If the saying is true that all politics are local, then to get a real understanding of Evo Morales and his MAS party, one must look at the local characters that, from the beginning, have constituted the MAS social movement.
In many regions of the country (especially the highlands and valleys), even before the election of Evo Morales, MAS has been steadily taking control of rural municipalities.
The mayor is from a small farming community several kilometers outside of the main pueblo. His first language is Quechua, but he speaks Spanish fluently. The mayor never completed high school.
He is affable but visionless, and he seems to suffer from attention deficit disorder. When people speak to him about important issues, he is busy shuffling through papers, unable to sit still for very long, his eyes wander easily around the room, focusing on anything and everything but the matter at hand.
When he arrives in the city, his cellphone rings incessantly (cell phones usually don’t work in provincial areas). He talks into it like it was a walkie-talkie, responding to the person on the other end by holding the phone to his mouth like a PA. Even in important meetings with high-level government officials, he refuses to turn off his cell phone.
Like most politicians, he enjoys attention and power. He takes advantage of his position to behave in ways that seem wholly inappropriate. He drinks shamelessly and publicly with his cohorts, fist-fighting with friends and acquaintances in local watering-holes.
Some Saturdays he arrives to work disheveled and drunk, unable to make a coherent decision, setting a poor standard for his subordinates while behaving in a way that would get most everyone else fired.
Despite his lack of vision, the municipal government of which he is the head plods along, completing projects with its slim budget, subject to petty corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency, but not crippled by it.
Though most pundits, sealed away in their air-conditioned fortresses, choose to focus on the discontinuous nature of the changes in Bolivian politics, it seems to me that we would be better served by focusing on the continuity. For the mayor is not an anomaly in the municipal fabric of Popular Participation, but is rather the quintessential example of Bolivian politics in action. In fact, most Bolivian’s are realizing quite quickly, that beneath the veneer of nationalization and beyond the indigenous clothing of the new political elite, little has actually changed within the hearts and souls of the “rentist” bureaucrats that run the nation.
One response to “The Mayor”
[…] The social movements that toppled Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada are giving [President Evo] Morales the time and the support that he needs to govern. Two or three years from now, if his promises fail to materialize, it is difficult to predict what the political environment in Bolivia will be like. But, for the time being at least, Bolivia enjoys the political stability that it has craved for so long. Two or three years from now, if his promises fail to materialize, it is difficult to predict what the political environment in Bolivia will be like. But, for the time being at least, Bolivia enjoys the political stability that it has craved for so long. Now the situation has deteriorated palpably. The list of problems seems almost endless. The prices of all consumer products, especially the basics, like rice, sugar, and meat, have doubled, and even tripled in some cases. Yet wages have remained stagnant. Lines of transport vehicles and heavy trucks, often extending for several blocks from the gas station, can be seen along the edges of the roads, as diesel fuel has mysteriously become a scarce commodity (I have heard many reasons why diesel is scarce, but none of them has been extraordinarily convincing). Emigration remains an intractable problem, with some sources claiming that approximately 25% of the country’s population can be found in other countries, namely Argentina, Spain, the United States, and Brazil. The Constitutional Assembly has torn the country apart, with different political and social groups battling for regional autonomy and greater control over natural resources like oil and gas. But, far beyond the very concrete examples of long lines, stagnant wages, and skyrocketing prices, is the overall malaise that one senses in the general population: despair, hopelessness…and complacency, an acceptance of conflict and impending disaster. Perhaps a fitting microcosm of the early 21st century, in a world that seems ever closer to spiraling out of control. In many ways, I suppose the current state of Bolivia could have been easily predicted by an astute observer. I personally chose to focus on the continuity of Bolivia’s socio-political progression, rather than any dramatic breaks with the past. Corruption is still rampant, the mayor still arrives to work late and drunk, and people fight over petty personal differences in search of individual gain instead of looking for solutions that are of interest to the nation at large. […]