The MAS has lost the necessary perspective to be able to confront its adversaries. Luis Arce and Evo have propitiated the fragmentation of the popular bloc.
Álvaro García Linera, former vice president of Bolivia between 2006 and 2019, warned in an interview with La Jornada, that he has not ceased to be a militant of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS), that he is working to form a replacement generation to lead another moment of mobilization and collective epiphany, like the one Bolivia experienced 20 years ago, and which brought them to power to build a plurinational country.
However, he refuses to censure drastic criticism of his party and its most connoted leaders: President Luis Arce and former President Evo Morales, now “mortal enemies”.
For him, within the national popular bloc there is a loss of the strategic horizon, of the real adversaries to be confronted, and an entanglement in personalized and very petty struggles.
-Do you want to identify who bears more responsibility for this deterioration?
Both leaders are responsible for the deterioration. There is no debate on how to get out of the economic crisis, the only issue is who should be the presidential candidate for 2025. This has to be placed in a historical context: the end of the hegemonic moment of the process of progressive changes, and the beginning of an administrative and fragmented phase.
I would say that the cultural horizon that opened up between 2000 and 2008 has room for expansion, and surveys have shown it. Support from popular sectors for redistributive policies and the important role of the State is 60 percent, which means that the process of change has a medium-term horizon, but not in its hegemonic/progressive phase, but in a more administrative phase.
The transition towards this phase is not being conducted in a healthy, generous and heroic way, but in a mean, disorderly and strategically inferior manner, giving rise to the fragmentation of the popular bloc.
The phase of the great political majority around which the other political forces revolved is coming to an end and a political cycle of smaller minorities is beginning, which is more complicated in terms of alliances and possibilities of transformation.
-Is it possible to implement corrective actions that allow for a more organic transition?
Two things: second generation reforms, because the ones we made in 2005 are insufficient for the new period, and a process of pragmatic unity of the two leaderships in order not to lose in 2025.
-Attention must also be paid to the economic situation, which causes social discontent?
Second-generation economic reforms necessarily involve restoring the economic strength of the State, which has been lost in the last five years. In our time, 65 percent of exports were made by the State. Today it is 25 percent and 75 percent by the private sector.
-What immediate measures are required?
A transition period is needed to reestablish the economic power of the State with the following immediate measure:
1) Control of foreign trade, where all exporters during a temporary period have the obligation to liquidate their dollars in the Central Bank to resolve the popular and middle sectors’ uneasiness due to the absence of dollars;
2) Progressive tax reform that taxes the largest fortunes, those who have more than one million dollars, without touching the middle and popular sectors, to reduce the deficit that is at 11 percent, must be done.
3) Approve the two transgenic crops so that productivity and the agricultural frontier expand within less than six months, up to 27 percent in the following harvests. Today 98 percent of the production is transgenic, which dates back to the 2000s;
4) Buy more gold from the cooperatives north of La Paz and in the Amazon, today production is barely 5 percent;
5) Redesign the lithium issue, we have lost almost five years, it is barbaric, first with the coup in 2019 and then with the erratic policies of Luis Arce, we have zero other than what Evo did. My vision is not extractivist, but rather of a value chain, we can use the fact that we are the largest lithium reserve in the world, as a shareholding contribution to an association of international companies with the State as a partner.
-Why do you say that Arce’s government has failed in the lithium strategy?
It was not assumed as a presidential project, He left it in improvised hands. In the battle against Evo he got rid of the entire team that accompanied us for 13 years to place people who had only recently begun to see in the periodic table of the elements what lithium meant.
-Does the left have the strength to impose this set of policies?
We had it, we won 55 percent of the votes. Now we are fractured and to implement this we need, at the same time, the unification of the popular bloc and to promote the reforms. It is impossible for Luis to do it on his own because he is a minority in the Parliament. It requires an agreement with the pro-evista block beyond the candidacy, in the perspective of how to maintain the popular majority block and implement reforms that restore to the process the mystique and enthusiasm lost today. There is a silent uneasiness and apathy.
-I have found opinions in the street that lament that the coup will not prosper.
It is a bad government with increasing difficulties to get back on its feet before 2025, and there are many symptoms of deterioration. But unlike Evo, I do not believe that what goes bad for Lucho, favors him. That is a completely instrumental and electoral interpretation and not a political one. What is bad for Luis is bad for all of us, for the country and for Evoism.
-What are you doing to create the unity you are demanding?
Two years ago, I exposed what was happening, the risks that were coming, and visualized possible, viable, concrete and feasible second-generation progressive reforms that could pull us out of the mire we are in right now.
Politically, I am dedicated to working with grassroots youth. I come from collective action, from popular struggles and I am committed to a new popular struggle, short and long term, processes that regenerate politics, ethics and social ideologies.
Mine is not a battle for the administrative space. I am at ease in the rupturist moments when the igneous forces of society awaken and create a new world. I believe in those moments of social outburst.
It is true, someone must be in the administrative space. There are two comrades who are fighting for the vote, but let them fight well. What they are presently doing will only end in defeat. Others will take their place and what could be an administrative transit of the process of change may end due to the strategic mistakes that both leaders are making.
-Do you see this moment of rupture as violent?
Not at all, they are moments of collective epiphany where people feel called to participate and debate at their own risk to change the horizon. That happened in 2,000 and it was democratic and was resolved by elections and a constituent assembly. These were moments of collective protagonism in the society that gave us strength in these 20 years.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
Bolivia: A Coup for Destabilization and Forced Early Elections
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 