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WHO WE ARE
The Democracy Center works globally to advance social justice through investigation and reporting, training citizens in public advocacy, and leading international citizen campaigns.
Globalization, Stories From The Front Row
No country offers a better lens through which to understand the long history and current state of global integration than Bolivia. The poorest nation in South America, Bolivia's central role in global integration stretches from the far past to current day. From the mid-1500s and for three centuries onward a single Bolivian hill, the silver-laden Cerro Rico in Potosi, almost single-handedly bankrolled the Spanish Empire, yet leaving Bolivia only destitute, with a hollowed-out mountain of millions of slave corpses to show for it.
In the modern scene, for the past 15 years, Bolivia has been the chief Latin American test laboratory for a series of market-oriented, World Bank and IMF globalization policies - privatization, debt reduction, relaxing labor standards, and others known by the label neoliberalism. In turn, especially since the country's now famous 2000 revolt against water privatization, Bolivia has become a powerful international symbol of popular resistance to those policies. In October 2003 Bolivians ousted their President over a proposed gas sale to California.
In 2005 The Democracy Center will launch a new investigation and writing project, looking at a specific set of examples that illustrate Bolivia's real-world experience with the forces of economic globalization. The project will include active participation by a team of Bolivian investigators and writers, telling their country's story to the world.