A Brief Overview of the Situation in Bolivia

Spanish conquistadors invaded Bolivia, and their descendants basically stripped Bolivia of its gold and silver, leaving behind no economic infrastructure or wealth. The descendants of the conquistadors have ruled Bolivia with an iron hand for 500 years, based on race.

From the 1920s to the 1950s, international mining companies (mostly from the U.S.) took the wealth of Bolivia in iron ore, zinc, tin, and many other minerals. Once again, they bled the country dry, leaving behind nothing but extremely polluted streams and rivers.

The population of Bolivia is 5-7% Hispanic, 20-30% Mestizo, and 60-70% Indigenous.

The Hispanics control the vast majority of wealth in Bolivia, and they controlled all of the power until 2005.

Bolivia was one of the countries in the world closest to having an apartheid political and economic system up until 2005.

The Roman Catholic Church has been the state religion of Bolivia since the days the conquistadors imposed it with muskets and horses. Just one example: In this nation, where few children are born in hospitals and cannot get a birth certificate, a baptismal certificate is required to be able to get Bolivian identity papers or a passport. However, the only acceptable one is a Catholic baptismal certificate. Therefore, everyone is baptized Roman Catholic, and then some are re-baptized as Protestants.

It was actually against the law in Bolivia for anyone to be a member of any church except the Roman Catholic Church until 1952. It was against the law to teach any indigenous person how to read or write in Spanish, the national language. They couldn’t own land, etc.

From the 1920s to the 1970s, the Methodist Church of Bolivia had several missionaries who privately, and occasionally openly, defied these laws. To this day, Bolivian Methodist officials are convinced that the Bolivian government had a U.S. Methodist missionary killed in the early 1960s for his work evangelizing the indigenous Aymara people.

Even with the change in the official Bolivian laws in 1952, all Protestants experienced huge religious oppression by local and even federal officials, and racist prejudices controlled and limited their human rights.

In 1979, the Methodist Church of Bolivia had the “Aymara Revolution” within the church, in which the indigenous people took control of the church and elected the first indigenous bishop. He was the first indigenous person to lead a national organization, religious or secular, in all of Bolivia. Consequently, the Methodist Church of Bolivia became a leader in the fight for human rights of the indigenous peoples and true democracy for Bolivia. This led to arrest, torture, exile, and martyrdom of many Aymara Methodist leaders in the 1980s.

Bolivia has the highest economic inequality ranking in the world between the top 10 percent and bottom 10 percent of people. Namibia is second. If Bolivia were to reduce the differential between the top and bottom by 23%, they would still be in last place behind Namibia.

From the 1960s to the ’90s, there were virtually no resources that the world wanted from Bolivia, and Bolivia became the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. What little economic development there was occurred in Eastern Bolivia, especially in the Santa Cruz area.

Vast tracts of land have been purchased from the Bolivian government by a few wealthy Hispanic families and non-Bolivian expatriates over the decades, and huge ranches have developed. This was without respect for the indigenous people who had been living in those rainforest areas for centuries. In some places, the indigenous Guarani workers deal with a type of forced servitude.

In 1999, there was the discovery of vast natural gas deposits in eastern Bolivia. Petrobras, the Brazilian national oil and gas company, paid millions of dollars in bribes to Bolivian government officials to develop the gas and remove it from Bolivia.

Petrobras dramatically underpaid Bolivia for the gas, once again leaving no economic infrastructure or wealth. The cheap natural gas fueled an economic “miracle” in Brazil, while Bolivia, the source of the natural gas, had no economic growth.

In the 2005 Bolivian presidential campaign, an Aymara coca farmer and human rights activist, Evo Morales, ran for the presidency. Evo is a controversial figure because he was a poor coca farmer who was strongly opposed to the way the U.S.-sponsored Bolivian government focused its anti-drug campaigns on the poor coca farmers, instead of the drug traffickers or on reducing demand from the U.S.

• There are legitimate uses for coca leaves in small quantities, including teas, relief of altitude sickness, and relief of hunger pains, to name a few.
• Evo said he would allow small amounts of coca to be grown, but would continue to crack down hard on large coca fields which are obviously being used to make into paste and send to the Colombian drug cartels.

Evo, as an indigenous Indian, also said that he would change the Constitution to have freedom of religion, and fair representation by the majority indigenous population. He also declared that he would see to it that the wealth coming from the natural gas would go to the majority and the needy folks, instead of the Hispanic elite, by “nationalizing” the gas fields. This threatened the Bush administration, and they subsidized his opponents with campaign funds.

In December 2005, in a stunning and totally unexpected result, Bolivia elected the first indigenous Indian to become the leader of a country in the Western Hemisphere since the days of Columbus. Evo was elected with 52% of the vote, the highest percentage in the history of the country. (Bolivia has a European-style democracy with many parties and until this time, there always had to be a coalition of several parties to make a government.)

President Morales, while not a Methodist, had attended a training event put on by the Methodist Church in Bolivia on how to be a community organizer to get things done. (He has obviously taken those lessons far beyond anything we taught him.)

Two weeks after his election, President Morales called in the Executive Committee of the Evangelical Methodist Church. He said that he had been elected to move indigenous people into leadership positions but that the only educated indigenous people he knew were Methodists. He asked the Church leadership to make a list of people available to serve in the government. He ended up turning to the Methodists for many important posts, including:

• Head of the Justice Ministry (Casamira Rodriguez)
• Ambassador to Denmark (former Bishop Eugenio Poma, who is being considered as the next ambassador to the U.S.)
• Ambassador to Italy
• Several key positions in the Foreign Ministry
• Vice Minister of Health (Dr. German Crespo)

Soon after the election, it was discovered that Petrobras had been bribing the previous president and that he had several million dollars in Swiss bank accounts. He was given political asylum by the Bush administration and is currently living in exile in Maryland, immune from arrest.

Evo did nationalize the natural gas fields, but instead of making them government-run, he immediately renegotiated with Petrobras and signed an agreement. Petrobras would continue to run the fields, but they would pay the Bolivian government fair market values for the gas. This was an additional $750 million a year, nearly doubling the income for the Bolivian government.

The Bush administration felt that such a move was a threat to all oil companies and labeled Evo a Communist, and withdrew all of its support of the Bolivian government.

Without the government-to-government support of the U.S., Bolivia has turned to Venezuela, who has been more than willing to provide money and support.

Evo has used the new gas money primarily to help the poorest within his country, building infrastructure such as roads, electricity, and potable water, and starting a type of Social Security program to help feed and care for the elderly poor.

• All of this has been over the protest of Hispanic elite, who complain that the money is being wasted on unimportant and insignificant things.
• Why should the Bolivian government pay older indigenous people a monthly allowance when they never had a formal job? It is wasting money and nothing but a bribe Evo is paying to the indigenous people.
• The amount is about $5/mo. and is only paid to anyone of any ethnicity who is over 60 and has no formal income. In the U.S., we would call it “Social Security.”

President Morales also made land reform a top priority in his efforts to reverse centuries of subjugation of the indigenous majority.

In August 2006, at a grand celebration of the 100th Anniversary of the Evangelical Methodist Church of Bolivia, President Morales came and said,

“My movement (the Indigenous People’s Movement) and the Methodist Church never planned or coordinated our actions. The Methodist church is a spiritual movement and ours is not.

“However, whenever we were marching for the rights of the indigenous people, and we ran out of food and water, it was the Methodists who fed us. When we stood against the dogs and the water cannon of the dictators, it was the Methodists who stood beside us. When we were in prison and being tortured, it was the Methodists who were in the jail cells next to us.

“No other organization in Bolivia has stood for democracy and the rights of the indigenous people as the Methodist Church so strongly or so long. Therefore, the Bolivian government is giving the highest civilian award possible, the Order of the Condor, to the Evangelical Methodist Church in Bolivia for its 100 years of service and evangelization of the indigenous peoples of Bolivia!”

The Hispanic governor of the Santa Cruz department* suddenly decided that all of the tax revenue from the gas fields in Santa Cruz should remain in Santa Cruz, and none go to the national government. Strikes and other typical Bolivian political protests have occurred in the Santa Cruz area, and spread to other areas with Hispanic governors where there is relative wealth.

Tensions rose dramatically in the fall of 2008. The governor of Santa Cruz and other Hispanic governors said that Evo no longer had the support of the people and that they no longer had to listen to him. They began having statewide referendums calling for autonomy from the Bolivian government.

There are some indications that the Bush administration used USAID money, which by U.S. law is only allowed to go for development, to support organizations in Santa Cruz who were organizing against the federal government and to help opposition political parties.

• If true, this would be outright intervention in the domestic politics of an overwhelmingly democratically elected government, and the use of USAID money would be illegal.
• Several U.S. and Latin American advocacy groups in Washington are trying to get access to the budget of USAID-Bolivia through the courts and the Freedom of Information Act to see if this occurred. So far, those records remain closed.
• U.S. law allows such intervention using CIA money, but not USAID.

In this highly charged political environment, the United States ambassador announced that he was going to go to Santa Cruz and speak with the governor. The Bolivian government asked the ambassador not to do so, as this was an internal political situation and the U.S. should not meddle in the local national politics of a democratic nation. He did it anyway.

Immediately following the visit by the ambassador, the governor of Santa Cruz used racist language in describing President Morales, and the Hispanic mayor of Santa Cruz even called for a ’70s-style military coup of the federal government.

The Bolivian government felt that the ambassador was working to support the governor and organizing a coup. (I would assume that it isn’t true, but it is understandable why they would feel that way.) Based on that, they have sent the U.S. ambassador home.

The governor of Pando apparently organized an attack on indigenous people near Cobija. Twenty people were killed. The national government finally sent in troops and had him arrested.

Finally, on September 17, the dissident governors, shocked by the violence of one of their own, agreed to the continuing request from Evo to talk.

In an attempt to diffuse the situation, Evo called for a recall vote of all of the governors in Bolivia, and himself as president. Evo said that if he was voted out of office, he would go back to farming and quietly leave politics.

In that vote, Evo won the support of 67% of the population, but most (not all) of the Hispanic governors also won support in their respective departments.

Tensions remained high and another round of talks began. To protect himself and ensure that the governors reported the truth in these meetings, President Morales asked that a representative of the Roman Catholic Church, a representative of the Organization of American States, and a representative from the Evangelical Methodist Church of Bolivia be present to observe and facilitate these highly sensitive talks. Rev. Freddie Cuevas, an indigenous Quechua Methodist pastor and the director of the American Institute (a Bolivian Methodist-run high school), was that representative.

Things reached a settling down point and focus went on the Constitutional elections in January. (Not reported in U.S. press.)

Bishop Robert Hayes, Bishop of the Oklahoma Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church, visited with President Morales in January. He urged discussions in order to normalize relations with the U.S. government, with the change in U.S. administrations.

Evo also organized a Constitutional convention to rewrite the Constitution. It passed on a referendum vote by the entire nation with 64% of the vote. The Constitution:

• Ends racial bias in the law,
• Guarantees democracy, which will also permanently transfer power from the Hispanic elite to the poor indigenous majority,
• Changes the length that someone can be president, and
• Brings freedom of religion and treats the “Evangelical” (Protestant) churches on an equal basis with the Roman Catholic Church. (For example, a baptismal certificate from any church is now acceptable to get identity papers and a passport.)
  • The Catholic Church vehemently opposed this last idea. They declared that Evo was a devil for promoting it.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter was in La Paz in May 2009 to discuss normalizing relations with the US.

A team from the State Department arrived in the summer of 2009 to discuss normalizing relations between our two governments.

Since that time, Evo has indicated his willingness to open relations with the U.S.

*Bolivian states are called “departments.”