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International Herald Tribune
January 26, 2009
A woman voting in El Alto, on the
outskirts of
BOLIVIANS RATIFY NEW CONSTITUTION
By Simon Romero
EL ALTO, Bolivia: President Evo Morales seemed
assured of an easy victory in a referendum on Sunday over a sweeping new
Constitution aimed at empowering Bolivia's Indians. The vote capped three years
of conflict-ridden efforts by Morales to overhaul a political system he had
associated with centuries of indigenous subjugation.
Citing
preliminary vote counts, reports on national television said about 60 percent
of voters had approved the new Constitution. If that margin holds or goes
higher, it would strengthen Morales's mandate, political analysts here said.
Still,
regional conflict over the results may loom in the months ahead. Citing the
same counts, both state and private news media said at least four departments,
or provinces, in Bolivia's rebellious eastern lowlands had rejected the charter
by wide margins.
Vaguely
worded items among the new Constitution's 411 articles would broaden
definitions of property to include communal ownership; allow Indians to mete
out corporal punishment under their own legal systems; extend limited autonomy
to regional prefects; and reaffirm state control over Bolivia's ample natural
gas reserves.
It
is up to Congress to draft regulations for many of these articles, but the
legislature also is an institution in flux, with Indians guaranteed new
representation in its chambers.
"With
my humble vote, I am creating a little bit of hope for my children," said
Ismael Pocoaca, 42, a construction worker who voted Sunday morning at the
Chuquiago Marka School here in this city of slums on the windswept plain
overlooking the capital, La Paz.
After
the vote, Pocoaca and other Aymara Indians gathered in front of the school,
where vendors sold fried-pork sandwiches and posters of Morales, a former llama
herder. "We are finally recapturing our dignity," said Maria Laure,
38, a soap saleswoman who voted for the new Constitution.
But
while Indians across the country celebrated the vote, the Constitution opens a
new stage of uncertainty in fractious Bolivia.
Few
people claim to know precisely how the laws will function under the new
Constitution, in what way they will undergo substantial revision in Congress or
how they will affect a nation facing a sharp economic slowdown this year.
Officials
in the lowlands, where most of Bolivia's food and petroleum are produced,
ridiculed the new charter. "No constitution can be implemented if it has
not been approved in all of the departments," said Carlos Dabdoub, a
political leader in Santa Cruz, an eastern department that rejected the
Constitution.
Given
the festering resistance in Santa Cruz and elsewhere, it was notable that the
Constitution came to a vote. Violence over the proposed charter reached a head
in September when more than a dozen peasants, mostly supporters of Morales,
were killed in a clash in the Amazonian department of Beni.
Talks
between Morales's supporters in Congress and the splintered opposition produced
a compromise from earlier versions of the charter. One of the most polemical
articles in the final draft reversed a plan to allow Morales to indefinitely
run for re-election, limiting him to one five-year term if he wins a new
election later this year.
But
other articles reflect the influence wielded by Morales, 49, an Indian who
lacks fluency in Aymara and Quechua, Bolivia's main indigenous languages.
Communicating with audiences in the colonialist language, Spanish, he has
nevertheless forged a political movement imbued with nationalism and has
heightened ethnic awareness.
"After
500 years, we have retaken the Plaza Murillo!" Morales told followers last
week in a speech at the end of the campaign in La Paz's central square, which
until the 1950s Indians were prohibited from entering.
The
new Constitution would allow Morales, whose government is supported financially
by Venezuela, to assert even greater state control of the economy, with
articles that could forbid foreign companies from repatriating profits or
resorting to international arbitration to resolve nationalization disputes.
Indeed,
Morales seems undaunted by a dearth of investment and a slowing economy as
prices decline for Bolivia's natural gas and neighboring Brazil lowers imports
of the fuel.
On
the eve of the vote, he announced the nationalization of a Bolivian unit of the
British oil giant BP, and created a new daily newspaper, Cambio, controlled by
his government. And after his recent expulsion of the American ambassador and
Drug Enforcement Administration agents, whom he accuses of espionage, he
repeated his criticism of the United States.
"Bolivia,
little by little, is shutting itself off from the world," said Gonzalo
Chávez, a Harvard-educated economist at the Catholic University of La Paz, who
sees economic growth falling to 2 percent this year from about 6 percent in
2008.
But
others say the new Constitution addresses underrepresentation of Indians,
pointing to articles that would reserve seats for them in Congress and in other
areas of the fast-growing bureaucracy. Even Morales's cabinet has just two
Indian ministers; his top aides, the vice president (a former guerrilla) and
the chief of staff (a former military officer), are light-skinned
intellectuals.
In
symbolic importance, said Xavier Albó, a Jesuit scholar and linguist, the new
Constitution may be the equivalent of Spain's Reconquest of the Iberian
Peninsula from the Moors in 1492. But instead of the blood spilled in that
process, Albó said, Bolivia is "advancing in a democratic process that
does not exclude or subjugate anyone."
Some
Bolivians who read the entire Constitution came away with other impressions.
Edmundo
Paz Soldán, a writer who teaches at Cornell University, said it reminded him of
an essay by Jorge Luis Borges that describes a Chinese encyclopedia's attempt
to divide fauna into myriad nonsensical categories. For instance, Paz Soldán
said that the Constitution recognized 36 different indigenous groups in
Bolivia, some with fewer than 100 people, but that it was unclear how precisely
each group would be enfranchised in a country where three main indigenous
groups — the Quechua, Aymara and Guaraní — wield much larger influence.
"The
mind-boggling text may have the ratification of the majority," Paz Soldán
said, "but it might not be the recipe for a viable country."
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