Blockades and Breaking Points

Those of us in Cochabamba are in for a fun ride over the next while.

A meet­ing was recently held in which the lead­ers of the Opposition move­ment and Evo Morales, pres­i­dent of Bolivia, were sched­uled to dis­cuss solu­tions and com­pro­mises in light of the recent ref­er­en­dums. The oppo­si­tion lead­ers attended. Evo did not; Evo sent a low-level flunky in his stead. The oppo­si­tion closed the ses­sion and returned to their respec­tive locations.

Santa Cruz is, essen­tially, tak­ing the atti­tude of — “Fine. We can the block­ade game, too. You [Evo, et al.] have three days.”

This means, for exam­ple, that:

• The roads from Santa Cruz to the non-opposition depart­ments, includ­ing neutral/stuck-in-the-middle Cochabamba, are closed.
• The bor­ders to Argentina and Brazil from the oppo­si­tion depart­ments are closed.
• Gasoline lines from Santa Cruz to the non-opposition depart­ments are closed.

Pragmatically, this affects our family’s life in a cou­ple of ways:

• Most of the beef in Cochabamba comes from Santa Cruz and Argentina. The gro­cery stores and butch­ers are sell­ing just chicken at the moment. Our pre­ferred butcher, which is seem­ingly ritzier than the oth­ers with its nice build­ing and clean envi­ron­ment, but is in fact cheaper than any­where but La Cancha, is plan­ning to fly the meat in from Santa Cruz. This means that although some beef will be com­ing in by plane, it will be a) in short sup­ply, and b) much more expensive.
• Gasoline is being rationed today and tomor­row, after which it will prob­a­bly not be avail­able at all. Our car is gaso­line only. The gov­ern­ment is pro­vid­ing free con­ver­sions to nat­ural gas, but that will require gut­ting the car of its A/C, power steer­ing, etc. We’ll wait, thanks.

Politically, Bolivia could be reach­ing a break­ing point. Up until now, the lead­ers of the oppo­si­tion have been refus­ing to make too many ulti­ma­tums in pref­er­ence to a desire for nego­ti­a­tion and, to a cer­tain degree, a will­ing­ness to com­pro­mise. They’ve sat with the medi­at­ing orga­ni­za­tions. They’ve kept their auton­omy move­ment lim­ited to pol­i­tics and words. They agreed to the August ref­er­en­dums. After Evo’s extreme, and frankly silly, rude­ness by send­ing a flunky instead of attend­ing the meet­ing him­self as promised, the oppo­si­tion have made their ultimatum:

“Agree to our terms, or…”

Public build­ings are being stormed. Borders and roads are block­aded. Hey, this sounds famil­iar — is this not extremely sim­i­lar to how Evo led MAS in 2003/4 and 2005 in the Gas Wars and the run-up to the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion? The dif­fer­ence is that Evo and the Masistas could just sit in the way, cause prob­lems, and have protests. The oppo­si­tion this time is made of polit­i­cal bod­ies -  whole polit­i­cal depart­ments. Evo is con­sid­er­ing send­ing in the mil­i­tary… which would cause him to lose all cred­i­bil­ity and would esca­late the sit­u­a­tion even fur­ther. News reports are fil­ter­ing in of peo­ple caught incit­ing vio­lence under the ban­ner of the oppo­si­tion — but when inves­ti­gated, they’re mem­bers of MAS. Both sides are in on this.