Benjamin Kohl

Stabilizing neoliberalism in Bolivia: popular participation and privatization

Abstract Neoliberal theorists and development practitioners contend that economic liberalization and privatization lead to increased private sector productivity and decentralization accompanied by administrative reforms lead to greater democracy, more efficient public sector investment, and faster local development. Examination of the Bolivian case, which has been promoted as a global model for neoliberal restructuring, presents a different picture. There, economic restructuring and privatization have led to a decline in government revenues and a continuing economic crisis. Privatization of public services has led to rate hikes, which, in turn, have generated massive social protests. Political restructuring through decentralization has as often resulted in the entrenchment of local elites as in increases in truly democratic control of resources and social investments. This economic and political restructuring has also served to territorialize opposition to privatization and neoliberal economic policies and, in some areas, reinforce regional social movements. When examined together, it becomes clear how economic and administrative restructuring has sought to provide transnational firms both access to Bolivian natural resources as well as the social stability necessary in which to operate. As privatization through the Law of Capitalization further opened the country’s borders to global capital, the decentralization program through the Law of Popular Participation served to focus the attention of popular movements from national to local arenas. While foreign investment has increased, the lack of benefits for the majority of the country has led to mounting regional social protests in the face of reduced government spending on social programs and increased prices for basic services.

Restructuring Citizenship in Bolivia: El Plan de Todos

Current international development policies promote both free markets and democratic states through privatization and decentralization programs. Building on T.H. Marshalls concept of citizenship, this article examines how these programs have affected the rights associated with citizenship in Bolivia since 1993 when the administration of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada introduced a broad set of economic and political reforms. His administration sold state firms that had accounted for 50% of government revenues at the same time as it adopted a new constitution that recognized the multicultural and pluri-ethnic nature of Bolivian society. His administration also began decentralization programs in government, health and education that transferred 20% of national revenues, as well as the responsibility for providing services, to municipal governments. I show how current development practice has strengthened a neoliberal citizenship regime in which civil rights associated with ownership of private property, and political rights associated with formal democracy and representation, have been promoted at the expense of social rights associated with access to health, education and welfare. Copyright Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishers Ltd 2003.

Bolivia under Morales A Work in Progress

Evo Morales assumed office in January 2006 with a resounding mandate from marginalized indigenous peoples to reinvent Bolivia. Five hundred years of colonial and republican rule, combined with 20 years of neoliberal economic policy in this poorly consolidated democracy, constrained his ability to reshape the country during his first term in office. Morales still faces the fundamental challenges of (1) national oligarchies, (2) limited administrative capacity, (3) rent seeking and institutionalized corruption, (4) social movements, and (5) transnational actors. Rather than being distinct, these challenges are overdetermined: the economic challenges of transforming an extractive economy are intertwined with the lack of government capacity that is the legacy of exclusionary social and political processes since the Spanish conquest. Armed with the firm political will embodied in the new constitution, he has consolidated his support, and this has allowed his government to begin its second administration in a better position than almost all its predecessors as it attempts to create a more equitable society.

Bolivia under Morales Consolidating Power, Initiating Decolonization

Evo Morales assumed office in January 2006 with a resounding mandate from marginalized indigenous peoples to reinvent Bolivia. Five hundred years of colonial and republican rule, combined with 20 years of neoliberal economic policy in this poorly consolidated democracy, constrained his ability to reshape the country during his first term in office. Morales still faces the fundamental challenges of (1) national oligarchies, (2) limited administrative capacity, (3) rent seeking and institutionalized corruption, (4) social movements, and (5) transnational actors. Rather than being distinct, these challenges are overdetermined: the economic challenges of transforming an extractive economy are intertwined with the lack of government capacity that is the legacy of exclusionary social and political processes since the Spanish conquest. Armed with the firm political will embodied in the new constitution, he has consolidated his support, and this has allowed his government to begin its second administration in a b...

Social Control: Bolivia’s New Approach to Coca Reduction

When the indigenous coca grower Evo Morales was elected president in Bolivia in 2005, he promised to fundamentally change 25 years of the U.S.-funded and dictated “drug war.” The new policy values the coca leaf and relies on local organizations to control coca production within limits set by the government. A review of its successes and limitations to date suggests that Bolivia’s experience may offer lessons for drug control in other parts of the hemisphere.

Mobilizing Memory: Bolivia's Enduring Social Movements

In Bolivia, the most indigenous of South American countries, powerful social movements have drawn on collective memory to build effective coalitions across significant differences in ethnic identity and awareness, class consciousness, generations and regions. We contend that this deployment of memory to strengthen protest identities is reinforced by pervasive indigenous cultural practices. Deeply rooted in oral storytelling, perceptions of time, place and a reverence for ancestors, collective memories help bring the past into the present, and create responsibilities to those who came before. The result is a mutually constituting relationship between memory and activism, where an instrumental construction of collective memories serves to provide shared meanings to divergent movements. We suggest that scholars of social movements could deepen their analysis by interrogating rather than normalizing the cultural backdrops that movements operate within.

“Less Than Fully Satisfactory Development Outcomes” International Financial Institutions and Social Unrest in Bolivia

At five key moments, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund pressured weak administrations in Bolivia to adopt policies that had a negative impact on the countrys political stability. The principle of “market democracy” had become so sacrosanct within the international financial institutions that they ignored the difficulties their policies created. Changes in policy since 2006, when Bolivias first indigenous president, Evo Morales, came to power, reflect more of an accommodation in the face of a shifting context than any significant recognition of neoliberalisms limitations.

Limits to Reform in BoliviaWebberJeffery R.From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia: Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011.

Jeffery Webber’s From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia is a welcome addition to the recent literature on Bolivia. Rather than unreservedly celebrating gains in indigenous rights and political participation and the election of “Bolivia’s first indigenous president,” Webber criticizes President Evo Morales and the Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement toward Socialism—MAS) for failing to achieve fundamental changes in Bolivian economic and social structures and for “reconstituting” rather than replacing neoliberalism. The book’s fundamental contribution to current analysis of the Bolivian “process of change” is to remind us that even as we celebrate gains at the level of cultural and identity politics, we must not neglect class in any project committed to fundamental societal transformation. Webber breaks the discussion into two sections for a total of seven chapters preceded by an introductory essay. The four chapters of the first section incorporate articles originally published in 2008, which together account for about two-thirds of the text. After an introduction to Bolivia’s economic and social structure and the protest cycle that led up to Morales’s election, Webber examines both the electoral victory and the major policies implemented during Morales’s first year. He begins with the five years leading up to the election, citing sitting Vice-President Alvaro García Linera’s use of Marx’s definition of a “revolutionary epoch” as a “period of intense political activity” that broadly challenges the state (47). This is a critical concept in that it implies that the potential existed for a “social revolution” that would have brought about “basic changes in social structure and in political structure” (47). Webber argues that Morales and the MAS, through their pursuit of an electoral strategy, “dampened the immediate prospects of a socialist and indigenous-liberationist revolution” (2). This interesting assertion contains the implicit assumption—despite Webber’s recognition of the contingent nature of revolutionary epochs (46)—that, had the uprising not been derailed by the MAS’s electoral strategy, Bolivia would have had a successful social revolution. However, the last revolutionary epoch in Bolivia, from 1978 to 1985, saw multiple governments before the 1982 return to civilian rule, which, of course, was followed by the 1985 victory not of an indigenous “reformer” but of the architect of 20 years of neoliberal rule. The result was the evisceration of the labor movement that had to that point been the vanguard of demands for structural change. The second section of the book contains two substantive chapters—on the ideological and economic structures of reconstituted neoliberalism—followed by a short conclusion. Webber discusses the 2009 election and the way Morales is perceived in the 453895LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X12453895LATIn AMERICAn PERSPECTIVESKohl / Book Review 2012