Bolivia's Climate Summit: "The People's Agreement"

Readers:

This week, with the People’s Summit on climate change wrapped-up and gone (and Tiquipaya returned to its normal people-to-cows ratio), the Democracy Center has had an opportunity to begin looking more deeply at what happened last week – at what messages have come out of the Summit and at what impact it might have globally and here in Bolivia. Today we begin a series of Blogs posts looking more in depth at the summit, beginning with this one by Elizabeth Cooper examining the People’s Agreement that came out of the meeting. We’ll follow this next week with an analysis by Jessica Aguirre on, “Money and the Market: What Role in Addressing Climate Change? and by me on “Where’s the Strategy for Moving Forward?”

One other note, on May 1 the Blog from Bolivia has to migrate to a new publishing system, a task beyond my feeble mind's ability to comprehend. So if there are some delays and glitches in our posts in the next week or so, blame technology not chicha.

Jim Shultz


Bolivia's Climate Summit: "The People's Agreement"
Written by Elizabeth Cooper

More than 30,000 people were officially registered for last week’s People’s Summit on Climate Change (about 25% from abroad and the rest from various parts of Bolivia). After a wild flurry of meetings by working groups and participant-led workshops, the Summit finally produced a lengthy declaration of conclusions, a so-called “Peoples’ Agreement” designed to respond to what the Bolivian government and other participants branded as the failure of the Copenhagen summit last December. While critical of the UN negotiation process, the Agreement is aimed at the next installment of those negotiations, the UN-hosted summit scheduled for next December in Cancun.

Wrapped in a thick blanket of rhetoric about the perils of imperialism and capitalism for the planet’s health, the conference agreement laid out a set of specific demands and plans aimed primarily at the wealthy countries of the north. The four main proposals among these are:

1. The establishment of a UN Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that would reflect and complement the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

2. The establishment of an International Climate and Environmental Justice Tribunal with legal teeth to “to prevent, judge and penalize States, industries and people that by commission or omission contaminate and provoke climate change.”

3. The acceptance of a comprehensive climate debt owed by developed countries (notably the U.S. and Europe) to the developing countries suffering the Impact of climate change.'

4. The carrying out of a global referendum to consult the peoples of the world on these and other topics related to climate change.

This People's Agreement is based on a set of proposals drafted beforehand by the Bolivian government, and then worked through by a set of 17 official working groups which all participants were invited to join during the meeting. The final document was then assembled to communicate the positions each group had adopted.

On the subject of "climate debt", the Agreement declares that developed countries must assume financial responsibility for a long list of impacts and solutions, including the costs of transferring technologies to developing countries, assuming responsibility for accommodating a potential hundreds of millions of “climate migrants”, and cutting carbon emissions enough to allow for carbon contamination by developing countries as they industrialize.

While the document did heavily reflect Morales’ original language and objectives, there was also certain evidence of the responsiveness of the drafting process to feedback from the participants. For example, an important policy debate reflected in the Agreement deals with the current policy of allowing carbon emitters to offset that contamination by effectively leasing large tracts of forests, mostly in developing countries. The controversial REDD program (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries) was a target of heated opposition at the conference. The forests working group—which initially held a pro-REDD position—ended up adopting a strongly anti-REDD stance, stating, “We condemn the mechanisms of the neoliberal market, such as the REDD mechanism…which are violating the sovereignty of our Peoples and their rights to free, prior and informed consent and self determination.” In some panels those objecting to the REDD approach called it a plan to turn people in developing countries into “park rangers.”

Throughout the Agreement participants in the People’s Summit challenged a fundamental strategy in the Northern approach to climate change since the Kyoto Protocol – the use of market mechanisms as a way to reduce carbon emissions and damage to the climate. The Agreement declares that carbon markets have “become a lucrative business, commodifying our Mother Earth.” The report rejected the commodification of the right to pollute as well as the privatization of common goods such as water. It also called for the transfer of climate-related patents and technologies to into the public domain, to make them more readily accessible to the planet as a whole.

Calling current funding to developing countries as well as the proposal under the Copenhagen Accord “insignificant,” the document demanded that developed countries commit to an additional—direct and non-conditional—annual funding of at least 6% of their GDP to combat climate change in developing countries. It noted that a similar amount is already spent yearly on national defense. It additionally demanded a new mechanism under the UN Conference of the Parties with significant representation from developing countries to dispense these funds and ensure an efficient and compliant process.

The Agreement went beyond specific policy and soared into a debate over fundamental ideology, denouncing the common analysis that climate change is “a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.” The battle between on one hand living sustainably and in harmony with the Earth—“Living Well”—and on the other the continued global pervasion of the capitalist model ran as a thread throughout the whole document, echoing Morales’ opening statements at the beginning of the conference that “either capitalism lives and the earth dies, or capitalism dies and the earth lives.”

In language reminiscent of a Biblical apocalypse, the Agreement warned, “the future of humanity is in danger, and we cannot allow a group of leaders from developed countries to decide for all countries as they tried unsuccessfully to do at the Conference of the Parties in Copenhagen.” It demanded the right to consultation of indigenous peoples in the negotiation and implementation of all climate-change related measures, in accordance with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The main dissent expressed at the meeting focused on contradictions at the local level. Some of the strongest dissenting voices came from Mesa 18, the autonomous space called outside the conference by CONAMAQ, a well-known national organization that represents indigenous nations in the Bolivian altiplano. The groups in Mesa 18 focused on a critique of Bolivia’s own environmental policies, charging that the Morales government, on mining and extraction issues in particular, was adopting the same broken capitalist development strategies of the past and risking the same damaging environmental impacts.

There is little question that the Bolivia meeting was more open and participatory than the usual UN summits, but there is also equal debate over what impact the People’s Agreement and Summit will actually have on global practice and policy. The consensus reached amongst the participants remains a consensus of a group of people already in ideological agreement with one another. Reaching out and gaining support beyond those narrow lines will be harder.

Bolivia's People's Summit on Climate Change: Day Two

Update, Sunday April 25:

The Democracy Center team is still in recovery from the People's Summit on Climate Change that left town in a flourish on Thursday. In the Blog posts below you will find a wide variety of material on the summit, ranging from my Democracy Now interview, to video interviews with participants, to our analysis of the goings-on in Tiquipaya. We are now at work at a set of articles analyzing what happened at the summit and its implications for the climate justice movement.

Stay tuned for all that in the next few days.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

A Presidential declaration about the threat to male potency posed by eating chicken. The challenges of all things large. A clandestine chicharia. Bolivian environmentalists strike out on their own to challenge the Morales government. And the continuing search for strategy. These are just a few of the topics we bring you on this, our second later than midnight report, on the Bolivian People's climate summit. First, some announcements:

See and Hear the Climate Summit!

Thanks to the filming and editing efforts of the truly amazing Aldo Orellana, we bring you the video above with the voices of some of the people attending the People's Summit, their hopes for the meeting and their thoughts about the crisis of climate change. And thanks to the audio efforts of our talented Jessica C. Aguirre and Aldo once again, we bring you a radio piece on the morning's event with President Morales and others in the Tiquipaya stadium, which can be found in this feature radio piece from the Democracy Center on Free Speech Radio News.

Join us for Three Democracy Center Workshops on Wednesday

Tomorrow, Wednesday at Noon the Democracy Center will present, for the first time, our new study on Bolivia and lithium. Four months in the making and based on extensive field research and more than fifty interviews, Rebecca Hollender and I will present the study at "Mesa 18", the forum of Bolivian environmentalists set up just outside the government-sponsored Summit. We'll post the full report soon here on the Blog, along with news about our public presentations coming up in Cochabamba and in the Salar de Uyuni, home to Bolivia's sought after lithium.

The Democracy Center is also hosting two other workshops on Wednesday afternoon. At 2:30 we'll be joining colleagues from Latin America to talk about the trade tribunal system and its threat to the environment, and at 4:30 we'll lead a workshop on effective strategies for taking on multinational corporations. Join us for either or both in the Univalle Sociology building, Univalle Room.

Now on to our reports!

Jim Shultz


Scenes from the Day
Jim Shultz

Here some bits and pieces from People's Summit, day two.

The Evo Show

This morning I could hear the booming voice of President Evo Morales projected across fields and farms from the Tiquipaya stadium all the way to my house, where I was busy drilling holes in a wall to hang curtains and ready a guest room for imminent visitors. Just as the town of Tiquipaya waited until Sunday to pave the streets leading to the Summit site, I waited until the last minute as well. I have become Bolivian

I evidently missed quite an Evo Show. As our friends at AP wrote it: "Morales told an environmental conference that chicken producers inject the birds with female hormones, 'and because of that, men who consume them have problems being men." He also suggested eating too much chicken for too long could make men go bald. Nevertheless the men of the Democracy Center took our chances by having solar cooked chicken for dinner. You have to give Evo credit for being entertaining.

Bolivian Environmentalists Show What Strategy Looks Like

Meanwhile, my Search for Strategy continued at today's conference, and I found some in a humble place, among the indigenous and campesino leaders who have decided to challenge Morales here on his own environmental record in Bolivia. Elizabeth Cooper reports below on their efforts at "Table 18".

Earlier this week, on the eve of this global summit, the communities of Potosi who live beside the contaminating San Cristobal mine decided to use this ripe moment to make their move to protest the environmental destruction from that large open pit. Blocking roads in and out of the zinc and silver mine, the communities are demanding action to stop the contamination of their local water supplies, among other issues. While the government has sought to focus blame on the Japanese owners, the Sumitomo Corporation, and previous governments, the mine protests highlight the ongoing weakness of government protection of the environment here.

To be certain, the Morales government deserves a lot of credit for being a global rallying point for deeper action on climate change. But like all Presidents, he has plenty of environmental issues to deal with in his own back yard.

If the thousands of climate activists here want to get a glimpse of what good strategy looks like, these Bolivian activists have shown its basic elements. First, they have a demand that is clear, specific and easy to understand. Second, they have picked an action that maximized their leverage in making that demand to their government. Mounting the protest on the even of Evo's summit is an echo of the move by U.S. civil rights activist fifty years ago when they launched the first "freedom rides" on the eve of the Kennedy-Khrushchev summit. It was smart strategy then and this is smart strategy now.

Strategy Rule # 15: Pressure a president when he is most in the public eye and wants to look his best. The government ought to exclude the groups from the summit and so they have set up shop in a cavernous hall a block away, and are drawing some of the biggest crowds of the meeting.

The Climate Dangers of Chicha

The town of Tiquipaya, where the People's Summit is being held, announced last week that it was imposing a no-alcohol ordinance for the duration of the meeting. This, we assume, is based on the silly belief that either climate activists are prone to getting sloppy drunk or that locals might and will embarrass the town. The ban, which includes locally produced chicha (the fermented corn that is a big part of local culture), prompted a visit over the weekend by my friend Valentina to the Tiquipaya Mayor.

Valentina, a local Bolivian, is an amazing artist (she painted the image that is the cover of our book, Dignity and Defiance) and also took first place last year in the wickedly competitive Tiquipaya Chicha Fair, with an organic brew that was super. According to Velentina, the Mayor justified the action by explaining that chicha contributes to global climate change. While I am not clear about the science on that either way, I am reasonably certain that it probably creates less climate change than the eight SUV, ten motorcycle motorcade that delivered Evo to the Hotel Regina here this afternoon, or the air traffic that brought thousands of people here from across oceans. But I am just guessing.

By the way, friends of mine, in a brazen and glorious act of civil disobedience, have set up a clandestine "chicharia" a block from the Summit. If you want to know where it is, call me.


“The Subterranean Mesa”
Elizabeth Cooper

“One thing that every government should know is that when you ban something, you make it more popular. We as writers all wish our books would be banned,” writer and climate activist Naomi Klein told the crowd sitting in the warehouse-style Brazilian restaurant a couple of blocks outside the campus of the official summit in Univalle. She was right.

Several movements across the country have come together to organize a space outside the official summit to discuss the issues of “Collective Rights and the Rights of Mother Earth,” and in so doing have made a powerful statement of the limitations the official discourse imposes on the spaces within the conference to address these topics.

The participants called the group “Mesa 18,” emphasizing that their conversations were external to those happening in the 17 working groups of the conference.

Here, participants lay bare some of the conflicts within the government that is now looked at by many as a global rallying point for (more) radical movements against climate change. One participant addressed the tension in the new government’s and the new constitution’s pro-indigenous rhetoric. “There are a series of contradictions here,” he said. “On one hand, the new laws recognize indigenous sovereignty in theory, but on the other, they are permitting capitalism to pervade our communities even more.”

Juan Carlos Guzman Salinas, of the organization CEDLA from La Paz, recounted what he saw as the failures of the Bolivian government to responsibly develop the country’s natural resources: “Beginning with nationalization, energy has become much more expensive and intensive in terms of environmental cost in relation to economic productivity. We can measure the robustness of our economy by how independent we are in our energy production, and have lost much of our independence in this respect. We export more energy than we did previously, but we also import more.” Nationalization of energy resources also impedes the development of clean energy, he argued. “Renewable energies will never be able to compete in this market while the price of combustible energy is fixed so low. Bolivia must reflect on these practices and correct them.”

“We need to recognize that these resources are not the state’s,” another member contributed. The resources belong to the people of the nation—that is what nationalization ought to imply.

An indigenous woman sitting next to me in the audience explained another shortfall of the supposed autonomy afforded by nationalization. “According to the constitution, we have the right to be consulted in the plans for development the corporations bring, but what we must have is the right to their administration itself, and the power to actually make the decisions. Right now, what happens is that the corporations arrive and they cheat us. They come and the first thing they do is offer some small improvement for our homes to gain popularity, but then once they gain approval for their plan, the way is wide open for them to do what they want.”

Just as the natural resources collectively belong to the people of the country, so too should the power to decide how they are developed. Some members of Mesa 18 saw the government as complicit in handing over this power to the corporations that exploit the communities and their sovereign resources.

“These favors that the companies bring when they arrive are generally carried out in cooperation with the prefects,” explained another presenter. “What we need is for the people to be empowered to monitor what is happening within and between their own communities.”

A Global Solution to a Global Crisis?
Jessica Camille Aguirre

The summit began in earnest today, as the narrow path running through the main campus became a jostling, elbow nudging gauntlet of vendors and hawkers.

As the number of participants more than doubled over night, the strain of logistics became apparent as people wandered around looking for events that weren’t where and when they should have been. Nevertheless, some of the milling led to some auspicious encounters – an Australian anti-mining couple strategized with an activist from South Korea, a major coal importing country. A young Cochabambina found herself sharing experiences with a delegation arrived from Alaska.

Lucky happenstance aside, it seemed that the conference has become alarmingly big very quickly. Size is a constant matter of discussion here, but the issue goes much deeper than mere logistical concerns.

As people continue arriving from all over the world – most being greeted with an hours long line to register – the largeness of the task ahead has begun to become more perceivable. And despite continuing conversations about the necessity of community-based solutions, many say that a challenge this big requires big solutions.

In a tightly packed panel this afternoon, Bolivian Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera demanded that if the movement to save the planet is to be successful, it must be a planet-wide movement. Jonathan Neale, of UK-based Campaign Against Climate Change, agrees: “We have to have a resistance. We have to have a resistance like the one they had in Greece, only bigger… We have to have it all over the place.”

But he goes on: “(A challenge is) for people to bring together the economic crisis and the environmental crisis – for the movements to understand that these must go together and that they must be solved together.”

The connection between un-sustainable economic models and the climate crisis resonates around the conference, with social leaders pointing to exploitation of transnational corporations as particular detrimental to the prospect of sustainability. Global capitalism, Frei Betto said this afternoon, is incompatible with harmony with nature.
So as conference attendees meet new friends and suffer occasional lines, the question of scale is addressed in multitudinous conversations. How can movements negotiate the act of going global? How can global organizations be held accountable?

Other Reports from the Summit

Climate Connections (Jeff Conant)

Cochabamba, the Water Wars and Climate Change (Amy Goodman, Truthdig)

The “People’s Climate Conference” in Bolivia Kicks Off with Ambitious Aims (Tina Gerhardt, Grist)

From Buenos Aires to Cochabamba (Joseph Huff-Hanon, The Guardian)

The Bolivian Transition Project (Karah Woodward)

Bolivia's People's Summit on Climate Change: Day One

Readers,

Imagine you live in a slow and sleepy village where the cow population rivals that of people and suddenly some ten thousand people from all parts of the planet descend upon it – bearing slogans. Welcome to Tiquipaya on the opening day of the People's Summit on Climate Change.

My personal day began by riding my bike to the conference site (the local university, Univalle) to make an 8 am appearance on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. You can see the interview here. If you watch it you will know why people always tell me that I have a face made for radio. The rest of the day is a blur of chatting with journalists, sitting in on workshops, and trying to get a handle on what is going on here.

Welcome to the opening day of our Blog coverage of the summit. The Democracy Team is on the task and here is the plan. I'll be covering the question, "Where's the Strategy?" Jessica Camille Aguirre will be following the ideas and conversations among indigenous groups and social movements at the summit. Elizabeth Cooper is tracking an issue vital to low-income people and nations: How does combating climate change compete with the desire for economic and social development?

Please pass this along to others interested in the Tiquipaya Summit, and keep reading.

Jim Shultz

In Search of the Strategy: Still Looking
Jim Shultz

We don't have time to waste. When we talk climate change we are talking about a crisis in which human behavior needs to change very much, very fast – and the only way change that fast happens is by changing public policies. So my beat at the Tiquipaya climate summit is about looking for the strategies to make that policy change happen. What are the objectives? Who does the climate movement need to move to achieve them? How are they going to do that? What are the arguments, alliances and actions that will make that happen?

I have a bias. I believe that if you don't have a strategy you are just screwing around in the dark, and the planet doesn't have time for us to go screwing around in the dark.

The climate summit here this week is based on the start of a strategy – to move past a formula where social movements meet outside the doors of government summits and try to influence what goes on inside. This is a meeting of the people and groups that were outside at Copenhagen. Pablo Solon, Bolivia's Ambassador to the UN and a major force behind this week's climate summit, was on Democracy Now just after me and he explained the strategy behind the summit this way:

"What is the point? To organize. We need to organize a worldwide coalition of social movements, of networks, of NGOs, in order to—all of them, with different perspectives maybe in Asia, Africa, Europe or here in Latin America, but all with a common purpose, how we are going to save the future of humankind and of our Mother Earth by trying to have enough force in order to press developed governments to have a really commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions."

That makes sense, a lot of sense. Climate change is not going to be combated without public policies designed to do that and governments are not going to enact those polices without a heavy push from their peoples. So, what are we pushing them to do and how are we pushing them to do it.

I spent some time today listening to people talk about two ideas on that front, both promising on the surface.

"Climate Debt"

One is the idea of "climate debt." This is basically a way to frame a fundamental moral fact, that the wealthy nations of the globe have already used up all of the atmosphere we can afford to with carbon emissions. It is like a speaker at a workshop using up all the airtime before anyone else can get a word in. Among those I spoke to today who are keen on this idea is Naomi Klein, whose thinking on serious subjects I respect a good deal.

The climate debt idea has two big implications (among others). One is that developing countries can't follow the path of industrialization that their rich predecessors have without making the climate crisis even worse. The other is that wealthy nations, in addition to reducing their own emissions, have a moral responsibility to finance what it will take for poorer countries to adapt to climate change and to industrialize in ways that won't deepen the problem.

But arguing a moral responsibility is one thing and being able to make it a legal responsibility is another. Is there any treaty or institution in the world that can force the U.S., for example, into making such payments? No. Is there any chance whatsoever that the U.S. would voluntarily subject itself to what would be an international tort system for climate damage? Well, look how happily U.S. lawmakers subjected the country to the world criminal court. Not quite.

So, if forcing rich countries to pay a climate debt is a dead end, what is the plan to move "climate debt" from a catchy idea to a real proposal with a chance of delivering some results? At a workshop today on that topic, there was an abundance of declarations about why climate debt is important, but few ideas of how to make it real. So we keep waiting for signs of a strategy.

A Global Referendum

Another idea popular here is a proposal to work toward a global voter referendum on climate change. Advocates argue, with reason, that the people of the earth are truly in the same sinking boat with regard to climate change and that we ought to, as a global people, have a vote on how to deal with it. But, as a student of the referendum process (in California I wrote a popular book on ballot measure politics, The Initiative Cookbook), I am stunned by the lack of serious thought that has been put in on two essential points.

The first is about what question to ask. The referendum is not planned as a binding law on government, the way an initiative is in California, for example. It is designed to be a collective public expression that can help pressure governments to act. So with such a referendum you need to think about what question will push governments in precise ways and to be damned sure you will win. Losing a referendum election doesn’t advance your cause. Quite the opposite.

At a meeting today on the referendum idea, a packed room debated a proposal to put a set of questions on the ballot, including:

-- Are you in favor of restoring harmony with Mother Earth?
-- Are you in favor of changing the model of super consumerism?
-- Shall we rededicate the funds now dedicated to War to defense of the environment?

I left in the middle of a discussion over whether an additional question should be added about the abolition of capitalism.

These questions may speak to people's ideological desires but they do not speak to specific actions that governments should take; they do not likely to win broad public support; and they are not serious questions for a global referendum.

The second point is about the mechanisms of arranging a public vote. Not all countries have such mechanisms and in many that do the time and cost of trying to secure such a vote is enormous. In California alone, for example, getting a measure on the ballot is a million dollar proposition. Does the climate justice movement really have the resources of time and energy to do this worldwide, and is this really the best use of the limited resources it has.

There is an alternative that makes far more sense if organizations want to go this route, citizen-organized referendums or "consultas". Mexican activists pioneered this technique a decade ago, setting up tables across the country and asking the people (in a single weekend) a basic question: For example, are you in favor of the government's economic reforms? The organizers of the Cochabamba Water Revolt also used this tactic in 2000. A citizen referendum that asked people if they favored breaking the government's contract with Bechtel drew more than 60,000 people, 10% of the city's population, in three days. As Oscar Olivera told me later, "The consulta made our movement much more participatory."

But these basic strategic questions seemed to little place in the discussions I saw here today. I was not the only person there who observed this. Tomorrow I'll begin my "search for strategy" once more.

Bolivia’s Indigenous Movements Take the International Stage
Jessica Camille Aguirre

In the main plaza of Tiquipaya tonight there was a Bolivian traditional dance group performing. As taxis streamed by hauling people back to Cochabamba after a long day of registration and conference events, a disparate crowd gathered around the stage. Bolivian teenagers bemusedly drinking beer (conference-induced drinking ban notwithstanding), intent looking young activists, exhausted organizers and journalists gathered around, reposing in plastic lawn chairs.

One of the most dynamic parts of this People’s Summit is the convergence of indigenous movements, primarily Bolivian and South American, with the multitude of social movements from around the globe. Indigenous representatives, dressed in brightly crafted and intricately adorned ensembles, are an impressive presence at the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Right of Mother Earth.

The conference program, containing a thick plethora of events, places a noticeable emphasis on events featuring alternative relationships to Mother Earth via the cosmovision Andina (Andean understanding of the cosmos).

Conversations that have happening among Bolivian social movements for months are now being thrust into international spotlight, and into a global context. CONAMAQ, the Bolivian national indigenous organization, is a ubiquitous presence at these presentations, underlining the necessity to live in harmony with nature and rejecting what they see as the commodification of natural resources. Speakers emphasize the need re-enforce communities. Fernando, a speaker with CONAMAQ, said that the relationship with the earth is predicated on good relationships with loved ones. His grandmother, he said, planted the seed of understanding in his heart with her smile.

But the challenge to many of these messages is making them resonate with activists from around the world who face different realities. The concept of vivir bien – living in harmony with nature and in reciprocity with community – is difficult to imagine in the context of contemporary urban environments. The social contract, Italian activist Giuseppe de Marzo pointed out, is broken when societies become too large. Adapting vivir bien to a Western city requires, he said, moving away from the concept of constant economic growth. Changing the entrenched culture of richer nations may be difficult, but many here see it as fundamental to the success of the climate change movement.

Though adapting the message of vivir bien will have its challenges, Bolivian indigenous organizations also found resonance today in indigenous representatives arrived from all corners of the globe. Moira Millan, an Argentine activist of the Mapuche peoples, echoed the concept of vivir bien as she described how her peoples see the natural world as a physical manifestation of their ancestors. But she called for a revolution of thinking among the indigenous peoples of the world: the movement, she said, must globalize as well.

This will be the challenge of the days to come: linking the wisdom of indigenous peoples to the realities of nature-starved urban contexts, and creating strategies for building a movement that maintains the distinctness of traditions while obtaining global significance.

Local Knowledge and Local Technologies
Elizabeth Cooper

In the working group “Development and Technology Transfer,” the day’s discussions opened with a conflict that was emblematic of the North-South tension in this week’s People’s Summit.

A member of the Summit planning team, a Spanish-speaker in a suit and tie, brought the group together to elect its president. He introduced as a candidate Victor Menotti, the executive director of the International Forum on Globalization, based in San Francisco. Victor has been a well-known figure in globalization issues for more than a decade, and also a competent Spanish speaker. Despite a room full of South Americans, no other candidate was nominated.

Then one participant, Ramiro Palizza Ledezma, a historian from La Paz, spoke up. “We are a group that is in the majority Spanish-speaking, and what’s more, we have many skilled participants from this continent present. We have academics, organizers, and miners, and our indigenous compañeros, who are experts in their knowledge of indigenous practices and technologies, present,” he reminded the group.

He suggested that perhaps someone from this group itself should lead, and his comment opened up a small flood of calls of agreement. In the end, the group settled in a three-way leadership that included Victor, an English-speaking woman, and the addition of a leader from the national indigenous organization CONAMAQ named Miguel from the nation of Chicha. Miguel started off the discussion with a discourse in Quechua that was only slightly muffled by the coca that filled his cheeks.

This issue of valuing the knowledge and abilities of indigenous peoples and those from the South was an undercurrent to the rest of the afternoon as it is to the Summit as a whole.

One part of combating climate change is about making effective use of technologies, such as solar energy. Here, the discussion is not only about how wealthy countries can share that technology with less wealthy ones, but about how to do that in a way that takes into account local realities.

“For example, we should not put solar panels to use in La Paz, where the whole landscape is up-and-down and the area does not get consistent sunlight,” said Roberto, the young man who moderated the sub-group discussion. Another participant explained that countries like Bolivia are buying technologies that are inappropriate for their needs because another country or a transnational sells them to them.

Some of the other ideas suggested at the meeting included scholarships for international study that also bring those students—and what they learn—back to their home countries, and sharing best practices between Latin American countries.

“Development” is the other word that comes up over and over in this conversation. In the meeting today, that word meant liberating Southern countries from dependence on Northern countries for the technologies that can improve their lives and fight climate change. Ramiro, the paceño historian, shared his fears for what development can mean. He told me that in a country like Bolivia, development can also mean new forms of competition between people that run against the nature of the culture.

Another participant declared passionately that to even have this conversation, we needed a new word for development that did not carry with it the implication of inflicting such damage to the mother earth. The very last comment of the workshop was made by an indigenous woman—one of the only women I heard speak over the course of the discussion—as most of the crowd was already shuffling out of the room. “We have cultivated knowledge that has allowed us to live in harmony with the earth, and our grandparents have the obligation to pass this information along to our children before it is lost,” she said.

For she and others at the meeting, the wisdom of elders is also a technology with important value.

What Else We're Reading

Some links to other good reports on the climate summit and Water War Anniversary:

Bolivian villagers want compensation as glaciers melt (Andres Schipani, BBC News)

Climate Change Conference in Bolivia: In Defense of Pachamama (Franz Chávez, Upside Down World)

Bolivia Steps Up: An Interview with Climate Negotiator Angelica Navarro (Joseph Huff-Hannon, The Progressive)

FSRN Headlines: People’s Conference on Climate gets started in Bolivia (Jessica Camille Aguirre, Free Speech Radio News)

People’s Conference on Climate Justice Begins in Bolivia; New Yorkers Can Participate Online (Renée Feltz, Indypendent)
Water Wars: How One City’s Fight Against a Multinational Ignited a Movement Battling Water Privatization (Tina Gerhardt, Alternet)

Bolivia: Meet Faith Gemmill from Arctic Village (Brenda Norrell, Censored News) (Part of a series introducing conference participants)

A Climate Change Summit Comes to Bolivia

Last December, leaders and negotiators from more than a hundred countries went to Copenhagen for a global summit that was supposed to produce a set of actions to aggressively tackle the crisis of climate change. The summit failed. No binding agreement was forged and a global response to the crisis was set adrift once more.

This coming week here in Bolivia, a very different sort of global climate summit will be convened. This one will be a "People's Summit", drawing what is expected to be more than 7,000 climate justice activists from at least 100 countries, along with four heads of state, and a handful of high profile celebrities.

The People's Summit called by Bolivian President Evo Morales is actually going to be held here in Tiquipaya, the tiny village of cows and corn where my family and I live. I'll have the good fortune to walk or ride my bike to the meeting. City leaders have been doing there best to spruce things up. An alcohol ban is supposedly in place during the time of the meeting, which will certainly have no impact whatsoever on drinking here. A local taxi driver told me last night that he and the other drivers will all be wearing neckties next week. That will be a big change for sure (and a goofy one).

Here is a preview of what is to come, and of how the Democracy Center and I will be providing live coverage here on the Blog.

Hot Air or a Strategic Plan?

When I mentioned the coming of the summit to my older brother in Southern California he replied, "Great, more hot air to make things worse." He is not without reason in his skepticism. Any meeting of this size that brings together people who basically have the same perspective is likely to be full of self-righteous noise. That's true if it is one of the recent giant right-wing gatherings in the U.S. ("Drill baby drill, you betcha!") or a group of climate activists sitting down in rural Bolivia.

But given the failure of the world's governments to take aggressive action against a crisis that is already real and shoving us toward events far worse, it is essential for climate activists to get together in a forum that is not about pushing at authorities in the room next door but getting a whole lot more strategic in its actions and plans. There is not more time to waste time on actions and strategies that take us nowhere other than making us feel like we are doing something.

The bottom line on climate change is that the people of the planet need to move quickly in three directions at once:

First, we need to take action to reduce the carbon emissions that are trapping the sun's heat into the atmosphere and raising the Earth's temperature. We are already going to have a hell of a time dealing with emissions that are there now following a century of oblivious industrialization. The more we keep adding the worse things will get, much worse.

Second, we need to start on adaptation projects now. No matter how aggressively we address future carbon emissions the fact is that climate change has already begun. Here in Bolivia glaciers that have existed for thousands of years are already melting with huge effects on the people who live here (see our video). In a few years the water supply for Bolivia's largest urban area, La Paz/ El Alto, will be severely diminished. We need to deal with these impacts, worldwide, now.

Third, global policies on climate change need to address the stunning inequalities involved. The fact is that it is the wealthy nations of the world that have created this crisis and it the poorest countries that will suffer the soonest and the most. There has to be a viable and real system under which wealthy nations address the damage they have done and finance the changes that need to be made.

How will this summit, and the climate justice movement in general, address these three key challenges?

It reminds me of a story, the one about the three blind men who run into an elephant. One of them grabs the leg and declares, "It is like a huge tree!" Another grabs its tail and yells back, "No, it is like a snake!" The third grabs the elephant's ear and announces to the others, "No, it is like a giant leaf!" The strategies we need to employ to combat climate change are not one thing but several. It won't do the movement, or the planet, any good to waste time arguing which of them are the true path to change. They all are:

1. Public Education and Consciousness Raising: Al Gore aside, there is still a lot of education that needs to be done not only about the scientific proof of climate change, but about the actions we must all take to make a difference.

2. Policy Change: It is a fact that if you want to change the behavior of masses of people quickly (which is what we must do on climate change) then the most certain way to do that is policy change. If carbon taxes raise the cost of gasoline that will affect the car-driving choices people make more certainly than anything else we can do, for example. But policy change inherently pulls us into a world where compromises get made and compromise is something that some movement activists can't tolerate at all.

3. New Technologies: While it is certainly true that technology has played a leading role in getting the world into this mess, it is also true that new technology has a crucial role to play in getting us out of this mess. Whether it is new solar panels to generate clean electricity or devices that clean-up factory emissions, we need to see technology as an ally not just a threat, and wealthy nations or going to have to finance both its development and global application.

4. Resistance and Direct Actions: The less radical in the movement may not approve, but the fact is that with a planet in peril there are going to be many instances where direct action and resistance are going to be needed, legal or not, to stop the damage in motion. As Martin Luther King wrote in his famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail nearly half a century ago, " Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.

That's what we'll be looking for at the People's Summit and what we will try to support – real conversations that are about thinking strategically and making plans for action that have a chance to make a real difference.

What the Democracy Center Will be Doing at the Summit

First, if you are coming to Bolivia for the meeting, please join us for two workshops we are hosting:

Taking strategic action against the corporations damaging the climate: Thursday April 21, 4:30-6:30, Univalle Room: AV Soc 1:Multinational corporations cause some of the worst damage to the Earth's climate, through both their economic acts and their political ones. Join us for a forum and discussion that will look at the lessons learned from some of the major global anti-corporate campaigns (Bechtel, Chevron and others) and how we can take the most effective action possible.

International Trade Tribunals: A Threat More Powerful than Nations: Thursday April 21, 2:30-4:30, Univalle Room: AV Soc 1:Trade tribunals in institutions such as the World Bank are a powerful tool for multinational corporations to overrule the will of the people and even of national governments. It is through this system that Bechtel tried to sue Bolivia for $50 million after the Cochabamba Water Revolt, and that the cigarette giant Phillip Morris is now suing the people of Uruguay to overturn important health protections. It is also going to be a process through which corporations can challenge new rules to curb global climate change. Learn about the threat this system poses and what we can do about it.

And if you are coming, please drop us a note so we can get connected: contact@democracyctr.org

If you aren't coming, have no fears, the Democracy Center will be reporting daily on the key events. The entire Democracy Center team will be there – from Bolivia, Australia, the U.S. and Denmark – scouting out the stories and people we find of interest and that we think you will as well. Starting Monday, each night we will post a new Blog, including written reports and a new video capturing some of the voices from the conference you might not otherwise hear. We are very interested in knowing what you'd like us to cover, so if you have suggestions, please post them here in the comments section!

Following the meeting we'll be producing a series of analysis articles, both her on the Blog and for publications including the NACLA Reporter, Foreign Policy in Focus, YES Magazine, In These Times, and others.

Voices from the People's Summit

In advance of the meeting here we asked some of our friends who are coming to tell us why:

“I am coming to Cochabamba both to celebrate its historic struggle against water privatization and also to take part in the creation of another world centered on the rights of the Earth and all her people.” -Vandana Shiva, environmental activist, eco-feminist, author, and physicist, Delhi, India

“The Copenhagen climate talks proved those who gain most from ‘business as usual’ find it very difficult to stand up against the pillage of Mother Earth. Greed gets in the way. So, now it’s up to us all. Bring on Cochabamba, for a chance to work strongly together from here on in, for Mother Earth and all her good folks. - Steve Denshire, Rising Tide Australia and Naomi Hogan, Climate Action Newtown, Australia.

“As we saw in Copenhagen, many governments are unwilling to commit to changes that are needed to avoid a truly catastrophic future for our children and theirs. I hope that in Cochabamba we will be able to strengthen the global climate movement that will make it impossible for governments to avoid change. I’m especially interested in the proposed global referendum on climate change, which could be a valuable organizing and educating tool for movements around the world. -David Kane, Associate for Latin America and Economic Justice, Maryknoll Office for Global Concerns, Washington, USA

We have to bring together our voices and come out with a clear and coordinated plan of action, with mobilizations in the streets and strong proposals in the negotiations, for COP-16, which will be held in Cancun in December of this year. La Via Campesina in Mexico hopes to receive the social movements of the world at this event, and we must come out of Cochabamba with a plan and with agreements with Evo and other friendly governments.”-Alberto Gomez, co-coordinator of the Via Campesina for the North America region, and a member Union Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas Autonomas (UNORCA), Mexico.

“For me, the main reason for going is to connect with and learn from the other social movements that will be present, so we can collectively explore how to build an effective global movement for climate justice. Also, it is important to communicate to those on the front line of the struggle that there are others from more affluent parts of the world who are working towards the same goals, who understand that climate change is a symptom of a crisis within our political and economic systems, and that capitalism is a fundamental part of the problem.”-Chris Kitchen, independent climate justice activist involved with Climate Justice Action network and Camp for Climate Action UK, England

“In Copenhagen, the ALBA countries resisted the imposition of a non-solution. This showed that Latin America was not afraid to speak the truth to power, water is important, food is important, the climate and biodiversity must be protected. These are simple truths that even my grandmothers would understand were they still alive. I am still hopeful in spite of the mining, the oil and gas exploitation and the genetically modified monocultures in the Argentine pampa and the plains of Southern Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia that South America can show some leadership in protecting Planet Earth.”-Tony Phillips, Friends of the Earth Argentina, Project Allende Argentina

The Bolivia Water Revolt, Ten Years Later

Dear Readers:

I am just back from a week away to a place without Internet (my novel-writing escape), which answers the questions some have had about why I haven't written about the elections. The results don't take either a rocket scientist or political scientist to understand. It is certainly, on the one hand, a substantial victory for MAS. In 2005 MAS won three of the nine governorships. This year it won six, including big pick-ups in two of the most populous regions of the country, La Paz and Cochabamba, (which had elected opposition governors in 2005 but recalled them in 2008). MAS also took over in Chuquisaca and Pando.

MAS did less well in the cities, in particular by losing every major mayorship except for El Alto and Cochabamba. Notably, it also lost mayorship votes in La Paz and Oruro to the Movimiento Sin Miedo party (MSM), founded by La Paz Mayor Juan del Granado. The loss of the mayorships says two important things about the state of Bolivian politics. One is that there is still a significant rural/urban split over MAS, which benefits Evo Morales' party in departmental elections where the rural vote is strong and weakens it in city elections. The second is the clear rise of MSM as the only genuine national opposition party. That's worth watching because MSM beat MAS in areas like La Paz where the MAS base would normally be considered strong and MSM is not anything close to a right-wing party. Other than in the shrinking opposition east, the old right-wing Bolivia parties are effectively dead, or at least in a very deep sleep.

That's all I have to say about the vote. For those wanting a more conservative analysis you can see what the Inter-American Dialogue published here (I usually add a commentary there but was away). Now on to the topic at hand, the Cochabamba Water Revolt, Ten Years After.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

The Bolivia Water Revolt, Ten Years Later

A decade ago this week the city of Cochabamba exploded into the streets in what became known as the "final battle" of the Cochabamba Water Revolt. A decade ago this week my days consisted of leaving my house early on bicycle, riding as far into the city center as I could get before getting threatened by protesters intent on cutting my tires, and then proceed the rest of the way on foot to bear witness to the events from their core and make my way back up the hill home to send off dispatches over the Internet. In the midst of all that I dodged a large rubber bullet that a motorcycle policeman thought would be fun to fire at a gringo, learned the wonders of tear gas inhalation, and blatantly lied to my mother that I had never left the house.

Not everyone's story of that week ended so well. So we pause to remember especially the 17-year-old boy, Victor Hugo Daza, taken that week from his family by a bullet fired by an Army sharpshooter, an officer acquitted and promoted for his efforts.

This coming week people from various parts of the world will come here to Cochabamba for a set of events marking the tenth anniversary of the Water Revolt. Most will join in on the Third International Water Fair, which includes many different activities, and which you can read about and join in on here.

The Democracy Center – because of the role we played in reporting on the Water Revolt from the streets while it was happening and our leadership in the campaign afterwards to block Bechtel's $50 million legal case against Cochabamba – is offering a variety of materials to readers and visitors who want to learn more. The story of the Water Revolt is not a simple one. It is certainly in large part the story of a modern day David and Goliath, which is why a decade later it still commands such global attention. But it is more complex than that as well. So we hope you will take time to have a look through some of the following:

1. Video Interview with Jim Shultz (click on the screen above or visit here)

Ten years later, what are the lessons we can learn from the Cochabamba Water Revolt, about both the global powers that sparked it and the ongoing problems involved in actually building an alternative?

2. The Cochabamba Water Revolt and Its Aftermath

The complete chapter, written by Jim Shultz, from the Democracy Center's recent book, Dignity and Defiance, Stories from Bolivia's Challenge to Globalization (University of California Press, 2009)

3. How Bechtel Lost its $50 Million Case Against Bolivia

After the Water Revolt the Bechtel Corporation sued Bolivia for $50 million before a World Bank trade court. The story of how people all over the world joined with Bolivia to beat back Bechtel.

4. Photographs

Our friend Tom Kruse's extraordinary photographs from the streets.

5. Cochabamba’s Poorest Neighborhoods Take on the Challenge of Water

A video and written report from the Democracy Center about a little-known piece of the post-Water Revolt story – How the neighborhoods of Cochabamba’s impoverished south side have taken into their own hands the challenge of getting water.

6. Leasing the Rain (Video and New Yorker article)

Following the Water Revolt New Yorker writer William Finnegan produced both this powerful article on the Revolt and, with David Murdoc, this well-done documentary that aired nationally on PBS in the U.S.

You can also find many additional resources about the Water Revolt here, including copies of before and after water bills, exchanges of correspondence between the Democracy Center and the World Bank and the Democracy Center and Bechtel, and more.

An Additional Note:

I do hope that this post will facilitate a good debate among commenters over the impact that the Water War has had, both in Cochabamba and globally. It is an important debate to have. For those of you actually interested in a real analysis, the following should be of interest (to those not interested in real analysis, just skip it).

The Aftermath of the Water Revolt

First, to be clear, my writings (as in the interview posted above) have never varnished over the fact that the public water company reconstituted after the Water Revolt (SEMAPA) has never matched what the people of Cochabamba hoped for it or have a right to expect. In fact, one of my adversaries during the water revolt, the then-head of water at the World Bank, John Briscoe, wrote to journalists afterwards:

"And now there is a new report from Jim Schultz [sic], who played such an important role in glorifying the Cochabamba Water War and bringing it to your and the world's attention. To Mr. Schultz's credit he has not just "moved on", but has stayed in Cochabamba. And to his credit, too, he has given an objective description of what has come from the Cochabamba revolt."

If people want a serious analysis of why that is, that is included in great detail in my book chapter here. In short, however, I will say this:

While the Water Revolt reclaimed the company from Bechtel, it never succeeded in reclaiming it from the two powers that have long used SEMAPA as a source of patronage and graft – the Mayor of Cochabamba and the leaders of the SEMAPA workers union. Much of the inefficiency and mismanagement over the past decade can be attributed directly to that, something that has been the subject of many solid studies.

That said, there is no reason to believe that the people of Cochabamba would have been better off under Bechtel and there is every reason to believe they would have been much worse off.

It is a certainty, for one thing, that SEMAPA rate payers would have paid many additional millions in water tariffs to Bechtel for the past ten years – based just on the increases forced by Bechtel at the start (see here). It is also likely that there would be even fewer new hookups in Cochabamba's impoverished southern neighborhoods. In the book chapter I did a comparison between expansion of water service by SEMAPA in Cochabamba and by Suez (a private company) in La Paz El Alto. It is important to remember that the key challenge with water service in both places is building the infrastructure and developing the supply to provide water to areas that are newly urbanized. That is the truly expensive part, not servicing arras where the tubes are already in the ground.

The main reason that Suez was kicked out by the people of El Alto and La Paz in 2004 is that is consistently refused to provide service to those areas where new infrastructure was needed. In Cochabamba, SEMAPA agreed to expand its service area and responsibility. This is a fundamental difference between a private vs. public approach. Suez had as its first priority the maximization of its profit (that is what corporations are designed to do) and the way a water company maximizes profit is to minimize its responsibilities to the customers who are most expensive to serve. It is exactly akin to a health insurance company denying coverage to people who are sick. In this case the "preexisting condition" is to not have water pipes already installed in your street and all the way to your house. One can make a very reasonable argument that Bechtel would have operated much the same in Cochabamba.

My Role in the Water Revolt and its Aftermath

I always find it entertaining, to be honest, how people (always anonymous) like to inflate my role in all things Bolivia. At various times I have been given direct credit for the election of Evo Morales, the turning out of thousands of angry people into the streets of La Paz and El Alto, and of course my well-known secret leadership of the Cochabamba Water Revolt. I was also, by the way, the person behind the successful NASA moon landing in 1969, when I was eleven years old. I just wanted to mention that.

Because there always seems to be allusions to what I did or did not do in the Water Revolt, let me be precise (for those very few who actually care about such things). I had nothing to do with the fact that an entire city took to the streets and kicked out Bechtel's company here. I think the credit for that can be divided three ways. Bechtel comes in first, because if it had not been so stupid to raise water rates by so much so fast, it probably would have gotten away with it. The government of Bolivia at the time gets credit as well, because if it had not been so stupid as to send out soldiers to squash the peaceful protests in February, most likely the Water Revolt would never have gained the kind of broad intensity of support that it did. And of course there are the actual Bolivians who risked so much to lead the protests.

In the real world, my involvement included the following:

1. Writing dispatches from the scene: These were primarily for a U.S. and Canadian audience and can be read here.

2. Outing Bechtel: As documented in the PBS film on the Water Revolt, I was the one who managed to identify that it was actually Bechtel lurking behind the scenes of the privatized company. Here's how William Finnegan of the New Yorker and PBS reported it:

"But who exactly was Aguas del Tunari? Jim Shultz, an American journalist and activist living in Cochabamba, undertook to find out.

Shultz: Nobody understood really who Aguas del Tunari was. Mostly we knew that Aguas del Tunari had a parent company, that owned it and managed it which was International Water Ltd. So I went to their home page to see if there was anything on their Web site that actually mentioned Bolivia by name. And it was from this page that we figured out that International Water Ltd. was founded in 1996 by Bechtel.

Finnegan: Bechtel was a name people knew. Based in San Francisco, it's a huge, privately owned engineering, and construction company with vast political connections."

3. The Campaign Against Bechtel's Legal Case: Many people and many organizations in countries all over the world played important roles in forcing Bechtel to drop its $50 million legal case. The Democracy Center also played an important role. We developed much of the overall strategy, helped coordinate actions worldwide, and most importantly made sure that journalists and activists alike had the real information on Bechtel as opposed to the corporation's blatantly inaccurate spin.

The U.S. Lets an Ex-President Stand Trial for its Clandestine Collusion with the Bolivian Military

Readers:

Thank you for your positive reaction to our April Fools Day Blog on the plan to make Bolivia and Venezuela one country. We especially thank those of you who fell for it and reproduced it as news.

This Blog post is not a joke. It is dead serious, a special report on how the U.S. went behind the back of a democratic President and today lets that former leader hang in the wind on treason charges because "politics" won't permit Washington to tell the truth. This is the case of the Chinese missiles and the wrongful prosecution of former President Eduardo Rodriguez. The report includes documents from both the U.S. and Bolivian governments never before published in public.

Jim Shultz
The Democracy Center

The U.S. Lets an Ex-President Stand Trial for its Clandestine Collusion with the Bolivian Military

Over the past four years, Bolivian President Evo Morales has leveled one charge after another that the U.S. does not respect Bolivian sovereignty and that it has meddled in the country's domestic affairs.

Some of those charges have been based on substance. It is suspicious that Ambassador Phillip Goldberg went on a tour in September 2008 to visit the country's opposition governors, just on the eve of their launching a series of hot street rebellions against Morales. It is also a fact that an Embassy official illegally solicited Fulbright Scholars and Peace Corps volunteers to scrounge up intelligence for the Embassy.

Other times Morales' charges against the U.S. have been just silly. This includes the infamous photo (right) taken of a smiling Goldberg on the floor of the Santa Cruz fair, Epocruz, along side a supposed Colombian paramilitary operative. To cite the photo as evidence of a U.S. conspiracy, as Morales did at a summit of Latin American Presidents, is to assume that the U.S. Embassy prefers to hold its clandestine meetings amidst thousands of people sampling local fruits and machinery.

There is however another recent case of U.S. intervention in Bolivia's domestic affairs that goes far, far beyond meddling. It is a case that involves the U.S. Pentagon colluding with the Bolivian Army behind a President's back. It involves the clandestine removal of Bolivian arms for shipment to the U.S. It involves the proffer of a $400,000 payment by the Pentagon to the leaders of Bolivia's armed forces, again behind the back of the President. And it is a case that is not based on conjecture but on hard evidence, including documents we are publishing here in this post.

If the Morales government is looking for evidence of U.S. disregard for Bolivia's sovereignty, then this is the case upon which that charge can be made and made clearly. Instead however, the Bolivian government is letting the U.S. off the hook and pinning the blame, wrongly, on the former President behind whose back the U.S. conspired.

This is the story of the U.S. theft of Bolivia's surface-to-air missiles, and of the wrongful prosecution of former President Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze.

The Chinese Missiles

In August of 1986, four Bolivian military officials went to China on a shopping expedition for weapons. Their wish list mainly included guns and bullets, some 3,300 of the first and millions of the second. After a long period of negotiations, the weapons were finally purchased with a loan by the Chinese government of $2 million. Later, in October 1997, when one batch of those weapons arrived in Bolivia, military officials discovered something else in the mix – what many Bolivians would call una yappa, like the extra tomato a vegetable seller might add in as a thank you for purchasing the other twenty.

Included in the crates that arrived were thirty HN-5 Chinese surface-to-air missiles, known in the military trade as Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems (MANPADS). Bolivia suddenly had what some in the military liked to refer to as an "air defense system."

In the course of this investigation I had a long conversation with a Canadian arms specialist who works for the UN on weapons destruction projects (who spoke on condition of not being identified by name). He told me that the Chinese surface to air missiles like those shipped to Bolivia were considered the "Yugo" of MANPADS. In other words, they were poorly made to begin with and even more useless over time. "It's the Russian models that you want," he told me.

Maybe it was for that reason that the Bolivian Army was reluctant to test them. It was three years later, in 2000, when the Army finally took a shot at firing one. These missiles are small weapons, thin tubes about five feet long and weighing just twenty pounds. Their lethal qualities come not from their size or range but their function. Used against aircraft, the missiles aim for the heat emitted from the exhaust pipe and tunnel right inside before exploding. They attack a plane or helicopter at its weak spot, in the way that Luke Skywalker took out the Empire's Death Star through a tiny ventilation shaft.

That particular knowledge of the missiles' mechanism must have been lost on Bolivia's Army in its La Paz test launch. According to sources, the missile fired and then went crazy, flailing around in the air and sending soldiers diving for cover. It then fell – a dud. The only other test attempted by the Army was in 2004 when the missile wouldn't fire at all. Its battery, like that of the rest of the missiles, had gone dead.

U.S. interest in stripping other countries of their surface to air missiles began not long after the September 11, 2001 attacks. That effort to find and decommission stockpiles of the MANPADS got a key push in 2005 by a bipartisan team of U.S. Senators, Republican Richard Lugar of Indiana and a freshman Democrat from Illinois, Barack Obama. Speaking of the MANPADS Lugar said. “Such weapons could be used by terrorists to attack commercial airliners, military installations and government facilities here at home and abroad. Al Qaeda reportedly has attempted to acquire MANPADS on a number of occasions.”

The focus of the U.S. hunt for these weapons was on the Russian-made variety, which were considered serious weapons and loose in the world in great numbers. Why the U.S. suddenly took such an obsessive interest in Bolivia's outdated junk-MANPADS in the middle of 2005 is a subject of speculation and theory – but an obsessive interest it took.

The Unlikely President

In most countries of the world the men and women who become President do so only after decades of careful plotting and positioning. Eduardo Rodriguez became the President of Bolivia with about 30 minutes notice and he wasn't very happy at all about the prospect.

On the night of June 10, 2005, as Bolivia was spiraling into nationwide chaos, the scholarly Chief Justice of the country's Supreme Court was watching the news on television with his wife and getting ready to go to bed when his telephone rang. It was the President of the Senate, Hormando Vaca Diez.

For days, Bolivia's social movements had paralyzed the country with a series of protests and road blockades demanding nationalization of the nation's gas and oil. The protesters were furious with the watered down gas and oil reforms being pushed by President Carlos Mesa, and Mesa was once again repeating his penchant for threatening resignation to try to cajole the Congress and the country his way.

Mesa's resignation gaming had set off a monumental power struggle between he and Vaca Diez, the next in the line of succession. When his rivals called Mesa's bluff and told him to send the resignation right over, Mesa refused if it meant that the right-wing Senator would take control (Vaca Diez had declared publicly that his answer to the protests would be to crush them with the military).

That night in June the Congress had fled the capital in La Paz, where the social movements had made it impossible to meet. Instead the Congress sought to convene in a surprise session in Sucre where it would accept Mesa's resignation and swear in Vaca Diez. The social movements, led by dynamite-wielding miners from Potosi, surrounded the Congress in session and blocked members' exit to the airport. Bolivia was on the verge of exploding.

Over the phone, Vaca Diez explained that he, President Mesa, and the leader of the House of Deputies, Mario Cossio, had finally agreed to the only deal they could think of to keep Bolivia from rolling off the precipice. Mesa would resign and the two Congressional leaders would relinquish their right to succession. That meant that Rodriguez as head of the Supreme Court would have to assume the Presidency, a move which would also trigger automatic elections within six months. "Do you agree to do this?" Vaca Diez asked him. Rodriguez knew he didn't have any choice.

After hanging up the phone and changing back into a suit and tie, Rodriguez found himself an hour later speaking live before the Congress and the nation. "I didn't even have a speech prepared," Rodriguez told me, explaining the odd and dramatic events that night. "I had to make it up as I went along."

Afterwards Rodriguez was up until 4am getting briefed by the nation's generals on one standoff after another around the country where the Army and the social movements were on the verge of open warfare with one another. As he recounted the events of the night he told me, "You can't imagine the stress. Presidents come into office with a whole team of people they have worked with. I was totally alone."

The next morning Rodriguez's two young children awoke to discover that their father was now the President. As he walked the two out his front door in Sucre to the car that would take them to school, the children looked wide-eyed at the line-up of television cameras and the swarm of armed soldiers roaming around their home. Rodriguez told me that is seven-year-old son looked up at him and said, "Dad, you are the President. What are you going to do?"

In the landscape of Bolivian politics, Rodriguez is an oddity. He came to the Presidency not as a lifelong politician, nor as a social movement leader. He rose to lead the Supreme Court based on a respected and squeaky-clean record as a lawyer and public servant. In Latin America in 2005 there wasn't a President anywhere that seemed a less likely candidate to be screwed by the U.S.

Eduardo Rodriguez is the kind of man one might pass on the street and not notice, even if you had seen him on television a number of times. At 54, with scholarly glasses and a short graying hair, Rodriguez looks like the mild-mannered lawyer he set out to be at an early age. He grew up in Cochabamba across the street from Plaza Colon. His parents owned a local pharmacy and Rodriguez was schooled nearby by the Jesuits at St. Augustine, a private Catholic School which also graduated just a few years afterwards Morales' Vice President, Alvaro Garcia Linera.

The first thing that set Rodriguez on the path toward law, he says, was a school requirement that sent the clean-cut high school student to the San Sebastian men's jail to help teach inmates to read. The school requirement was for two months, Rodriguez stayed six. Injustice, he told me, was no longer a theory taught in class.

Rodriguez second conversion experience came in 1973 during the year he spent in Springfield Missouri as a high school exchange student. Night after night the teenager from Cochabamba joined his host family and millions of Americans as they watched the Senate Watergate hearings unfold on television. Thinking about the brutal dictatorships back at home, Rodriguez was mesmerized by a political system that brought down its President without a shot.

Back in Bolivia he set his professional trajectory on public service. After attending public university and law school, he got a job as junior staff to a special Congressional committee investigating the country's most recent dictatorships, an operation quickly shut down in 1980 with the arrival of yet another coup. Later he won a USAID scholarship to attend the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. On his return he helped build a new national auditor's office, the stuff of numbers not revolution. In 1999 Rodriguez tossed his hat in the ring for an improbable promotion, as a Justice of the country's Supreme Court. Then candidates for the job were selected by a vote of Congress. In a process overflowing with politics and party jockeying, the unaffiliated Rodriguez ended up finishing first place in the Congressional vote. Later he was elevated by his bench mates to be Chief Justice.

Then in September 2005, just three months after assuming the presidency, Rodriguez discovered that the U.S. military officials and the Army chiefs under his command had been mobilizing behind his back.

The U.S. Acts Behind the President's Back

During the last weekend of that September, President Rodriguez was on a rare trip away from Bolivia, to a Presidential summit in Brazil. That is when the Bolivian Army and its U.S. counterparts decided to act.

On Sunday morning of that weekend a Bolivian military unit entered the weapons storage facility in La Paz where the missiles were held and loaded them on a truck for the drive uphill to El Alto. The 28 missiles that remained in the Bolivian arsenal were taken to the base of the Bolivian Air Force where they were transferred to a U.S. military aircraft and transported out of the country. The President knew nothing of the operation, finding out about it only afterwards.

Nor did President Rodriguez find out until afterwards about the four-page signed document that the U.S. Pentagon left behind as a thank you, a September 30, 2005 "Mutual Cooperation Agreement" between Bolivia and the U.S. (read the document here). It includes the following:

WHEREAS in recognition of the Republic of Bolivia's outstanding support of the war on terrorism and as incentive to continue this support DoD [Department of Defense] desires to transfer $400,000 to the Republic of Bolivia.

The Pentagon memorandum then leaves a series of blank spaces where the Bolivian generals were expected to list the bank, bank account, and beneficiary to which that $400,000 in Pentagon cash should be wired. The Bolivian Generals could have listed anyone on the simple return form to Washington, including themselves.

The whole manner in which the U.S. rushed to remove the missiles from the Bolivian arsenal in the closing months of 2005 raises a series of crucial questions.

First, why the rush and why behind the back of the democratic President of the country?
The UN arms destruction specialist who I spoke with was astonished on this point. "Handing over weapons to the UN or to another country for destruction is an extremely political decision. Usually it requires an act of Congress."

Former President Rodriguez recounted a conversation he had with the then-U.S. Ambassador, David Greenlee on this question. According to Rodriguez, Greenlee told him, "We had to get them out. If we didn’t get them out then we wouldn't be able to."

There are several theories about why the U.S. went rogue.

One has to do with the other big event taking place in Bolivia that September – a historic Presidential election in which a fierce U.S. adversary, Evo Morales, was surging to the lead. Was the U.S. really worried that two dozen outdated missiles in the hands of Morales was some kind of threat?

According to Rodriguez and others, U.S. concerns about stray MANPADS falling into the hands of Al Qaeda included charges of some form of terrorist presence on the Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay border. Witnesses in an Argentine legal case reportedly testified that members of the Bolivian military had sold at least one missile in the area and Rodriguez believes that reports like these made the U.S. nervous about the possible slippage of the Bolivian MANPADS into undesirable hands.

President Rodriguez, a man known to be a stickler for the law and correct procedure, was not likely to give a stamp of approval to such a politicized action as handing over missiles to the U.S. without submitting it to public disclosure and proper consideration. And that undoubtedly would have spilled the U.S. request over into a Morales administration.

Or was the U.S. trying to curry favor with the Bolivian military on the eve of a Morales presidency? This is where the offered payment of $400,000 becomes especially curious, especially given the informality with which the generals could submit the designated beneficiary for that fortune. I asked the UN weapons expert about the payment and the U.S. insistence that the missiles be removed from Bolivia for destruction.

"Twenty-eight MANPADS? It's a simple process. You dig a hole three meters wide and three meters deep in an unpopulated area, wrap them in a bundle with some dynamite and explode them. If I were contracting it out it would be a day's work and cost about $1,500."

Nearly half a million dollars is a mighty big thank you for such a small project. In fact, it remains unclear why the U.S. wanted the missiles removed from Bolivia at all, instead of just observing their destruction in some desolate hole in the altiplano.

Speaking about the scandal to Voice of America, State Department Spokesman Sean McCormick dismissed concerns that the U.S. had acted behind a President's back. "As for who was told in Bolivia about the action, you'll have to talk to the Bolivian government about that."

Given the long history of the U.S. colluding with militaries in the region behind the backs of democratic leaders (see General Pinochet, Chile, 1973) one would expect that the State Department understands that talking to the generals is not enough.

Facing Trail for Treason and Left Hanging in the Wind by Uncle Sam

Last month the Morales government announced that it was going to accelerate its efforts to prosecute a list of former Presidents, and included Eduardo Rodriguez on the list. While the others face charges of corruption related to foreign oil contracts, the case against Rodriguez, over the missiles, is something altogether more serious. He faces charges of treason that can carry up to thirty years in a Bolivian prison.

There is no question that Rodriguez was kept in the dark about the handover of the missiles to Washington. In fact, upon discovering it, Rodriguez cancelled the $400,000 offer from Washington, demanded a full report (read the report here), and fired both the head of the Army and the Minister of Defense.

Why the Morales administration is going after Rodriguez over the missiles, instead of leveling those charges against Washington, is a mystery -- especially given that the reason for the U.S. operation may have been fears of Morales himself.

The U.S., for its part, knows it wronged Rodriguez and is letting him face life in prison over a set of acts that it undertook not him. The former President claims that several high level U.S. officials have admitted as much to him in private, but say that the U.S. can't admit its actions in public for "political reasons." The former exchange student to Missouri is being taught a new lesson about the realities of U.S. politics, one not nearly so attractive as the accountability he witnessed during Watergate. Today Rodriguez is looking at options for filing a legal action against the U.S., on behalf of Bolivia and its people.

The U.S. has says often that it wants to build a new relationship with Bolivia, including exchanging ambassadors again (the two countries kicked out their respective ambassadors in September 2008). If it wants to do so it should start by coming clean about its behind-the-back-of-democracy shenanigans that September weekend in 2005. It should not let a decent man take the rap for the Pentagon's suspicious maneuvers. And if the Morales government wants its prosecution of other former Presidents, including Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada, to look like more than a political twitch, it should re-aim its sights on the missile case to where those sights belong – on Washington.

Chavez and Morales Announce Plan to Merge Venezuela and Bolivia into One Country by 2011

In startling back-to-back news conferences in Caracas and La Paz, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Bolivian President Evo Morales announced Wednesday that they plan to merge their two countries into one nation by the end of 2011. The plan – which would establish the new Republic of Bolizuela – came as a shock in both capitals.

"This new nation will complete the dream of our great liberator, Simon Bolivar, a dream born nearly two centuries ago," proclaimed President Chavez. "We are two great peoples coming together to create one grand republic that will win the notice of the world." A beaming President Morales added, "Brothers and sisters of Bolivia, never again will our nation be dismissed as powerless and poor. We will now take our rightful place among the great nations."

The announcement immediately set off a firestorm of criticism and political threats from Chavez and Morales opponents. In Bolivia former President Jorge Quiroga, a prominent opposition leader, denounced the move. "This is precisely the end of Bolivian sovereignty that I have been warning about since Evo took office. Santa Cruz Governor Ruben Costas told reporters there, "We will become the subjects of Venezuela and the dictator Chavez on the same day that they discover cattle on the moon – never!"

Foreign Reaction

In Washington, U.S. State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley reacted cautiously to the Bolizuela announcement at his morning news briefing. "Certainly the U.S. recognizes that both Bolivia and Venezuela are sovereign nations and are free to enter into any agreements that they choose." He added, "This obviously has strategic ramifications in the region and we hope the governments of these two countries will fully consult with their people and avoid the obvious confrontations the move will set off."

Crowley also noted one benefit of the move for the U.S. "The good news is that this should render moot the question of when the U.S. and Bolivia will exchange ambassadors once again. The current U.S. ambassador to Caracas and the Venezuelan Ambassador to Washington should be able to handle affairs for Bolivia as well, so we see some cost savings there, always welcome as the President sets out to tackle the deficit."

House GOP leader John Boehner was less enthusiastic about the Venezuela/Bolivia merger, telling the Associated Press, "Great, two flippin' nut cases in one shell, just what the U.S. needs in our backyard. This is one more example of the Obama administration's weakness in the face of tin dictators run amok."

Richard DeLong, a Latin American expert at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, said the voluntary merger of two existing countries without contiguous borders was not without precedent. He specifically cited the short-lived 1958 merger of Egypt and Syria into what became the United Arab Republic. "Actually, we see a trend in nation mergers globally right now, just as with corporate mergers, and for the same reason. These are political marriages based on the value of combining complimentary assets. We see this, of course, in the steady integration of Europe and in the preliminary merger discussions underway between Singapore and Malawi."

In the case of Bolivia and Venezuela, various analysts were quick to point out some of the advantages that the marriage of nations would bring, especially in terms of energy resources, sea access, and prospects in international soccer competition.

"This a powerful merger in terms of emerging energy markets," observed Elizabeth Condit, a writer with the industry publication Energy Today. "Venezuela is a dominant player right now in the gas and oil market. Bolivia is going to become a serious player soon in the lithium market. So this combines the energy present and future in one nation and from a market position it is a very shrewd move. I do think the branding is off, though. Bolizuela? Who can say it right?"

Morales was quick to declare the benefit of finally gaining access to the sea, lost when Bolivia's last stretch of coast was seized by Chile in 1879. "Never again will we be a landlocked nation, dependent on others for our access to the ocean!" Morales also announced that the new state airline, BoA, will begin offering free flights between Bolivia and Bahia Guanta, the Venezuelan seaport. The airline announced that girls under eight-years-old making the flight would receive a complimentary Little Mermaid tiara.

Jérôme Champagne, Director of International Relations for the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) told LeMonde in Paris that he sees huge advantages ahead for the two countries in international soccer. "I think that the coaches will want to divide their teams into two squads, one that plays in competition at low altitudes, where the Venezuelans bring a distinct advantage and a second squad for high altitude competition, where the Bolivian players are almost unmatchable. We think it is a very exciting prospect and I also like the new country name as well. It translates very nicely into French."

Difficult Negotiations

A source in the Bolivian government, who agreed to speak to the Democracy Center off the record, explained that the secret negotiations that led to Wednesday's announcement were often difficult.

"The Presidency was obviously one difficult matter. We agreed in the end on a plan for a rotating presidency. On weeks that begin with an even numbered date President Chavez will be responsible for domestic matters and Evo will take charge of foreign concerns, such as saying bad things about the United States. On odd numbered weeks they will reverse those responsibilities." This issue was apparently settled only this past Monday with a compromise that authorizes President Chavez to say bad things about the United States on any day he wishes.

Another key sticking point, said the source, was development of a new common currency. The two governments settled early on a new tender that will be named 'the Huvo' and which will be adorned with formal portraits of the two presidents.

"Understandably, however, both of the Presidents wanted their portrait to appear on the left side of the new bills, so finally it was agreed that the images of would rotate each year," the source explained. It was learned that President Chavez won the right to begin in the left position in the first year through an arm wrestling competition between the two leaders that, according to the source, went two for three.

The capital of the new country will be located in Cochabamba. Venezuelan sources reported that President Chavez developed a taste for the local plate, Pique Macho, during last year's ALBA summit and felt that was reason enough to locate the new capital there. Morales, eager to escape the cold climate of La Paz, agreed.

National Bird

One remaining stumbling block appears to be the final selection of a national bird. The Presidents announced that they are assembling a bi-national team of geneticists, aided by Cuban experts, to undertake the crossbreeding of the two current national birds – Venezuela's peacock and Bolivia's condor. "Our aim," said a spokeswoman for the panel, "is to create a bird that will simultaneously dress really well, but also have the speed and stamina to escape attacks by eagles dropping bird shit from above on the Bolizuelan Concock."

For the full New York Times report on the proposed Venezuela/Bolivia merger, read here.