Bolivia's Battle of Wills (Page 3)

A week later, when the airports have not yet been shut down, Morales and I end up on the same flight to La Paz. He can't remember our recent hourlong interview. I remind him of all the details; he looks at me with earnest, tired eyes but still can't remember. I am traveling with a colleague, Ryan Grim from Slate. Neither of us can decide whether Morales's total lack of pretense should be read as reassuring honesty or simple incompetence. After all, glad-handing journalists is Politics 101. As we take our seats in coach and Evo slides into first class, Grim leans over to me: "If you hear a loud bang and see a bright light, you know the CIA has gotten rid of the Evo Morales problem with a 'mysterious plane crash.'"

The lowland jungle of the Chaparé region, a few hours east and downhill from Cochabamba, is where Morales got his start as a union leader among the cocaleros. Driving into the Chaparé on alternately paved and washed-out dirt roads, the jungle looms up--lush, wet and claustrophobic. The roadside villages are mildewed and feel broken down. The air is soft and full of oxygen, unlike planet La Paz at 13,000 feet.

The first white and mestizo settlers in this area were deserters from the Chaco War with Paraguay in the late 1930s. Disease whipped most of the local Yuki Indians. In the 1980s a new wave of immigrants arrived, pushed out of the highlands by the layoffs and deindustrialization of president Victor Paz Estenssoro's monetarist "new economic policy." To survive, the former miners and displaced highland Quechua campesinos turned to growing coca, some of which made its way to the legal market to be chewed as a mild stimulant and hunger suppressant but most of which was, and is, purchased by Colombia-connected drug traffickers who turn it into cocaine.

In many ways the first chapter in Bolivia's current season of political upheaval began here in the Chaparé during the 1990s, when the US-orchestrated drug war began targeting these new cocaleros and their openly socialist and indígenista trade unions. Known simply as the Six Federations, the cocaleros' unions function as a de facto state, mixing traditional Quechuan communitarian custom with more modern forms of political organizing. Though land is formally titled to individuals, it is really the Six Federations that collectively manage it. Cocaleros who do not cultivate their plots and refuse to participate in union and community struggles have their land repossessed and redistributed by the unions.

In the city hall of Villa Tunari, one of the damp little towns in the Chaparé, MAS party mayor Feliciano Mamani takes a break from meetings to explain the politics of the Chaparé. "The drug war is a political fight. It's about dismantling our union organizations," says Mamani, who came up through the ranks with Evo. "First they called us communists, then they called us narco-traffickers, now they call us terrorists."

To emphasize his point Mamani rolls up his pants to reveal his dented and blackened shin, where he took a canister of police tear gas five years ago. The wound exposed his bone and remained open and weeping until recently. As he explains the story of his injury, a gray Huey helicopter sweeps low and loud overhead.

For the past six years the Chaparé has been in the grip of a very-low-level guerrilla war and counterinsurgency: The military kills unarmed civilians, tortures detainees, uproots the cocaleros' crops and occasionally burns down their homesteads, while police and prosecutors jail union leaders and MAS officials on charges of drug trafficking and terrorism. So far, 150 MAS leaders have faced such charges, often based on evidence as flimsy as possession of coca or pamphlets by Che Guevara.

The cocaleros fight back with blockades, protests, roadside sniping, occasional abductions and homemade bombs hidden in the coca fields, set to kill the military eradication teams. According to Kathryn Ledebur of the Andean Information Network, an NGO that monitors human rights conditions in the Chaparé, the violence has claimed the lives of about sixty cocaleros and twenty soldiers since the conflict began, with hundreds more, mostly cocaleros, wounded and maimed. During my trip to the Chaparé two corpses show up: One is a possible snitch, found in the field of a local union leader.

The cocaleros claim that the drug war has only made them stronger, but I can't help getting the impression that MAS and the Six Federations would be better off if the United States were not giving the Bolivian police and military roughly $90 million every year to harass and prosecute rank-and-file activists.

Off one of the back roads, through some coca fields and up a dirt path lives Hilaria Perez, a Quechuan woman who was shot in the back by the military when they tore up her coca crop in 2003. The bullet went through her right lung, but she survived. She still farms coca and lives in a dark brick shack with her husband and four little children. Since the shooting, the Perezes have drifted from the union.

"I haven't been to a meeting in two months," says Hilaria's husband. To enforce participation, the unions--like all Bolivian social movements--impose fines on members who shirk their political duties such as attending meetings, marches and blockades. The new social movements fit the romantic activist's vision of a reinvented left in that they are "networked," highly democratic and rooted in indigenous forms of community decision-making. But politics in Bolivia are deadly serious, and the movements use subtle forms of coercion to bolster consent and to keep the cadre marching.

Despite the drug war and grinding poverty, MAS has run the local governments of the Chaparé remarkably well. Over the past decade they have practiced a type of Third World gas-and-water socialism, investing their meager budgets in an infrastructure of roads, schools and clinics.

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