BOLIVIA:In a major challenge to the Morales administration, four regions voted this year for autonomy from the central government, writes Joshua Partlowin Santa Cruz, Bolivia
HENRRI ZEBALLOS, a lawyer, and his wife, a dentist, gathered the kids in their minivan for a Sunday morning drive through their home town of Santa Cruz.
People came out of their houses to watch them pass. Housewives shouted slurs. Grown men and little girls thrust up their middle fingers in rage.
"This is natural," Zeballos said.
A young woman stopped washing a truck and shot the hose-spray into the open window of the Zeballoses' van. "It's okay. We don't want to fight. We'll get wet," Zeballos said.
Technically, what the Zeballos family took part in Sunday was a flag-waving parade in support of President Evo Morales. But their caravan was also a provocation, a gesture of defiance in an increasingly volatile country. Other cars in the parade were hit by rocks; on the street, fistfights broke out.
The city the parade traversed is the emotional heart of opposition to Morales, a relatively wealthy lowlands region that is pushing for autonomy and a free-market alternative to the socialist path pursued high in the western mountains by Morales, the first president from the country's indigenous majority.
On Sunday, the nation is scheduled to vote on a referendum on whether to recall Morales, his vice-president and nearly all of the regional leaders, known as prefects. Polls suggest that Morales and several of the prefects will probably keep their positions.
"Whatever the result, the referendum is going to show that this is a divided country," said Juan Carlos Rocha, editor of the La Razon newspaper .
The conflict grows from two distinct and conflicting visions of the future of Bolivia, a small impoverished country where about 60 per cent of residents identified themselves as indigenous (native cultures that predate the Europeans) in a 2001 census and roughly the same percentage live in poverty.
To supporters of Morales, his landslide victory in December 2005 marked a historic turning point, especially for downtrodden indigenous communities that for generations have provided cheap labour for rich businessmen, extracting from the ground silver, tin, oil and gas, and soybeans.
The former leader of a coca growers' union has expanded cash payments to more than two million school-age children and the elderly. He has restructured contracts with international oil companies to give the government a higher percentage of the revenue. Public investment in roads and other projects has risen from $629 million in 2005 to $1.1 billion in 2007. The national budget has been in surplus the past two years, unimaginable in earlier years.
The prevailing concept, said the vice-minister of the budget department, Emilio Pinto Marin, is to avoid unfair contracts and perks for big businesses and "to govern by obeying the people."
"Past governments focused more on businessmen so that they could generate wealth and distribute it. But it didn't happen. We've been waiting for 25 years for this to happen, and it never did," Pinto said.
"President Morales, as a man of the people, a man from the countryside, an agriculturalist, he knows more than anybody about the needs of the people. He has launched a politics of redistribution of income."
These policies do not sit well in many parts of the country. Many critics say the Morales government focuses on the indigenous to the exclusion of other peoples. The government succeeded only in scaring away international investment, the critics say, threatening local private enterprise and weakening the rule of law as it tries to secure more power for itself.
Supporters of these policies "are working to destroy private property. They want the state to be in charge of everything," said Carlos Dabdoub, an author and leading member of the Santa Cruz civic committee, a prominent opposition organisation.
In a major challenge to the Morales administration, four regions - Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija - voted this year for autonomy from the central government, which considers the referendums to be illegal. The autonomy movements demand more control of locally generated revenue and local management of healthcare, education, property rights and the police.
Common complaints heard in Santa Cruz, an important agricultural region, are that Morales has restricted exports, reduced oil tax payments to the regional governments and stood in the way of autonomy.
Morales said in a speech in Santa Cruz on Monday that he respects private property and that the region has been receiving more money during his administration than under previous presidents.
If Morales wins the referendum but does not accept Santa Cruz's referendum vote for autonomy, Dabdoub said, Santa Cruz will not recognise him as president.
"Our issue is centralism. We want to get rid of centralism," said Branko Marinkovic, president of the Santa Cruz civic committee.
For Morales' supporters, such arguments amount to the complaints of an embittered oligarchy at risk of losing its preferred status. But the division transcends economics and has laid bare cultural and geographic differences as well. People from the Andean highlands, with its indigenous majority, often accuse those of Spanish descent in the lowlands of Santa Cruz of having a racist agenda.
"Everything looks bad to the people who used to be in power," said Felipe Montevilla (55), a man of the Aymara ethnic group who attended a Morales rally in the town of Viacha, on the high plateau above the national capital, La Paz. "For 500 years, they never had to tip their hat to an indigenous man. This problem is primarily racist," Montevilla said.
If Morales loses the recall referendum, he would be required to call for a new round of general elections in the coming weeks.
"Right now, I think progressive change depends on the power of the street. It doesn't depend on constitutional or legal norms. And that's a pity," said George Gray Molina, a Bolivian economist and former UN development official.
"What we're seeing is a political battle here. It's not just about decentralisation. It's not just about autonomy. It's about who rules in Bolivia." - ( LA Times-Washington Post service)