The crisis in Bolivia regarding the attempts to develop a pipeline to send natural gas through Chile to tankers for sale to the United States has reached a dangerous point as some twenty protesters were killed and President Gonzalo Sánchez de Losada agreed to suspend the project while martial law is declared in the La Paz suburb of El Alto where the protesters were killed.
This crisis is a combination of anti-neoliberalism and nationalism. The anti-neoliberal component lies at the heart of several disastrous privatization efforts, including an attempt privatize the water supply in Cochabamba that led people to accuse Bechtel Corp. of trying to "buy the rain." As with so many countries in Latin America like Guatemala, Mexico, and Peru, Bolivia's most desperately poor are the indigenous people and they are the ones most vigorously against the privatization.
The nationalism component has to do with resentment that still festers after the War of the Pacific in 1879 in which Bolivia lost its seacoast to Chile. While I understand the anger and resentment toward the privatizations, this is the issue that I have the greatest problem with. I have a general antipathy towards nationalism. I find all too often that it easily becomes the greatest weapon of violent and vicious demagogues. Certainly the Balkan Wars of the 1990's were fueled by vicious, demagogic nationalists and the invasion of the Falklands by Argentina in 1982 was clearly an attempt to use nationalist fervor by the Argentine Junta generals to distract an angry public from their brutal rule.
Bolivia needs the jobs and revenue from the sale of the natural gas, estimates of which place it at having the second largest reserves in South America. I don't see a simple amicable solution to this problem given an extremely unpopular president and a very angry, frustrated and bitter populace. This could be a very explosive issue for South America.
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