Bolivar’s Ghost

Catia, a shantytown in west Caracas, seems to sprawl endlessly, its wretched conditions stretching into the horizon. One of its districts is called Manicomio (meaning bedlam), in reference to the large insane asylum that dominates the skyline. From here, it is difficult to discern either progress or hope. The poverty seems intractable, illiteracy and a lack of marketable skills are the norm, and resignation is etched on the faces of most inhabitants. And yet, amid the squalor, even here there is a crack of light.

In December 2002, the principal and most teachers at Juan Bautista Alberdi school walked off the job, declaring that they would not return until Hugo Chávez was deposed. These teachers lived outside Manicomio, their sympathies clearly those of a more elite class, their action in solidarity with Chávez’s opponents. Eight months after trying to oust him in a coup, Chávez’s enemies were busily promoting general strikes and employer lockouts to bring down his government. At the school, locks were placed on the front gates, and within days the place took on the hue of so much else in the teeming slum: dysfunction, rot, pathos.

But then something odd happened. Parents and neighbours, fed up with the constant politicking, decided to take matters into their own hands. A group of them busted open the locks with a view to running the school themselves. Inside, they found that their children had been attending a very dark place, a place more reminiscent of a prison block than a school.

The horrific conditions were recorded on video before the parent-neighbour group set to cleaning, restoring, and rebuilding the school. Parents were recruited as teachers, students returned, and, for the first time in memory, they were given proper meals. In April 2003, as an international delegation was ending a visit to the school, a group of students surrounded the delegates. To the question, “Is there anything you want to ask of President Chávez?” they responded joyfully and almost in unison, “We want absolutely nothing from the president. Only that he come to our school and witness for himself what we have done.” While this school was a community effort, there was devotion in the students’ voices.

The forces aligned against Chávez, however, remain powerful and are unlikely to ever make peace with him. Like other leaders, Chávez’s political fortunes rest on the ability to deliver tangible improvements to places like Manicomio. Based mostly on oil revenues, in late November he committed a whopping $100 billion over five years for infrastructure development. This new spending comes on top of a 43-percent increase in spending on education, health, and other social programs in 2005 alone. For the time being Chávez is delivering, but the real test will come when world oil prices sag.

For centuries, the highlands that surround Lake Titicaca and straddle the border between Bolivia and Peru have been home to some of the region’s most tragic battlegrounds. It was from here, in 1780 — more than two hundred years after the Spanish conquistadores first arrived — that the indigenous Quechua leader Tupac Amaru II looked down on the Spanish rulers in the valley of Cuzco and decided that it was time for them to go. Amaru launched a bloody assault. The Spaniards captured the bold leader, took him to the central plaza in Cuzco, and had each of his limbs torn from his body. But the battle raged on.

Across Lake Titicaca, on the Bolivian side where the altiplano (high tableland) dominates the landscape, it is said that another Tupac, Tupac Katari, heard the wailing screams of Amaru and, following them, led an Aymara army on a six-month siege against the Spanish. In the end, he too was captured and publicly dismembered, and the indigenous army was defeated. Popular myth has it that Tupac Katari’s final words can still be heard echoing across the altiplano: “You can kill just me now, but tomorrow I will return and will be millions.”

Today, those millions have arrived, and La Paz is facing an ominous encirclement. Surrounded by millions of poor Aymara living in barrios that crawl up the hillsides and spill onto the altiplano, the city is on edge. The expansion has created a new metropolis called El Alto, a key base of support for Evo Morales, the Aymara peasant leader who heads the Movement Towards Socialism party. Morales’ genius has been to turn a series of disparate anti-government protests into an indigenous uprising. Bolivia has the second-largest oil reserves in South America after Venezuela, but it is the region’s poorest country (and the one with the highest proportion of indigenous people). Inspired to a degree by Venezuela and the apparent trickle-down effects of its oil economy, the people of El Alto rose up against British and Spanish companies exporting oil to California from Bolivia. Beginning in September 2003, strikes and roadblocks paralyzed the country and led to a bloody confrontation — the first gas war — with the military. Some seventy people were killed, and as the news spread, President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada’s already tenuous grip on power was further eroded. He resigned on October 17, 2003.

After a period of relative calm, Morales and his followers — unsatisfied with the new president, Carlos Mesa, who had failed to nationalize Bolivian oil resources — took to the streets again. The El Alto threat: “Not one drop of gas” for the city of La Paz. For weeks on end, tens of thousands of people descended on the capital below, once again shutting down La Paz and engaging in running street battles with the police and military. The second Bolivian gas war pushed yet another president out of office.

As the late-2005 election campaign rolled over Bolivia, Morales promised sweeping changes, including the nationalization of the gas industry, participatory democracy reforms, and, loosely construed, the end of capitalism as Bolivia has known it. To some international observers his most provocative election promise was the decriminalization of coca production. In Washington the war on drugs remains active, and its position has long been that the “narcoterrorists” of Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia, and their support chains in Venezuela, must be shut down, crushed if necessary. Morales responds by saying that coca is benign, a quasi-cultural industry, and that if there are any problems, they are problems of demand not supply — of a sickness in America, not in Bolivia.