Bolivia’s Rocky Path Ahead

A fair yet critical assessment of President Evo Morales and his MAS (Movement toward Socialism) party’s “refounding revolution” in Bolivia, initiated in 2005, presents a challenge to scholars and policy makers. Critics and supporters alike must walk the fine line between political reality and partisan rhetoric and between achievements and setbacks in governance. In their insightful evaluation of the continuity and change in Evo’s Bolivia from 2009 to 2014, two well-established country experts, Linda Farthing and the late Benjamin Kohl, have done precisely that. It would be a mistake to treat this comprehensive, extensively researched, and readable book as anything but excellent scholarship by two solidarity activists who are unafraid to be critical as well as thoughtful and balanced in their assessments of Bolivia’s first indigenous- and social-movements-dominated administration.

In this spirit, the authors frame their complex narrative around the Aymara concept of ch’ixi, which is described as something “simultaneously white and not white and black and not black,” a “third state” that superficially appears to be gray, as when black and white threads are woven together, but is not (7). Fittingly, the book is dedicated to the memory of coauthor Ben Kohl, an educator and scholar of Bolivia who died suddenly in 2013, and to that of Domitila Barrios de Chungara, a miner’s daughter and wife and celebrated early women’s activist who suffered under military repression in the 1960s and 1970s and died in 2012. In this context the authors position the rise of Evo Morales along the continuum of struggle for political and socioeconomic rights from the 1952 National Revolution to the birth of “new” social movements in the 1990s. To tap the complexity and contestation inherent in Evo’s Bolivia, they include vignettes from diverse Bolivian personalities that provide interesting and insightful perspectives on the ongoing process of change and continuity.

The authors’ interviews indicate that even supporters, both indigenous and nonindigenous, have reservations about or are disillusioned with Morales’s policies, especially concerning the disastrous attempt to cancel the gas subsidy in 2010, the extraction-driven development model, and the ongoing dispute that erupted in 2012 over the proposed new road through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory. Various MAS supporters feel that the “process of change is stalled” (147) and that the so-called Morales revolution is not a true revolution and remains an “unfinished” transition (144). The country still confronts almost daily protests and roadblocks that are economically costly, yet the fundamental system and structures of economy and state—despite the groundbreaking new 2009 constitution and expansion of political participation by the indigenous majority—remain unaltered. And although Evo remains popular and handily won the 2014 presidential elections, there is concern over who will come after him. One former MAS official offers some comfort, arguing that “’the government doesn’t own the process of change, the people do, and we need to rebuild from the base up to push change forward’” (145). However, how that will be done, by whom, and with what success remain troubling questions.

Thus there is a great deal to recommend Evo’s Bolivia in both substance and style. Farthing and Kohl’s clear and accessible narrative allows the reader to form an independent assessment. The authors are transparent in their goal to ground their work in a “commitment to social and economic justice within a vision of respect for the natural environment” and specifically to hold “the left” accountable in terms of its own measures and values (ix). The chapters are uniformly well conceived and developed and are excellent sources for the interested general reader as well as experts in and students of development and Latin American politics. Of particular interest are the chapters on state power, the economy, land and territory, and the sacred coca leaf. The MAS-controlled state’s relationship with social movement and indigenous organizations has become more divisive. Despite steady growth and fiscal stability, Bolivia has yet to solve the age-old economic dilemma of resource dependency. Ironically, the new constitution has heightened rather than resolved the struggle over land and autonomous indigenous territorial rights. Morales’s innovative, voluntary, and more efficient “social control” drug policy has reduced enforcement violence and human rights violations, and according to some estimates his harm reduction approach has stabilized coca leaf cultivation. In 2013 he was successful internationally in achieving the recognition of Bolivia’s traditional use of coca leaf by the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs. However, his aggressive campaign to legalize coca has a tough slog ahead, and his goal of industrializing coca leaf products is described by one expert as a “myth” (137).

Evo’s Bolivia recognizes the ongoing problems confronting Bolivia and the complexities of the change process: the defects of the MAS; the extraction-based dependent economy; the confusion over the evolving concept of indigeneity; the conflicts among indigenous groups; Morales’s propensity for top-down decision making; the increasing co-optation and isolation of social movements; patchwork, inefficient policies; continued endemic corruption, rent-seeking, and patronage politics; the persistence of neoliberal market values versus communitarian ones; and the increase in fragmented and sectarian coalitions pursuing narrow interests. One critical voice the authors quote is that of the Aymara leader and political opponent Felipe Quispe, who dismisses the MAS government as “’neoliberalism with an Indian face’” (148). At the same time, they summarize in their final chapter the government’s extensive and significant accomplishments in indigenous rights, land distribution, poverty reduction, educational reforms, health expansion, innovative drug policy, and new constitutional and environmental legislation. Therefore they conclude that, although Morales and the MAS invite criticism from all sides, radical and conservative alike, the Morales experiment is preferable to “a return to business as usual under global neoliberalism” (161).