Chilean View of Bolivia's Leftist President Evo Morales and the Risks He Presents (Translation)

Monday, 22 January 2007

Risks in Bolivia

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The majority support with which President Evo Morales was elected placed him in a promising position to obtain Bolivian governability. Moreover, the significant improvement of the prices of the principal Bolivian exports of soy, minerals, and gas, the discovery of important reserves of hydrocarbons, plus the structural adjustments carried out by preceding governments, allowed for favorable expectations for the neighboring economy.

Nevertheless, the methods of Morales in advancing his controversial electoral promises are preventing his capitalizing upon the auspicious conditions under which he assumed office. The combination of discouraging governmental measures against private investment, disagreements with departmental authorities, actions to reverse decentralization, and initiatives to augment presidential powers have strengthened the opposition and resulted in violence and uncertainty over the Bolivian future.¹

The Constituent Assembly of Bolivia is forced by pro-government pretension to elude the established majority to approve the terms of the new constitution.² Furthermore, President Morales has imposed new ministers of the Supreme Court, obtaining control of the high tribunal to serve his designs; the prefects elected to govern the departments find themselves confronted with the Chief Executive; the pressures for autonomy are spreading; foreign investors have retreated, and social protests are growing.

The international community is beginning to worry about the precariousness of Bolivia, and their response is to flee across its borders. Of course, conflicts with foreign investors damage relations with their respective governments. Also, the fragility of the supply of gas for Argentina and Brasil affects the energy security of both countries and indirectly of Chile. Equally, the legalization of new coca plantations results in a better deal for the narcotics trafficker. Internal insecurity can result in uncontrolled immigration. Finally, there are warnings of an ever more increasing dependence upon the Venezuelan government.

These considerations are very relevant for our country. The greater preoccupation surges from the risk of [Morales'] instrumentalization of the maritime demand³ to distract attention [from himself] during political crises and the consequences in bilateral relations of [his] internal difficulties. There exists an undeniably good disposition in Chile to strengthen the ties of bilateral relations and, eventually, to normalize the relationship. In order to reach those advances it is important to count upon internal political consensuses in each country, a situation which in the Bolivian case cannot be appraised.

There exists the risk of the instrumentalization of the maritime demand to distract attention during political crises.

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Translator's Notes:

¹ A recent miner's strike and land redistribution programs have both been marked by violence in Bolivia over the past few months. At least four departments (i.e. "states") have organized militia resistance to the policy and are moving towards increasing their autonomy from Morales' government.

² Morales has summoned a Constituent Assembly in which his MAS Party holds a simple majority which it has tried to use as the basis for voting, rather than the two-thirds majority called for by the present Bolivian Constitution as necessary for passing constitutional reforms. Opposition to Morales has been strident on the issue of the simple majority/two-thirds majority in the Constituent Assembly and the issue is still unresolved at present.

³ The "maritime demand" refers to landlocked Bolivia's desire to have overland access to a Pacific coast port at Chile's expense, the securing of which Morales has declared to be his principal foreign policy goal.

This editorial from Monday's El Mercurio newspaper in Santiago, Chile was written as a message to the administration of President Michelle Bachelet to be very careful in negotiations with Bolivian President Evo Morales over his, and Bolivia's, larger objective of securing sovereign access to a Pacific coast seaport by means of a Chilean territorial concession to Bolivia, which the latter country feels justified in seeking since Chile seized the land after an 1879-1883 war. Yesterday it was publicly announced that Chile refused to grant Bolivia access to the sea, thus bringing to a quick result negotiations reported from the recent Mercosur Summit in Rio de Janeiro between Evo Morales and Chilean Foreign Minister Alejandro Foxley. There were some who hoped that the talks might lead to a restoration of normalized diplomatic relations between the two countries, which were severed in the late 1970's after a brief attempt to normalize them under Augusto Pinochet.

I would like to post a translation of the quoted Chilean Defense Ministry statement published in the Bolivian newspaper El Mundo yesterday on Chile's rejection of a negotiated agreement with Bolivia to grant the latter sovereign access to the Pacific Ocean (from last link in previous paragraph):

The majority of Chileans "feel much affection for Bolivia and for its people," but "they are put on the defensive" and have a "rejectionist attitude" facing the possibility of ceding a maritime access with sovereignty, Santiago's Minister of Defense, Vivianne Blanlot, said.

The government functionary maintained that is the principal difficulty to go beyond the maritime disagreement which has affected relations between both countries since 1879, when Bolivia lost its access to the Pacific in a war with Chile that involved Peru. "It is necessary to be truly honest, when one considers ceding sovereignty there is a rejectionist attitude among the population. This is the fundamental reason for advancing (in the negotiations) with difficulty," Blanlot affirmed. . . .

It is hard to imagine that any nation, including Chile, would willingly roll over and give away a portion of its territory to its neighbor, but it is worth noting here that Evo Morales made the securing of a Pacific maritime corridor for Bolivia his principal promise in foreign policy during the 2005 Bolivian presidential campaign. The manner of Chile's open and pointed rejection of negotiating such a deal for Morales -- no one really expected the Chileans to cede territory -- is a major blow for him and Bolivia. When placed in the larger context of what has been developing in Latin American politics recently in several high-profile elections, Venezuela's bid for a UN Security Council seat, and the just-concluded Mercosur Summit in Rio de Janeiro; there appears to be a clear dividing line developing which separates South America's most ardent leftist regimes from everyone else. Hugo Chavez and his close allies Rafael Correa in Ecuador and Evo Morales in Bolivia are finding themselves isolated and able to lean only on each other for mutual support.

The editorial at the beginning of this thread does a good job of presenting a critique of Morales from the Chilean perspective that makes two important observations, both of which are relevant to understanding how and why international opposition to Bolivia, and by extension Chavez and Correa, is developing among the South American nations: 1. That Morales has created serious internal political problems for himself through his own mismanagement of Bolivia's economy and his rough handling of his political opposition which may be pushing him to externalize his, and Bolivia's, problems through what the author describes as the "instrumentalization" of the "maritime issue" to divert attention away from what is going on at home. 2. That he has demonstrated serious short-sightedness in pursuing policies which put international economic and political relationships in his own neighborhood at risk. The sum total of these two from the perspective of the Chilean editorialist is that Morales simply cannot be trusted.

One can review the editorial for a quick summary of how Morales has created internal political problems for himself within Bolivia. But it may be worthwhile to look a little closer at the international political and economic issues at stake in Morales' policies, and to do so without forgetting how Hugo Chavez is involved, to get a firmer grasp as to just how out of control the hard left in Latin America has become in its international policies and how they have made themselves into their own worst enemy in alienating their potential friends. In an earlier thread last October, we showed that Chavez may have prevented Venezuela from securing a temporary seat on the UN Security Council last fall for alienating Chile by appointing an ambassador to Santiago who inserted himself into Chilean politics and threatened Bachelet's left-center coalition. It cannot have been anything less than alarming to a Chilean patriot to have heard Hugo Chavez praising Evo Morales' goal of securing a Pacific coast seaport at the expense of Chile, saying that he dreamed of a day when he could "bathe on a Bolivian beach." And Chavez's military aid to Morales did nothing to ease neighboring concerns either. The nationalization of oil and gas (hydrocarbons) in Bolivia has also created regional problems. The biggest loser in Morales' move was the Brazilian national oil company Petrobras, who had invested over a billion dollars in Bolivia over the previous two decades. And with the legal outcome of the move to nationalize these holdings still uncertain, both Argentina and Brazil are directly threatened by the possibility that their regular supply of Bolivian natural gas may not be maintained, something the author of the above editorial makes clear. You will also read how fears that the increase in Bolivian coca production Morales has implemented will worsen the problem of narcotics trafficking in the region, a move that puts Bolivia directly at odds with neighboring Peru, which is cooperating at some cost with U.S. efforts to eradicate coca cultivation in the region.

With all of this in mind, it is worth asking just how well the Chavez-Morales-Correa alliance is working. One only need look to the recent Mercosur summit and its aftermath, in which Chile has rejected Bolivian pretensions to an access to the Pacific through the cession of sovereign Chilean territory, to get an answer. When Evo Morales attacked Colombian President Alvaro Uribe for his close ties to the U.S., the normal rules of the conference were ignored by the assembled heads of state to permit Uribe to exceed his alloted time to speak in response to Morales' allegations and they resoundingly applauded his defense of Colombian actions. And Hugo Chavez's attempt to defend Morales to Uribe immediately afterwards was equally rebuffed.

For all the anxiety we may feel that the development of an international ideological front in opposition to the U.S. within Latin America presents a threat, the recent evidence is that geopolitical and national interests are trumping leftist ideology and that the designs Chavez, Morales, and their fellow Bolivarianos have for creating effective and united action within Latin America against the U.S. are failing. And in the particular case of Bolivia and Morales there is distinct regional opposition to his external policies and widespread fear that the impending failure of his domestic agenda may spill over into their lives in ways already identified.

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