Martin Sivak, Evo Morales: The extraordinary rise of the first indigenous president of Bolivia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010)
By Manuel Rueda
Shortly after being elected as Bolivia´s President in 2006, Evo Morales, an indigenous leader and president of a gritty federation of coca leaf growers addressed a crowd of thousands gathered in the central square of La Paz.
“Causachum Coca. Wanachun Yanquis!” he said in the local Aymara language. “Long live the coca plant, death to the Yankees.”
In a recently translated biography of Morales, Argentine journalist Martin Sivak, explores the origins of Morales´ anti-American sentiments, while providing a nuanced profile of a President that is mainly known in the US for his opposition to neo-liberal economics, his decision to nationalize his country´s oil and gas reserves and his economic alliances with Venezuela, Cuba and Iran.
Sivak begins Evo Morales: The extraordinary rise of the first indigenous president of Bolivia with a behind the scenes tour of the Morales presidency. He reports on a cabinet meeting where Morales scolds the water minister, for negotiating tariffs without his consent. He accompanies Morales as Venezuelan airplanes whisk him off to remote parts of Bolivia, were the president inspects agrarian reform projects and plays soccer games with local communities.
Morales, we learn, is a tireless campaigner and an honest politician, who holds cabinet meetings at 5am, sleeps two hours a day and frets about staying too long at governmental conferences outside Bolivia because all the talking there makes him feel too idle. For Morales, Sivak says “there is no life outside of politics.”
The author also documents moments of Morales life in which he was not present, like his empoverished childhood and his early political life.
As a union leader for Bolivian coca growers in the eighties and nineties, Evo Morales is fiercely opposed to the Bolivian government´s plans to eradicate coca fields through violent means.
But in 1980s Bolivia, the U.S. embassy pegs eradication outcomes to economic aid packages that the local government desperately needs to stop hyper-inflation and other economic ills.
Morales, the union leader, demands that the government and the U.S. stay away from Bolivia´s coca farmers, saying they hold no responsibility for cocaine production and claiming that his people do not manufacture the drug, they only grow a plant that is also consumed in its natural form by the local indigenous people. “We take it to the market” Morales says in a 1995 interview “and what happens after that is not my responsibility.”
Throughout his career as a union leader Morales is constantly detained by suspicious government forces that are eager to silence him. On one occasion they beat him severely and drop him off in the countryside assuming he is dead.
Morales, tells Sivak that secret agents also tred to plant drugs in his luggage when he travelled. He says that in the nineties the press portrayed him as a drug trafficker and says he felt persecuted by the U.S. backed Bolivian military. When Morales first runs for the Bolivian presidency in 2002 Sivak reports, U.S. ambassador Manuel Rocha threatens to withdraw aid to Bolivia if Morales wins, and says his movement of coca growers and indigenous groups are the “Taliban” of the Andes.
By providing a recount of Morales´s run-ins with the US backed “war on drugs”, Sivak´s book, provides some perspective to his occasional anti-yankee chants and his custom of denouncing the works of the “US empire” at international meetings.
The book also describes how things have changed for U.S. policy makers in Bolivia since Morales took office in 2006. Bolivia´s first indigenous president does not answer phone calls from the US embassy, like his non indigenous predecessors did, and he asks the embassy staff to send written requests to the Presidential palace if they want a meeting . Sivak says Morales no longer seeks the advice of the US embassy when it is time to make policy decisions, because his mandate within the country is so broad that unlike his predecessors, he does not require a foreign government to prop him up or help him find a way out of political crisis.
But the book could do more to explore Morales controversial relationship with Venezuela´s Hugo Chavez, an issue that often worries diplomats and the president´s opposition. Sivak tells us how Morales flies around his country in Venezuelan planes and delivers Venezuelan aid money to local governments seeking funds for bridges and wineries. He says Morales accepts Venezuelan aid because “it comes with less conditions” but does not tell us how much aid is coming from the Venezuelan president or how important it is to the functioning of the Bolivian government.
For Sivak, Morales´s alliance with Chavez and his opposition to the U.S. do not make him a socialist radical, as some of his opponents contend. Sivak shows that the so-called nationalization of oil and gas reserves in Bolivia for example, only meant that the government charged foreign companies greater royalties and taxes while still allowing them to operate in the country. He says the Morales administration has a “gradualist spirit,” with an economic plan whose goal is to reduce poverty from 58 percent in 2006, to 49 percent in 2011, and to only reduce the Gini-Coefficient -the indicator that tracks concentration of wealth – by one point in the same period. In an attempt to demonstrate the government is conducting austere macro-economic policies, Sivak shows that reserves in Bolivia´s Central Bank went from $1.7million in 2006 to $8.58 million in 2010.
Unfortunately, the Argentine journalist fails to report on Morales´ plans to curb drug-trafficking, a global problem that Bolivia is deeply involved in as a coca leaf producer and a location for clandestine cocaine laboratories.
While the book is full of references to Morales´s opposition to the eradication of coca leaf fields his solution to the problem is not discussed.
Only one small comment from Morales on this issue arises in the book, while Sivak goes with him to a meeting at the New York think tank, Council for the Americas. “After Evo´s speech” Sivak writes “an agro-exporter from Cali, Colombia asked whether Morales supported the decriminalization of drugs as he did. ´I don´t understand the subject´ Evo answered.” With such great access to Morales and his entourage, Sivak could have pressed the president a bit harder on this controversial issue.
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