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On the horizon?

09.14.2006

Technorati tags: Bolivia politics Evo Morales

Lots of bad news on the Bolivia front the last few days. Let's see. After the media luna strike (which had varying levels of success & sporadic mild violence), MAS supporters have threatened to descend on Santa Cruz to "blockade" the city (as protesters often do to La Paz). While that's a ridiculous proposition (more on that below), it's a sign of increasing confrontational attitudes between the government & its supporters versus those who support the regional comités cívicos & the political opposition (primarily Podemos & the MNR).

Meanwhile, Evo's been blasting "American imperialism" & alleging that there's a vast conspiratorial plot (led by Washington, of course) to overthrow his presidency. All this while vice president, Alvaro García Linera, prepares to travel to Washington to ask for increased economic aid & development assistance. The irony hasn't escaped me. Evo's own trip to the US has suddenly been called short (he was set to visit New York City) because Manfred Reyes Villa, the prefect of Cochabamba, called the president out on missing the festivities for the anniversary of the founding of Cochabamba. I'm curious about what this means, that Evo's responding to challenges from an opposition prefect.

But the bombshell came today. Despite the fanfare regarding Bolivia's pronouncement to nationalize its oil & gas industry, little progress was made. But Brazil's Petrobras just made announcements that they would no longer continue renegotiating w/ the Bolivian country, and are preparing to just walk away (w/ compensation for their losses, of course) from further investments in Bolivia. Yes, this could be mere bluster. But if Petrobras pulls out, one wonders whether the French Total or the Spanish Repsol will linger. Who would replace them? Indian or Chinese companies perhaps. But they won't arrive soon. And even they might get skittish, if the regional oil & gas giant (Petrobras) has had enough.

Can Santa Cruz be blockaded?

The question of why I think blockading Santa Cruz is ludicrous is simple: It's not La Paz. In a previous post, I pointed out how easy it is to blockade the city of La Paz, which is built in a series of narrow Andean valleys that can be easily cut off from the only real highway out of the city — which comes from the Ceja in El Alto. La Paz's roads also converge primarily on a single main avenue (which changes names as it descends from the Ceja into the Zona Sur).

In sharp contrast, Santa Cruz is sprawls across the lowland savannah. There are numerous main traffic arteries — some of them four or five lanes wide in both directions — that allow for traffic to circulate from any point in the city to any other point in the city along numerous routes. Essentially, the main arteries (the anillos) are a series of concentric circles, with numerous radial arteries connecting them to each other.

While it could take as few as 50 people to bring La Paz traffic to a standstill (if you've been to the La Paz, you may've seen protests of that size on the Prado do just that), such a number would barely stop a single lane of one of the Santa Cruz arteries. To stop enough of the arteries to really make a major impact on Santa Cruz traffic (to stop all traffic in the city, rather than traffic in front of some specific place) would require thousands of organized, determined people.

The other problem, unfortunately, is the difference in degrees of pacivity. While paceños have become accustomed to such protests as a daily part of life, cruceños have not. Sure, in part the paceños are cowed by threats (and acts) of violence from protesters (e.g. launching small pieces of dynamite at anyone who boos or whistles at them). But cruceños are more likely to retaliate than run the other way. It's no surprise that cambas have a stereotyped reputation for flash tempers.

In short, an attempt to grind Santa Cruz into a halt — if it was not supported by the city's residents or viewed as "legitimate" — would be aggressively resisted. And there's little chance that cruceños would view a protest aimed specifically to "punish" them for last week's strike against the central government as "legitimate" (in their eyes). I fear that any serious attempt to impose a blockade on Santa Cruz, a city of 1.4 million, by an organized group of MAS supporters (who'd likely come from the surrounding countryside, or from Cochabamba or further away) would merely descend into pitted street battles between pro-government & anti-government forces. And that might just the spark needed to push moderate cruceños (who I think make up the bulk of the residents) from seeking rapprochement w/ the government to win some local autonomy, into the arms of more radical (e.g. secessionist) forces.

Posted by Miguel at 11:16 AM

Comments

Posted by: David C. at September 14, 2006 05:20 PM

Posted by: mcentellas at September 14, 2006 06:24 PM

Posted by: Tambopaxi at September 16, 2006 03:50 PM

Posted by: Norman at September 19, 2006 09:49 AM