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Title: Evo’s Highway Author: John Severino Date: December 22, 2010 Language: en Topics: State socialism, development, Evo Morales, TIPNIS, highway construction, indigenous, Bolivia Source: Retrieved on June 23, 2013 from https://chileboliviawalmapu.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/evos-highway/
It sounds like something the IMF would have funded during the regime of
General Banzer: a super highway cutting across Bolivia, linking Brazil
with Peru and Chile—and thus with East Asian markets, and in the process
plowing straight through a vitally important nature reserve that also
happens to be the home of three indigenous nations.
Since 2006, Bolivia has been governed by MAS, a progressive political
party that grew directly out of the movements that opposed neoliberalism
and the oppression of indigenous cultures. Its president is Evo Morales,
an indigenous man whose background is in the coca-growers union. Under
these circumstances, Bolivian social struggles have made the news much
less, compared with 2005 and earlier, when major clashes paralyzed the
entire country, as in the Gas War of 2003 and the Water War of 2000,
both of which halted key attempts to privatize natural resources.
Internationally, the Morales regime has curried substantial favor from
the current manifestations of the antiglobalization movement, and it is
no coincidence that in April, 2010, activists and NGOs from around the
world met in Tiquipaya, Bolivia, for the People’s Climate Change
Conference.
Within the progressive narrative, a project like the highway described
above belongs to Bolivia’s past. But in fact, it is a new initiative,
the love child of Evo and Brazil’s socialist president, Lula, another
darling of the opponents of neoliberalism. And the capital is coming not
from the IMF but from a Brazilian development bank, and the
constructioncompanies are all Brazilian.
The indigenous nations whose home will be destroyed by the highway—the
Moxeños, Chimanes, and Yuracares—were not consulted before the agreement
for the highway was signed. The nature reserve where they live, called
TIPNIS, is unique in that the indigenous inhabitants are included in
creating the management plan for the park, unlike other reserves that
simply clear out the prior inhabitants, under the eurocentric assumption
that human communities cannot live sustainably in nature. And on paper
at least, TIPNIS’s constitution prohibits any projects that will have a
high environmental or social impact.
TIPNIS used to be the National Park Isiboro Secure. It was converted
into the Indigenous Territory of the National Park Isiboro Secure
(TIPNIS) as a direct result of strong pressure from below, most
immediately a major indigenous march that crossed the country in 1990.
In other words TIPNIS represents a victory of social struggle, from a
time when Bolivia was ruled by a government everyone recognized as
exploitative and militaristic. It is also one of the most important
reserves of biodiversity on the planet, home to 108 mammal species, 470
different types of birds, 38 reptile and 53 amphibian species, and 188
types of fish, on 12,363 square kilometers of land. Thirty-eight of the
vertebrate animal species that live there are in danger of extinction.
Adolfo Moye, an indigenous leader from the affected area, explains the
importance of the park: “This place is our Eden, because here we have
everything and precisely through the heart of our sacred land the
government now wants to construct a highway. It’s the zone of refuge
from the constant flooding of the [river] Beni. It’s the high ground
where all of us, animals and people, find refuge.”
If the highway is built, it won’t only destroy the land immediately in
its path. It will also divide animal habitats in half and cut across the
migration routes of many species that move from the lowlands to the
highlands during the rainy season; it will facilitate the illegal
logging of protected trees that survive now only because there is no
infrastructure to support logging; it will pollute the rivers; and
encourage slash-and-burn agriculturalists to move in and cut down the
forest for export-driven coca production (Andean communities grow coca
as an important ritual and medicinal plant, whereas large scale
cultivation for export goes to cocaine production).
The resolution of a gathering of indigenous inhabitants of the park
states: “We are tired of sending cards and resolutions with our
rejection of the initiative to construct a highway uniting Villa Tunari
with San Ignacio de Moxos, which have never been attended or listened to
by the prior or present government.”
In sum, Morales’ populist government proves no different from any other
government, both in choosing destructive projects and ignoring those who
protest them. The most novel thing about this project, in fact, has been
the relative lack of opposition. So far, the only people moving against
the highway are the inhabitants of the park and a few small indigenous
and anarchist groups in other parts of the country. Before 2006, a
project like this might have sparked road blockades and street battles
up and down Bolivia.
And in the end, that is Evo’s real triumph: he has made Bolivia’s
impoverished people identify with their government, so that it can go on
doing what governments have always done. The highway is by no means the
only development project of its kind. When there was a growing
opposition to a lithium mine that will dessicate an already arid region
of the country, Evo quelled the protests by promising the farmers’
organization leading them a share of the profits. By co-opting social
movements rather than repress them, Bolivia’s progressive government has
accomplished what the earlier military dictatorships never could—it has
pacified the country’s rebellious tendencies. The various organizations
that forced out multiple governments in recent years have now all been
brought into the fold. Many movement leaders have been given government
posts, and money (from the development projects) is shared with once
rebellious organizations.
With generous payouts, radical rhetoric, an increase in welfare that
hasn’t come close to alleviating the country’s poverty, and a
chauvinistic development plan that will ostensibly make Bolivia as
powerful as its neighbors, the social movements themselves have been
turned into the government’s first line of defense.
Oscar Olivera, the author of
¡Cochabamba! Water War in Bolivia
, an influential figure in the labor movement, and a former comrade of
Evo’s, tells me: “There’s no space to speak, to act, to mobilize,
without being shut down, delegitimized, or maligned by the government
[...] What they care most about is money, money to complete their
promises of development. So what the government says is, where’s the
money? And it’s in the mines, it’s in the oil, it’s in building
highways. Nothing else interests them, just the money.”
Carlos Crespo, an anarchist academic, describes the negative response
from former comrades or people in the streets to anyone seen as
anti-government. “One can’t criticize the government because you’d be
accused of playing into the Right, but the Right is destroyed in this
country. It’s Stalinist!”
There is a growing amount of resistance to the new government, although
critics have little ground to stand on, with the entire organizational
framework they used to form a part of being co-opted. The day after the
interview with Oscar and Carlos, the streets of Cochabamba were blocked
off by a protest against a new law that would allow the government to
shut down critical media outlets.
Inside Bolivia, discontent with the regime is disadvantaged, but
apparent. No one has been fooled more thoroughly than the progressives
in other countries who have touted the rise progressive socialism in
South America (Chavez in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Lula in Brazil, and
Morales in Bolivia) as a major victory for movements against corporate
interests.
They were so easy to fool, one might call their triumphalism “willful
ignorance.” When all the delegates came to the Climate Change conference
in Tiquipaya, the government simply had to cover up all the sawmills
lining the main road from Cochabamba, and nobody asked what was behind
the curtain.
In the pages of The Progressive or Democracy Now! one can find plenty of
signs of the Left’s infatuation with Evo. Even more bizarre is the
adulation of arch South American progressive, Hugo Chavez, the model
progressive who opted for an electoral victory after a military coup
didn’t work out. Rafael Uzcátegui, a member of the human rights
organization Provea and journalist with the anarchist newspaper El
Libertario, recently published a book that exposes the Chavez regime to
its very core, Venezuela: La Revolución como Espectáculo.
In it, he describes how after Chavez took office, his “Bolivarian
movement began a process of diluting the very social fabric that had
brought it to power. [...] They achieved the rapid institutionalization
of the social movements, out of which a body of leaders would be
isolated and successively frozen, in the separation of leaders from
followers.”
Transforming the government into a populist one has not made it any less
violent. On the contrary, in 2000 there were 104 police murders in
Venezuela, and in 2008, after ten years under Chavez, the figure rose to
247. Between January 2008 and March 2009, Uzcátegui documents 10,103
investigations of police crimes such as abuse, assault, and torture, and
only 22 cases in which police were arrested as a result.
But just like the Castro regime before it, and the USSR before that,
Chavez can count on friendly publicity courtesy of the champions of
social justice and human rights in other countries. In 2007, when
pro-Chavez paramilitaries shot student and anarchist protestors during
demonstrations against a public referendum that would have extended
welfare and made Chavez president for life, Democracy Now! refused to
run the story.
And, Uzcátegui reveals, when Michael Albert, author and editor with Z
Magazine, came to Venezuela, he was put up in a five star hotel by the
government, and on the very last day of his trip met with grassroots
dissidents to tell them how great Chavez’s program was. Noam Chomsky’s
visit went even further in legitimizing the Chavez regime.
Joshua Clover, writing in The Nation (“Busted: Stories of the Financial
Crisis”), took the chorus of free-market apologists and pseudo-critics
to task for their superficial and moralistic explanations of the
financial crisis. He deftly argues how blaming lax regulation or human
greed operates as a cover-up for the inherent boom and bust dynamics of
capitalism, that quite aside from human greed, the imperative for
capital to reproduce itself, requires investors to go out of business or
to speculate against future earnings, no matter how irresponsible market
conditions require them to be in the process.
Similarly, criticizing neoliberalism or yankee imperialism without
criticizing capitalism itself creates a mythical past, in which the same
sorts of destructive development projects and exploitative practices did
not exist during the Keynesian period, and a mythical future, in which
the same atrocities will not occur if new investments are backed by
Brazilian or Bolivian capital. And failing to understand that a
government, whether under the leadership of a progressive or a
neoconservative, will continue to do what governments have done for all
of history, is to condemn ourselves to the repetition of past failures,
to set our sights low and become apologists for the resulting
disappointments.
How pathetic it is to lose by winning. Fortunately, not everyone at the
base of South American social struggles have given up the fight. In
Bolivia, resistance is brewing at the grassroots, as indigenous and
anarchist groups in TIPNIS, Cochabamba, and La Paz spread the word about
the highway, and build opposition. Hopefully, activists in other
countries won’t aid those who are silencing them, just to preserve their
own illusions.