On Wednesday I will be traveling to the South American nation of Bolivia. In the years 2000-2003 I lived in a small village in the province of Mizque, four hours from the city of Cochabamba. Now, after 3 years in the US, I will return to Bolivia for three months, in part to observe the current state of a society that is undergoing massive political and cultural change. Naturally, the focus of this blog will change to reflect my observations and experiences in the Bolivian Andes.

In Latin America and elsewhere, all eyes are on Bolivia and the new Bolivian President Evo Morales. Though the North American press has depicted the election of the leftist-populist Morales as an unexpected and ahistorical shift towards radical socialism, in reality his emergence as Bolivia’s primary political figure is firmly rooted in the country’s political history.

Outside of Bolivia, little is known about the massive decentralization reform initiated by the Bolivian government with the 1994 Law of Popular Participation. Ironically, the law was formulated and implemented by the government of President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. Little did ‘Goni’ realize that he had set into motion forces that, nearly 10 years later, would result in his ouster and subsequent exile.

The definitive work on Popular Participation, "The Politics of Popular Participation in Bolivia 1994-1999", was written by Dr. George Gray Molina of Oxford University’s Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security, and Ethnicity. Gray-Molina takes great care to detail the origins and trajectory of the Popular Participation reform, elucidating the ways in which the reform was adopted across an ethnically diverse country characterized by weak public institutions and vastly different social and political customs.

In essence, Popular Participation was designed to both extend the reach of a discontinuous state and to make project planning and implementation procedures accessible to public participation. This was accomplished through the creation of municipal governments, which were created and operated using funds received from the central government.

Decentralizing the planning and implementation of public works had several immediate effects. First, it forever altered the geopolitical boundaries of the Bolivian state. The creation of rural municipalities involved drawing borders and building municipal infrastructure. Popular Participation required wealth redistribution through the newly created municipal governments. For decades the Bolivian state was weak and primarily urban; municipal development created a new mechanism for wealth distribution to rural areas through public works and participative planning.

Also, the adoption of decentralization reform accentuated the social and cultural differences across a political landscape brimming with ethnic diversity. According to Gray Molina, "Popular Participation…is a process of continuous political construction -a layering of democratic politics upon corporatist and clientelist politics, itself juxtaposed over campesino and indigenous politics over time."

Gray Molina’s analysis centers around a description of the reform adoption process in different geopolitical sectors of Bolivia. His work goes into great detail about the ways in which local customs and political traditions have shaped the adoption of Popular Participation, and how policy responsiveness is in turn shaped by the complex political alliances within and between local political groups.

Gray Molina presents several case studies of highland, valley, and lowland communities, arguing that in general lowland, tropical municipalities tend to be characterized by political capture (the control of municipal government by a single political party), highland communities by political fragmentation (the control of municipal government by several political parties), and valley communities by an emphasis on localism, or the creation of local alliances and inter-municipal relationships as a strategy for increasing policy responsiveness and implementation capacity.

What is interesting to note here is how the opening of Bolivian politics through Popular Participation forever altered the landscape of national politics. Contestation and clientelist relationships, the increasing importance of NGOs and other interest groups in the highlands, and the continuing emergence of a national identity all occurred against the backdrop of public disaffection with "neoliberal" politics, the US led war on drugs, and a failed policy towards natural gas.

What seems to many Western pundits to be a hijacking of the Bolivian democratic process by the likes of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, is in reality the ascendancy of a populist leader supported by a loose coalition of political interests that have been organizing and debating for many years within the empowering framework of Popular Participation.

Yet the further democratization of Bolivian politics, notably through the election of departmental prefectures, has left the prefectures in the hands of five different political parties. This has made the Bolivian state vulnerable to the same forces that Gray-Molina describes in his analysis. Once appointed by the central government, the departmental prefects are now elected by the people. The results have nationalized the geopolitical trends towards fragmentation and political capture, and may in the long run further weaken a Bolivian state that is still extremely limited in its capacity to plan and implement investments in social and physical resources.

Bolivia’s future is uncertain. However, when observing and discussing the politics of any nation, we should be careful to remember that political developments do not occur in a historical vacuum, nor do they conform to the oversimplified, black and white view of the world promulgated by the US media. Popular Participation has affected and will continue to affect the direction of Bolivia’s political trajectory.

In many ways, Bolivia’s experiment with democracy is similar to our own when our country was young, and it raises the question: Can a small, ethnically diverse nation, divided on so many issues and pulled in many directions by the world’s great powers, use the tools of democracy to overcome a host of seemingly insurmountable obstacles? Only time will tell.