecuting Goni is “political” (whatever that means) is not nearly so important a question as whether it is right. The answer to that question, especially through Bolivian eyes, is extraordinarily clear.

In Bolivia and much of Latin America the word “impunity” means something. Recall the history of Bolivia’s neighbor to the west, Chile. There, on that other September 11th (1973), a regime took over whose definition of moral leadership included raping women with dogs and killing people in mass in a soccer stadium. Chileans had to wait until 25 years before they even began to sniff justice and still Augusto Pinochet remains a free man.

Bolivia had it’s own Pinochet, several of them in fact, and the main one among them, Hugo Banzer died without being held accountable (on Earth at least) for the “political” sins of abundant murder and repression.

I am working with a group of young writers here to help them develop a set of stories from Bolivia for readers in the US. We met just yesterday afternoon here and one of them, a young man named Gisel wrote about the importance of bringing Goni to justice. “Will we have to wait 25 years, as with Pinochet?” he asked.

I guess I should stop being astonished by the arrogance of the US government in its meddling with other countries. Did Bolivia ask the US’s opinion? Would the US receive it well if the Bolivian government weighed in on, say, the Michael Jackson case?

Mr. Boucher, probably under the command of his superiors seems to make a habit of saying and doing stupid things about Bolivia. In September 2000 he made a declaration from the State Department praising the constraint of then- President Hugo Banzer who was mulling back and forth whether to start shooting at protesters in a town near here, Vinto. Twelve hours after Boucher opened his mouth and gave Banzer effective license to do his worst 1200 troops opened tear gas fire at dawn on the town. One of the canisters flew into the patio of a home and hit a six year old named Ximena in the face, nearly killing her and destroying her nose and face forever. I visited her in the hospital and The Democracy Center raised funds from friends to help with her care.

Way to go Richard Boucher. How many more stupid things will you say until you collect your federal pension and leave the task to someone new?

A note to our regular readers. I am off in the morning to Brazil for a project we are working on there. So stay tuned as the “Blog from Bolivia” turns temporarily into the “Blog from Brazil” where I am sure I will find some interesting things to share in this space.

Thoughts on Today’s NY Times Article on Bolivia and Water

I have received a good deal of e-mail today from readers, reacting and asking for my reaction to a lengthy article in today’s New York Times, Latin America Fails to Deliver on Basic Needs. I had several conversations with the author of the article as he prepared it and am quoted near the end.

The essential message of the NY Times article is that Latin America is having a hell of a time trying to meet the basic needs of its citizens, especially on basics like water, and that the turn toward privatization to deliver the goods has ended in substantial protest and some highly visible oustings of multinational corporations – as evidenced by Cochabamba and El Alto.

I think that basic thrust is right. What are important of course are the details of why and what to do about it.

First off, a point that I wish the Times had made but didn’t is that many of these privatizations were not democratically decided but forced, as they were in the case of Cochabamba and El Alto water, by the World Bank. See my recent editorial article in The Nation for more on that.

One of the most essential policy choices that a people make is what activities to carry out through public systems and which to turn over to the market. Our readers in the US know this well from the ongoing debate over how to provide adequate heath care and the Bush-led effort to partially privatize Social Security. I suspect that US citizens would not take too kindly to any effort by the World Bank to make those decisions on their behalf.

One reader asked me a question I have been asked before, in response to my quote in the article: "Ultimately, if Bolivians are going to get real access for water it's going to have to be subsidized and it's going to have to be subsidized in some form of foreign assistance."

Can’t Bolivians finance their water themselves? Isn’t it patronizing to say they are dependent on foreign aid to do so?

Here’s a fact from our post-analysis on rates after the Cochabamba water revolt. You can pretty much run a public water system in the black with the water rates people pay once they are hooked up to the system. What you can’t fund without hiking up rates beyond what people can afford is expansion of the system to people who don’t have it. That is where the high costs are.

Speaking as the aging Harvard-trained policy analyst and university teacher that I am – what you have here is a policy problem. What are your options and how do you evaluate them?

Option one is to invite foreign investment and base water prices on the market costs of keeping those multinationals earning a profit and happy. That is the World Bank option. The people of both Cochabamba and El Alto have made it wickedly clear through public rebellions that servicing Bechtel’s or Suez’ profits needs makes water prices unaffordable. Option two is to build in cross-subsidies between wealthier water users and poorer ones. The problem is that there aren’t enough rich water users to provide all the subsidies required. Option three is to subsidize water through the national tax system, but Bolivia is already in perennial hot water with the International Monetary Fund for having high budget deficits.

So it comes down to this, we either abandon the international human rights standard that water is a fundamental right or we subsidize poor countries through aid, not loans, from wealthy ones. Is this patronizing? It is not more patronizing than the lifeline utility rate subsidies that low-income people receive in the US for water, electricity and telephone service. It is just a different country.

Bolivia through the Eyes of US College Students

This afternoon I got to do one of my favorite things here, teaching a seminar on “Bolivia and Globalization” for the visiting US students of the School for International Training’s semester abroad program. I used to teach at San Francisco State University when I still lived in California and miss it.

The SIT program is terrific. Undergraduate students from throughout the US come to Bolivia for a semester. They take intensive Spanish classes, live with Bolivian families, attend seminars on social, political and economic issues, visit the whole range of Bolivian society, and finally work on an independent study project of their choosing. These range from reports, to movies, to pieces of creative theater.

I have gotten to know dozens of these students and I have seen how deeply the experience of coming to Bolivia changes their perspectives on the world and in many cases the course of their lives. Many have worked with us at The Democracy Center on special projects. One young woman helped us research why so many Bolivian orphans are left without adoptive families even though there are so many families in the US who would love to adopt them. Another student, along with her visiting boyfriend, just spent the past month helping us investigate the role of the International Monetary Fund in Bolivia, for our forthcoming report on that subject.

At the start of today’s session I asked the students to introduce themselves and explain why they came to Bolivia. For most the answer was the same – to understand a world so distant in so many ways from their own, to rock their worlds. I know they won’t be disappointed. They had so many thoughtful comments and questions that our afternoon seminar only ended when dinner called.

If you are a college student reading this and pondering an adventure, by all means take the leap if you can. Check out the SIT program and see if it is an option for you. Here’s the Web site.

The Bush Administration Worries About Its Bolivian Chickens Coming Home to Roost

I suspect this received little or no notice in the US, but this week Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice had a few things to say before the US Senate about Bolivian politics, and especially its possible tilt to the left.

While she was testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Lincoln Chafee (R-Rhode Island) asked Rice if there wasn’t “something curious” about the strengthening position of “the political party of the coca growers.” He added, “In moments in which we are advancing democracy we have this phenomena in Bolivia. In reality does this party exist that is having so much success?” Here is the article in Spanish in the Bolivian daily La Razon.

For those not versed in Bolivian politics the Senator was speaking about the party Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) headed by coca grower leader Evo Morales. Chaffe was quite right about MAS moving ahead politically. In the last Presidential election in 2002 Morales came within two percentage points of finishing in first place and MAS won a large block of seats in the Congress. In the nationwide municipal elections a few months ago the party took control of a number of small towns.

Rice quickly signaled that the Bush administration shared the Senator’s concern. “We are very worried [about MAS],” she said.

The odd thing of course is that MAS and Morales owe a great deal of their political success to the US government. The coca growers union came together largely as response to US-sponsored anti-coca laws and forced eradication. Even if you think there is wisdom in sending in soldiers to rip people’s livelihoods out of the ground (there are decent arguments both ways) there should be no doubt that the US drug war has jailed thousands of innocents in the name of providing US Ambassadors with happy arrest statistics to show off to their superiors in Washington. Here’s an article we published some time ago about just such a case, the woman who takes care of my two-year-old daughter.

Morales also owes a big chunk of his 2002 vote directly to the US Embassy here. The Ambassador at the time, Manuel Rocha, made a big public statement just before the vote calling on Bolivians to reject Morales and MAS and saying that US aid hung in the balance. That statement may have boosted Morales’ vote by as much as nine points and the coca leader joked about the Ambassador being his campaign manager.

There are plenty of foreigners, here and abroad, who are sort of Evo groupies, putting him on the pedestal as a charismatic Aymara Indian leader, leading the left from out of the wilderness – a Bolivian Lula. I am not in that group. There is a good deal of dirty laundry in the cocalero closet.

However, if the US government is really trying to dismiss MAS as the party of the coca growers, then the US hasn’t developed any better sense of Bolivia then it had during its “Don’t vote Evo!” debacle in 2002. Why is the MAS powerful? True it has a political base among coca growers whom, while wildly motivated, remain a pretty tiny group. More importantly, Bolivians across class lines (except perhaps the very wealthy) have grown very wary of the US backed “Washington Consensus” economic model which has delivered up one bad result after another, from overpriced water to microscopic economic growth. Evo is a smart politician and he has positioned himself as the electoral champion of public anger at World Bank and IMF economic policies imposed on Bolivia.

That ultimately is my point; Evo Morales is a politician and that is something that the US government would be wise to figure out. Love him, hate him, or somewhere in between, Morales and MAS have decided to play politics. They want power and they have decided to aim for it through organizing and elections, with some street pressure added in from time to time to strengthen their negotiating position in disputes with the government – as with the demand in January to rollback an increase in gas prices.

One of the most significant and positive political events in Bolivia in 2004 was the fact that so many of Bolivia’s public debates, such as that over gas exportation, moved from blockades on the roads to public ballots and the corridors of Congress. That happened in large part due to MAS’ decision to be a real political party.

What wouldn’t the government and the people of Colombia give these days to have a serious negotiating partner as its opposition instead of armed guerillas? If Senator Chafee and Secretary Rice really want to help Bolivian democracy along they could start with getting the US government to stop demonizing MAS and Morales and start respecting both as a legitimate political voice, even if they don’t care for what that voice has to say.

Then again, maybe MAS and Morales would prefer that the US attack them even more. There is an election coming up again in two years and they can use the votes.

Isaac Asimov, Where are You When We Need You?

There have been periods in my life when I have been addicted to science fiction, and in particular to the roughly five million books produced by Isaac Asimov (I think he wrote in his sleep too.). Thanks to the recent movie I Robot based on Asimov’s work, even many non-Asimov fans are familiar now with his famous three laws of robotics.

Fearful that a race of robots could one day dominate humans, both intellectually and physically, all robots were hot wired with three unbreakable rules in this sequence:

1) Do not harm humans.
2) Obey humans.
3) Once you have those two covered, then preserve yourself.

I wrote in my book The Democracy Owners’ Manual how I wished we could make corporations follow this same sequence of commands instead of the reverse which they seem to follow. But that is a topic for another day.

An article in today’s New York Times suggests that we ought to get moving on those Robot Rules sooner than expected. As part of a $127 billion project (that breaks down to about $430 per man, woman and child in the US) the Pentagon is developing robot soldiers. Within a few decades we’ll have machines programmed and capable of killing in our name.

Let’s think about that a minute. On the one side I have a 17-year-old son. Would I rather that Presidents send machines into battle than him? You betcha. This of course is the selling point, as one general is quoted, “They don’t get hungry, they are not afraid, they don’t care of they guy next to them has just been shot.” They are also a big money saver apparently, at an average lifetime cost of $4 million per live soldier (which breaks down to about 1,200 full UC Berkeley scholarships for a year).

Then there is the other side. In addition to all the risks of technology gone wrong – poorly programmed warriors opening up fire on civilians, etc. – what can history tell us about the technology of the future? If there is one historical constant about war that has been handed down through the ages it is this – we can always count on political leaders to send soldiers off to war for reasons that in retrospect were little more than error or ego. From chasing after Helen of Troy to chasing down imaginary weapons of mass destructions, the record isn’t pretty.

If war becomes cheap, both in terms of life and money, will the US slide into it even more gracefully than it does now? Will we ever actually NOT be at war again?

Then there is one more science fiction memory from my youth, a film called the Colossus – the Corbin Project. Colossus was a computer set up to control US nuclear arms after it all got so complex that humans couldn’t operate the system anymore. As you might imagine, in the movie the computer just took over and ran the world too.

Robots as soldiers? It makes me nervous, it makes me real nervous. After all, we won’t even know until next summer if Jedi Knights can beat back a clone army. Put the robot army together with the US real life Star Wars plans and can the Death Star be far behind?

Adventures in Bad Journalism

Over the weekend that hotbed of careful journalism, the Washington Times, managed to find a little space to discuss Bolivia in an opinion column by a former Reagan Administration official named Norman A. Bailey. The spin of the piece, like articles I’ve seen previously in papers such as the New York Times and New York Post, is essentially that Bolivians are either stupid or misled because they aren’t rushing to sell off the country’s vast natural gas reserves to foreign corporations. Here’s a taste:

“Bolivia is on the verge of nothing less than social suicide. The reason? Unprincipled politicians seek power by selling a self-defeating notion to Bolivians — many of them Indians and mixed-race cholos barely eking out a living on high, dry soil. The demagogues have convinced the dispossessed that selling Bolivia's huge natural gas reserves to foreigners somehow is contrary to the national interest. Better, they say, to leave the gas in the ground — and remain poor.”

And:

“With the entry of foreign firms from Europe, Brazil and the United States, proven and probable reserves burgeoned from 4 trillion cubic feet in 1996, to 36 trillion cubic feet today. That's a ninefold increase in eight years — with more in prospect if Bolivia doesn't throw away its opportunity. In short, gas production and exporting has been a financial bonanza for the Bolivian government, which rakes in an average of about 68 percent of gross petroleum revenues in royalties and other, complex taxes.”

Well, that would explain why Bolivia seems like such a wealthy country these days. I can’t count the number of once-poor Bolivians I see driving BMWs down the street.

Here’s the problem, Mr. Bailey has his facts just plain wrong.

To be sure, oil production has increased since the industry has been privatized. It is just that the new profits are going to foreign oil companies, not the Bolivian people. According to Bolivian budget data, revenue from oil and gas has essentially remained flat since privatization, and in some years has even been less. In 2001, for example, national revenue from privatized oil and gas was $40 million less than the take during the last year under public ownership.

Moreover, under the privatization reforms, a huge chunk of the taxes the government collects are now passed onto Bolivian consumers in the form of higher gas prices, bus fares, and energy costs.

Bolivians are neither stupid or misled. They understand quite well that they have been the victims of one bad international deal after another. Like people in poor-yet-mineral-wealthy countries all over the world, Bolivians aren’t opposed to selling their natural resources. They just want a fair share of the wealth that comes from under their feet.

As Mr. Bailey’s former boss, Ronald Reagan, once famously said, “Facts are stubborn things.” From privatization of oil and gas in Bolivia to privatization of Social Security in the US, it seems that some on the political right are so enamored with their ideology that the facts are really not all that important.

A Murder on a Rooftop – Two Years Later

La Paz, Bolivia

It was two years ago this weekend that a 24 year old student nurse, Anna Colque, was murdered in cold blood by military sharpshooters on a rooftop here. She was killed while coming to the aid of another shooting victim, a repairman who was fixing the roof.

All this happened during what Bolivians call ¨Febrero Negro¨ (Black February), when the country erupted in protest over a tax hike on the poor instigated by the International Monetary Fund. From the wide windows of the IMF´s office here you can see down to the rooftop where Ann Colque was killed.

The debate over IMF and World Bank economic policies in poor countries is full of rhetoric on all sides. Yesterday I spent time with two people more affected by these policies than anyone else ever could be, Anna’s mother and the baby son Luis, now three, which she left behind.

¨She went out to help the people wounded, ¨ Anna’s mother told me. Her family asked her not to go but she did. That is who she was.

For months The Democracy Center has been preparing a report on the events of Bolivia’s Black February, which we will release in April in Washington when the IMF and World Bank have their annual joint meetings. We have interviewed everyone from the President of the nation, to the IMF, to people in the streets. We have reviewed hundreds of pages of documents, all aimed at uncovering the truth.

The IMF, sitting a hemisphere away in Washington, did not pull the trigger on that sad day two years ago this weekend. Evidence is clear however that, through the economic coercion it applied here, the IMF knowingly loaded the gun.

To borrow a piece of prose coined long ago, ¨We write so that death will not have the last word.¨ The death of Anna Colque, dressed in her white nurse’s uniform on a La Paz rooftop, must not be forgotten. We remember it with our readers today and we will do everything in our power to expose the policies, the thinking, the actions, and the people who set her death in motion.

The Widow on the Post Office Stairs

I have another slice of Bolivian life to share tonight, though a sad one.

Several times a week I visit the Cochabamba post office, which is the only way to receive mail (no home delivery here). Every day that I go I stop to talk a bit with a woman named Santusa. Gray and bent, wrinkled with large gaps in her smile, I’d guess her to be in her mid-70s. She sits day after day on the concrete post office steps, not asking for money, but with a hat in her hand waiting for whatever small change passersby might voluntarily toss in.

I try to imagine what it is like to sit there day in and day out and have most people just ignore you altogether. Most all of us have tried to imagine it but we really can’t unless we have been there. I always make a point to add to my change a short visit and a gentle touch of her hand, just to make some sort of contact with her.

Today as I arrived at the steps Santusa was there, but wearing a cheap black square of nylon draped across her head. I recognized immediately the symbol of mourning.

“Santusa, what happened?”

“Mi veijito ha muerto (my old man died).”

Her old man was her husband Severino, who died on Saturday, was buried on Sunday and whose widow was back in her begging spot three days later.

Others have lost their husband or wife. Others have had to beg for spare change. But seeing Santusa there draped in black was a reminder to me about how hard life is for so many in the world, how grinding abject poverty can be for those who endure it.

Is there any cause in the world, aside from the prevention of war, more worthy of our attention that helping those who by the random luck of being born poor live with such indignity?

Five Things I Saw on My Bicycle Ride

Once again I’d like to write not about the politics of Bolivia, but just about Bolivia, a place of humble joys. This morning, as I try to do as many Sundays as possible, I set out on an early morning bike ride across Cochabamba. Others go to church, I like to meditate on two wheels watching Bolivia go by. Sunday mornings are a wonderful time to get a glimpse of a city’s life. Here are five things I saw.

Puppies on Parade: On Sunday mornings Cochabamba animal seekers and sellers gather outside our football (that would be soccer) stadium to buy and sell puppies. Dalmatians, German Shepards, Cocker Spaniels, and other assorted breeds. It is a two year old’s dream come true, which I know first hand from the time I took our own Mariana there for a petting frenzy. We have two dogs, neither of which came from the Sunday morning pet fair. Simone the Wonder Dog walked in the door from the street as a puppy the first week we lived here six years ago, a classic Cochabamba mix that can't quite be identified. Cochabamba dogs are like snowflakes -- no two alike. Little Bear is Simone’s love child.

The Salteña Carts: Bolivians are like Hobbits, they have “second breakfasts” at around 10am and the favorite mid-morning delicacy is salteñas, a dumpling of crunchy crust filled with a wickedly tasty meat stew. Women in white straw hats roam the streets in the morning pushing their salteña carts, square glass cases on wheels with the hot treats resting inside.

Cotton Candy Sellers: Sunday is the one day of the week that a good portion of Cochabamba gets to actually spend the day with their families. On Sunday mornings women in my neighborhood set out early down the long hill toward town with huge, six-foot-tall at least, stacks of cotton candy to sell to people enjoying their day off. Bright pink, luminescent green, starry white. Nothing could draw a child’s attention more.

Water Balloons: This is Carnival weekend and to step outside your door is to become a target. Every child over age one seems armed with water balloons. Even Mariana insists on carrying her precious green “blooon” around the house. That’s one reason I left early. A gringo on a bike is a dousing waiting to happen. I dodged most of them pretty well.

The Rickety Tin Pedal Carts: In Plaza Colon, one of my favorite spots in the city, was filled with families happily passing their Sunday morning together. Most weeks someone sets up a little business renting rickety tin four-wheel bikes. These are the kind of contraptions that would seem junkyard bound in the US. Here it is recreation. Two girls, probably twelve years old or so, were giggling as they rode in circles side by side around the plaza. In the US I think such a thing would be considered geeky, or at least not nearly cool enough for a teenager to get near it.

It is one of the things that is so glorious about Bolivia. Even simple things – a cheap tin pedal cart, a small meat dumpling, a water balloon, petting a puppy, a bright pink cotton candy – just these on a Sunday morning are a source of joy and appreciation here.

Globalization the Theory vs. Globalization the Reality -- A Preview

Some readers may notice that I haven’t been writing as much this past couple of weeks as earlier. One reason, happily, is the easing of Bolivia’s various political crises of the past month. The other reason is that I am up to my neck in writing a major report that The Democracy Center will release soon. It is the carefully documented story of how International Monetary Fund-forced budget cuts and tax hikes led to a national rebellion here in Bolivia that left 33 people dead. That happened exactly two years ago this month.

We have been at this report for a while. I have interviewed President Carlos Mesa, IMF officials, a well-known international economist, and many others at length. We’ve also immersed ourselves in the views of social movement leaders, the testimony of victims and their families, and dozens of tedious policy papers. I am grateful for the aid of two stellar volunteers, Carolyn Claridge and Nicholas Verbon of the University of Washington, who are helping us here.

So much of the debate about the World Bank and IMF, from both sides, is abstract and rhetorical. Once again Bolivia provides a story of what these global policies mean on the ground, for real people, living in the real world. We plan to release the report in Bolivia and in Washington in connection with the joint IMF/World Bank meetings in April.

Meanwhile, as a preview, I thought I’d share a pair of economic declarations that speak volumes about the gap between what conservative, pro-market economic reforms were supposed to bring to Bolivia and what really happened. This is an important point. I have come to the conclusion, after studying these issues for a long while, that the split over globalization is not so much about left vs. right but about the world of theory vs. the world of reality.

Here is that theory vs. reality come to life in Bolivia.

Here is what the IMF, World Bank and Bolivian government jointly predicted, in 1998, about the rosy economic results that would come from privatizing oil, water, electrical service and other state-owned companies, as well as other pro-market reforms:

“… a significant reduction in poverty by 2002 through faster economic growth and stronger social programs. Specifically, the program aims to raise economic growth from 4½ percent in 1998 to 5½– 6 percent by 2001, reduce inflation gradually to 5 percent in 2001, achieve moderate gains in reserves, and keep the external current account deficit on a sustainable path.

Here is what the Bolivian government reported back to the IMF four years later about the actual results:

Economic growth averaged only 1½ percent a year in 1999-2002. The resulting fall in per capita income and employment, and the contraction of the informal economy owing in part to the coca eradication campaign, have contributed to rising social tensions that erupted recently. Moreover, the weak economy has undermined government revenues, raised the fiscal deficit, and placed a heavy financing burden on the public sector. The prolonged economic stagnation has also weakened the financial and corporate sectors.

As I wrote about the El Alto water revolt, the reason that Bolivians are so suspicious about the World Bank’s and IMF’s economic prescriptions of privatization, budget cutting, and the like is not because of either stupidity or ideological blindness. It is because, in point of fact, it hasn’t worked.

We will have a lot more to say about all of this shortly when we release our report.

Thank You for Visiting

It has been just over a month since The Democracy Center began this “Blog from Bolivia”. Supporters of ours encouraged us to do this for a while.

Evidently, the Blog has caught on. Since we began visits to our Web site have nearly doubled. We now receive more than 18,000 visits per month and the Blog has become one of the most popular pages on our site. Reporters from the foreign press have told me that they use our Blog as a way of keeping up on events here in Bolivia.

As long-time readers of our e-newsletter know, I have always tried to make what we write a mix. Sometimes we are hard core political. Sometimes we make attempts at humor. The two most responded two articles that I have written in the past five years was our coverage of the Cochabamba water revolt and my obituary in December for my friend Christopher McKenzie. I think this means people enjoy reading a mix of things.

I am always happy to receive suggestions from people about what they’d like to hear about on the Blog and several offerings here come directly from reader suggestions. Please send them along to me at: JShultz@democracyctr.org.

Here’s what is coming up from The Democracy Center in the next couple of months:

** The IMF, Bolivia, and 33 People Killed Connecting the Dots: An extended case study we are writing about the events of Black February and the role of the IMF. Based on interviews with President Carlos Mesa, the IMF, social movement leaders and others.

** The US Demands Immunity for Human Rights Crimes – The story of US efforts to pressure Bolivia and other countries worldwide to exempt US soldiers and officials from the International Criminal Court.

** Blog from Brazil – I’ll be headed their for two weeks in March to look at how citizens there are taking the initiative to understand and influence national budget policy.

** My Life with a Cartoon Character – Tales from the wonderful world of raising a two year old!

Stay tuned!!

Once Again – The Curse of Carnival

We have arrived at that time of the year when I try mightily never to leave my house, except for quick trips to the local park with my two-year-old daughter Mariana. Some things are not to be sacrificed. It is once again Carnival season in Bolivia, when Cochabamba turns into one giant mayhem of water fighting.

Some years ago, during one of my first Carnival seasons in Bolivia, I wrote this article about it, The Curse of Carnival. For those interested in the odd spectacle of an entire city throwing water balloons at one another, have a look at the article.

Meanwhile, I have an arsenal of plastic squirt guns in case things get rough and I am making up lots of reasons to stay here where it is safe and dry in my house. If you are coming this way in the next two weeks, bring a full-length raincoat.