Bolivia may be just the start

Bolivia may be just the start

Much of Central and South America ripe for leftist revolutions

National Post Canada -Tuesday, October 21, 2003

...After decades of being left out of the country's power structure, Bolivia's native peoples took the lead in weeks of violent protest that left dozens dead and the country paralyzed before former president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada finally resigned on Friday and fled to Miami.

The trigger for the massive street protests was a government plan to sell Bolivia's natural gas to the United States and Mexico by exporting it to Bolivia's archrival Chile. But the proposed pipeline project was a symbol for something much more troublesome -- the government's inability to improve the economy or to transform a long entrenched culture of social exclusion that has effectively shut out the Indian majority.

Despite two decades of democratic reform and economic turmoil, Bolivia remains the poorest country in South America. Unemployment officially stands at 12% and six in every 10 people live on less than US$2 a day.

Agriculture, the backbone of the country, employs more than half the workforce but it accounts for only about 23% of the country's gross domestic product. And only 2% of Bolivia's land is arable.

For most farmers, who overwhelmingly are natives, the future holds hope for nothing more than a hardscrabble existence. Twenty per cent of indigenous children die before their first birthday and 14% more die before they reach school age.

Nearly two decades of economic liberalization, in which successive governments, under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund, have privatized public companies and mines and moved to modernize the oil and gas industries, has failed to improve the lives of ordinary people.

Bolivia's Indians feel rich whites do nothing but exploit their country's resources, leaving nothing behind for the poor. Now, they are demanding fundamental political change.

"The constitution is like a mirror, but we have never seen our faces reflected on it," says Felipe Quispe, a leader of the indigenous Pachakuti Party and one of the opposition leaders who led the street protests...

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printed from Bolivia may be just the start on 2004-06-15 04:41:43