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| Author: | Mary Crane, Editorial Coordinator |
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December 16, 2005
Bolivian voters head to the polls December 18 to vote for a new president to lead one of Latin America's poorest, most divided countries. The frontrunner by a small margin is populist leader Evo Morales, leader of the left-wing Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), whose populist, socialist, anti-American campaign rhetoric has the Bush administration up in arms. By the end of campaigning December 14, analysts predicted Morales, an indigenous Aymara Indian, will not win the necessary 50 percent of the popular vote in Sunday's elections and will likely be forced to enter into pact-making with former conservative President Jorge "Tuto" Quiroga, leader of the center-right Poder Democratico y Social (Podemos) Party. Despite the international attention paid to Bolivia's elections, experts say the elections will not resolve the longstanding issues dividing the country's disparate populations along ethnic, economic, and political lines.
Eight candidates are running for Bolivia's presidency, but only three are set to play decisive roles in Sunday's election. A December 14 poll by the daily newspaper La Prensa showed 34 percent of voters supported Morales and 29 percent supported Quiroga. Cement magnate Samuel Doria Medina of the Fronte de Unidad Nacional (UN) party trailed with 9 percent.
It is unlikely that the elections will rectify the country's longstanding social and economic problems. Bolivia's new president will face serious challenges: a deeply impoverished yet politically invested and empowered indigenous population; pressure to exploit the continent's second-largest natural gas reserves to alleviate Bolivian poverty; and calls for greater regional autonomy from the wealthier and ethnically distinct lowland areas including the city of Santa Cruz.
If neither candidate wins in the vote, which will be supervised by the United Nations and Organization of American States, the decision falls to the national Congress, where Quiroga's party Podemos is expected to take the majority of the seats. If Quiroga wins the most votes, but not enough to be automatically named president, MAS will likely pressure Congress to elect Morales, not Quiroga. "All realistic outcomes of the vote are fraught with difficulty," says DeShazo. Politics in Bolivia has never been easy: The country has had eighty-three presidents and about 200 coups and countercoups since it gained independence from Spain in 1825.
Experts say he may be challenging one of the most sensitive areas of U.S. policy in Latin America by campaigning on the coca card. Bolivia is one of the world's largest coca producers with an estimated 79,000 acres of coca under production. Many poor Bolivians rely on coca cultivation as their sole source of income. The country's coca-eradication efforts have been largely suspended since last year and cocaine production soared 107 tons in 2004, up 35 percent. Though Morales has promised to fight cocaine trafficking and to only allow coca cultivation on 12,000 hectares of land, many experts expect cocaine production will rise under a Morales presidency. Past crop-eradication programs have meant political suicide for Bolivia's politicians, though the exercises usually mean more U.S. aid. In 1998, Bolivia enacted a drug-eradication program called the Dignity Plan in the coca-producing region of Chapare. According to Gamarra's report (PDF) for the Inter-American Dialogue on drug policy and democracy in the Andean region, "economic recession and political turmoil...contributed to a pattern of instability that almost ended Bolivarian democracy."
The U.S. is also concerned over Venezuela's suspected backing of Morales in the election, though Morales calls U.S. allegations he is being bankrolled by Chavez "ridiculous." Experts who predict Morales will be more pragmatic once in office expect he will not fall in the Chavez-Castro camp. "There is a dangerous tendency to view Morales as more radical than he is and to treat him as a pariah instead of trying to bring him into the fold," says Youngers. Her WOLA colleague Jeff Vogt, in an interview from La Paz, agrees. He says U.S. analysts and government officials have for a long time misread Morales by pegging him as a radical. "In order to keep up with his base, he had to make more radical promises to not be completely left behind."
The one common thread among all Morales observers is no one really knows what a Morales victory will mean for Bolivia, or U.S.-Bolivian relations and experts say Morales will have a difficult time governing if elected. Congress will be divided with strong opposition on the left and right. In a country as polarized as Bolivia, Morales will have a difficult time building coalitions. Morales will have to play powerbroker between a very strong Podemos in Congress and radical leftist movements that may revolt against him if he moderates his position.
If Morales caters to his left and follows through with a more radical campaign to nationalize Bolivia's natural energy industry, he risks losing much-needed foreign investment in the country and alienating aid from the international donor community, experts say. Youngers expects Morales to recognize a more moderate path is necessary to survive after the elections. Should Morales become more moderate in office, he risks strong opposition from the more radical leftist elements that helped bring him to power. "In any case, his campaign has awakened expectations for economic and social benefits that will be hard to satisfy," says DeShazo.
This year has been dubbed the year of elections for Latin America, with a dozen presidential elections and thirteen legislative elections across the continent. Many Latin American observers predict the elections will result in a tilt to the left in region for years to come. Since 1999, when Hugo Chavez was voted into office in Venezuela, left-leaning leaders have emerged in three-quarters of the hemisphere countries, and now head Latin America's three largest economies: Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela. But the Economist predicts the "bigger picture is broadly one of continuity—for better or for worse." Each of these elections presents a different political picture, says DeShazo, and it would be hard to use Bolivia as an example for elections to come. "Some of the issues in play in Bolivia—concern about jobs, poverty, social exclusion of indigenous populations, public security, and dissatisfaction with traditional politics, will certainly manifest themselves in other elections," he says. "Whether voters go left, right, or center, will depend on perceptions of the candidates and what they offer."
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