Analysis: Bolivia and its eternal unresolved social conflicts

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In early November, several civic committees, trade unionists, transport workers and the public university, among other organizations, began a strike in the department of Santa Cruz in rejection of a law aimed at increasing police control and political centralism.

This conflict is the result of the MAS (Movimiento al Socialismo) government’s difficulty in building consensus in a society where regional governments, social classes and indigenous groups (mainly in eastern Bolivia) have been unable to find common ground to settle their historical fractures with the State.

While the ruling party is permanently conjuring ghosts and is entrenched in its “coup d’état” theory, a large part of the opposition is reproducing a political discourse in line with McCarthyist anti-communism. The permanent conflicts, linked to unresolved structural issues, are related to the State itself.

The Bolivian State acts according to the interests of the political force in power. A symptom that the Bolivian State is a mere instrument of power, which generates mistrust among citizens. One year after Luis Arce took office, there is both a structural and a conjunctural dimension that explain the Bolivian political crisis which has intensified this month.

CONFLICTS IN TIME (CONJUNCTURAL)

MAS has been the leading political power in the national and subnational elections of 2020 and 2021, and dominates at the territorial level. However, it has lost its political hegemony at the national level.

Therefore, the government is struggling to establish a political articulation between the State and the majority of Bolivian civil society, composed of popular sectors and middle classes that are not aligned with the government, in order to lead the country through a framework of ideas that encompasses the whole of society.

This has led to socio-political conflicts when MAS tries to impose its positions.

The political crisis experienced in the country in the first half of November, reflected in a multisectoral strike and street blockades, was triggered by the government’s attempt to establish a regulatory framework in the name of the “National Strategy to Fight against the Legitimization of Illegal Profits and the Financing of Terrorism.”

The measure, if pursued, could have affected various informal popular sectors, middle classes and entrepreneurs, because any money transaction, irrespective of the amount, may be considered illegal, which led to uncertainty.

Faced with this, the MAS has singled out one social organization as the only one responsible for trying to politically destabilize Arce’s government: the Santa Cruz Civic Committee. This way, the government intentionally minimizes the conjunctural dimension of the conflict for ideological convenience and limits the potential for establishing a space for deliberation and understanding between the national government and the mobilized sectors.

STRUCTURAL DIMENSION

In broad terms, Bolivia has three structural contradictions or fractures that the State has thus far been unable to solve, despite having a Plurinational Political Constitution, passed in 2009, which, according to the MAS narrative, would be the solution to all historical conflicts: ethnic-cultural, political-spatial and social class differences, which contribute to deeply rooted issues in Bolivian society such as racism, political centralism, regionalism, social exclusion and mistrust in political representation.

According to the 2010 Latinobarómetro, one year after the approval of the Political Constitution of the Plurinational State (2009), trust in political parties reached 17%. A decade later, according to the same index, support has dropped one point. However, the great distrust towards political parties in Bolivia has not affected citizen participation, which in the 2020 general elections reached almost 9 out of 10 voters, with an electoral support for MAS of 55%.

By way of conjecture, this contradiction is due to the fact that voters supported the winning party in search of political certainty and in the hope of overcoming the economic crisis after a pandemic year and an interim administration (headed by Jeanine Áñez) plagued by misguided policies, corruption and political turmoil. However, the divergence between representatives and represented as reflected in the distrust towards political parties is still concerning.

Bolivia is a difficult country to understand, because it does not have a State project capable of mitigating the recurrent social conflicts. The parties’ corporate interests are above public interest. Populist sentiments and sectorial pettiness are commonplace, which undermines any political process aimed at strengthening the role of the State as guarantor of compliance with the rules of the game and prevents its intimidating behavior on private life and citizens’ rights.

This has become clear with the conflicts in Bolivian streets in the first half of November.