Parts of Bolivia declare autonomy from socialist government

NY Times:

“Against narco-communism,” reads one line of graffiti in this city in the lowlands of Bolivia. “To arms, Cruceños,” reads another, calling on residents to fight the government of President Evo Morales, who put the armed forces on alert this week as four eastern provinces move toward greater autonomy.

Elsewhere in South America, such calls might be dismissed as mere bombast. But not in Bolivia, where fears of political violence are intensifying in Santa Cruz, a bastion of opposition to Mr. Morales, a former coca grower and the nation’s first indigenous president.

Those tensions may reach a crest on Saturday. That is when leaders of Santa Cruz province and three other provinces — Tarija, Beni and Pando — are expected to declare their autonomy before tens of thousands of antigovernment protesters. Santa Cruz’s assembly has already taken a step in that direction, passing a resolution on Thursday giving the province a bigger share of tax and petroleum revenues and allowing it to constitute its own police forces and create its own television network.

“They call us reactionaries, but we have a lot to react against,” said Wilson Salas Pinto, 43, a director of the Bolivian Socialist Falange, a right-wing group here whose members wear black berets and parade with their hands in the air à la Mussolini. “Evo wants to transplant Cuban Communism to Bolivia. We’re prepared to resist that project.”

Upon first glance at the ethnic tensions here, it is easy to focus on increasingly vocal fringe groups like the Falange. A counterpart on the left is the Ponchos Rojos, or Red Ponchos, indigenous activists from the high plains who recently slit the throats of two dogs before television cameras as a warning to those who resist Mr. Morales’s plans.

Eastern Bolivia’s clash with the president, however, is far more complex. Leaders here have long chafed at the influence of the capital, La Paz, but recent moves by Mr. Morales, who has received substantial financial and political support from President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, have added to concerns over power consolidation.

The sudden moves this week to seek greater autonomy came after the president’s supporters rushed last weekend to approve a new Constitution, despite an opposition boycott of their assembly. They had abruptly switched the vote to the city of Oruro, a Morales stronghold, from Sucre, which had been racked by street protests.

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The way the constitutional changes were approved did little to burnish the president’s democratic credentials.

“Evo, in trying to empower the indigenous, has made the same mistake Chávez did in trying to empower the poor,” said Jim Shultz, a political analyst in Cochabamba. “Evo also erred in trying to mix that agenda with trying to empower his political movement.”

Political power is one issue dividing the country. Petroleum is another. Most of the natural gas and oil in Bolivia, which has South America’s second-largest natural gas reserves after Venezuela, is produced in the east.

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Resisting Evo makes a lot of sense since his socialist objectives do not make sense. Socialism makes everyone poorer. Just look at Cuba. Morales is likely to spark a civil war and although he ostensibly controls the government, it will be a very poor government with out the rebelling provinces. Perhaps he can get Chavez to pay the cost of subjugating the dissidents, but it will come at a high price. Poor people are poor because they keep doing the things that make them poor. As Zimbabwe has shown, taking from the wealthy and giving to the poor plunges the entire country into poverty.