The Washington Post Opts for Rhetoric Over Fact

An editorial in yesterday’s Washington Post demonstrates what happens when editorial writers living a hemisphere away decide to pontificate about Bolivia based on what they read from wire reports – they take one of the nation’s most respected newspapers off the cliff of rhetoric over fact. Here’s the Post editorial, “A Threat to Latin Democracy”.

If you believe what the Post writes, then the current wave of protests in Bolivia are part of some dark, region-wide Latin American conspiracy to upend “democracy” in the name of converting the region into one big Cuba-Iran-Libya-China. Really, I am not making up this stuff. Read the Post editorial.

Let’s start somewhere the Post opted not to — with the facts.

The Post says, “The insurgents, who claim to represent the country’s indigenous population, drove one democratically elected president from office 18 months ago; now they are working on his successor, Carlos Mesa…”

Fact: The popular demands in October of 2003 were all about stopping President Gonzalo Sànchez de Lozada’s gas export deal, which people didn’t trust would deliver for Bolivians. The demand for his resignation didn’t come until the President’s repression against the protests resulted in fifty-three deaths and the call for his resignation came not just from the so-called “radicals” but from mainstream leaders in the church, the legal community and academia. Even his own Vice-President at the time, Carlos Mesa, broke with him over the killings.

Apparently the Post believes that the more “democratic’ course would have been to let the shooting go on unabated. We are fortunate that the Post took a different stance toward failed presidencies during the Nixon administration.

Fact: The protest movements underway now have explicitly NOT called on Mesa to resign. In fact, they have called on him to complete the responsibilities he assumed when he ran in 2002 and serve out his term. I guess this point was too complicated for the Post to understand, or didn’t make for the rhetorical package it was aiming for.

The Post also says that the protests underway today, over the shape of the new gas export law, come from “a radical movement opposed to foreign investment”.

Fact: No one in Bolivia, not even the Post’s “radicals”, is arguing that Bolivian gas and oil be developed without partnering with foreign corporations. The issue is what those partnerships will look like. Who controls the volume of production? How are the profits to be split? As I have written in this Blog many times in the past few weeks, the social movements are demanding a return to the 50/50 split that Bolivia had before the IMF and World Bank coerced Bolivia into privatizing its oil and gas in the 1990s. That is hardly a radical proposal.

If the Post is so concerned with “democracy” in Bolivia, perhaps it might consider how that democracy has been taken away by having key public choices, over privatization of water and the like, usurped by international financial institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. If the IMF or Bank suddenly took it upon themselves to decide the current US debate over privatizing Social Security, would the Post’s editorial writers consider that a problem in terms of democracy?

As I have also made clear in my recent Blogs, I think that the social movements here have used the tactic of road blockades too freely and too many times. But the fact remains that their demands are legitimate and not some Post-imagined conspiracy to install Fidel Castro as leader of the American southern hemisphere.

The Post ought to know better.

Note: We have asked the Post to publish an op-ed in response to their editorial, from Roberto Fernandez and myself. Take a moment if you will and send the Post a note asking them to do that at: oped@washpost.com