Bolivian Breakup?

by Mary O'Grady

'Peace on earth" may be the season's greeting, but in the eastern part of Bolivia peace may prove elusive. There, rumblings of civil war hang in the air even in the midst of the preparations for the Christmas celebration.

President Evo Morales has painted the conflict between his government and his critics as a showdown between the country's indigenous poor and rich Bolivians of European descent. But as his anti-democratic attempts to consolidate power have begun to offend a larger cross section of the nation, his class and racial warfare narrative is losing traction. Now even the socialist government of Brazil, which has thus far supported Mr. Morales so that its access to Bolivian natural gas might not be disrupted, is beginning to show signs of discomfort with his strident approach toward governance.

Tensions between four eastern states -- Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija -- and the central government have been running high all year. Last week the strained relations took a turn for the worse, when the four governors announced a series of "autonomy statutes." Polls show that autonomy is now popular in two more states, Cochabamba and the former Morales stronghold of Chuquisaca.

The statutes are not quite declarations of secession, but in the eyes of the Morales government they are audacious acts of rebellion. Vice President Álvaro Garcia Linera has warned that the government plans to "use all its powers" to rein in the "separatists." Yet the noise from the palace hasn't fazed local leadership. Each of the four states has already begun collecting signatures for referendums that, if passed, will ratify the autonomy statutes.

After centuries of centralized power, Bolivia took major steps toward decentralization in the mid-1990s. In 2005, for the first time ever, each of the country's nine states elected their own governors.

Mr. Morales took power in January 2006 and had a different idea of how Bolivia should be run. He and his hard-left party, Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), immediately began working to recentralize power through a rewrite of the constitution. But he hit a roadblock when MAS was unable to garner the two-thirds majority it needed in the constitutional assembly to adopt the new, heavily socialist constitution.

To get around the problem, MAS unilaterally declared that the meeting place of the assembly could be moved to wherever the party decided, and then used force to keep out opponents. Meetings of MAS-only delegates have since declared its version of the constitution ratified. The document not only strips regional authorities of their political and economic power; it also elevates citizens who qualify as indigenous above those of mixed racial heritage. By any definition it is a putsch against democracy and pluralism. But Mr. Morales seems to believe he can legitimize it all by citing the grievances of the Bolivian poor.

Yet as Mr. Morales has become increasingly autocratic -- particularly in passing his constitution outside of the legal process -- he has been losing support. His problem seems to be that, while he was elected on a platform that promised to do something about Bolivian poverty, a growing segment of the population no longer views him as a leader who can solve the problem. This is a fact not only in Bolivia's richer states but also in some of the poorest.

Mr. Morales insists that opposition to his agenda is nothing more than the resistance of rich states to sharing the country's wealth. It is true that Tarija is the most prosperous state in Bolivia. But Beni, which also opposes Mr. Morales, is running neck and neck with Chuquisaca as the second poorest state in the country. Both the states of Oruro and La Paz, MAS strongholds, have higher per-capita income.

During his visit to New York this month, Beni Governor Ernesto Suárez told me that the blame for poverty in his state lies chiefly with the central government, which has long drained resources to feed the bureaucracy in La Paz. Mr. Suárez's beef gets to the heart of the struggle -- the question of whether concentrated power serves a nation well.

The autonomy statutes that he and the other governors have adopted aren't militant declarations of independence. Instead they are rather tame claims on the right to nominate state superior-court and electoral-court judges, to tax at the state level and to keep a share of hydrocarbon revenues. The states also want to be allowed to raise local police forces, decide locally on land use, and protect the right to private-sector education. They also do not recognize the Morales principle that La Paz has the authority to dictate indigenous community privileges.

The threat that Mr. Garcia Linera -- who is, by the way, an upper-class Bolivian of European descent and a former terrorist -- will stand by his pledge to use force against the states is real. The states do not have armies and would have no chance in a direct confrontation. But it is also true that there is a growing recognition in the region that Evo has strayed off the democracy path. Last week, Brazil's leftist President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva counseled the Bolivian to have "patience and more patience" with the states. The not-so-subtle message was that if Mr. Morales tries to mow down his democratic opposition, even Lula will have trouble scaring up support for his socialist brother.

Source: wall Street Journal