Bolivia: Race and Revolution

It will get very fraught in Bolivia when Morales starts re-writing the constitution to include the excluded, as he has already sworn to do, but the ethnic solidarity among Bolivian Indians that has helped him into power will also make it very hard for Washington to overthrow him. So long as he avoids the civil war that some of the more extreme members of the white minority may now try to provoke, he will probably manage to serve a full term in office. What he does with that term may change Bolivia beyond recognition.

They were also all white, even though the majority of Bolivia’s population is “indigenous”, descended wholly or in part from the Indians whose ancestors already lived there as subjects of the Incan empire at the time of the Spanish conquest five centuries ago. So what are the odds that Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, will survive a full term of office?

Morales, who won an absolute majority of the votes in last Sunday’s presidential election, faces not only the usual hazards of life as the president of South America’s poorest country, but also the threat of American intervention to overthrow him. As a socialist whose declared goal is to “end the colonial state” and a leader of the coca farmers who promises to lift the ban on growing coca leaf, the crop from which cocaine is produced, he is deeply unpopular in Washington.

In the past, policies that are unpopular in the United States have proved to be bad for the president’s health in a number of Latin American countries. To those who argue that the Bush administration is too deeply mired in the war in Iraq to contemplate acting against Morales, the pessimists point out that the U.S. found the…

Posted by ShiftShapers
Welcome to (A)utonomous Resistance, GNN’s exclusive one-stop infoshop for radical resources and information. This blog primarily serves as a vehicle with which to bring greater exposure to repressed and marginalized voices and ideas. Much of what I post here...

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