Nine Years of Paradox in Bolivia
Weekend Edition Jan 30-Feb 01, 2015
Evo's Third Inauguration
Nine Years of Paradox in Bolivia
by CHELLIS GLENDINNING
La Paz, 22 January 2006.
Evo Morales Ayma was born Aymara and poor in the department of Oruro. For lunch he and his father would scrounge the thin meat from orange peels cast from the windows of passing autobuses, and his most ambitious childhood dream was to ride in a bus. During his life he worked as a baker, brick layer, farmer, trumpet player, and soldier; then rose up through the ranks of coca-farmerunions to become a leader of El Comité de Coordinación de las Seis Federaciones and finally of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS).
It is for such humble beginnings that his election to the presidency of the poorest country in South America was of so much interest to Tom Hayden that he convinced me to travel to the transmit del mando in 2006. The truth is I didn´t want to go, although I admit that I was impressed: between the election and the inauguration Evo was already traveling the globe lining up potential allies—and doing so garbed in the ratty, old red-and-blue pullover that he became known for. His vice president had been a guerrillero in the Tupak Katari Guerrilla Army, and his First Lady would be his sister, a vegetable vendor.
In the end, Tom swayed me, insisting that “We will never witness anything like this again in our lifetimes.”
At the time we in the U. S. of A. were in a decidedly Eeyore state of mind. George W. Bush was busy dishing out his deadly brew with a neoliberal serving spoon and spitting out such indigestible scraps as:“I don’t listen to focus groups. It doesn’t matter if you mass a million, billion, six billion people or whatever. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.” Despite the official claim that the global corporate economy was providing a miraculous boost to Wall Street, for those of us at Ground Zero, the fissure between rich and poor was cracking apart like the San Andreas Fault. Not to mention the rollback—or out-and-out demolition–of the rights and equalities we, our parents, and grandparents had fought for.
And so it was with an unforeseen boost to my waning sense of possibility that I was lifted to the altiplano skies by the exploding spirit of the Bolivian people.In Plaza San Francisco, where in the past syndicates and citizens had gone mano-a-mano against the military,they were now awaiting the arrival of their new leaders. Beaming Aymara women in bowler hats. The street kids rehabilitated by El Teatro Trono atop stilts made of scrap wood, gyrating to the thunder of homemade drums. Quecha women in their flat-topped straw monteras. Miss Bolivia Universo. Bigger-than-life eagle puppets. Charango players and marching bands. Dance groups in huge head dresses. Bolivia’s glorious trícolor, blue MAS banderas, multi-colored wiphala flags– all flapping like foam caps atop a sea of humanity.
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/01/30/nine-years-of-paradox-in-bolivia/
