When Evo Morales took over as president of Bolivia in January of last year, no one imagined he was going to have an easy ride. After all, the fiery indigenous leader and onetime grower of coca leaf, the stuff which fuels the world cocaine trade, had reaped a whirlwind, riding into La Paz on a gale of social and ethnic unrest. Now it seems even the skeptics might have been optimistic.
After a year and a half of deliberations in Sucre, a regional capital, the constituent assembly charged with rewriting the nation's constitution has all but collapsed. With less than a month to go to the Dec. 14th deadline, not a single article of the charter that was to reinvent Bolivia has been drafted. Lawmakers are at each other's throats, two top justices have quit, and foreign investment is as rarefied as the air over the Andean altiplano. Worse, political gridlock at the top has stoked resentment down below, from the coca groves to the gas fields. And when the Bolivian street gets restless, the whiff of tear gas and cordite are never far behind.
Alarmist hype? Just listen in on the battleground. "The constitutional assembly has been hijacked, blackmailed and pressured by a circumstantial alliance of ...minorities," Àlvaro García Linera, the Bolivian vice president announced on Nov. 6. He warned that if government foes keep stonewalling the constitutional assembly - which happens to be stacked with Morales supporters -they will "have no right to complain if the majority [of Bolivians] takes a radical stance on property rights." Translation: rich folk beware.
Meanwhile, five governors in natural gas-rich lowland Bolivia have lashed out at the Morales' regime's new pension plan for the elderly which La Paz means to finance by taking away natural gas royalties that had been earmarked for the provinces. And in late October, two judges from Bolivia's constitutional court stepped down on grounds that La Paz was meddling in judicial decisions.
Ok, so not everyone gets into a lather over the woes of this bitterly poor, landlocked nation stretched between glaciers and jungle. Indeed, while most foreign investors are pulling back, Indian steel giant Jindal Steel and Power is stepping into the fray, plowing $2.6b into an iron mine in southeast Bolivia.
But the complacency may change if Bolivia slides into further disarray. Brazil depends on Bolivia for half the natural gas it burns, and with economic recovery stoking energy needs, Latin America's biggest market can ill afford losing access to the Bolivian gas fields, South America's second biggest, estimated at 680 billion cubic meters. Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, who has used his oil bounty to stock up on Russian machine guns and fighter jets, has also vowed to send troops into the cordillera if Morales' opponents get too strident. All of which makes the George W. Bush White House break out into a preemptive sweat. If cooler tempers don't prevail soon, by mid December it's going to be harder than ever to catch your breath in the Andes.
