Bolivia at the Crossroads

Politics, Economy, and Environment in a Time of Crisis

Soledad Valdivia Rivera, Soledad Valdivia Rivera

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000385649
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

As Bolivia reels from the collapse of the government in November 2019, a wave of social protests, and now the impact of Covid-19, this book asks: where next for Bolivia?

After almost 14 years in power, the government of Bolivia's first indigenous president collapsed in 2019 amidst widescale protest and allegations of electoral fraud. The contested transitional government that emerged was quickly struck by the impacts of the Covid-19 public health crisis. This book reflects on this critical moment in Bolivia's development from the perspectives of politics, the economy, the judiciary and the environment. It asks what key issues emerged during Evo Morales's administration and what are the main challenges awaiting the next government in order to steer the country through a new and uncertain road ahead.

As the world considers what the ultimate legacy of Morales's left-wing social experiment will be, this book will be of great interest to researchers across the fields of Latin American studies, development, politics, and economics, as well as to professionals active in the promotion of development in the country and the region.

1 From democracy to an ochlocratic intermission

The 2009 Constitution in the Bolivian pendulum

Eduardo Rodríguez Veltzé

Introduction

Constitutional failure best describes the situation in Bolivia at the end of 2019. The academic discourse around the subject is split between those who seek to prove that a coup against president Evo Morales took place and those who see a civic, pro-democracy movement displacing his increasingly authoritarian and illegitimate rule. Following Morales’ ousting by the armed forces and the police as a result of the failed elections of October 2019 amid fraud allegations and social unrest, the questioned interim presidency of Jeanine Áñez soon mismanaged its time in office. Her government exerted unnecessary violence by the armed forces and the police to halt public demonstrations and failed to respond effectively to the COVID-19 pandemic. Áñez attempted to profiteer from an untimely presidential candidacy and she delayed the rerun of elections twice.

New elections were satisfactorily held in October 2020. A clear majority of Bolivians have chosen to hand the government to Luis Arce as president, and David Choquehuanca as vice-president. Both were Evo Morales’ former economic and foreign affairs ministers, respectively. The MAS-IPSP party won with a comfortable majority¹ as if to dispel any doubt of the population’s yearning for stability and clarity in politics.

It has been debated whether the end of Mr Morales represented a democratic spring against an ever more authoritarian and illegitimate regime, or whether it was a coup d’état by the reactionary right. Neither of these premises fully captures the upheaval that Bolivia went through at the end of 2019. A breakdown of constitutional order made me president in 2005 (The New York Times 2005). A chain of successive resignations started in 2003 when president Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada left Bolivia after the social upheaval left dozens of dead victims as a result of civilian and armed forces confrontations. Carlos Mesa, his vice-president and successor was not able to address their grievances nor was he able to coordinate with the Legislative Congress, a structural governance agenda, on key issues like passing a new hydrocarbons law or calling a constitutional convention. People were out in the streets claiming a renewal of a decayed political system embedded in the Executive and the Legislative offices whose leaders were also moved to decline the presidential succession. Given some similarities between then and now, I will outline the flaws of Bolivian rule of law and its political system that led to its constitutional failure in 2019.

Historically Bolivia is one of the countries that have had the most revolutions and coups worldwide (Coup d’etat Dataset). Throughout time, since the Independence in 1825, social convulsion has ousted governments and military dictatorships have interrupted democratic practices. While the country holds mostly free and fair elections, political parties exist and democratic practices are widespread, street protests often derail the formal proceeding of the formal democratic procedure. This makes Bolivia a Janus-faced democracy, to put it in classical terms. In antiquity, Plato outlined dichotomies of different types of government. Differentiating by the number of people who ruled, Plato defined democracy as the virtuous rule ‘kratos’ of the people in general, the ‘demos’. But the rule of the people also had a problematic side. Plato referred to the ‘bad’ side of democracy as the rule of the mob: ochlocracy. Both forms of democratic rule can be found throughout Bolivian history.

Bolivia has a tradition of democratic values and principles worth the name, but popular dissent has not been properly channeled through the State’s institutions. This has resulted in episodes where the masses (or mobs) have taken over public space forcing governments into action, attempting to take over tacit power, basically ruling over the country themselves. Despite these abrupt changes in political procedure, Bolivia has shown the ability to swing from one type of democratic practice to the other, with the utmost flexibility. The last 38 years of democracy have been the longest period of continued democratic rule, despite its ups and downs, if we consider the ochlocratic intermissions also as a form of democratic rule. This is a persistent state of upheaval, nonetheless. It is the source of the lack of good governance, specifically caused by a broken system of checks and balances, a missing independent and effective judicial system and a predatory presidentialism resulting in a democratic-ochlocratic pendulum.

Following this line of thought, Bolivia’s current woes deepen in their scope. The delayed elections after the 2019 crisis to replace the executive and legislative branches may be seen to correct the current extraordinary lack of political legitimacy in the country. Following the lack of positive legitimacy of the Áñez presidency, the elections held are but a short-term solution to the issues at hand. Mere elections do not address the fact that the constitution and the four main organs of the State failed catastrophically in 2019.

With this introduction I want to develop the argument of constitutional failure. At first glance this may sound narrowly legal, yet seen through the prism of Bolivian history, the wider meaning of the term ‘constitutional’ is also to be considered. As opposed to ‘constitutional’ meaning the codified laws that define the structures of a State, ‘constitutional’, when employed not only in the sense of the composition of a State but as the way the State interacts with the society that makes it up, a layer of meaning that transcends legality can be conveyed by the term. Hence ‘constitutional’ can be used to ‘describe the […] Constitution in terms, not of first principles but of the real behavior of those who operate it’ (Crossman 1966). Accordingly, it is necessary to examine the factors that led to the failure of the constitutional order both in legal and governance-related terms in order to explore a way forward to solve the structural issue of Bolivia’s democratic-ochlocratic pendulum.

Historical development and the challenges facing constitutional order in Bolivia

Bolivia was founded in 1825. The first Constitution was drafted in Lima, Peru, in 1826 and included notes from Simon Bolivar, after whom the country was named. It merely lasted five years. Since 1831, the Bolivian State has seen constitutional change by different means (either through assemblies, amendments or legislative congresses) on 15 different occasions, the last one being the Constitutional Assembly of 2006, which yielded today’s constitutional text, ratified in 2009 (Rodríguez Veltzé 2008). The new Bolivian Constitution brought major conceptual and institutional innovations, framed under what is known as the 21st Century Constitutionalism in the region. This current notably focuses on granting indigenous peoples and the rural constituencies more social and political participation within the State that is traditionally run by dominant white minorities since the end of Spanish colonial rule.

Constitutionalism has become an integral part of the Bolivian State. Rojas Tudela argues that in Bolivia, since the last constitutional convention, the constitutional process can be understood as a rolling ‘constitutional policy’ maker, aiming at reinventing or interpreting the law in a process where the Constitution is not a unitary text but a sort of ‘navigation map’ with multiple options (Rojas Tudela 2018). Yet this vast history of experimentation and implementation of constitutional codification has not provided the political and societal results to establish sustainable democratic institutions that harnessed public grievances within its formally outlined systems (Gargarella 2011). Constitutionalism is a current academic and political challenge in Bolivia, because of the two main challenges faced by the 2009 constitution that stemmed from it: flawed institutions and caudillismo.

Arguably, Bolivia has become more inclusive since the 2009 Constitution. The ethnic and cultural diversity of the Bolivians is nowadays recognized and cherished by the State. The constitution of 2009 has provisions that revindicate those that had been systematically kept at the margin of national development throughout the country’s history. Bolivia now recognizes a plethora of formerly marginalized groups (racial minorities, indigenous communities and the like) that have been given wide-ranging self-determination rights and that are now included in all matters of State. Yet, while progress has been made, Bolivia remains a postcolonial State bound by its origins as a foreign imposition of statehood on natives in their own territories. Indeed, the Bolivian State’s history is one of conflict and cooperation between the newly arrived and ancestral people with whom the State institution has always operated with tacit and uninterrupted dominance of the white settlers throughout the last four centuries. This has formed the basis for the exclusion of swathes of the population from statehood. This historical legacy was interrupted by the MAS’ rule from 2006. The electoral victory of indigenous political movements needs to be understood in relation to the ever-growing expansion of political rights and inclusiveness advanced since the return of democracy at the beginning of the 80s. Nevertheless, the growth in numbers and diversity of those involved in politics has not yet necessarily translated into more democratic participants. Frustration with democracy is still widespread due to persistent poverty and lack of opportunities, now starkly increased by the economic fallout due to the pandemic.

The frustration with democratic institutions, in tandem with economic difficulty, has produced the second powerful force that haunts the State-society relation: caudillismo. It has taken hold over political debate, where single figures, and not general ideas carried by political groups, in theory empowered by the Constitution, are the basis for political debate. Identity politics and devotion to a specific charismatic leader are the current modus operandi of political struggle. Political leaders sell the idea that they are the organic expression of the popular will or a collective. Hereby they alone can interpret it and are legitimized solely by the acclaim they receive. In this way, serious deliberation of any kind falls second to popularity contests. Furthermore, caudillismo is built into the State’s structure in the form of the overmighty presidency.

Since political debate is settled by popularity, the presidency is the ultimate prize and authority. Constitutional tradition has always reflected this reality. The figure of the president as the head of government and State makes the officeholder an indispensable part of the workings of the State, but also overburdens him or her with a wide range of duties. On average, the office of the president is entrusted with 30 different chores² which, in my personal experience, surpass a single individual’s capabilities. Beyond this, the presidency does not have an underlying effective administrative structure to facilitate the process of governing. Most duties are relegated to the Ministry of the Presidency, which works with the other ministries and State organs. In addition, the president must also fulfill State representation duties and implement political goals.

The heavy-duty presidential role lacks, however, a crucial aspect, namely a relationship of cooperation with the legislative branch. The relationship between the presidency and the Legislative Assembly is currently reduced to a yearly presentation of an annual report which is not debated and has no real consequence. This leaves the presidency lacking any sort of oversight, at least within the constitutional structure. This, in combination with the need to gain and maintain popularity emanating from a political culture of caudillismo, accounts for the development of powerful tools to boost the image of the president when needed.

The allocation of land is exemplary for these purely popularity-enhancing tools at the disposition of the presidency. Since colonial times, the Spanish King granted entitlements in which his signature constituted the legitimation for rulers in the Americas. The postcolonial Republic retained this practice throughout the reforms and redrafts of the Constitution. Attribution 172.27 of the 2009 Constitution grants the president authority over the Bolivian Service for Agrarian Reform, which basically gives this office sole authority to grant and distribute rural property titles. Anecdotally, I remember that during my tenure in 2005 I found thousands of pending property titles, merely missing a presidential signature. This was due to the practice of withholding the titles until an opportunity to use them politically would present itself, especially with regard to large areas in the countryside. The purpose was to hold big rallies where the titles would be handed out by the president, generating great publicity. Worse still, it was rumored that previous presidents singlehandedly signed the titles. Aghast at this archaic practice, I arranged for mechanical signature devices to be used to tackle that shameful backlog. Fifteen years on, the practice is still in use. The Constitutional Assembly did not change this when working on the draft that was approved in 2009, thus retaining one of the many perennial ills of caudillo-style presidentialism.

The Constitution of 2009

It can be argued that any type of rule emanating from the 2009 constitution is fundamentally problematic. Yet, to assess why the constitutional structures fail to produce a stable political system that settles societal disagreement peacefully, the following question must be asked: who does what for whom? The tradition of constitutionalism, as previously outlined, has produced considerations over a number of substantive matters. A fundamental one is the problematic splintering of society in identity-based groupings. Despite the rhetorical wording of the new Constitution Preamble and articles on integration and unity of peoples, the recognition of identity-based groupings and the principles of unity do not become fully engaged in soothing deliberative processes. This, in turn, leads to a reduced or hindered authentic democratic participation, especially in the context of an immature political system and dysfunctional political parties. This results in the cooptation of these identity-based groups by charismatic leaders which vie against each other in what appears as strict popularity contests in order to reach the over-mighty presidency: an institution overburdened by tasks yet unrestricted in its power. Whereas the innovative character that some of these arrangements carry is laudable, their implementation is significantly limited by the structural issues at hand. The rest of this section discusses the roles of constitutional actors, their aims and duties.

Citizens as addressees

Starting with the last part of the question – ‘For whom?’ – it is necessary to specify who is the addressee of the constitutional order. Primarily, that is the subject of a constitution, and thus the addressees are the Bolivian citizenry. In this regard, Article 3 of the Constitution determines that ‘the Bolivian nation is composed by the totality of Bolivians, the nations and indigenous […] peoples […]’. Furthermore, Article 141 determines that Bolivian nationality is acquired by birth or naturalization. The problem is that the differentiation of legal citizens and indigenous peoples brings into question whether the applicability of the constitution is different for those who are not members of indigenous groups or so on, but are merely Bolivians.

This issue arises from Artitcle 1 St.1 whereby the Bolivian State is constituted as a ‘Unitary Social State of Plurinational Communitarian Law’ (Estado Unitario Social de Derecho Plurinacional Comunitario) that is free, independent, sovereign, democratic, intercultural, decentralized and with autonomies. Bolivia is founded on plurality and on political, economic, juridical, cultural and linguistic pluralism in the integration process of the country. Traditionally democracy is understood to be the rule of the people by the people, but this principle turns complex when ‘the people’ consists of a plurality of peoples with different rights in the same polity. The Plurinational State counts with not only citizens but also ‘precolonial nations and indigenous peoples’, as stated in Article 2. Furthermore, the 2009 Constitution also encompasses these groups’ autonomous self-determination and autonomous regions, as well as principles of pluralism and interculturalism that operate in parallel to governing through law. This turns the constitution to merely a (but not the) will of the people, as the government is then not only bound to the legislation emanating from the political processes within the framework of the constitution but coexists with parallel expressions of the will of the people. This complicated premise for the determination of who makes up the State is still being debated in the application of a plural and diverse set of rights. Furthermore, even though Article 410 provides that the Constitution is the supreme law of Bolivia and enjoys supremacy before any other normative, Article 190 allows nations and native indigenous rural peoples to exercise jurisdiction and apply their own principles, cultural values, norms and procedures. If there is a plurality of addressees who can pursue distinct goals within the State with distinct st...